65. Cubans Brace for "Reorganization" of Labor Force

by Marc Frank, Reuters

Cuba is moving up to a million employees, or a fifth of its workers, off bloated public payrolls and into jobs where they actually have to work, according to Communist Party and government sources. The goal is to boost the island's struggling economy by targeting what President Raul Castro has called "unnecessary workers" in a five-year project to reorganize its labour force in tandem with some economic liberalization.

"We hope to eliminate 200,000 jobs per year, as much as 100,000 of them over the coming year in the capital alone," a Communist Party economist said, like others asking that his name not be used. Castro said in a speech to young party supporters in April that payrolls would be cut to help modernize the economy and that there were possibly more than a million excess workers.

All state agencies were ordered in January to review payrolls with an eye to trimming unneeded positions, apparently with dramatic results.

"We have 304,000 employees, of which it is necessary to reorient 79,000," Domestic Trade Minister Jacinto Angular Pardo said in an interview in the latest edition of Bohemia magazine.

"We will do this gradually over five years as part of a reorganization of the company system, distribution networks and forms of administration that rid the state of unnecessary burdens and improve efficiency," he said.

The plan is just getting under way, so there have been few layoffs so far, sources said. They said those being let go are offered other jobs when available.

Hundreds of employees at the SEPSA security service in Havana were recently given the choice of jobs in agriculture, construction or the local version of the FBI, a worker said.

LIMITED OPTIONS

"The plan is that those over retirement age will be let go and the rest offered up to three possible jobs," said a former party leader in eastern Holguin, with similar reports coming from various other provinces. Options are limited because the state employs about 85 percent of the work force of 5 million and claims an unemployment rate of only 2 percent.

Those who do not accept initial job offers will have to look for work at the Labour Ministry, get land through the government's agriculture land-lease program and take up farming, or live off family remittances and illegal activity.

They will get unemployment benefits for just six weeks, but will not be totally out in the cold because all Cubans receive free health care and education, subsidized utilities, a subsidized food ration and automatic adjustment of mortgages to 10 percent of the top breadwinner's income.

Still, said an employee at the state-run telephone company, "everyone is nervous, and in particular those above retirement age."

Because of the job shakeup, the government is likely to accompany the plan with economic reforms that will allow more self-employment and other schemes, most of which are currently prohibited, analysts said.

"This plan probably signals additional policy reforms, because current policies are not generating new jobs," said Phil Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute in Virginia.

"There are lots of options: foreign investment, self-employment, cooperatives, or small- and medium-sized businesses. All would yield more jobs and tax revenue, a lower social welfare burden, and less black market activity," he said.

The government's plan in Havana calls for issuing more licenses for self employment in various trades that were frozen a number of years ago, the party economist said.

He said it also appears probable the state-run retail sector will be liberalized, which could absorb some of the extra workers.

64. Ecuador Wins Compensation for Not Drilling for Oil in Yasuni National Park

From Earth’s Newsdesk and the Rainforest Portal, projects of Ecological Internet (EI)http://www.ecoearth.info/newsdesk
http://www.rainforestportal.org/

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It is reported Ecuador will be compensated for leaving oil reserves in Yasuni National Park untouched. This is a major victory for Ecuador, the rainforest movement, and Ecological Internet – who was the first to campaign internationally on the issue.

Ecuador’s government announced today it has reached a deal with the United Nations Development Program under which donor countries will compensate Quito for leaving oil reserves untouched in a large primary rainforest filled national park. Yasuni National Park – covering some 9,820 km2, or about the size of Massachusetts – is thought to be one of Earth’s most biodiversity rich sites and is also home to several nomadic Indian tribes. Yasuni’s preservation (total protection, not “sustainable management” or “conservation”) would spare Earth some 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that contribute to global warming; while keeping biodiversity, ecosystems and cultures fully intact. The official signing is reported to be held on Tuesday.

Ecological Internet’s Earth Action Network [1] was the first to campaign internationally on threats to Yasuni from oil exploration, successfully internationalizing the issue. “This marvelous rainforest and climate victory is very gratifying and exciting,” states Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet President. “Ecological Internet began to campaign in the early 2000s to protect Yasuni National Park from oil development, and continuously since. Like so many of our campaigns, it has just taken off. Our efforts were picked up by ‘The Ecologist’ Magazine, and since then a large local and global movement has been built – including the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, Scientists Concerned for Yasuni, Save America’s Forest and many other participants – who share in this victory.”

In 2007, Ecuador’s then President Rafael Correa launched the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, which sought compensation for agreeing to forgo exploiting the estimated 846 million barrels of crude in the Yasuni National Park. Negotiations had centered on the amount of compensation Ecuador would receive, with Correa insisting his nation get at least 3.5 billion dollars over ten years — about half the value of the estimated reserves in the protected area. When international donors were slow to respond, Ecological Internet launched another campaign which successfully “nudged” donor nations to fund this Yasuni-ITT proposal[2]. As of early this year, about half had been pledged, with Germany (910 million) and Spain (241.8 million) leading the group of donors that included France, Sweden and Switzerland.

Much of the remainder of the Western Amazon — home to some of the most biodiverse and intact primary rainforest ecosystems left on Earth, which are critical for driving regional and global ecosystems and climatic patterns necessary for life – are threatened with decimation by oil rigs and pipelines. Over 180 oil and gas “blocks” – covering some 688,000 km2 (170 million acres) of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil (nearly the size of Texas) – areas zoned for exploration and development. This energy production is concentrated in the Amazon’s largest remaining un-fragmented primary rainforest wildernesses, containing the most species of birds, mammals, and amphibians.     


“Destruction of primary rainforests for oil production and other industrial developments is a global ecological emergency. Regional governments, international donors and global citizens must decide whether every last bit of the Earth’s old forest wildernesses; and intact, large ecosystems which make Earth habitable, will be sacrificed to delay having to transition now to renewable energy sources. In the process, abrupt run-away climate change, mass extinction and social disintegration will be ensured. This deal, if indeed signed as reported on Tuesday, represents a major new model for achieving global ecological sustainability, which must be replicated wherever primary rainforests shroud oil reserves. Further, it sets the precedent that to truly be protected, primary rainforests must be fully preserved in an intact condition, and not ‘sustainably managed’, which is a myth,” explains Dr. Barry.

63. "You can Fool People, But You Cannot Fool the Fish"

Yesterday's Washington Post carried an article about how the Obama administration has formally limited the use of chemical dispersants by BP in its "clean-up" effort but actually rubber stamped BP's repeated request to use the highly toxic chemicals. "Despite the order -- and concerns about the environmental effects of the dispersants -- the Coast Guard granted requests to use them 74 times over 54 days, and to use them on the surface and deep underwater at the well site (see the entire article here).  The use of chemical dispersants more as a public relations gimmick.  The less oil on the surface of the Gulf, the more successful BP's attempt to clean up the mess it created looked. Carys Mitchelmore, a professor at the University of Maryland, told the Washington Post that "By using more dispersants you're just going to be killing more things in the water column."  This validates an earlier commentary I wrote that the BP (and the "Big Oil"), not the government, has been in the driver seat of oil and gas policy.  More generally, the government has been serving the general corporate interests.  

The article below by Campbell Robertson of the New York Times offers a longer view of how the Gulf of Mexico has been the dumping ground for the U.S. military and industry, including the corn and oil and gas industries, for more than half a century. Thus, Washington and the corporate interests it defends have used one of the most intricate ecosystems in the world as their dumping ground regardless of which party or set of politicians were in power. 

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By Campbell Robertson (The New York Times, July 29, 2010)

HOUMA, La. — Loulan Pitre Sr. was born on the Gulf Coast in 1921, the son of an oysterman. Nearly all his life, he worked on the water, abiding by the widely shared faith that the resources of the Gulf of Mexico were limitless.

As a young Marine staff sergeant, back home after fighting in the South Pacific, he stood on barges in the gulf and watched as surplus mines, bombs and ammunition were pushed over the side.

He helped build the gulf’s very first offshore oil drilling platforms in the late 1940s, installing bolts on perilously high perches over the water. He worked on a shrimp boat, and later as the captain of a service boat for drilling platforms.

The gulf has changed, Mr. Pitre said: “I think it’s too far gone to salvage.”

The BP oil spill has sent millions of barrels gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, focusing international attention on America’s third coast and prompting questions about whether it will ever fully recover from the spill.

Now that the oil on the surface appears to be dissipating, the notion of a recovery from the spill, repeated by politicians, strikes some here as short-sighted. The gulf had been suffering for decades before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.

“There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so,” said Felicia Coleman, director of Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”

The gulf is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, home to abundant wildlife and natural resources.

But like no other American body of water, the gulf bears the environmental consequences of the country’s economic pursuits and appetites, including oil and corn.

There are around 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms and tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, where 90 percent of the country’s offshore drilling takes place.

At least half a million barrels of oil and drilling fluids had been spilled offshore before the gusher that began after the April 20 explosion, according to government records.

Much more than that has been spilled from pipelines, vessel traffic and wells in state waters — including hundreds of spills in Louisiana alone — records show, some of it since April 20.

Runoff and waste from cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses and oil-stained parking lots drain into the Mississippi River from vast swaths of the United States, and then flow down to the gulf, creating a zone of lifeless water the size of Lake Ontario just off the coast of Louisiana.

The gulf’s floor is littered with bombs, chemical weapons and other ordnance dumped in the middle of last century, even in areas busy with drilling, and miles outside of designated dumping zones, according to experts who work on deepwater hazard surveys.

The likelihood of an accident is low, experts said, but they added that federal hazard mitigation requirements are not strong enough to guarantee the safety of drillers working in the gulf.

Even the coast itself — overdeveloped, strip-mined and battered by storms — is falling apart. The wildlife-rich coastal wetlands of Louisiana, sliced up and drastically engineered for oil and gas exploration, shipping and flood control, have lost an area larger than Delaware since 1930.

“This has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years,” said Aaron Viles, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit group. “What we’re seeing right now with BP’s crude is just a very photogenic representation of that.”

History of Neglect

All along the coast, people speak of a lack of regulatory commitment and investment in scientific research on the gulf by state and federal lawmakers.

They note, for example, that over the last decade, the Environmental Protection Agency’s financing for the Chesapeake Bay Program, a regional and federal partnership, was nearly five times the amount for a similar Gulf of Mexico program, and a Great Lakes program was given more than four times as much.

“The funding had never been equivalent to other great water bodies,” said Lisa Jackson, the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “That’s absolutely true. But it’s also absolutely true that this administration changed that long before the spill.”

While the Gulf of Mexico program financing remains at roughly the same levels, Ms. Jackson pointed to other programs to address gulf health that have been created and received tens of millions of dollars in the last two years.

On July 19, the Obama administration announced the recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, a committee created in 2009 to coordinate governance over the country’s major bodies of water.

The White House also announced the creation of a gulf restoration road map before the spill to address the long-term problems on the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.

The details of some of these federal plans remain vague, and the financing is viewed as just a start, but they have raised hopes of a more effective federal approach to the gulf’s problems — an approach that has long been missing, say scientists, lawyers and environmental advocates here.

Ms. Jackson added that it is not all about money. Some of the key coastal issues, like control of the Mississippi River, present thorny jurisdictional complications between the federal government and the states.

And while billions of dollars would be required to restore the coast — much more than has already been committed — the maintenance of a healthy gulf also demands rigorous enforcement of regulations.

Some of the strongest resistance to tough regulation, as well as the most permissive attitude toward industry and property development, has come from the Gulf States themselves.

While the states formed an alliance in 2004 to address the gulf’s overall health, the group includes some of the poorest states in the country, and they are concerned that tighter rules could chase away jobs.

In a federal ranking of states for annual toxic release, 3 of the top 10 are along the gulf.

This has led to a cycle of lax oversight. Members of several national environmental groups said they had found much of the gulf a hostile fund-raising and political atmosphere — a point echoed by Paul Templet, a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

“They don’t have any support in state government,” Mr. Templet said of the groups. “They do a cost-benefit analysis, and they decide to spend their money elsewhere.”

A Regional Difference

But without the aggressive watchdog role played by well-financed environmental groups in places like California and the Mid-Atlantic, threats to the gulf have largely gone unmonitored.

Kieran Suckling, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, said he was shocked in the days after the Deepwater Horizon spill to discover the United States Minerals Management Service’s lax oversight of the offshore drilling industry.

“The blatant, extremely public actions of the M.M.S. would not survive for 10 minutes if they were doing this very same thing in the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

But his organization, like many others, did not have an office on the gulf.

“The environmental movement was either so far removed from it that it was unaware, or it was aware and afraid to challenge it because of local politics,” Mr. Suckling said. “Or it was unwilling to challenge because it has written off the gulf as America’s dumping ground.”

By the time the environmental movement gained steam, in the 1970s, the Gulf of Mexico had already established a reputation as a place where the country did its dirty work.

Oil and gas companies have been drilling offshore in the central and western gulf for more than 60 years, providing tens of thousands of jobs for states with ailing agrarian economies.

In that time, only the Ixtoc I spill off Mexico in 1979 has come close to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But still, a report from the Ocean Studies Board and other federal scientific advisory groups found that the waters of the northwestern gulf take on more oil on average per year, from spills, natural seeps and land-based sources like coastal refineries and everyday transportation, than any other North American marine waters.

According to data from the Minerals Management Service compiled and analyzed by Toxics Targeting, a firm that documents pollution and contamination, at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water — a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals — are dumped into the gulf every year. The discharges are legal and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But in the early 1990s, Robert Wiygul, an environmental lawyer who works on the Gulf Coast, brought at least a half-dozen lawsuits against companies that were found to be dumping produced water in shallow areas along the coast without any permit at all, citing little to no enforcement by the E.P.A. and little concern from regional politicians.

The E.P.A. later tightened regulations, including an outright ban on dumping produced waters near shore. But Mr. Wiygul described the situation as typical.

“If you’d had high-level politicians saying, ‘Y’all need to do this, this needs to happen,’ you would have seen a different situation there,” he said.

A Double-Edged Sword

Some of the alternatives to oil and gas could present their own problems to the gulf. While many farm groups, along with the Obama administration, are pushing for an expansion of ethanol-based fuels, such an expansion could mean more corn grown in the Midwest. That in turn could mean more nitrogen-rich fertilizer pouring into the gulf from the Mississippi River.

The nitrogen discharged into the Mississippi — 1.5 million tons of it yearly, from fertilizer, as well as urban runoff and sewage plants — creates a feeding frenzy among the phytoplankton when it enters the gulf. When the phytoplankton decompose, oxygen in the water is reduced so significantly that little life can exist.

That man-made area of dead water, called a hypoxic zone, is second in size only to a similar zone in the Baltic Sea. And its source, for the most part, is in states hundreds of miles from the gulf.

“One of the problems with the gulf as an ecosystem is its insults come from so damn far away,” said Oliver Houck, a lawyer at the Tulane University Law School in New Orleans.

The Clean Water Act has been effective at regulating “point source” pollution from specific factories and waste plants. But the act leaves much up to the states when it comes to regulating more diffuse sources of pollution, like runoff. And agricultural runoff is explicitly exempt from regulation under the act.

That does not mean that the states and the E.P.A. are powerless to curtail upstream pollution, said Nancy Rabalais, an expert on gulf hypoxia and executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. They just have been reluctant to do so in the past.

She said some positive steps had been made recently, including a new four-year, $320 million federal initiative dedicated to substantially reducing the nitrogen coming into the gulf by working with agricultural states upriver. But the plan is only a start, she said, and she has not seen the states along the Mississippi, including those in the gulf, push for the financing needed to make a measurable difference.

Mr. Pitre is skeptical that anything will change, given the economic realities. The BP spill aside, much of the damage to the gulf has been gradual and piecemeal. And people still believe that the gulf is big enough to absorb it.

“You can fool people,” Mr. Pitre said. “But you can’t fool the fish.”

62. New Hypothesis about Human Evolution and Human Affection for Other Animals

ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) — It's no secret to any dog-lover or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals. But in a new journal article and forthcoming book, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University argues that this human-animal connection goes well beyond simple affection. Shipman proposes that the interdependency of ancestral humans with other animal species -- "the animal connection" -- played a crucial and beneficial role in human evolution over the last 2.6 million years.

"Establishing an intimate connection to other animals is unique and universal to our species," said Shipman, a professor of biological anthropology. Her paper describing the new hypothesis for human evolution based on the tendency to nurture members of other species will be published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

In addition to describing her theory in the scientific paper, Shipman has authored a book for the general public, now in press with W. W. Norton, titled The Animal Connection. "No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild -- no gazelles take in baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer," Shipman said. "Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?"

Shipman suggests that the animal connection was prompted by the invention of stone tools 2.6-million years ago. "Having sharp tools transformed wimpy human ancestors into effective predators who left many cut marks on the fossilized bones of their prey," Shipman said. Becoming a predator also put our ancestors into direct competition with other carnivores for carcasses and prey. As Shipman explains, the human ancestors who learned to observe and understand the behavior of potential prey obtained more meat. "Those who also focused on the behavior of potential competitors reaped a double evolutionary advantage for natural selection," she said.

Over time, Shipman explains, the volume of information about animals increased, the evolutionary benefits of communicating this knowledge to others increased, and language evolved as an external means of handling and communicating information through symbols. "Though we cannot discover the earliest use of language itself, we can learn something from the earliest prehistoric art with unambiguous content. Nearly all of these artworks depict animals. Other potentially vital topics -- edible plants, water, tools or weapons, or relationships among humans -- are rarely if ever shown," Shipman said. She sees this disproportion as evidence that the evolutionary pressure to develop an external means of storing and transmitting information -- symbolic language -- came primarily from the animal connection.

Shipman concludes that detailed information about animals became so advantageous that our ancestors began to nurture wild animals -- a practice that led to the domestication of the dog about 32,000 years ago. She argues that, if insuring a steady supply of meat was the point of domesticating animals, as traditionally has been assumed, then dogs would be a very poor choice as an early domesticated species. "Why would you take a ferocious animal like a wolf, bring it into your family and home, and think this was advantageous?" Shipman asks. "Wolves eat so much meat themselves that raising them for food would be a losing proposition."

Shipman suggests, instead, that the primary impetus for domestication was to transform animals we had been observing intently for millennia into living tools during their peak years, then only later using their meat as food. "As living tools, different domestic animals offer immense renewable resources for tasks such as tracking game, destroying rodents, protecting kin and goods, providing wool for warmth, moving humans and goods over long distances, and providing milk to human infants" she said.

Domestication, she explained, is a process that takes generations and puts selective pressure on abilities to observe, empathize, and communicate across species barriers. Once accomplished, the domestication of animals offers numerous advantages to those with these attributes. "The animal connection is an ancient and fundamentally human characteristic that has brought our lineage huge benefits over time," Shipman said. "Our connection with animals has been intimately involved with the evolution of two key human attributes -- tool making and language -- and with constructing the powerful ecological niche now held by modern humans."

61. Warmer Climate and Release of Carbon Dioxide by Inland Lakes

ScienceDaily (July 23, 2010) — Much organically bound carbon is deposited on inland lake bottoms. A portion remains in the sediment, sometimes for thousands of years, while the rest is largely broken down to carbon dioxide and methane, which are released into the atmosphere. Swedish researchers have shown that carbon retention by sediment is highly temperature-sensitive and that a warmer climate would result in increased carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. 

The study is published in the current issue of the journal Nature. 

Particles of different kinds -- including microscopic algae, other plankton and humus from surrounding land areas -- are continuously deposited on lake bottoms. The breakdown of a portion of this matter by bacteria in the sediment contributes significantly to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Lake sediment nevertheless constitutes an important "carbon sink," serving to store -- sometimes for a very long time -- a significant portion of the carbon-containing material that does not decompose.

To date, it has been unclear to what extent organic, carbon-containing material remains on lake bottoms, as opposed to being broken down. A group of researchers under the leadership of Professor Lars Tranvik at the Department of Limnology at Uppsala University has found a strong connection between the carbon dioxide production of lake sediment and bottom-water temperature.

"What we have discovered is that a very similar temperature-dependence relationship holds for a wide range of lake-sediment types," says doctoral student Cristian Gudasz, who was responsible for data collection and evaluation. "Temperature affects carbon-dioxide production in much the same way regardless of a lake's nutrient content and geographic location and the chemical composition of the sediment."

The discovery of a broadly robust temperature-dependence relationship set the stage for an investigation of the effect of temperature on lake sediment in the boreal forest zone that runs through Eurasia and North America and contains millions of lakes. The annual rate at which bound carbon is deposited as sediment in the lakes of the boreal zone will fall by 4-27 per cent, depending on which climate forecasts are borne out, over the next hundred years. The production of carbon dioxide by lake sediment will increase correspondingly, resulting in higher levels of emissions to the atmosphere.

It is becoming increasingly clear that inland water systems play an important role in the global carbon cycle, in spite of the fact that they only cover 3 percent of the land area of the Earth. The study under consideration demonstrates how the role of inland water systems can be expected to change in response to climate change.

The project was carried out in collaboration with researchers at Linköping University within the scope of a major research undertaking focusing on the effects of environmental change on lake ecosystems and financed by Formas and the Swedish Research Council.

60. Civil Libertarian Lawyer Lynn Stewart Resentenced to 10 Years

On July 14, Judge John G. Koeltl of the Federal District Court in Manhattan increased the sentence of Lynne Stewart,  a civil libertarian lawyer falsely convicted of assisting terrorism, to 10 years — nearly five times as long as her original sentence.

In the context of "war of terror" crackdown on civil liberties, on April 9, 2002 Lynne Stewart was arrested. In February 2005, Stewart was convicted of charges of smuggling messages from her client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to his followers.  The Sheik has been serving a life-sentence for plotting to bomb the World Trade Center.   

In 2006, Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in jail, a relatively light sentence. Judge Koeltl acknowledged that there was "'no evidence that any victim was in fact harmed' by her actions" and noted her career as a "lawyer to the poor and the unpopular."

However, the arrest, trial and sentencing of Lynne Stewart are part of the attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and install fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s repressive measures, especially those who want to help Arabs and Muslims being prosecuted for free speech.

Thus, the prosecutor appealed to a higher court for more severe punishment for Stewart.  In 2009, the higher court upheld the conviction and ordered Judge Koeltl to increase the sentence. 

Lynne Stewart is 70 years old and is under care for breast cancer. Ralph Poynter, her husband, characterized judge's decision as  “a death sentence."

“I’m somewhat stunned, Judge, by the swift change in my outlook,” Stewart said in court. “We will continue to struggle on to take all available options to do what we need to do to change this.”

She added: “I feel like I let a lot of my good people down,” to which people in the gallery shouted, “We love you.”

59. Mumia Abu-Jamal on Ecocide

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning Pennsylvania journalist who exposed police violence against minority communities. On death row since 1982, he was wrongfully sentenced for the shooting of a police officer. New evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two killers of Officer Faulkner) points to his innocence! Mumia had no criminal record.

For the last 28 years, Abu-Jamal has been locked up 23 hours a day, denied contact visits with his family, had his confidential legal mail illegally opened by prison authorities, and put into punitive detention for writing his first of three books while in prison, Live From Death Row.

His case is currently on appeal before the Federal District Court in Philadelphia. Mumia's fight for a new trial has won the support of tens of thousands around the world, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, The European Parliament, Alice Walker, Paul Newman, Maya Angelou, Sister Helen Prejean, Danny Glover, Rage Against The Machine, the Detroit and San Francisco City Councils, Amnesty International, and many others. Mumia Abu-Jamal's fate rests with all those people who believe in every person's right to justice and a fair trial.

"I remain innocent. A court cannot make an innocent man guilty. Any ruling founded on injustice is not justice. The righteous fight for life, liberty, and for justice can only continue." Mumia Abu-Jamal , Oct. 31, 1998.


Mumia continues his to write and speak from the death row,  Recently, the Prison Radio Project recorded a brief essay of him on Ecocide, focusing on the BP oil spill disaster. 


To learn more about Mumia's case visit the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal page on Who Is Mumia.