Date: 1/30/2009
By LIZ SIDOTI
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican Party chose the first black national chairman in its history Friday, just shy of three months after the nation elected a Democrat as the first African-American president. The choice marked no less than “the dawn of a new party,” declared the new GOP chairman, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele.
Republicans chose Steele over four other candidates, including former President George W. Bush’s hand-picked GOP chief, who bowed out declaring, “Obviously the winds of change are blowing.”
Steele takes the helm of a beleaguered Republican Party that is trying to recover after crushing defeats in November’s national elections that gave Democrats control of Congress put Barack Obama in the White House.
GOP delegates erupted in cheers and applause when his victory was announced, but it took six ballots to get there. He’ll serve a two-year term.
Steele, an attorney, is a conservative, but he was considered the most moderate of the five candidates running.
He was also considered an outsider because he’s not a member of the Republican National Committee. But the 168-member RNC clearly signaled it wanted a change after eight years of Bush largely dictating its every move as the party’s standard-bearer.
Steele became the first black candidate elected to statewide office in Maryland in 2002, and he made an unsuccessful Senate run in 2006. The former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party currently serves as chairman of GOPAC, an organization that recruits and trains Republican political candidates, and in that role he has been a frequent presence on the talk show circuit.
He vowed to expand the reach of the party by competing for every group, everywhere.
“We’re going to say to friend and foe alike: ‘We want you to be a part of us, we want you to with be with us.’ And for those who wish to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over,” Steele said.
“There is not one inch of ground that we’re going to cede to anybody,” he added.
“This is the dawn of a new party moving in a new direction with strength and conviction.”
His job is to spark a revival for the GOP as it takes on an empowered Democratic Party under the country’s first black president in the next midterm elections and beyond.
He replaces Mike Duncan, who abandoned his re-election bid in the face of dwindling support midway through Friday’s voting.
Two others who trailed farther back in the voting eventually followed suit, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and Michigan GOP chairman Saul Anuzis.
In the sixth and final round of voting, Steele went head-to-head with his only remaining opponent, South Carolina GOP chief Katon Dawson. Steele clinched the election with 91 votes; a majority of 85 committee members was needed.
Just eight years after Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, the GOP finds itself out of power, without a standard-bearer and trying to figure out how to rebound while its foe seems to grow ever stronger.
The Democratic Party boasts a broadened coalition of voters — including Hispanics and young people — who swung behind Obama’s call for change. At the same time, the slice of voters who call themselves Republican has narrowed. The GOP also has watched as Democrats have dominated both coasts while making inroads into the West and South, leaving Republicans with a shrunken base.
Despite the run of GOP losses, Duncan had argued that he should be re-elected because of his experience; his five challengers called for change and said they represented it.
As he left the race, Duncan thanked Bush and said of his two-year tenure: “It truly has been the highlight of my life.”
Another candidate, former Tennessee GOP Chairman Chip Saltsman, withdrew from the race on the eve of voting and with no explanation, saying only in a letter to RNC members, “I have decided to withdraw my candidacy.”
Saltsman, who ran former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s failed presidential campaign last year, saw his bid falter in December after he drew controversy for mailing to committee members a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” by conservative comedian Paul Shanklin and sung to the music of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”
___
On the Net:
Republican National Committee: http://www.rnc.org
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Financial burden of homeownership spread unequally
Date: 1/19/2009
By ALAN ZIBEL
AP Real Estate Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — When it comes to homeownership, Hispanics in New Jersey, single parents in California and senior citizens in Rhode Island all have something in common: More than a third have an unaffordable mortgage.
Inequality in America has traditionally followed familiar patterns of race, age and education. Those long-standing gaps have been magnified by the real estate boom and now the historic bust, according to an Associated Press analysis of 2007 Census Bureau data.
While minorities have made significant gains in wealth and home ownership since 1990, “things are going into reverse gear,” and now the homeownership rate for blacks and Hispanics is falling, said Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and wealth distribution.
Nearly 9.5 million households, or nearly one out of every five of the nearly 52 million homeowners with a mortgage, spend 38 percent or more of their pretax income on their mortgage payment, property taxes and insurance, the AP’s analysis found. That’s the new threshold to qualify for the loan assistance program launched last month by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance companies now under government control.
Not surprisingly, the most financially burdened are in California, Florida, Nevada and the Northeast, areas hardest hit by soaring home prices and now foreclosures.
Yet in every state, there are many pockets of homeowners who are just one unexpected medical bill or car repair from falling behind on their mortgages and setting the foreclosure clock ticking.
The AP’s analysis reveals the enormous scope of the U.S. housing market bust and how unevenly the burdens are spread, both geographically and demographically. And the situation is worsening — a record 10 percent of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage are at least one payment behind or were in foreclosure as of last fall, compared with 7.5 percent a year earlier and just under 6 percent in 2006.
The burden is clearly more arduous among minority households, the AP analysis found.
Just under a third of Hispanic homeowners spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing expenses, compared with about a quarter of Asian and black households and nearly 16 percent of white households.
In much of the country, the trend is more pronounced. For example, included among those who spent at least 38 percent of their income on housing are:
About 40 percent of black borrowers in California, Nevada, Oregon and Massachusetts.
More than 30 percent of of Asian borrowers in California and Florida.
Nearly half of Hispanic homeowners in Rhode Island and at least 40 percent in Alaska, California, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey and New York.
Many Latino families wound up with expensive subprime mortgages because they often have cash income and no bank account, said Janis Bowdler, associate director for wealth building at National Council of La Raza in Washington.
It is common for Latino families to have stable incomes, but limited credit histories — and hence lower credit scores, which lenders use to gauge risk. Many have multiple sources of income, some of it in cash.
During the housing boom, consumer advocates say it was both faster and more profitable for mortgage brokers and loan officers to put Hispanic families in loans that didn’t require proof of income, but charged higher interest rates.
“They had them out the door in a fraction of the time,” Bowdler said. “They were definitely getting more expensive loans.”
Now, Hispanic households like the Cazares family of Visalia, Calif are caught up in the mortgage crisis. Out of work for more than a year after contracting a rare disease caused by an airborne fungus, Joel, 36, brings in $550 a week in disability payments. His wife Maria, 34, makes about that much money weekly by working as a hair stylist.
They haven’t made their $2,500 home loan payment in four months. The couple, who have three kids, have been waiting since October for a loan modification from IndyMac Bank, which was seized by the federal government last July. They hope it will bring their payment down to a more manageable level of around of $1,500.
In the meantime, they buy supersized bags of generic cereal to make ends meet. They’ve canceled their Internet service and are only using one of their two cars, a pickup truck, because it gets better gas mileage.
Our money’s like a piece of gum,” Joel Cazares said. “We’re making it stretch as far and as long as we can.”
The AP’s analysis also found that education level is highly correlated with income and mortgage expenses. Nearly one in three of those without a high school or college diploma spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing, compared with only 12 percent of those with advanced degrees, the AP analysis found.
In addition, seniors spent a far higher share of their income on housing than any other age group.
While about half of seniors own their homes outright, the other half often face financial challenges and diminished earning potential.
Among seniors with a mortgage, nearly three in 10 spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing, according to the AP analysis. The stress is most severe in nine states: California, Washington D.C., Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
As the pain from the mortgage crisis spreads, Washington is abuzz with talk of new efforts to stabilize the housing market and stop the freefall in home prices. President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to direct up to $100 billion in financial bailout money toward a sweeping effort to prevent foreclosures.
Frustrated housing counselors around the country say that if the Bush administration had grasped the severity of the foreclosure crisis earlier and enacted more ambitious programs long ago, the pain for American families and the economy might not be so severe.
“So far, we haven’t seen the mortgage products or resources that we really need to help people who are at risk of losing their homes,” said Brenda Clement, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition of Rhode Island.
To be sure, housing counselors acknowledge that some borrowers only have themselves to blame. They clearly got in over their heads and many knowingly took out risky loans. But they also say that mortgage brokers and lenders took advantage of the elderly, immigrants and the unsophisticated.
For decades, the government and most lenders considered homeowners who spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing to be financially strapped.
But that rule of thumb got thrown out the window during the housing boom. When prices were soaring, many Americans could only afford to buy a home by taking out ever-riskier home loans. Lenders were happy to cooperate, because if the homeowner defaulted, the property could still be sold for enough money to cover the loan.
House-rich and giddy, American attitudes about debt and the risks that go with it changed dramatically.
“The average American is in hock up to his eyeballs,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York.
That’s especially true now that prices are falling and around 13 million households, or about one in four with a mortgage, owes more to the bank than their properties are worth, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at economic forecasting firm Moody’s Economy.com
One of those “underwater” borrowers is Heather Noble, 36, who lives outside Detroit and can see five foreclosures from her front porch. A single mother, she struggled to make her mortgage payment since being laid off from her job in October 2007.
Late last summer, she started a $17-an-hour job handling billing for a doctor’s office, b ut making her home loan payment of around $1,000 a month was a stretch because her take-home pay is at most $1,600 a month, depending on the amount of time she works.
Starting last spring, she spent hour after hour on the phone talking to what she describes as “every human being and division possible” at JPMorgan Chase & Co., before obtaining approval for a loan modification.
Noble’s modification had been held up until the fall, and she was actually blocked from making her monthly payment until the Associated Press made an inquiry into her case. “In the large volumes that we’re handling, we occasionally will miss something,” spokesman Tom Kelly said.
Her two home loans have now been modified. Effective Feb 1., her new monthly payment will be a much more affordable $683 a month.
“That I can pay,” she said. “Now I can pay my bills and stay current and not worry about losing my house.”
Among single parents like Noble, more than a quarter in Michigan and about 27 percent nationwide spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing. And in California the strain is far worse: About four in 10 single parents meet that threshold.
And what worries Avis Holmes, director of Detroit Non-Profit Housing Corp. in Detroit, is that much of the government’s financial aid isn’t targeted at those who are in the greatest danger of losing their homes.
So far, Holmes said, “there are no rescue funds for the homeowners.”
__
AP Data Specialist Allen Chen contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By ALAN ZIBEL
AP Real Estate Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — When it comes to homeownership, Hispanics in New Jersey, single parents in California and senior citizens in Rhode Island all have something in common: More than a third have an unaffordable mortgage.
Inequality in America has traditionally followed familiar patterns of race, age and education. Those long-standing gaps have been magnified by the real estate boom and now the historic bust, according to an Associated Press analysis of 2007 Census Bureau data.
While minorities have made significant gains in wealth and home ownership since 1990, “things are going into reverse gear,” and now the homeownership rate for blacks and Hispanics is falling, said Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and wealth distribution.
Nearly 9.5 million households, or nearly one out of every five of the nearly 52 million homeowners with a mortgage, spend 38 percent or more of their pretax income on their mortgage payment, property taxes and insurance, the AP’s analysis found. That’s the new threshold to qualify for the loan assistance program launched last month by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance companies now under government control.
Not surprisingly, the most financially burdened are in California, Florida, Nevada and the Northeast, areas hardest hit by soaring home prices and now foreclosures.
Yet in every state, there are many pockets of homeowners who are just one unexpected medical bill or car repair from falling behind on their mortgages and setting the foreclosure clock ticking.
The AP’s analysis reveals the enormous scope of the U.S. housing market bust and how unevenly the burdens are spread, both geographically and demographically. And the situation is worsening — a record 10 percent of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage are at least one payment behind or were in foreclosure as of last fall, compared with 7.5 percent a year earlier and just under 6 percent in 2006.
The burden is clearly more arduous among minority households, the AP analysis found.
Just under a third of Hispanic homeowners spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing expenses, compared with about a quarter of Asian and black households and nearly 16 percent of white households.
In much of the country, the trend is more pronounced. For example, included among those who spent at least 38 percent of their income on housing are:
About 40 percent of black borrowers in California, Nevada, Oregon and Massachusetts.
More than 30 percent of of Asian borrowers in California and Florida.
Nearly half of Hispanic homeowners in Rhode Island and at least 40 percent in Alaska, California, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey and New York.
Many Latino families wound up with expensive subprime mortgages because they often have cash income and no bank account, said Janis Bowdler, associate director for wealth building at National Council of La Raza in Washington.
It is common for Latino families to have stable incomes, but limited credit histories — and hence lower credit scores, which lenders use to gauge risk. Many have multiple sources of income, some of it in cash.
During the housing boom, consumer advocates say it was both faster and more profitable for mortgage brokers and loan officers to put Hispanic families in loans that didn’t require proof of income, but charged higher interest rates.
“They had them out the door in a fraction of the time,” Bowdler said. “They were definitely getting more expensive loans.”
Now, Hispanic households like the Cazares family of Visalia, Calif are caught up in the mortgage crisis. Out of work for more than a year after contracting a rare disease caused by an airborne fungus, Joel, 36, brings in $550 a week in disability payments. His wife Maria, 34, makes about that much money weekly by working as a hair stylist.
They haven’t made their $2,500 home loan payment in four months. The couple, who have three kids, have been waiting since October for a loan modification from IndyMac Bank, which was seized by the federal government last July. They hope it will bring their payment down to a more manageable level of around of $1,500.
In the meantime, they buy supersized bags of generic cereal to make ends meet. They’ve canceled their Internet service and are only using one of their two cars, a pickup truck, because it gets better gas mileage.
Our money’s like a piece of gum,” Joel Cazares said. “We’re making it stretch as far and as long as we can.”
The AP’s analysis also found that education level is highly correlated with income and mortgage expenses. Nearly one in three of those without a high school or college diploma spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing, compared with only 12 percent of those with advanced degrees, the AP analysis found.
In addition, seniors spent a far higher share of their income on housing than any other age group.
While about half of seniors own their homes outright, the other half often face financial challenges and diminished earning potential.
Among seniors with a mortgage, nearly three in 10 spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing, according to the AP analysis. The stress is most severe in nine states: California, Washington D.C., Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
As the pain from the mortgage crisis spreads, Washington is abuzz with talk of new efforts to stabilize the housing market and stop the freefall in home prices. President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to direct up to $100 billion in financial bailout money toward a sweeping effort to prevent foreclosures.
Frustrated housing counselors around the country say that if the Bush administration had grasped the severity of the foreclosure crisis earlier and enacted more ambitious programs long ago, the pain for American families and the economy might not be so severe.
“So far, we haven’t seen the mortgage products or resources that we really need to help people who are at risk of losing their homes,” said Brenda Clement, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition of Rhode Island.
To be sure, housing counselors acknowledge that some borrowers only have themselves to blame. They clearly got in over their heads and many knowingly took out risky loans. But they also say that mortgage brokers and lenders took advantage of the elderly, immigrants and the unsophisticated.
For decades, the government and most lenders considered homeowners who spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing to be financially strapped.
But that rule of thumb got thrown out the window during the housing boom. When prices were soaring, many Americans could only afford to buy a home by taking out ever-riskier home loans. Lenders were happy to cooperate, because if the homeowner defaulted, the property could still be sold for enough money to cover the loan.
House-rich and giddy, American attitudes about debt and the risks that go with it changed dramatically.
“The average American is in hock up to his eyeballs,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York.
That’s especially true now that prices are falling and around 13 million households, or about one in four with a mortgage, owes more to the bank than their properties are worth, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at economic forecasting firm Moody’s Economy.com
One of those “underwater” borrowers is Heather Noble, 36, who lives outside Detroit and can see five foreclosures from her front porch. A single mother, she struggled to make her mortgage payment since being laid off from her job in October 2007.
Late last summer, she started a $17-an-hour job handling billing for a doctor’s office, b ut making her home loan payment of around $1,000 a month was a stretch because her take-home pay is at most $1,600 a month, depending on the amount of time she works.
Starting last spring, she spent hour after hour on the phone talking to what she describes as “every human being and division possible” at JPMorgan Chase & Co., before obtaining approval for a loan modification.
Noble’s modification had been held up until the fall, and she was actually blocked from making her monthly payment until the Associated Press made an inquiry into her case. “In the large volumes that we’re handling, we occasionally will miss something,” spokesman Tom Kelly said.
Her two home loans have now been modified. Effective Feb 1., her new monthly payment will be a much more affordable $683 a month.
“That I can pay,” she said. “Now I can pay my bills and stay current and not worry about losing my house.”
Among single parents like Noble, more than a quarter in Michigan and about 27 percent nationwide spend at least 38 percent of their income on housing. And in California the strain is far worse: About four in 10 single parents meet that threshold.
And what worries Avis Holmes, director of Detroit Non-Profit Housing Corp. in Detroit, is that much of the government’s financial aid isn’t targeted at those who are in the greatest danger of losing their homes.
So far, Holmes said, “there are no rescue funds for the homeowners.”
__
AP Data Specialist Allen Chen contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
Cuba thaw, good or bad? US fugitives unsure
Date: 1/18/2009
By WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press Writer
HAVANA (AP) — William Potts calls himself the “Homesick Hijacker.” U.S. authorities have another name for him: fugitive harbored by an enemy government — one of dozens of Americans hiding in communist Cuba.
Almost 25 years ago, he smuggled a pistol onto a commercial flight, diverted the plane to Havana, and spent 13 1/2 years in a Cuban prison for air piracy.
Now the Mount Vernon, New York, native has written to President-elect Barack Obama seeking a pardon and hoping U.S.-Cuba relations will improve and he’ll be able to come home.
Others among the more than 70 American fugitives in Cuba fear the opposite — that a thaw in the nearly 50-year-old freeze between neighbors will put them within the reach of U.S. law.
“It’s not a good time to raise my name up there,” said Charlie Hill, who was accused in the slaying of a New Mexico state trooper and hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1971. “Things are going good. I don’t want to be in the limelight.”
Neither government would comment on the subject because these are sensitive times — a change of U.S. administrations, and indications that both Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro are ready to make tentative moves toward detente.
Among other issues, U.S. officials are hoping Cuba will cooperate in apprehending a ring of Cuban-Americans who fled here from Florida in a Medicare scam. And Cuba continues to insist that the U.S. return five Cuban agents it says were wrongly convicted of spying in Miami.
But a former U.S. diplomat says better relations could give the FBI more freedom to go after the fugitives.
“In my time, we always got more of those kinds of people back from them when things were going a little better,” said Brookings Institution scholar Vicki Huddleston, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1999 to 2002.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, there were dozens of American hijackings to Cuba — so many that they became fodder for standup comedians. As a way of discouraging them, both sides signed a 1971 agreement under which each government agreed to prosecute hijackers or return them to the other country.
Still, periodic tensions with Washington often pushed Cuba to suspend the deal, and many fugitives reaching Cuba got asylum — bank robbery suspects, Puerto Rican independence fighters, Black Panthers leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver. They were treated as political refugees — a key reason why the U.S. still labels Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The remaining fugitives enjoy the same free housing, health care and other subsidies as Cubans.
The U.S. has no extradition treaty with this country, and in some ways, they have become wanted Americans whom no one is after. Washington can’t even provide updated information on who is believed to be in Cuba, referring The Associated Press to an outdated FBI list of 78 U.S. fugitives — at least four of whom are known to be dead.
Cuba stopped giving new arrivals sanctuary in 2006, so far returning four wanted Americans who recently had fled to avoid prosecution.
But some famous ones are thought to remain, such as Victor Gerena, a Puerto Rican separatist. He is still on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive list for a 1983 armed robbery of an armored car company in Connecticut.
Another is Assata Shakur, aunt of slain rapper Tupac Shakur. A black separatist, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey police officer and had ties to former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers, who became a campaign issue for Obama because he and Ayers served on the same Chicago community board.
Shakur escaped from prison and made it to Cuba. Though she remains underground, Potts says he ran into her at a Havana book fair last year. Gerena and Shakur still have $1 million bounties for their arrest. As recently as 2005, Fidel Castro said U.S. racism made Shakur a “true political prisoner.”
But Potts, who got to Cuba a year after Shakur, was not celebrated — instead, he ended up in the fearsome Combinado del Este prison just outside Havana. Now 52, he argues he has paid his debt — and that prison time-served here should allow him to head back to America a free man.
“I am no terrorist. Not even at the height of my sophomoric idealism could I ever condone terrorism of any kind,” he wrote in his pardon request, which he plans to send to the White House through his sister in Georgia.
He still faces an indictment for air piracy in Florida federal district court that could carry a 20-year prison sentence. Alicia Valle, special counsel to the U.S. Attorney for the district, refused to say whether prison time in Cuba could mean a reduced U.S. sentence.
In March 1984, on a Miami-bound Piedmont Airlines flight that originated in Newark, New Jersey, Potts pushed his call button and gave the flight attendant a note saying he had two accomplices aboard with explosives. He now says he told the lie to “avoid confrontations.”
He claimed to be Lt. Spartacus, a soldier in the Black Liberation Army. But now he says he was never actually a formal member of the violent Marxist group, and that he knew the hijacking would be nonviolent.
He was so infatuated with Cuba’s communist way of life that he was willing to hijack a plane, even though he spoke no Spanish, knew no one on the island and expected to go to prison.
Potts has married twice since being released from prison, but is now going through his second divorce. His wife took his Cuban-born daughters, ages 7 and 4, and nearly all the furniture in their scruffy Havana apartment, leaving him only a bed, pile of books and CDs, Muslim prayer rug and a small table on which is a single bowl and chopsticks.
Until recently, he ran an illegal Internet cafe on his aging home computer, netting about $110 a month after expenses, but now he is planning to move out of Havana, hoping to put the divorce behind him.
Potts says if pardoned he will go to the U.S. to help care for his elderly parents, but return to live in Cuba.
His U.S. relatives have visited him twice in recent years as part of family-visit programs designed for Cuban-Americans, and he took them with him to the U.S. Interests Section, Washington’s Havana mission, seeking visas for his daughters.
On the walls were wanted posters for Shakur and other Americans, but not for Potts.
When he met the officials there, “I asked them, ‘Look, are we going to have some trouble in here?’” he recalled. “And they said, ‘No. We could subdue you if we wanted to.’”
They didn’t, but his visa requests were denied.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press Writer
HAVANA (AP) — William Potts calls himself the “Homesick Hijacker.” U.S. authorities have another name for him: fugitive harbored by an enemy government — one of dozens of Americans hiding in communist Cuba.
Almost 25 years ago, he smuggled a pistol onto a commercial flight, diverted the plane to Havana, and spent 13 1/2 years in a Cuban prison for air piracy.
Now the Mount Vernon, New York, native has written to President-elect Barack Obama seeking a pardon and hoping U.S.-Cuba relations will improve and he’ll be able to come home.
Others among the more than 70 American fugitives in Cuba fear the opposite — that a thaw in the nearly 50-year-old freeze between neighbors will put them within the reach of U.S. law.
“It’s not a good time to raise my name up there,” said Charlie Hill, who was accused in the slaying of a New Mexico state trooper and hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1971. “Things are going good. I don’t want to be in the limelight.”
Neither government would comment on the subject because these are sensitive times — a change of U.S. administrations, and indications that both Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro are ready to make tentative moves toward detente.
Among other issues, U.S. officials are hoping Cuba will cooperate in apprehending a ring of Cuban-Americans who fled here from Florida in a Medicare scam. And Cuba continues to insist that the U.S. return five Cuban agents it says were wrongly convicted of spying in Miami.
But a former U.S. diplomat says better relations could give the FBI more freedom to go after the fugitives.
“In my time, we always got more of those kinds of people back from them when things were going a little better,” said Brookings Institution scholar Vicki Huddleston, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1999 to 2002.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, there were dozens of American hijackings to Cuba — so many that they became fodder for standup comedians. As a way of discouraging them, both sides signed a 1971 agreement under which each government agreed to prosecute hijackers or return them to the other country.
Still, periodic tensions with Washington often pushed Cuba to suspend the deal, and many fugitives reaching Cuba got asylum — bank robbery suspects, Puerto Rican independence fighters, Black Panthers leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver. They were treated as political refugees — a key reason why the U.S. still labels Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The remaining fugitives enjoy the same free housing, health care and other subsidies as Cubans.
The U.S. has no extradition treaty with this country, and in some ways, they have become wanted Americans whom no one is after. Washington can’t even provide updated information on who is believed to be in Cuba, referring The Associated Press to an outdated FBI list of 78 U.S. fugitives — at least four of whom are known to be dead.
Cuba stopped giving new arrivals sanctuary in 2006, so far returning four wanted Americans who recently had fled to avoid prosecution.
But some famous ones are thought to remain, such as Victor Gerena, a Puerto Rican separatist. He is still on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive list for a 1983 armed robbery of an armored car company in Connecticut.
Another is Assata Shakur, aunt of slain rapper Tupac Shakur. A black separatist, she was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey police officer and had ties to former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers, who became a campaign issue for Obama because he and Ayers served on the same Chicago community board.
Shakur escaped from prison and made it to Cuba. Though she remains underground, Potts says he ran into her at a Havana book fair last year. Gerena and Shakur still have $1 million bounties for their arrest. As recently as 2005, Fidel Castro said U.S. racism made Shakur a “true political prisoner.”
But Potts, who got to Cuba a year after Shakur, was not celebrated — instead, he ended up in the fearsome Combinado del Este prison just outside Havana. Now 52, he argues he has paid his debt — and that prison time-served here should allow him to head back to America a free man.
“I am no terrorist. Not even at the height of my sophomoric idealism could I ever condone terrorism of any kind,” he wrote in his pardon request, which he plans to send to the White House through his sister in Georgia.
He still faces an indictment for air piracy in Florida federal district court that could carry a 20-year prison sentence. Alicia Valle, special counsel to the U.S. Attorney for the district, refused to say whether prison time in Cuba could mean a reduced U.S. sentence.
In March 1984, on a Miami-bound Piedmont Airlines flight that originated in Newark, New Jersey, Potts pushed his call button and gave the flight attendant a note saying he had two accomplices aboard with explosives. He now says he told the lie to “avoid confrontations.”
He claimed to be Lt. Spartacus, a soldier in the Black Liberation Army. But now he says he was never actually a formal member of the violent Marxist group, and that he knew the hijacking would be nonviolent.
He was so infatuated with Cuba’s communist way of life that he was willing to hijack a plane, even though he spoke no Spanish, knew no one on the island and expected to go to prison.
Potts has married twice since being released from prison, but is now going through his second divorce. His wife took his Cuban-born daughters, ages 7 and 4, and nearly all the furniture in their scruffy Havana apartment, leaving him only a bed, pile of books and CDs, Muslim prayer rug and a small table on which is a single bowl and chopsticks.
Until recently, he ran an illegal Internet cafe on his aging home computer, netting about $110 a month after expenses, but now he is planning to move out of Havana, hoping to put the divorce behind him.
Potts says if pardoned he will go to the U.S. to help care for his elderly parents, but return to live in Cuba.
His U.S. relatives have visited him twice in recent years as part of family-visit programs designed for Cuban-Americans, and he took them with him to the U.S. Interests Section, Washington’s Havana mission, seeking visas for his daughters.
On the walls were wanted posters for Shakur and other Americans, but not for Potts.
When he met the officials there, “I asked them, ‘Look, are we going to have some trouble in here?’” he recalled. “And they said, ‘No. We could subdue you if we wanted to.’”
They didn’t, but his visa requests were denied.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
AIDS battle burnishes Bush’s legacy in Africa
Date: 1/12/2009
By CLARE NULLIS
Associated Press Writer
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — In her AIDS-scarred South African township, Sweetness Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise for George W. Bush that echoes to the deserts of Namibia, the hills of Rwanda and the villages of Ethiopia.
Like countless Africans, Mzolisa looks forward to Barack Obama becoming America’s first black president Jan 20. But — like countless Africans — Mzolisa says she will always be grateful to Bush for his war on AIDS, which has helped to treat more than 2 million Africans, support 10 million more, and revitalize the global fight against the disease.
“It has done a lot for the people of South Africa, for the whole of the African continent,” says Mzolisa, a feisty mother of seven. “It has changed so many people’s lives, saved so many people’s lives.”
Mzolisa, 44, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1999 and formed a women’s support group to “share the pain.” In 2004 she received a U.S. grant to set up office in a shipping container and start a soup kitchen from the group’s vegetable garden. She stretches her $10,000 in annual funding to train staff to look after bedridden AIDS victims, feed and clothe orphans, and do stigma-busting work at schools and taxi ranks.
Hundreds of similar small grass-roots projects are being funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, alongside higher-profile charities and big state clinics.
Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003 to expand prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African, which account for more than half the world’s estimated 33 million AIDS infections. The initiative tied in with a World Health Organization campaign to put 3 million people on AIDS drugs by 2005 — a goal it says was reached in 2007.
Congress last year passed legislation more than tripling the budget to $48 billion over the next five years, with Republicans and Democrats alike hailing the program as a remarkable success.
But the task remains enormous. More than 1.5 million Africans died in 2007 (the U.S. death toll is under 15,000), fewer than one-third had access to treatment, and new infections continued to outstrip those receiving life-prolonging drugs.
In most African countries, life expectancy has dropped dramatically, and only a few, like Botswana, have started to turn the corner again.
And with no end in sight to the global financial crisis, there are fears about whether all the funding approved by Congress will be delivered.
There continue to be detractors who say the U.S. administration should have channeled the money through the U.N.; that it has placed too much emphasis on faith-based groups and abstinence; that it has trampled on women’s health by shunning anything associated with abortions; that it has concentrated on AIDS treatment at the expense of prevention; and that it has diverted attention away from bigger killers like pneumonia and diarrhea.
Helen Epstein, an AIDS expert who has consulted for the U.N. and the World Bank, says both the U.N. and PEPFAR have failed disastrously on prevention by preaching abstinence until marriage and failing to recognize that in some African cultures it is the norm to have several simultaneous long-term relationships.
She says the money would be better spent on strengthening African health care systems rather than focusing on a single disease.
Johanna Hanefeld at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says her research in Zambia indicated that the U.N. Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria was more effective in using HIV programs as a lever to improve health care and staff training, rather than scattering cash among many non-governmental groups, faith-based or other.
PEPFAR ambassador Mark Dybul dismisses criticism that the funding is too narrowly focused.
“In Africa you can’t tackle development goals unless you tackle HIV/AIDS,” he says, citing the devastation wreaked on professions like nursing and teaching.
Besides PEPFAR, Bush has launched a five-year, $1.2 billion initiative to cut malaria deaths in 15 African nations by half.
Dybul also says it is unfair to accuse the U.S. of overemphasizing abstinence because PEPFAR is a major supplier of condoms to the targeted African countries. For instance, PEPFAR figures show 60 million condoms going to Zambia, 40 million to Rwanda, 145 million to Ethiopia in the past five years.
Some critics, like rockers-turned-advocates Bono and Bob Geldof, have become admirers.
“The Bush regime has been divisive … created bitterness — but not here in Africa. Here, his administration has saved millions of lives,” Geldof wrote in Time Magazine as he accompanied Bush on an Africa trip last February.
“The administration and Bush himself deserve a lot more credit than they received for getting this job done,” says Josh Ruxin, assistant professor of public health at Columbia University.
Desperately poor Rwanda, where Ruxin runs a health care project, now has more than 100 centers where people can receive AIDS testing, counseling and treatment, up from just two in 2002.
“I am heartbroken overall by the Bush administration,” Ruxin said in a telephone interview. “But from my perch here in Rwanda, it is impossible to deny the results and achievements of PEPFAR. Many Rwandans were made Republicans because this was the first administration that has taken an interest and done something here.”
Ruxin hopes Obama will learn lessons from PEPFAR’s first five years — in particular end the emphasis on abstinence and start funding groups who work with prostitutes and carry out abortions.
PEPFAR’s biggest single success story is the fortyfold increase in the number of Africans receiving life-prolonging medication in the past five years.
Populous countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia are still struggling to increase access to medication. But in Rwanda, 71 percent of those in need of AIDS drugs received them in 2007, up from 1 percent in 2003, and in Namibia the rate shot up to 88 percent, from 1 percent.
AIDS is no longer a death sentence for people like Ndaxu Mungunda, a Namibian diagnosed as HIV positive after the birth of her child. She, her husband and child were given AIDS drugs provided at all major Namibian hospitals, thanks in part to PEPFAR funding which has increased tenfold in the past five years to $109 million.
Four years later, at age 40, she and her husband look forward to something that is by no means a certainty in Africa’s AIDS era — a ripe old age.
Jones Mubita, a Zambian policeman, had given up hope for his young daughter, a “mere skeleton” covered in boils when she was hospitalized. With the help of AIDS drugs provided by the U.S. government the child is now back at school, he says, beaming.
At a 22-bed clinic run by Living Hope, a church-based charity near Cape Town, 85 percent of patients now survive and only 15 percent die. A few years ago, it was the opposite, says Pat Ball, a retired teacher from North Carolina, and a volunteer at Living Hope.
The acclaimed mothers2mothers organization has expanded from about 40 locations around Cape Town to nearly 500 in seven African countries thanks to PEPFAR cash. Its network of more than 1,000 HIV positive women are trained as “mentor mothers” and paid to counsel the newly infected and ensure they and their babies stay healthy. Thanks to the growing provision of AIDS drugs to pregnant women, few babies in the m2m network are now born with AIDS, says co-founder Gene Falk.
In big South African government clinics, there is palpable optimism that AIDS infected newborns could become history.
Children are especially vulnerable as they are harder to diagnose and quickly pass the point beyond which medication can help.
In a sun ny room furnished with toys and a play kitchen at the Soweto Hospice in Johannesburg, dying children are given a chance to enjoy what remains of their life.
“We want to give them their childhood back,” said Louisa Ferreira, director of the nine-bed pediatrics unit funded by PEPFAR. “The hospice is not about death. It’s about life.”
PEPFAR says its programs have helped care for nearly 4 million orphans and vulnerable children.
One of them is Frans Dobola, who at age 13 lost his parents to AIDS. Heartbeat, an organization helping AIDS orphans with $750,000 in PEPFAR grants, trained a neighbor to act as his foster mother, provided a daily meal, and an after-school program.
Dobola, 20, now works at Heartbeat, in a township near the South African capital, Pretoria, and dreams of a job in computers. Meanwhile, he grows beets and tomatoes at the after-school center’s garden and gives poetry and dance lessons.
“I am giving back to the community what they gave me,” he says, smiling.
South Africa is also the biggest single recipient of PEPFAR money — $590 million last year, more than it received during the entire eight-year Clinton administration, according to U.S. ambassador Eric Bost.
After years of denial about the AIDS crisis by former President Thabo Mbeki, the new government is finally serious about tackling the epidemic.
Francois Venter, an outspoken doctor who heads a PEPFAR-funded program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, says because of its emphasis on measurable targets, “PEPFAR is different.”
“A lot of previous donor projects were touchy-feely, fuzzy,” says Venter, adding that U.S. funding helped boost the number of South Africans on medication to 700,000.
But with 2.5 South Africans becoming newly infected for every one put on treatment, Venter says that prevention remains a “black hole.”
Supporters and critics alike agree that prevention is the weakest link in global AIDS initiatives. When he launched PEPFAR, Bush said he wanted to prevent 7 million new infections but it is hard to tell whether that goal has been met.
PEPFAR says its funds have provided drugs to 250,000 pregnant women to prevent them passing on the AIDS virus in the womb. In countries like Uganda, babies born with the AIDS virus still account for 15-25 percent of new infections and so the increase in therapy to stop mother-to-child transmission offers one of the few rays of hope in an otherwise bleak prevention outlook.
Another promising option would be male circumcision, which can cut transmission by up to 60 percent. But it has so far received little PEPFAR backing because any mass program is thought to be too complex for impoverished countries to undertake.
Most experts agree that prevention means a fundamental change of behavior — fewer sexual partners and mutually faithful relationships. “We are trying to change culture, tradition,” says Mandla Ndlovu, project officer for Johns Hopkins Health and Education in South Africa.
“It is not going to be a one-round fight,” says Ndlovu, who runs a PEPFAR project to increase AIDS awareness among men in Carltonville, a gold mining town outside Johannesburg where men live in hostels away from their families and there are few pastimes besides alcohol and casual sex.
Bost brims with superlatives about the achievements of PEPFAR in South Africa, and believes Bush will be judged more kindly in history than on Jan. 21.
Dybul, a specialist in infectious diseases whose title is now U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, concurs.
“It’s the largest international health initiative in history for a single disease,” he says. “In any other circumstances, he (Bush) would be getting a Nobel prize.”
Sweetness Mzolisa, overflowing with energy and enthusiasm, puts it more simply.
“He’s got heart,” she declares. “He cares about people.”
___
Associated Press writers Donna Bryson and Celean Jacobson in South Africa, Rodrick Mukumbira in Namibia and Lewis Mwanangombe in Zambia contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By CLARE NULLIS
Associated Press Writer
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — In her AIDS-scarred South African township, Sweetness Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise for George W. Bush that echoes to the deserts of Namibia, the hills of Rwanda and the villages of Ethiopia.
Like countless Africans, Mzolisa looks forward to Barack Obama becoming America’s first black president Jan 20. But — like countless Africans — Mzolisa says she will always be grateful to Bush for his war on AIDS, which has helped to treat more than 2 million Africans, support 10 million more, and revitalize the global fight against the disease.
“It has done a lot for the people of South Africa, for the whole of the African continent,” says Mzolisa, a feisty mother of seven. “It has changed so many people’s lives, saved so many people’s lives.”
Mzolisa, 44, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1999 and formed a women’s support group to “share the pain.” In 2004 she received a U.S. grant to set up office in a shipping container and start a soup kitchen from the group’s vegetable garden. She stretches her $10,000 in annual funding to train staff to look after bedridden AIDS victims, feed and clothe orphans, and do stigma-busting work at schools and taxi ranks.
Hundreds of similar small grass-roots projects are being funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, alongside higher-profile charities and big state clinics.
Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003 to expand prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African, which account for more than half the world’s estimated 33 million AIDS infections. The initiative tied in with a World Health Organization campaign to put 3 million people on AIDS drugs by 2005 — a goal it says was reached in 2007.
Congress last year passed legislation more than tripling the budget to $48 billion over the next five years, with Republicans and Democrats alike hailing the program as a remarkable success.
But the task remains enormous. More than 1.5 million Africans died in 2007 (the U.S. death toll is under 15,000), fewer than one-third had access to treatment, and new infections continued to outstrip those receiving life-prolonging drugs.
In most African countries, life expectancy has dropped dramatically, and only a few, like Botswana, have started to turn the corner again.
And with no end in sight to the global financial crisis, there are fears about whether all the funding approved by Congress will be delivered.
There continue to be detractors who say the U.S. administration should have channeled the money through the U.N.; that it has placed too much emphasis on faith-based groups and abstinence; that it has trampled on women’s health by shunning anything associated with abortions; that it has concentrated on AIDS treatment at the expense of prevention; and that it has diverted attention away from bigger killers like pneumonia and diarrhea.
Helen Epstein, an AIDS expert who has consulted for the U.N. and the World Bank, says both the U.N. and PEPFAR have failed disastrously on prevention by preaching abstinence until marriage and failing to recognize that in some African cultures it is the norm to have several simultaneous long-term relationships.
She says the money would be better spent on strengthening African health care systems rather than focusing on a single disease.
Johanna Hanefeld at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says her research in Zambia indicated that the U.N. Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria was more effective in using HIV programs as a lever to improve health care and staff training, rather than scattering cash among many non-governmental groups, faith-based or other.
PEPFAR ambassador Mark Dybul dismisses criticism that the funding is too narrowly focused.
“In Africa you can’t tackle development goals unless you tackle HIV/AIDS,” he says, citing the devastation wreaked on professions like nursing and teaching.
Besides PEPFAR, Bush has launched a five-year, $1.2 billion initiative to cut malaria deaths in 15 African nations by half.
Dybul also says it is unfair to accuse the U.S. of overemphasizing abstinence because PEPFAR is a major supplier of condoms to the targeted African countries. For instance, PEPFAR figures show 60 million condoms going to Zambia, 40 million to Rwanda, 145 million to Ethiopia in the past five years.
Some critics, like rockers-turned-advocates Bono and Bob Geldof, have become admirers.
“The Bush regime has been divisive … created bitterness — but not here in Africa. Here, his administration has saved millions of lives,” Geldof wrote in Time Magazine as he accompanied Bush on an Africa trip last February.
“The administration and Bush himself deserve a lot more credit than they received for getting this job done,” says Josh Ruxin, assistant professor of public health at Columbia University.
Desperately poor Rwanda, where Ruxin runs a health care project, now has more than 100 centers where people can receive AIDS testing, counseling and treatment, up from just two in 2002.
“I am heartbroken overall by the Bush administration,” Ruxin said in a telephone interview. “But from my perch here in Rwanda, it is impossible to deny the results and achievements of PEPFAR. Many Rwandans were made Republicans because this was the first administration that has taken an interest and done something here.”
Ruxin hopes Obama will learn lessons from PEPFAR’s first five years — in particular end the emphasis on abstinence and start funding groups who work with prostitutes and carry out abortions.
PEPFAR’s biggest single success story is the fortyfold increase in the number of Africans receiving life-prolonging medication in the past five years.
Populous countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia are still struggling to increase access to medication. But in Rwanda, 71 percent of those in need of AIDS drugs received them in 2007, up from 1 percent in 2003, and in Namibia the rate shot up to 88 percent, from 1 percent.
AIDS is no longer a death sentence for people like Ndaxu Mungunda, a Namibian diagnosed as HIV positive after the birth of her child. She, her husband and child were given AIDS drugs provided at all major Namibian hospitals, thanks in part to PEPFAR funding which has increased tenfold in the past five years to $109 million.
Four years later, at age 40, she and her husband look forward to something that is by no means a certainty in Africa’s AIDS era — a ripe old age.
Jones Mubita, a Zambian policeman, had given up hope for his young daughter, a “mere skeleton” covered in boils when she was hospitalized. With the help of AIDS drugs provided by the U.S. government the child is now back at school, he says, beaming.
At a 22-bed clinic run by Living Hope, a church-based charity near Cape Town, 85 percent of patients now survive and only 15 percent die. A few years ago, it was the opposite, says Pat Ball, a retired teacher from North Carolina, and a volunteer at Living Hope.
The acclaimed mothers2mothers organization has expanded from about 40 locations around Cape Town to nearly 500 in seven African countries thanks to PEPFAR cash. Its network of more than 1,000 HIV positive women are trained as “mentor mothers” and paid to counsel the newly infected and ensure they and their babies stay healthy. Thanks to the growing provision of AIDS drugs to pregnant women, few babies in the m2m network are now born with AIDS, says co-founder Gene Falk.
In big South African government clinics, there is palpable optimism that AIDS infected newborns could become history.
Children are especially vulnerable as they are harder to diagnose and quickly pass the point beyond which medication can help.
In a sun ny room furnished with toys and a play kitchen at the Soweto Hospice in Johannesburg, dying children are given a chance to enjoy what remains of their life.
“We want to give them their childhood back,” said Louisa Ferreira, director of the nine-bed pediatrics unit funded by PEPFAR. “The hospice is not about death. It’s about life.”
PEPFAR says its programs have helped care for nearly 4 million orphans and vulnerable children.
One of them is Frans Dobola, who at age 13 lost his parents to AIDS. Heartbeat, an organization helping AIDS orphans with $750,000 in PEPFAR grants, trained a neighbor to act as his foster mother, provided a daily meal, and an after-school program.
Dobola, 20, now works at Heartbeat, in a township near the South African capital, Pretoria, and dreams of a job in computers. Meanwhile, he grows beets and tomatoes at the after-school center’s garden and gives poetry and dance lessons.
“I am giving back to the community what they gave me,” he says, smiling.
South Africa is also the biggest single recipient of PEPFAR money — $590 million last year, more than it received during the entire eight-year Clinton administration, according to U.S. ambassador Eric Bost.
After years of denial about the AIDS crisis by former President Thabo Mbeki, the new government is finally serious about tackling the epidemic.
Francois Venter, an outspoken doctor who heads a PEPFAR-funded program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, says because of its emphasis on measurable targets, “PEPFAR is different.”
“A lot of previous donor projects were touchy-feely, fuzzy,” says Venter, adding that U.S. funding helped boost the number of South Africans on medication to 700,000.
But with 2.5 South Africans becoming newly infected for every one put on treatment, Venter says that prevention remains a “black hole.”
Supporters and critics alike agree that prevention is the weakest link in global AIDS initiatives. When he launched PEPFAR, Bush said he wanted to prevent 7 million new infections but it is hard to tell whether that goal has been met.
PEPFAR says its funds have provided drugs to 250,000 pregnant women to prevent them passing on the AIDS virus in the womb. In countries like Uganda, babies born with the AIDS virus still account for 15-25 percent of new infections and so the increase in therapy to stop mother-to-child transmission offers one of the few rays of hope in an otherwise bleak prevention outlook.
Another promising option would be male circumcision, which can cut transmission by up to 60 percent. But it has so far received little PEPFAR backing because any mass program is thought to be too complex for impoverished countries to undertake.
Most experts agree that prevention means a fundamental change of behavior — fewer sexual partners and mutually faithful relationships. “We are trying to change culture, tradition,” says Mandla Ndlovu, project officer for Johns Hopkins Health and Education in South Africa.
“It is not going to be a one-round fight,” says Ndlovu, who runs a PEPFAR project to increase AIDS awareness among men in Carltonville, a gold mining town outside Johannesburg where men live in hostels away from their families and there are few pastimes besides alcohol and casual sex.
Bost brims with superlatives about the achievements of PEPFAR in South Africa, and believes Bush will be judged more kindly in history than on Jan. 21.
Dybul, a specialist in infectious diseases whose title is now U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, concurs.
“It’s the largest international health initiative in history for a single disease,” he says. “In any other circumstances, he (Bush) would be getting a Nobel prize.”
Sweetness Mzolisa, overflowing with energy and enthusiasm, puts it more simply.
“He’s got heart,” she declares. “He cares about people.”
___
Associated Press writers Donna Bryson and Celean Jacobson in South Africa, Rodrick Mukumbira in Namibia and Lewis Mwanangombe in Zambia contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
CNN: Gupta approached about surgeon general post
Date: 1/7/2009
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Barack Obama’s reported choice for surgeon general, CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, could bring a dose of star power to a job that hasn’t had that much clout in decades.
Gupta doesn’t just play a doctor on TV, he’s a neurosurgeon who still scrubs in part-time in one of the nation’s toughest hospitals when he’s not on CNN assignments that have taken him from Hurricane Katrina to Iraq. He also has co-hosted a health “network” that beams feel-good advice on TVs in clinic waiting rooms around the country — one that has drawn some criticism for drug-company promotion.
The surgeon general doesn’t set health policy — but the office can be an effective bully pulpit, and a major report aimed at Congress just last month called for “a more prominent and powerful role for the surgeon general who … should be a strong advocate for the American people.”
Past surgeons general pushed the nation to fight tobacco and AIDS. Having such a well-known TV personality could give the post a reach not seen since the renowned C. Everett Koop, who served under President Ronald Reagan and helped make AIDS a public health issue rather than a moral one — in an era before the 24/7 news cycle.
With the celebrity behind Gupta’s medical credentials, “it’s like a name-brand immediately,” said Dr. Michael Johns, chancellor at Emory University in Atlanta, where Gupta, 39, is an assistant professor of neurosurgery.
“If chosen, Dr. Gupta’s communication skills and medical knowledge could be a boon to the new administration’s health system reform efforts,” noted Dr. Joseph Heyman, chairman of the American Medical Association’s board.
And in contrast to the grandfatherly Koop, People magazine named the then-single Gupta one of the sexiest men of 2003.
However, a surgeon general would “need to demonstrate skills that are too often missing in medical news on TV: skepticism about the science and a careful analysis of both the benefits and harms of medical care,” said Drs. Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
The pair raised questions about drug-company sponsorship of some programs Gupta hosted in a broader critique of medical media coverage last fall, and on Tuesday they urged careful examination of any potential conflicts of interest.
CNN said Obama had approached Gupta about the job but said he would not comment on the discussions.
“Since first learning that Dr. Gupta was under consideration for the surgeon general position, CNN has made sure that his on-air reporting has been on health and wellness matters and not on health care policy or any matters involving the new administration,” the cable network said Tuesday.
Two Democrats with knowledge of the discussions over the surgeon general spot said Gupta was under consideration but cautioned a choice has not been made. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media on the matter.
Obama’s transition office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Gupta has made a handful of political donations in recent years, but appears to have stayed out of the 2008 presidential race.
To take the job, he’d have to give up a lucrative media-and-medical empire. Gupta hosts “House Call” on CNN, contributes reports to CBS News, and writes a column for Time magazine, as well as operating and overseeing residents part-time at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, known for its trauma cases.
During the Clinton administration, Gupta was a White House fellow and special adviser to then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Gupta grew up in the Detroit area, the son of parents who moved from India in the 1960s to work at a Ford plant. He earned undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Michigan.
CBS News is a unit of CBS Corp.; CNN is owned by Time Warner Inc.
___
On the Net:
Obama transition: http://www.change.gov
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
http://subtlebraininjury.com :: http://brainanatomyguide.com :: http://car-accident-rain.com :: http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com :: http://vestibulardisorder.com :: http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Barack Obama’s reported choice for surgeon general, CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, could bring a dose of star power to a job that hasn’t had that much clout in decades.
Gupta doesn’t just play a doctor on TV, he’s a neurosurgeon who still scrubs in part-time in one of the nation’s toughest hospitals when he’s not on CNN assignments that have taken him from Hurricane Katrina to Iraq. He also has co-hosted a health “network” that beams feel-good advice on TVs in clinic waiting rooms around the country — one that has drawn some criticism for drug-company promotion.
The surgeon general doesn’t set health policy — but the office can be an effective bully pulpit, and a major report aimed at Congress just last month called for “a more prominent and powerful role for the surgeon general who … should be a strong advocate for the American people.”
Past surgeons general pushed the nation to fight tobacco and AIDS. Having such a well-known TV personality could give the post a reach not seen since the renowned C. Everett Koop, who served under President Ronald Reagan and helped make AIDS a public health issue rather than a moral one — in an era before the 24/7 news cycle.
With the celebrity behind Gupta’s medical credentials, “it’s like a name-brand immediately,” said Dr. Michael Johns, chancellor at Emory University in Atlanta, where Gupta, 39, is an assistant professor of neurosurgery.
“If chosen, Dr. Gupta’s communication skills and medical knowledge could be a boon to the new administration’s health system reform efforts,” noted Dr. Joseph Heyman, chairman of the American Medical Association’s board.
And in contrast to the grandfatherly Koop, People magazine named the then-single Gupta one of the sexiest men of 2003.
However, a surgeon general would “need to demonstrate skills that are too often missing in medical news on TV: skepticism about the science and a careful analysis of both the benefits and harms of medical care,” said Drs. Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
The pair raised questions about drug-company sponsorship of some programs Gupta hosted in a broader critique of medical media coverage last fall, and on Tuesday they urged careful examination of any potential conflicts of interest.
CNN said Obama had approached Gupta about the job but said he would not comment on the discussions.
“Since first learning that Dr. Gupta was under consideration for the surgeon general position, CNN has made sure that his on-air reporting has been on health and wellness matters and not on health care policy or any matters involving the new administration,” the cable network said Tuesday.
Two Democrats with knowledge of the discussions over the surgeon general spot said Gupta was under consideration but cautioned a choice has not been made. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media on the matter.
Obama’s transition office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Gupta has made a handful of political donations in recent years, but appears to have stayed out of the 2008 presidential race.
To take the job, he’d have to give up a lucrative media-and-medical empire. Gupta hosts “House Call” on CNN, contributes reports to CBS News, and writes a column for Time magazine, as well as operating and overseeing residents part-time at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, known for its trauma cases.
During the Clinton administration, Gupta was a White House fellow and special adviser to then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Gupta grew up in the Detroit area, the son of parents who moved from India in the 1960s to work at a Ford plant. He earned undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Michigan.
CBS News is a unit of CBS Corp.; CNN is owned by Time Warner Inc.
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On the Net:
Obama transition: http://www.change.gov
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
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