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Armstrong’s bicycle found, police say

Lance Armstrong's bike was missing after he competed in the first day of the Amgen Tour of California.
A one-of-a-kind bicycle belonging to Lance Armstrong that was stolen Saturday, hours after the U.S. cycling legend rode it in a race, has been handed over to authorities, police said Wednesday.

“A local resident came to the police headquarters and turned in a bicycle that he believed to be Lance Armstrong’s,” said Sgt. Norm Leong, a spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department. By checking the serial number, “we were able to confirm that the bike was, in fact, Lance Armstrong’s bicycle,” said Leong, who added that the bike appeared to be in good condition. The man who gave the bicycle to police did not want to be identified, said Leong, who refused to answer questions about how the man came across it. Leong said the man who turned in Armstrong’s bicycle “is not a suspect at this time” and did not ask about a reward offered by Armstrong’s team for its return, he said. The bike is one of three believed to have been stolen Saturday from a trailer used by Armstrong’s team, Astana, while the trailer was parked behind a Sacramento hotel, Leong said. The bikes disappeared hours after the first stage of the nine-day Amgen Tour of California, in which Armstrong and the team are competing.

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The two other bicycles, which belong to members of Armstrong’s team, still are missing. Police have information “that we’re not putting out at this time” about a suspect or suspects, Leong said. Officials initially said four bikes were stolen, but one of them was discovered Tuesday to have been misplaced in a storage room in the hotel, Leong said. Armstrong’s bicycle, painted a distinctive black and yellow, “would be hard to sell,” Leong said. The bikes that disappeared were the first ones within reach of whoever opened the trailer, which held many more, Leong said. The California race is another step in Armstrong’s comeback from a 2005 retirement. Armstrong, a cancer survivor and seven-time Tour de France champion, kicked off his return to professional racing last month at Australia’s Tour Down Under. Armstrong announced the bike theft on his Twitter account Sunday morning and posted a photograph. “There is only one like it in the world therefore hard to pawn it off. Reward being offered,” he wrote. The 750-mile Amgen Tour of California ends Sunday. Armstrong, 37, said he is aiming for another Tour de France victory this summer. He also has said he is not trying to win the Tour of California but is riding in support of teammate Levi Leipheimer, who has won the race twice and leads this year’s event. Armstrong was in fourth place Wednesday. Armstrong’s comeback is not his first. He stopped racing in 1996, when he was diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. Doctors have him less than 50 percent chance of survival, but after treatment, he returned to cycling in 1998. He won the Tour de France — cycling’s premiere event — every year from 1999 to 2005.

Victim of chimp attack in ‘critical but stable’ condition

Police say Travis, seen here as a younger chimp, was like a child to his owner, Sandra Herold.
Seven hours of surgery and four teams of surgeons were needed to stabilize a Connecticut woman attacked by a pet chimpanzee, doctors at Stamford Hospital said Wednesday.

Dr. Kevin Miller said Charla Nash, 55, remains in critical but stable condition after her friend’s pet chimp, once featured in TV commercials for Coca-Cola and Old Navy, attacked her Monday. Nash, 55, had just arrived at the home of her friend, Sandra Herold, 70, when the chimp, named Travis, jumped on her and began biting and mauling her, said Stamford Police Capt. Rich Conklin. Conklin said the attack was unprovoked, and he described it as “brutal and lengthy.” Miller said Nash’s vital signs are improving but that she received extensive injuries to her face and hands. Miller said she is making good, but small, progress after being treated by hand specialists and plastic surgeons, as well as specialists in ophthalmology, orthopedics and trauma. Nash’s twin brother, Mike Nash, also spoke at the news conference and he thanked the community for their outpouring of support. “It should be known,” he said, “that people who were complete strangers to us prior to this have selflessly offered their assistance to our family.” Watch expert talk about keeping wild animals as pets » Herold had called Nash to her house to help get 14-year-old Travis back inside after he used a key to escape.

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While her friend was being attacked, Herold unsuccessfully tried to pull the primate off her. She then called 911 before stabbing the chimp with a butcher knife and hitting him with a shovel. Herold said her actions didn’t stop Travis’ rampage, though she said he gave her a look that said, “Why did you do it, mom” Stamford police released the emotional 911 recordings from Monday’s attack where Herold can be heard screaming, “The chimp killed my friend” and “He’s ripping her apart.” Herold pleads with the dispatcher for police to “please hurry” to save her friend from the beating. At one point, she even yells for the police to shoot the chimp to stop the attack. A Stamford police officer later shot the chimp multiple times in close proximity after the primate went after him while he was inside a police cruiser, Conklin said. Travis returned to the house, where police later found him dead. Conklin estimated that Travis weighed nearly 200 pounds. Conklin couldn’t confirm media reports that the chimp had Lyme disease, though he did say investigators were taking their time with the case to determine what may have provoked Travis to attack Nash. The police captain pointed out that Nash had recently gotten a haircut that had changed her appearance “significantly.” Conklin said the chimp had been acting “rambunctious,” prompting Herold to put Xanax in a cup of tea for him to drink. However, Herold told New York station WABC that the Xanax didn’t dissolve in the tea, and she doesn’t believe Travis had any of the drug in his system. Conklin said his department is not used to dealing with cases such as these, and they were taking their time to familiarize themselves with laws and regulations before deciding whether charges will be filed. Travis’ body has been removed from the home and taken to two separate locations: The head was taken to the state lab for a rabies test and the body was taken to the University of Connecticut for an animal autopsy. Conklin said this is standard procedure.

The police captain said this isn’t the first interaction his officers have had with Travis. The chimp, which was well-known and liked in the community, escaped in 2003 and “wreaked havoc” on the streets of Stamford for a couple of hours. Herold tearfully told reporters at her home that she slept with the chimp and that he was like a son to her.

Man who froze had history of late utility payments

The temperature in Marvin Schur's home was 32 degrees when his body was found, a medical examiner said.
Marvin Schur may have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the World War II veteran was chronically late in paying his utility bills during the two years before he froze to death last month at age 93 in his home in Bay City, Michigan, after his power was cut off.

A review of records by city workers reveals Schur, at one point, went to his own bank to make back payments, but was unable to do so because that bank was not an approved pay station for the city. “Maybe he had dementia. I don’t know that. We may never know,” City Manager Robert Belleman told CNN. Schur’s body was found in his bedroom. Authorities said the temperature inside his home was 32 degrees. A limiter installed a few days earlier had shut off power because of unpaid bills. City officials have said Schur may not have known he could reset the power switch to keep on his gas heat. “It was not an issue of his ability to pay, it was something else, ” Belleman added. According to a nephew in Florida, Schur lived frugally, once telling him he had saved at least $600,000. In February 2007, Schur tried to pay about $350 at his bank, according to a city accounts supervisor. Ten days later, the supervisor says, a city worker made a notation that Schur’s bank was not an authorized payment center. The following month, the same city official says records show Schur tried to pay $876 at a different bank that could accept utility payments. However, the city says its records inexplicably don’t reflect that the payment was made. After receiving a fine for unpaid bills, Schur wiped the slate clean with a $1,000 payment, according to Bay City Accounts Supervisor Tina Cooper.

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In June and July of 2007, Schur was slapped with more fines for unpaid utility bills, then came close to catching up by paying nearly $1,138. Cooper said that, in 2008, Schur continued to ride a seesaw of fines and payments and more warnings that his power would be shutoff. That led to the installation of a limiter switch January 13 as a warning that he had fallen behind again. This time, records show Schur owed slightly more than $1,000. When Schur’s body was discovered, money attached to utility bills reportedly was found in his kitchen. A city official said Schur’s phone had been disconnected. After Schur’s death, Bay City immediately removed all limiters and promised it would not turn off power to anyone this winter because of unpaid bills. The city commission is also starting a program on March 4 to prevent deaths that enlists mail carriers to watch for anything unusual at homes on their routes. To participate, residents have to enroll and place a sticker inside their mailbox. Mail carriers who notice mail accumulating or anything else that seems abnormal are instructed to notify authorities to check on the resident.

Will Killing Whales Save the World’s Fisheries?

Will Killing Whales Save the Worlds Fisheries?

Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, whale meat does not taste good. I know from experience: as a reporter in Tokyo I once attended a whale food festival — there were whale noodles, whale sashimi, fried whale, whale on crackers — put on by Japanese whaling industry lobbyists for the country’s legislators. But for all its forbidden mystique, whale meat tastes spectacularly bland — the sort of food you might eat only if there were nothing else available.

And that happens to be exactly why whale became a significant part of the Japanese diet, as a cheap source of protein in the impoverished days following World War II. As the country grew wealthier, however, whale meat grew less popular. Still, Japan continues to hunt and kill whales — more than 800 in the 2006 to 2007 season — and is pushing for an end to the 22-year-old worldwide ban on commercial whaling. While industry supporters contend that it’s necessary for food security, today the average Japanese eats a little more than an ounce of whale meat per year, which puts a damper on the argument.

So in recent years the whaling industry has been trying out a different defense — that whale populations need to be culled to reduce their threat to fast-disappearing fish stocks. Whales, after all, eat a lot of seafood, so it would make sense that controlling whale populations would be smart “ecosystem management,” as whaling supporters put it. But a new article in the Feb. 13 issue of Science demonstrates that’s hardly the case. “Essentially what we found was that…if you remove whales, it has a negligible impact on the biomass that is commercially available for fishing,” says Leah Gerber, a conservation biologist at Arizona State University and the article’s lead author. Translation: killing whales won’t resuscitate depleted fisheries.

The reason is that marine ecosystems and food webs are far more complicated than the one-to-one predator-and-prey relationship we might expect. Analyzing the waters off Western Africa and the Caribbean, where baleen whales breed, Gerber and her colleagues mined marine data to create ecosystem models that plotted the feeding interactions between whales and fish.

The models allowed the scientists to test what would happen if whale populations declined. It turned out that whale numbers had little impact on commercial fish populations, in part because the kind of sea life whales like to eat — krill, plankton — is highly unlikely to end up on your dinner plate. “The seafood that people prefer is higher on the food web than [whales’ diet],” says Gerber. There’s also the undeniable fact that today’s whale populations are still just a fraction of what they were in the days when Captain Ahab was whaling, yet commercial fish populations are still dwindling.

The International Whaling Commission is set to meet in a few months, and Japan and its allies will once again push for an end to the commercial ban — an appeal the Science analysis significantly undermines. But one fact of the Japanese argument is undeniable: the world’s commercial fisheries are in serious trouble, and they’re getting worse. In new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 12, the marine ecologist William Cheung announced that climate change would have a devastating impact on the world’s commercial fish and shellfish populations, including tuna, herring and prawns. Fish would flee toward the poles to escape rising temperatures, and many species would all but disappear from their familiar habitats. Many would not survive the transition — Cheung estimated that the Atlantic cod’s distribution could drop by up to 50% by 2050 thanks to climate change. “The scary thing is that this isn’t just happening in the future,” he says. “We’re seeing similar things happening now.”

Preserving commercial fisheries isn’t as simple as culling whales — it isn’t simple at all. But if the world’s fishing nations fail to curb overfishing and protect endangered marine habitats, in the end, whale might be all we have left to eat — and trust me, you won’t like it.

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In Protest, Tibetans Refuse to Celebrate New Year

When asked how his New Year celebrations have been, the pilgrim — a middle-aged businessman wearing a heavy winter coat against the bitter winds that knife through the monastery’s narrow alleys — immediately glances up and then over his shoulder. It is the universal, instinctive reaction of Tibetans I talked to on a recent trip to China’s far western province of Qinghai, where ethnic Tibetans make up the majority of the population in the areas closest to the Qinghai-Tibet border. “Cameras,” he hisses, nodding upward. “The police have them everywhere.”

Pulling me into the shadow of one of the deep doorways cut into the monastery’s thick walls, he launches into a tirade that reflects the feelings of most of the Tibetans I spoke to in the region, a group ranging from nomadic herdsmen to shopkeepers to students to monks. “We didn’t celebrate anything this year, because we have nothing to celebrate,” he says grimly. “We want to respect and commemorate the people who were killed last year,” when demonstrations against Chinese rule in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, which neighbors Qinghai, turned violent. Beijing says 19 were killed, mostly innocent Chinese shopkeepers. Tibet’s government in exile, led by its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, put the number at more than 200, mostly Tibetans. This businessman, like many of his compatriots, passionately insists that the real number is in the thousands. “We are a people living under the gun. They tried to make us celebrate the New Year, but we refused. They jail us if we display pictures of the Dalai Lama. They even force our children to study only in Chinese at school,” he tells me. “But we will never forget we are Tibetans and will always have the Dalai Lama in our hearts.”

To mark the anniversary, many Tibetans conducted a widespread campaign of civil disobedience this Lunar New Year against authorities in other heavily Tibetan areas of China, like Qinghai, where around half of the country’s 6 million ethnic Tibetans live. And with a probable boycott of Lunar New Year celebrations set to unfold inside Tibet, where the 15 days of festivities begin on Feb. 25 in accordance to the Tibetan lunar calendar, tension is likely to rise further. Even Chinese officials have said they can’t rule out an outbreak of trouble, blaming the Dalai Lama for fomenting unrest. Tensions could peak closer to March 14, when the bloody demonstrations started last year.

Tibetan exile groups are already reporting that 15 protesters have been arrested in recent days in the Tibetan-dominated town of Litang in Sichuan province. Chinese authorities have apparently decided that all Tibetan areas of China are now out of bounds to foreigners until at least April. This, combined with Beijing’s decision to keep out all but a handful of closely escorted foreign reporters out of Tibet since the protests last March, means that ethnically Tibetan areas of China are now effectively sealed off from the world.

If the sentiment in areas like Qinghai is anything to go by, further protests, arrests and possibly worse seem inevitable given the depth of anger among the Tibetan population. Most Tibetans here refused to undertake any of the public activities that usually mark the coming of the New Year. “There was no dancing or singing. No one let off fireworks, even though the Chinese gave people money to buy them,” says one young villager. He says the decision was not coordinated by outside forces but is a spontaneous reflection of Tibetans’ anger over the deaths last March. “Everyone is still very sad and also very angry at the Chinese authorities for what happened. No one felt like celebrating.”

Not surprisingly, the boycott has apparently angered Chinese authorities, who sources in exile allege have been engaged in a security crackdown code named Strike Hard since Jan. 18 in an attempt to head off trouble. “They have conducted house-to-house searches. They have military in plain clothes everywhere and snipers on the roofs,” says Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Council based in Dharamsala, India. According to one nomadic herdsman I meet at the Longwu monastery in Tongren, one of the most important outside the Tibet Autonomous Region, the attempt by the authorities to force celebrations — and the Tibetan resistance that has followed — has extended even into some remote areas. The 53-year-old, dressed in a traditional fleece-lined long coat and fingering his prayer beads, recounts how security forces came in January to his village in neighboring Gansu province and tried to enforce celebrations through a system of collective responsibility. “Ten days before New Year, the police came and divided us into groups of 20 families and put one or two people in charge. They were given a few thousand yuan and told they were responsible, that they would be punished if there were no celebrations,” he explains. “Later they came and arrested nine people who they said were ringleaders in the refusal campaign, even though they had nothing to do with it.”

Following the unrest last year, security forces arrested thousands of Tibetans on suspicion of involvement. Since then, the majority have been released, and life for Tibetans had seemed to be returning to normal. Some foreign tourists were even trickling into the region. But the coming months will provide a severe test of that relative calm. “It’s hard to predict what will happen,” says Rigzin. “But if they try to shove it down their throats and make Tibetans celebrate, that would not be good at all.” Even if this period passes quietly, the year ahead contains many more potentially explosive anniversaries for Tibetans. April will mark the 20th anniversary of the bloody 1989 suppression of anti-Chinese protests in Lhasa. Even more sensitive will be the 50th anniversary, in mid-March, of the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile in India after the so-called Lhasa uprising was suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army.

The herdsman shakes his grizzled head when I ask if it is possible that an influx of Chinese immigrants and modernization could mean that such events — and the protests of March 2008 — could eventually be forgotten. “What happened last year is now part of our history too. Even my son’s sons and their sons will remember after I die. They will hate the government too. We will never forget.”

See pictures from the past six decades of Tibet’s spiritual leadership.

Behind the French Ruling on WWII Deportations of Jews

Following decades of debate over the nation’s wartime history, France’s highest judicial body has formally ruled that the French state bears moral and legal responsibility for the deportation of nearly 76,000 Jews during the nation’s WWII occupation. In doing so, the court officially recognized the willful participation of France’s collaborationist Vichy government in anti-Semitic persecution that had long been attributed to Nazi occupying powers.

The ruling Monday, by the Conseil d’Etat, or State Council, was cheered by organizations representing French Jews and families of Jews who were deported during the war — a mere 3,000 of whom ultimately returned. The judgment involved the case of a 76 year-old woman seeking damages for the 1941 deportation of her father by Vichy forces to Auschwitz, where he was killed. In its decision, the Conseil d’Etat held the French state, as then represented by Vichy, “responsible for damages caused by actions which did not result from the occupiers’ direct orders, but facilitated deportation from France of people who were victims of anti-Semitic persecution.”

That ruling definitively buries historical interpretations rooted in the post-war reconciliation period. The common view, which has endured for decades, held that it was the Nazis who mistreated and deported France’s Jews, or forced their French collaborators to. “This is a very satisfying ruling for me, in that it legally refutes the notion that the Vichy regime and the acts it committed were entirely the responsibility of German occupiers,” says Serge Klarsfeld, France’s leading Holocaust historian and Nazi hunter, whose own father perished in German camps. “What this says in legal terms is that as much as France may detest what the Vichy state did, it is responsible for the acts it committed in the name of France.”

In 1995, as Klarsfeld notes, then-President Jacques Chirac gave a historical speech that sought to atone for the nation’s dark past. Chirac broke with the traditional French depiction of wartime events by accepting, in the name of France, responsibility for the July 15-16, 1942 arrests of 13,000 Jews by French police. Known as the “Vel d’Hiv roundup” — after the name of the winter cycling stadium in Paris the deportees were held in — the infamous case was cited by Chirac as an example of active French participation in Jewish persecution. Chirac called on his French countrymen to accept responsibility for the Vichy regime just as they celebrate the anti-Nazi efforts of General Charles de Gaulle and his Free French forces. “France, homeland of the Enlightenment and of human rights, land of welcome and asylum; France, on that very day, accomplished the irreparable,” Chirac said in his speech, using the Vel d’Hiv roundup as a metaphor for all Vichy crimes. “Failing her promise, she delivered those she was to protect to their murderers.”

Yesterday’s ruling goes further. “While [Chirac’s] speech was so important to France and her Jews by finally stating an historic truth, the ruling by the Conseil d’Etat is also crucial, because it now sets that down in stone in legal terms,” Klarsfeld explains.

Ironically, the court decision also delivered a setback to the plaintiff by rejecting over $357,000 in damages she had sought for hardship resulting from her father’s deportation. The reason: the Conseil ruled that organizations set up to pay deportees and their survivors damages, or to compensate them for belongings stolen by Nazis or their French collaborators, have proven to be capable of fairly settling damages without court involvement.

Klarsfeld says nearly $702 million in damages have been paid out to applicants since 2001, while $501 million in endowments to the Shoah Memorial Foundation have generated additional funding to those who suffered deportation. “It closes the door to further court cases in such affairs, but that only shows the system put in place to hear them is working,” he says.

What the Conseil decision doesn’t do, Klarsfeld stresses, is force French society into a reckoning with its war-time past that foreigners often think it denies. That has already happened, according to Klarsfeld and others, often in a deeper way than in other countries.

“Many nations, especially here in the U.S., tend to view France with the out-dated, 40 year-old perception that it hasn’t faced its past and learned hard lessons from it,” says Robert Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and an acclaimed expert on fascism and Vichy France. “It has done deep research, held trials, updated text books, and even uncovered troubling wartime information on public figures — late President François Mitterrand for one. I’d like school teachers around the U.S. to be able to teach American responsibility for slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans the way French educators do their own war-time history. Alas, if they did that here, most would get fired.”

See pictures of the Nazis in Paris.

See pictures of, and read about, Kristallnacht.

GM Bailout: Billions to Put People Out of Work

GM says it needs more money from the federal government or it will run out of cash next month. It has made some progress with its creditors and the UAW, but neither of those negotiations is final, so some of what GM can do to cut costs and improve its balance sheet will have to be taken on faith.

The parts of the GM restructuring the the company can claim are firm are the closing of some brands including Saturn and Hummer, the shutdown of several factories, and the firing of 47,000 people.

GM claims the amount of money it will need for the year at $16.6 billion. That will not guarantee the largest car company in the U.S. will get to break-even. If auto sales in America keep falling, GM may need more capital this year, and it will almost certainly need more again in 2010.

The government is faced with several complex and painful decisions. Analysts believe that GM going into Chapter 11 would put hundreds of thousands of Americans at the car company and its suppliers out of jobs. To counter that, the Congress and Administration may have to keep GM on life support indefinitely. The alternative is too awful.

The part of the GM request for money that is very clear is that, in exchange for $16.6 billion, the company will fire 47,000 people. It may be the only example in U.S. history where the government will pay to put tens of thousands of its own citizens out on the street. Most of these people have probably been paying taxes to the IRS for years.

The perversion of the government stepping in to run an industry to save the broader economy is that it must live with the consequences of its own actions, which in this case involves investing capital into a restructuring that increases the burden on social services, causes great suffering, and is a lesson to private enterprise that failure can, in some cases, be rewarded.

The Administration knows that it has to save GM as part of steadying the economy, but it has put itself into a policy position where killing some jobs is the excuse for saving others.

— Douglas A. McIntyre

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For constant business updates, go to 24/7wallst.com.

Drugs suspected in teen’s death at Fort Lewis barracks, Army says

Soldiers stand guard outside Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington, in 2002.
Army investigators suspect drugs played a role in the death of a 16-year-old girl found unconscious with another teenage girl at a closed barracks, a spokesman for the investigation said Wednesday.

The incident happened last weekend at Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Washington, as the girls were visiting an acquaintance at the barracks, which are closed to the public, according to Chris Grey, a spokesman for the base’s Criminal Investigation Command. Investigators have “received information that this is related to drugs,” but he would not elaborate, Grey said. He would not say if toxicology reports of either girl had been completed. Emergency personnel from the base responded to a 911 call about 3:30 a.m. Sunday and found the two girls in one of the barracks. A doctor declared one of the girls dead on the scene, and the second girl was transported to Madigan Army Hospital where she was in stable condition on Monday.

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There were no signs of trauma on either of the two females, Fort Lewis spokesman Joseph Piek said. Investigators questioned a soldier who was “allegedly an acquaintance” of the girls, according to Piek. No arrests have been made. Fort Lewis is not releasing the name of the soldier or the two girls, citing the ongoing investigation and the girls’ ages. The Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner is conducting an autopsy, Piek said, and it will be at least a week before results are complete. Both girls are from the nearby South Puget Sound area but were not related to anyone living on base, Piek said. Both girls’ families had been notified, he said. Although Fort Lewis is not open to civilians, they can be escorted in by a soldier living there, and if they have identification and a reason for coming onto the facility. The circumstances of how the girls came onto the base are under investigation, Piek said, but there was no evidence that security had been compromised. There are approximately 30,000 military personnel based at Fort Lewis. Barracks where soldiers live are usually split into rooms for up to three soldiers, Piek said. Details about the barracks where the girls were found were not released.

Holder: U.S. a ‘nation of cowards’ on race discussions

Eric Holder spoke to an overflowing crowd for Black History Month at the Justice Department Wednesday.
In a blunt assessment of race relations in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday called the American people "essentially a nation of cowards" in failing to openly discuss the issue of race.

In his first major speech since being confirmed, the nation’s first black attorney general told an overflow crowd celebrating Black History Month at the Justice Department the nation remains “voluntarily socially segregated.” “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder declared. Holder urged Americans of all races to use Black History Month as a time to have a forthright national conversation between blacks and whites to discuss aspects of race which are ignored because they are uncomfortable. The attorney general said employees across the country “have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace,” but he noted that “certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one’s character.” Watch Holder talk about race » “On Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago. This is truly sad,” Holder said. Following his address, Holder declined to say whether his unexpectedly stern message would be translated into policy.

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“It’s a question of being honest with ourselves and racial issues that divide us,” Holder told reporters in a hastily arranged news conference. “It’s not easy to talk about it. We have to have the guts to be honest with each other, accept criticism, accept new proposals.” The nation’s top law enforcement official vowed to “revitalize the Civil Rights Division” at the Justice Department but offered no specifics. In a reference to the highly divisive issue of affirmative action, Holder said there can be “very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can and should be nuanced, principled and spirited.” The attorney general criticized past public debates on the issue as “too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own narrow self-interest.” President Barack Obama has not yet nominated an assistant attorney general to head the Civil Rights Division, which is charged with enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws and which helps fashion race-related policy.

Allegations of politically motivated hiring in the division and increased emphasis on combating religious discrimination and human trafficking — rather than concentration on traditional civil rights enforcement — during the Bush administration caused some dissent in the department. Holder has promised to bring order to the Civil Rights Division.

U.S. protests expulsions of diplomats from Ecuador

First Secretary Mark Sullivan has been given 48 hours to leave the U.S. embassy in Quito, Ecuador.
The State Department called the expulsion of the second U.S. diplomat from Ecuador in just over a week "unjustified," rejecting charges the diplomats meddled in Ecuador’s internal affairs.

On Wednesday, the Ecuadorian government expelled First Secretary Mark Sullivan, whom it accused of meddling in the government’s internal police policies, giving him 48 hours to leave the country. On February 7, the government expelled Armando Astorga, an attaché with the Department of Homeland Security working in the U.S. Embassy. Acting Deputy Spokesman Gordon Duguid said the expulsions stem from the fact that certain Ecuadorian police were banned from taking part in U.S. counternarcotics training programs, but rejected “any suggestion of wrongdoing by embassy staff.” “Despite the government of Ecuador’s unjustified actions, we remain committed to working collaboratively with Ecuador to confront narcotics trafficking,” Duguid said. Asked whether the State Department would reciprocate the expulsions by kicking out Ecuadorian diplomats from the United States, Duguid would say only, “We will respond as appropriate.”

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A senior State Department official suggested the police in Ecuador police did not meet the criteria to take part in the training, noting, “The United States does have procedures that require it to vet candidates for U.S.-funded training.” The official added, “In some countries this is seen as onerous. However, it is part of the legal accountability measures we must follow.”