U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.
Andy Sanchez had just moved to this dusty outpost near Las Vegas when a gust of anti-immigration furor tore the town asunder.
The town board voted in 2006 to make English the official language of Pahrump and bar residents from flying a foreign flag without a U.S. flag near it. When a couple hung Italian and Polish flags in protest, their house got egged.
"I didn't know that kind of racism was here," said Sanchez, 73, though the ordinance was rescinded within a few months. "It broke my heart."
But last month, Sanchez was heartened when a group of residents launched a recall campaign against a county official who sent emails that disparaged Latinos. That's when Sanchez, a retired nurse, saw the new politics of Pahrump on display.
The Pahrump Valley Times had obtained emails in which Nye County Assessor Shirley Matson, a Republican, compared Latinos to "locusts," said pregnant Latinas were carrying "anchor babies" and told the sheriff she was fearful of "Mexican/Latino, non-English speaking" construction workers building a nearby jail.
Matson, who declined interview requests from The Times, said in a letter to the community that "rarely does a day go by that a county resident does not stop in to thank me for speaking out and ask me to hold my ground."
Yet the all-Republican county commission publicly excoriated her. The newspaper demanded her resignation on its front page. Sanchez joined a group of local activists trying to recall her. "As a public official, you cannot spread hatred," he said at a recent signature-gathering event.
Residents say Nye County has always had a small but vocal anti-immigrant crowd. But what has changed in a matter of years is the ferocity with which some residents are pushing back — underscoring the latest demographic trend in Nevada, where new and diverse residents have remade the swing state's complexion and political culture.
Some of the recent outcry in Pahrump can be attributed to the incendiary nature of Matson's comments, which repelled even supporters of tough border enforcement. "You can't stereotype us because we're 'tea party' people here," said Commissioner Dan Schinhofen. "We can see when things are over the top."
But there is also a tonal shift in Pahrump and elsewhere in Nevada, where the Latino population soared nearly 82% in the last decade. In 2000, nearly two-thirds of state residents were white. Now, close to half are minorities.
In many ways, that mirrors what's unfolding nationwide: Latinos accounted for more than half of U.S. population growth since 2000, and capturing their votes is considered crucial in the 2012 presidential race. Several RepublicanWhite House hopefuls have dispensed with their party's harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, if not its tough border policies.
"It's not just about the growth in Latinos," said Nevada political consultant Andres Ramirez, who has worked on state redistricting. "It's a change in philosophy of how people think."
The party diversity among Nevada's voters is split: Of approximately 1.3 million voters, about 563,000 areDemocrats, 460,000 are Republicans and 360,000 are nonpartisan or minor-party voters.
Nevada elected its first Latino governor last year, a Republican who won much of his support from white voters. Immigrant-bashing, once a reliable rallying cry for the Nevada GOP, now carries electoral risk, as nearly 27% of state residents are Latino.
Just ask Sharron Angle, whose 2010 bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Harry Reid was partly derailed by commercials depicting Latinos as menacing thugs — though she did win deep-red Nye County.
Local Democratic Party chairwoman Jan Bearss views the backlash against Matson as a backlash against the Pahrump of old. "A few years ago, I don't think this would have happened."
Nevada's population boom transformed Nye County. In 1990, of the nearly 18,000 people living scattered across its sun-baked valleys, about 7% were Latino. But as newcomers rushed to Las Vegas for tourism and construction jobs, thousands of people settled "over the hump" in Pahrump, the county's largest town and the self-proclaimed "Heart of the New Old West."
Now, of the 44,000 people who call Nye County home, roughly 14% are Latino. And Latinos accounted for about 22% of the county's K-12 students in the 2009-10 school year.
The growth also rerouted people from more diverse urban areas to a frontier outpost known for legal brothels and feral politics (county Libertarians recently held a Martin Luther King Day event at a gun range).
"The community itself became more diverse in opinion," said political consultant Ramirez. One sign: This month, a gay rights group is scheduled to hold a weekend of bingo and drag shows at a Pahrump casino.
Tension between natives and newcomers boiled over during the immigration tumult of 2006, when towns across the country adopted laws targeting undocumented immigrants. As a Nevada assemblywoman at the time, Angle unsuccessfully proposed making English the state's official language.
In Pahrump, the town board passed the English-only ordinance at a meeting where people who spoke against it were booed. Sheriff Tony DeMeo refused to enforce it, but some Latinos said they were afraid to speak Spanish in public. After a few months — and a number of unflattering news reports — the board repealed the ordinance.
The Matson episode has reopened some wounds.
Newly elected Matson has never publicly apologized for her comments. In her letter, she castigates her foes as "hypocrites" who "think freedom of speech is OK when they exercise it, but a conservative, well, that's altogether different." She has rallied some supporters in town, though their sway will soon be tested.
Stephanie Lopez, a homemaker who moved here from Las Vegas in 2005, is involved in local politics and runs a popular Facebook profile called "Positive Pahrump." When the Matson controversy erupted, Lopez's husband, Jose, asked her to intervene. So Lopez, 29, rounded up like-minded neighbors and started the recall drive.
Sanchez, the retired nurse, joined them. When he was a kid in Arizona, some families wouldn't let him play at their homes. As an adult, he lived in Vegas when it was considered the "Mississippi of the West" for its poor treatment of African Americans. When Lopez recently approached him about helping with the recall, he didn't hesitate.
"She made Hispanics stand up and be counted," he said, wearing a T-shirt that said, "Adios Matson."
Pakistani family members mourn the death of a man shot dead amid unabated violence in Karachi, Pakistan, July, 8, 2011.
"The city has been hijacked by ethnic death squads and sectarian death squads." Karachi-based journalist Ali Chishti
The Pakistani city of Karachi is caught in a wave of violence that by some estimates has killed more people in the past three years than terrorist attacks in all the rest of Pakistan during that same period. It is the worst violence the city has seen since 1995, driven by a complex web of ethnic, political, and social tensions.
Pakistan’s independent Human Rights Commission says the country’s largest city is in the grip of what it calls “a multi-sided wave of insecurity-driven political, ethnic and sectarian polarization that has greatly undermined its tradition of tolerance and good-neighborliness.”
The rights group says 490 people were killed in Karachi just in the first half of the year, compared to 748 violent deaths in all of 2010.
Despite the high number of deaths, Karachi-based journalist Ali Chishti says the ongoing violence in his home city has received little outside scrutiny.
"I think the world’s not paying attention at all. And it’s been misreported or hardly reported," says Chrishti. "It’s one of the biggest centers of the world, Karachi is, one of the biggest cities in the world, and it’s just going down the drain."
Much of the violence stems from a series of running clashes between rival gangs of the long-dominant political power in the city and a group of relatively new arrivals challenging their dominance.
Power shift
For years power in Karachi has been held by Mohajirs, the Urdu-speaking descendants of the immigrants who came from India at the time of partition in 1947. The ethnic group has wielded political power in the city through its party, the Mohajir Quami Movement, or MQM. But analysts say the city has undergone a sharp demographic shift as ethnic Pashtuns, many of them displaced from fighting in Pakistan’s northwest tribal areas, have migrated to the city.
Marvin Weinbaum of the Middle East Institute says young Pashtuns have often left the tribal areas to seek their fortune in Karachi, which is Pakistan’s economic hub. He says this migration has made the Mohajirs very uneasy.
"Here we have two very different cultures coming into contact with one another and again fighting over scarce resources, fighting for turf," says Weinbaum. "And a lot of it, then and now, continues to be in the category of simple criminality, which gets an ethnic patina on it."
Internal splits
Bouts of sectarian-based violence between Shia and Sunni Muslim groups have also been reported. Weinbaum adds that a further complication is a violent internal feud between factions of the MQM that has spilled into the streets of Karachi.
"Part of this new element is that the Mohajir population itself has split, so the MQM has now split. And it’s hard to tell sometimes, but that seems to be part of the mix right now which has been so lethal. So obviously it’s a very complicated situation, and it’s one that local authorities have never been able to get a real handle on," says Weinbaum.
The government has sent in paramilitary security forces, the Rangers, but has so far resisted sending in regular army troops. The army was accused by some groups of using an unnecessarily heavy hand to suppress unrest in Karachi in 1995.
Journalist Ali Chishti, who writes for the Friday Times, does not believe the government can get a grip on the violence.
"I think it’s gotten out of control," he says. "And even if the government wants to control the violence now, I doubt that anybody could do that because the city has been hijacked by ethnic death squads and sectarian death squads."
Analyst Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation says there is concern in American policy circles about the stability of the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.
"But it is bad when you have 30 to 40 people being killed in one day. This certainly has developed into a crisis situation, and I think it’s created a crisis of confidence in the PPP [Pakistan Peoples Party] government," says Curtis. "That seems to be the biggest impact. The government is unable to control the situation. I think it’s going to further undermine their credibility and weaken the Zardari government even further."
Militant presence
Curtis says the United States is concerned that Islamist terrorist groups may try to take advantage of an unstable situation. Ali Chishti says al-Qaida and Taliban figures have been hiding among Karachi’s Pashtun immigrant population.
"They’ve actually planned and orchestrated attacks in Yemen, attacks in Bali. So it has a heavy al-Qaida and a Taliban presence. They have refuge places among people," he says. "So if you map where most of al-Qaida, Taliban, and other people have been caught, it has to be in the outskirts of Karachi, where there’s a huge population of Awan Pashtun refugees living in the city. So it has a large number of terrorist ghettoes," Chrishti says.
The so-called mastermind of the Sep. 11, 2001 al-Qaida attacks in the U.S., Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, lived in a Karachi safe house in 2002.
Captured later in Rawalpindi, he confessed to the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi that same year. And the Taliban’s military chief, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was detained by Pakistani forces in the southern port city in 2010.
Up to 250,000 people marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday despite scepticism that turnout could surpass previous protests. Photograph: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
Activists behind spiralling protests in Israel plan to build on one of the biggest marches ever seen in the country by piling on "more pressure, more people, more tents and more protests" culminating in a million-strong march in 50 cities next month.
An estimated 300,000 people took to the streets on Saturday to press their demands for social justice and lower living costs in the largest demonstrations over social issues ever seen in the country. Despite scepticism that turnout could surpass previous events, almost twice as many people joined marches in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other towns and cities.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, was forced to respond to the spiralling protests with the establishment of a committee to "listen to the distress" and recommend action.
The protests, which began with a handful of tents erected in Tel Aviv, have unleashed a national fury at the government's failure to respond to the needs and complaints of middle-income Israelis. Tent cities have mushroomed in more than 40 locations across the country as well as daily demonstrations and roadblocks over the cost of housing, childcare, fuel, food and electricity.
Despite Israel's relatively healthy economic growth and low unemployment, wage disparities are big, wealth and corporate power are highly concentrated, food prices have increased almost 13% since 2005 and many people spend 50% of their incomes on rent or mortgages.
Up to 250,000 people marched through Tel Aviv to Israel's military headquarters on Saturday, causing major traffic diversions until the early hours. One sign, in Hebrew and Arabic, read "Egypt is here".
In Jerusalem, up to 30,000 people marched to Netanyahu's residence, chanting the rallying cry of the past three weeks: "The people demand social justice." Smaller protests were also held in Kiryat Shmona, Modi'in, Hod HaSharon, Ashkelon, Eilat and Dimona, according to media reports.
Stav Shaffir, 26, one of the original tent protesters in Tel Aviv, told the Guardian that "more pressure, more people, more tents and more protests" would follow. "Right now we're coming together to think about our next steps. There will be more protests – definitely more protests."
A loose alliance of activists behind the protests called for a million-strong march on 3 September.
The committee set up by Netanyahu was ordered to report within a month. "It is impossible to ignore the voices coming from the public," the prime minister said in a lengthy statement. Israel's economy was strong, but "we know that we must make the internal corrections ... social corrections, with sensitivity".
He added: "We will listen to everyone. We will speak with everyone." However, Netanyahu has so far refused to meet a delegation from the tent protesters.
"This is definitely not enough," said Shaffir. "We have been on the street for almost a month, and there has been no contact at all from Netanyahu. The public thinks the government is out of touch with the people, and people are angry and want to see change."Shimon Peres, Israel's president, said the protests were a "testament to the nation's maturity". In contrast, the extreme right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that cafes in Tel Aviv were "packed to capacity" adding that there was no reason "to be depressed".
The social protests have become the most pressing issue for the Israeli government, with the potential, according to some commentators, to topple Netanyahu's coalition. Opinion polls have put public support for the protests at around 90%. Protest leaders have insisted that bringing the government down is not their aim.
The organisers have striven to keep the movement as inclusive as possible, incorporating left and right, secular and religious, Jews and Arabs.
They have avoided publicly making connections between the amount spent on settlements and the military for fear of being branded anti-occupation activists.
"It is certainly one of the largest street protests we have experienced in Israel," said Tamar Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute. "But what really makes it different is its heterogeneous nature. Normally protest is homogeneous. Diversity is as important as size."
She said Israel's economic health was "one of the reasons people feel able to protest. When you are at rock bottom you invest everything in survival. People here are not devastated but discontented."
Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli parliament, said the protests would define Israeli society as "a collective based either on social solidarity or national territorialism".
Indications that the former was outgunning the latter were "why all the settlers are so upset", he added.
Some observers believe Netanyahu will try to ride out the protests until September, when the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations is likely to dominate the political agenda. The Palestinians, they say, are a familiar foe that Netanyahu feels he can outmanoeuvre whereas the Israeli social justice protesters are an unknown force.
Analogies drawn between the Arab spring and the Israeli summer were not completely misplaced, according to Hermann. "Israelis generally want to disassociate themselves from the Middle East, culturally, politically and economically. But obviously they have watched Tahrir Square as well as events in Spain and Athens.
"Protest is a phenomenon which often spills over national borders. This fits into a new wave of street protests that we are now seeing all over the world, including the Middle East."
As Israelis take to the streets to demand social justice, Palestinians are also gearing up to protest next month over their demands for recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations.
President Mahmoud Abbas has urged "popular resistance" as well as diplomatic moves. "In this coming period, we want mass action, organised and co-ordinated in every place," he said last month. "This is a chance to raise our voices in front of the world and say we want our rights."
Marwan Barghouti, an iconic figure for Palestinians who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail, also called for mass action. "I call on our people in the homeland and in the diaspora to go out in a peaceful, million-man march during the week of voting in the United Nations in September," he said.
Palestinian leaders, backed by the Arab League, intend to ask the UN general assembly to back a Palestinian state when it meets in September. However, full recognition requires the backing of the UN security council, which the US has vowed to veto.
The Israeli protests are being given scant attention in the Palestinian media. But, said Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian parliament, "we feel sympathetic because they are also demanding social rights. At the same time we hope that they will see that one of the reasons for this crisis is the Israeli occupation policy and military spending. "We hope that this social movement becomes a political movement which demands peace and end to occupation." Harriet Sherwood
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—In a dismal week when the most positive economic news for the United States was Friday’s federal data showing anemic employment gains, the plight of ethnic elders looks “even worse than we thought it would be,” according to Henoch Derbew, coauthor of a new report, “The Economic Crisis Facing Seniors of Color.”
“While the recession has affected all American, the effects have been truly devastating for Latinos, African Americans and Asian Americans hoping to retire with some dignity,” said Preeti Vissa, director of community reinvestment at the Greenlining Institute in Berkeley, Calif., which released the study Friday.
At a time when Congress and the president are considering cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, she said the report shows that federal and state governments need to take steps to protect lower-income seniors and “to immediately take off the table any proposal that will plunge our most vulnerable elders into poverty.”
Key Findings
Among the report’s findings are that:
• Even before the 2008 recession, a key study found that 91% of African American and Latino seniors are financially vulnerable, while overall figures showing lower poverty levels for older Asian Americans “mask hidden pockets of poverty,” such as among Hmong, Korean or Cambodian seniors;
• The Federal Poverty Line fails to consider factors, such as the high costs of health care, housing and transportation for seniors on fixed incomes;
• Seniors of color have become increasingly reliant on Social Security as they have tapped out their modest savings and employer-based pensions have dwindled in the past 30 years to just over one-in-three African Americans and slightly more than one in five Latino workers.
• The foreclosure crisis has disproportionately affected black and Latino families, draining over $213 billion in wealth from these communities—almost half of the losses to subprime borrowers nationally.
The disproportionately high levels of poverty and near poverty among ethnic seniors will be of growing concern nationally, because they will double by mid-century to four in ten seniors. In the Golden States alone, according to the report, “by roughly 2025, the majority of California’s seniors will be people of color.”
Because the federal poverty line, which is based on a half-century old formula, doesn’t account for significant living costs for elders, the Greenlining report calls on state and federal governments to develop and use more accurate poverty-measurement tools, such as the Elder Economic Security Standard Index (the Elder Index) developed by the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Wider Opportunities for Women.
When UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research applied the Elder Index to every California county (using 2006 census data), it found, for instance, that seniors in Oakland and other parts of Alameda County, needed $25,000 a year on average just to cover essential expenses – not the federal poverty figure of $10,210.
The report cites research showing, “The current financial vulnerability of seniors of color, both nationally and in California, has its roots in a longstanding racial and ethnic wealth and asset gap stemming from a variety of factors, including different initial wealth endowments and outright discrimination.”
For example, data from the Corporation for Enterprise Development reveal that “median net worth for minorities in California was $51,000 in 2006, compared to $304,982 for whites.” The report emphasizes, “These gaps are not going away; in fact, they are growing.” Declining household wealth since the recession started will make retirement an even more difficult goal as ethnic boomers pass the milestone age of 65.
How to Close Income Gap Among solutions to the widening income-security gap for ethnic elders, the reports recommends:
• Protect the social safety-net program, such as Supplemental Security Income, food stamps and adult day health care centers from budget cuts, “which may bring heavy burdens for seniors, and often ultimately higher costs for state and federal governments”;
• Lift asset limits that currently force poor seniors to “spend down” their savings before they can participate in Medicaid, cash assistance or other programs, thus evaporating even small retirement savings;
• Increase access to employer-matched and tax-deferred savings and pension plans for people of color and low-income groups, as well as special retirement accounts set up to help worker save automatically, regardless of whether their employers offer pensions;
• Better protect senior’s limited assets with stronger banking and lending regulations and consumer protections, such as curb the abusive practices of payday lenders, “which tend to cluster in communities of color.”
The report notes, “California is home to large groups of immigrants from more than 60 nations, and no race or ethnic group constitutes a majority of the state’s population.”
The study’s author’s call for great efforts to develop cultural competency in healthcare and related services to provide diverse patients with high-quality care that is safe, equitable and focused on patients and their family caregivers.
“Currently, disparities pervade healthcare to the point that healthcare is fundamentally unequal,” says the study. “For seniors of color, language and cultural barriers form distinct challenges for a population that often needs complex, intensive healthcare services; an adequate force of healthcare workers with appropriate language and cultural skills will be essential.”
