CHICAGO (AP) — Thousands of nurses and other protesters gathered Friday at a downtown Chicago plaza for a noisy but largely peaceful demonstration demanding a “Robin Hood” tax on banks’ financial transactions, before a smaller but more raucous crowd broke away and began marching through city streets.

The marchers chanted slogans and taunted police, who followed on bicycles and on foot. Police horses blocked some intersections as the breakaway groups wound through the city.

Friday’s demonstrations were the largest yet ahead of a two-day NATO summit that is expected to draw even larger protests.

Members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nurses union, were joined by members of the Occupy movement, unions and veterans. City officials have said the event could draw more than 5,000 because of a performance by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, an activist who has played at many Occupy events. Early crowds did not appear to be that large.

The nurses and their supporters dressed in red shirts and wore green felt Robin Hood caps with red feathers. There were few problems at the rally, though police arrested at least one demonstrator as the gathering broke up.

About a dozen police officers, some wearing riot gear, surrounded the protester, who was dressed entirely in black and identified himself as a 19-year-old from Albuquerque, N.M. Police handcuffed him and walked him away from the rally on Daley Plaza.

Deb Holmes, a nurse at a hospital in Worcester, Mass., said she was advocating for the tax but also protesting proposals to cut back nurses’ pensions.

“We’ve worked 30 years for them and don’t want to get rid of them,” she said.

The rally — which originally was scheduled to coincide with the start of the G-8 economic summit before that summit was moved from Chicago to Camp David — drew a broad spectrum of causes, from anti-war activists to Occupy protesters and Cathy Christeller’s nonprofit Chicago Women’s AIDS project.

Christeller, the agency’s executive director, said there is common ground among all protesters, even against the backdrop of the NATO summit.

“The whole … idea we should slash the (social) safety net instituted here and in Europe — It’s a disaster,” she said. “It ignores the source of the economic downturn, and it’s making people suffer unnecessarily. This brings us together,”

Mary O’Sullivan and Chris Fogarty held the same signs that they carry every week. The retired couple have been protesting together for more than a decade, and Mary has carried the same sign for years, taping over “Honk to indict Bush” to read “Honk to indict banksters.”

She said NATO “leaves rubble in their wake.”

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/hundreds-protesters-marching-chicago-200425577.html;_ylt=AopsHiJsTJltIJUQs0PeaXGs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNsMDJoaGUyBG1pdANUb3BTdG9yeSBGUARwa2cDNzUyYjlkMDgtOGZlZC0zYWYyLWIzMjAtYjRjNmJiYTA0YTAzBHBvcwMxBHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyA2U5ZTIxY2YwLWExMjQtMTFlMS1hNzNkLWJkNmNkZDgyZmY5Nw–;_ylg=X3oDMTFlamZvM2ZlBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdAMEcHQDc2VjdGlvbnM-;_ylv=3

President Obama’s 2013 budget just went down to defeat by a 99-0 vote in the Senate. In March, the measure went before the House for a vote – and went down to flaming defeat, 414-0. The Obama budget had been held up in the Senate by Democrats for fear of complete failure; that fear, it appears, was justified.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Senate Budget Committee ranking member, brought forward Obama’s budget as a resolution. The White House had already attempted to distinguish its budget from Sessions’ budget resolution by claiming that there were minor policy differences between the two, a weak attempt by the White House to provide an excuse for why Democrats would vote it down.

Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/16/Obama-2013-budget-goes-down

After an increase in killings of foreign troops by Afghan army and police officers, and at a time when Afghanistan is poised to take over security in an area where UK forces operate, how safe are British troops from so-called “green on blue” killings?

Lance Corporal Lee Davies, 27, from 1st Battalion Welsh Guards and Royal Air Force airman Corporal Brent McCarthy, 25, were shot dead by members of the Afghan Police Force, in Helmand province on Saturday. Their bodies are du to be flown back to the UK on Thursday.

Their deaths mean 12 British service personnel have now been killed in the country since 2009 in “green on blue” attacks, where members of the Afghan security forces have opened fire on international allies.

It comes at a critical time as Afghanistan is set to take over security in the Nahr-e-Saraj area where UK forces operate.

Afghanistan’s President Karzai recently announced that Afghan forces would take lead responsibility for security in another 122 areas of the country.

In March, Nato – the Western military alliance leading foreign military operations in Afghanistan – devised a strategy to strengthen security measures to reduce attacks on its forces.

A Nato spokesman said the new steps included revising and improving the vetting service for new recruits to include biometric data, medical checks and endorsement by local elders.

He said all those already recruited were undergoing the same checks retrospectively.

Afghan forces have also committed to strengthening leadership, and ensuring soldiers and police get adequate leave and regular pay.

All weapons must be accounted for and troops tested for drugs.

In addition, both Afghan and Nato troops are undergoing cultural awareness training to “bridge the cultural gap”.

 
Nato troops are training their Afghan counterparts in preparation for a full handover in 2014

Fake ID

The number of Afghan counterintelligence operatives is being increased to 850 members of staff, who are being embedded with troops and in training schools where they are tasked with monitoring the behaviour of Afghan service personnel.

The BBC’s Bilal Sarwary, in Afghanistan, says almost all rogue officers came from the eastern province of Ningrhar. Most used fake files with forged ID and signatures from tribal elders to join up.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18057422

A scathing new anti-Romney ad from the Obama campaign picks up right where Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich left off

With the release of a new two-minute (!) negative ad from the Obama campaign, it’s now official: Mitt Romney’s perfect record of being attacked over his Bain Capital days is still intact.

OK, there’s an asterisk: Technically, Bain didn’t come up in Romney’s first campaign, for the 1994 Republican Senate nomination in Massachusetts. But that was barely a race: His opponent, John Lakian, had been shamed out of politics by a résumé embellishment scandal a dozen years earlier, barely qualified for the primary ballot, and lost to Romney by 66 points. And Lakian’s background was in venture capital too, so Bain was not exactly a logical topic for him to raise.

But outside of that ’94 primary, every time Romney has been in a competitive race, an opponent has accused him of making his fortune by gutting companies and ruining the lives of innocent workers.

The new Obama ad, which is airing in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado, focuses on the story of GST Steel, a company in which Bain purchased a majority stake in 1993, just before Romney’s first foray into politics. In 2001, after Romney had left his day-to-day role with Bain and was overseeing the Olympics in Utah, GST’s Kansas City plant was shuttered, costing more than 700 workers their jobs even as Bain itself profited. The ad mixes in clips of Romney boasting about his job creation record and empathy for the jobless with testimonials from those whose lives were affected by the plant’s closure.

“It was like a vampire,” one former GST employee says of Bain. “It came in and sucked the life out of us.”

It’s a dramatic, well-produced ad that paints a damning portrait of the presumptive GOP nominee and the firm he built. The question is whether it will be effective, and the track record for previous Bain assaults on Romney is mixed:

1994 Senate general election: Here is the example the Obama team is hoping to emulate. After his September ’94 GOP primary win, a poll gave Romney a narrow edge over Ted Kennedy, whose own popularity had waned in the wake of the William Kennedy Smith trial. By the end of the month, the Kennedy campaign settled on Bain as Romney’s prime vulnerability, and made the firm’s acquisition of an Indiana company, SCM, a major point of emphasis. Here is one of several SCM ads that Kennedy’s campaign ran:

Interestingly, when this assault began, the Boston Globe noted that Romney had been running warm and fuzzy ads about his personal story for a few months and suggested that “voters may see this series as the powerful Kennedy machine beating up on that nice young man.” But by early October, Kennedy was comfortably ahead again, and the race wasn’t close the rest of the way, with the incumbent prevailing by 17 points. Were the Bain spots responsible for the giant polling shift? It’s impossible to say for sure, but they clearly didn’t hurt.

2002 gubernatorial general election: Romney spent much of the fall campaign running behind the Democratic nominee, state Treasurer Shannon O’Brien. He seemed to gain traction, though, with an attack ad that played up the losses that the state’s pension fund incurred on O’Brien’s watch from investments in Enron.

O’Brien countered by reviving the SCM story, running ads on the incident and calling Romney “the face of corporate greed in America.” She also launched an spot called “Sizzle” that featured a laid-off worker from GST – the same steel company Obama is now highlighting – who told viewers:

“It’s hard to believe that a man like Mitt Romney can have enough power and influence and money behind him to come in, destroy families, put people out of work that’s sick, with no health insurance. There’s nothing left. We have nothing left.”

O’Brien, though, lost to Romney by 7 points. This doesn’t mean the Bain attacks backfired. As Boston journalist Dan Kennedy noted today, Romney struggled throughout the ’02 general election more than the prior two GOP candidates – Paul Cellucci and Bill Weld – had. And it may have been a last-minute push by Romney to link O’Brien to unpopular Democratic leaders in the state Legislature that moved voters. Still, the fact remains that O’Brien played the Bain card aggressively, and it didn’t bring her to victory.

2008 Republican primaries: Bain was not a huge issue in this race, but when Mike Huckabee said that Romney reminds people of “the guy who laid you off,” he was clearly trying to harness the instinctively negative feelings that even many blue-collar Republicans have toward the world of venture capital. That line may have helped Huckabee in Iowa, where he beat Romney by 9 points.

Then, in the run-up to Florida’s primary, John McCain directly attacked Romney over Bain, arguing that “as head of his investment company he presided over the acquisition of companies that laid off thousands of workers.” McCain ended up winning Florida narrowly, a result that cemented him as the clear front-runner and dealt a severe blow to Romney’s hopes.

2012 Republican primaries: The attacks on Bain were far more pointed in Romney’s second bid for the GOP nomination, with Rick Perry accusing him of practicing “vulture capitalism” and Newt Gingrich branding him a “predatory corporate raider.” The Gingrich campaign even created a vicious 29-minute video titled “King of Bain,” which was released about a week before the South Carolina primary:

Democrats, of course, were delighted by this development, and an income gap came to define the GOP race, with Romney generally cleaning up with affluent Republicans voters but often losing to Gingrich (and later Rick Santorum) with those in the working and middle classes. At the same time, Gingrich took immense heat from leading Republican voices, who blasted him for doing dirty work for Democrats and defended Romney’s Bain work. And Santorum refused to join the Bain pile-on, saying that “I just don’t think as a conservative and someone who believes in business that we should be out there playing the games that the Democrats play, saying somehow capitalism is bad.”

Read original post: http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/the_bain_beast_returns/singleton/

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s budget deficit has swelled to a projected $16 billion — much larger than had been predicted just months ago — and will force severe cuts to schools and public safety if voters fail to approve tax increases in November, Gov. Jerry Brown said Saturday.

The Democratic governor said the shortfall grew from $9.2 billion in January in part because tax collections have not come in as high as expected and the economy isn’t growing as fast as hoped for. The deficit has also risen because lawsuits and federal requirements have blocked billions of dollars in state cuts.

“This means we will have to go much farther and make cuts far greater than I asked for at the beginning of the year,” Brown said in an online video. “But we can’t fill this hole with cuts alone without doing severe damage to our schools. That’s why I’m bypassing the gridlock and asking you, the people of California, to approve a plan that avoids cuts to schools and public safety.”

Brown did not release details of the newly calculated deficit Saturday, but he is expected to lay out a revised spending plan Monday. The new plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 hinges in large part on voters approving higher taxes.

The governor has said those tax increases are needed to help pull the state out of a crippling decade shaped by the collapse of the housing market and recession. Without them, he warned, public schools and colleges, and public safety, will suffer deeper cuts.

“What I’m proposing is not a panacea, but it goes a long way toward cleaning up the state’s budget mess,” Brown said.

Democrats, who control the Legislature, have resisted Brown’s proposed cuts so far this year. Republican lawmakers criticized the majority party for building in overly optimistic tax revenues.

“Today’s news underscores how we must rein in spending and let our economy grow by leaving overburdened taxpayers alone,” said Assembly Republican leader Connie Conway in a statement.

The governor pursued a ballot initiative because Republican lawmakers would not provide the votes needed to reach the two-thirds legislative majority required to raise taxes.

Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, acknowledged that lawmakers have “limited and difficult choices left to solve the deficit.” Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he wasn’t surprised by the deficit spike given that state tax revenue have fallen $3.5 billion below projections in the current year.

“We will deal with it,” Steinberg said Saturday. “And we know that more cuts are inevitable but we will do our very, very best to save more than we lose, especially for those in need.”

Under Brown’s tax plan, California would temporarily raise the state’s sales tax by a quarter-cent and increase the income tax on people who make $250,000 or more. Brown is projecting his tax initiative would raise as much as $9 billion, but a review by the nonpartisan analyst’s office estimates revenue of $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2012-13.

Supporters of the “Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012″ say the additional revenue would help maintain current funding levels for public schools and colleges and pay for programs that benefit seniors and low-income families. It also would provide local governments with a constitutional guarantee of funding to comply with a new state law that shifts lower-level offenders from state prisons to county jails.

A second tax hike headed for the November ballot is being promoted by Los Angeles civil rights attorney Molly Munger, whose initiative would raise income taxes on a sliding scale for nearly all wage-earners to help fund schools.

Anti-tax groups and Republican lawmakers say both tax increases will hurt California’s economic recovery. State GOP Chairman Tom Del Beccaro has embarked on a statewide campaign to discuss alternatives to Brown’s tax hikes.

The governor is expected to propose a contingency plan with a list of unpopular cuts that would kick in automatically if voters reject tax hikes this fall. In January, he said they would result in a K-12 school year shortened by up to three weeks, higher college tuition fees and reduced funding for courts.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/california-facing-higher-16-billion-shortfall-213905732–finance.html

By Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times | May 14, 2012

In a twist on a theme that has flared up on the national political stage, labor unions representing Los Angeles city workers are accusing Democratic Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of waging war against women, saying most of his proposed layoffs would hit jobs traditionally held by female workers.

In his proposed budget now under review by the City Council, Villaraigosa calls for eliminating 231 filled positions. Individual employees who would lose jobs have not been identified, but roughly 90% of the positions targeted are clerk, secretarial and other jobs mostly held by women.

If approved, the job cuts would follow a pattern set two years ago, when women made up less than a third of the city’s total workforce but constituted 54% of the layoffs called for by Villaraigosa, according to records. Dozens of child-care workers and library employees were among those let go.

Union members have raised the issue at news conferences and council budget hearings, where one city worker this month drew cheers from the audience when she told lawmakers: “This is an attack on women!”

Her comments echo recent accusations by Democrats of a Republican “war on women” over congressional efforts to roll back abortion and contraceptive rights. The local attacks, however, are being directed at Villaraigosa, who, as chairman of this summer’s Democratic National Convention, has been tasked with leading the Democratic Party platform.

Villaraigosa spokesman Peter Sanders said gender “was not a factor considered” when decisions about job eliminations were being made. And City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana said hundreds of vacant positions proposed for elimination include jobs more typically held by men. He also said the number of people facing layoffs will probably shrink as workers are shifted from threatened positions into vacancies.

Torie Osborn, a former advisor to the mayor, says the fact that women may be more affected by the elimination of lower-level civil service jobs simply “reflects what is.”

“We still have a gendered division of labor,” said Osborn, who is running for state Assembly. “It speaks to the continuing need for women to rise in power and leadership so they’re not at the bottom of the ladder.”

But local union leaders say layoffs are hurting the most vulnerable city workers. Alice Goff, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3090, which represents clerical employees, said her members, who are predominantly minority and female, have been hit disproportionately hard by the cuts.

Artillar Watts, a Police Department clerk for 22 years, fears she may lose her job if the mayor’s proposal to lay off 159 civilians in the department is approved. If her position is cut, Watts, a single mother, says she may not be able to afford college for her teenage son.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mayor-women-layoffs-20120514,0,3647068.story

New York City’s two Republican congressional representatives are calling on Democrats to apologize for backing an amendment that effectively rebuked the New York Police Department over its controversial counterterrorism tactics.

Republican Reps. Peter King and Bob Turner called the vote a “shameful surrender to political correctness.”

The proposal, which failed this past Wednesday on a mostly party-line vote, would have prohibited funding for law enforcement organizations engaged in unconstitutional or unlawful discrimination. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., the sponsor, made clear on the House floor that the measure was aimed at the NYPD.

Holt cited the “disturbing stories” written by the Associated Press about the department’s “profiling” of Arab-Americans in New York City and the surrounding region. Holt said communities were infiltrated “simply because they were Muslim,” while suggesting the department’s programs marked an “unthinking, lazy, unprofessional approach” to police work.

“Further, concern over these tactics is bipartisan,” Holt told FoxNews.com in a statement. “New Jersey’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, has said that reports of the NYPD’s extrajurisdictional spying are ‘disturbing.’ Sixteen of Mr. King’s Republican colleagues joined many Democrats last week in expressing concern over the use of religious profiling.”

In a joint statement released Saturday by King and Turner, the congressmen rejected Holt’s words and condemned Democrats for supporting the amendment — the measure failed on a 232-193 vote, with mostly Democrats supporting it.

“We are utterly dumbfounded and shocked that after such a slanderous attack, the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats and the entire Democratic leadership voted for the Holt amendment and against the NYPD,” they said. “We believe the Democrats owe New York and the NYPD an explanation for their shameful surrender to political correctness.”

City officials, as well as King and Turner, have defended the department’s tactics as effective and legal. Their tactics also have not been found to be unconstitutional, meaning Holt’s amendment might not have had much practical effect on the NYPD’s funding.

“My amendment, which was supported by nearly 200 members of the House, simply said that taxpayer dollars should not go to support inappropriate or illegal activities by any law enforcement agency,” Holt said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/13/gop-congressmen-demand-dem-apology-over-vote-against-nypd/#ixzz1uqTIMBxc

By Amir Shah | Associated Press May 12, 2012

KABUL – A man wearing an Afghan army uniform fatally shot an American soldier in the east of the country, one of two NATO troops killed on Friday, military officials said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

Also Friday, the US-led military coalition offered condolences to the families of Afghan civilians killed in airstrikes earlier this month.

The shooting was the 15th incident this year in which Afghan soldiers or insurgents disguised in military uniforms have turned their weapons on foreign troops. The killings have increased the level of mistrust among the US-led coalition and its Afghan partners and raised questions about the readiness of local forces to take over from NATO ahead of a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of foreign combat troops.

An Afghan defense official said the incident occurred in Kunar Province in northeast Afghanistan.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Captain John Kirby, said the service member was an American.

US military officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the shooting is under investigation, said the slain American was an Army soldier, and that two other troops were wounded in the attack. No more details were available.

Kirby said US and allied officials are troubled that the attacks are continuing with some regularity despite efforts to improve vetting of Afghans recruited into the army and police.

Read more: http://bostonglobe.com/news/world/2012/05/11/soldier-killed-attacker-afghan-army-uniform/e4vuAMwGOnnDABJWt0ZxKI/story.html

ADEN (Reuters) – Two apparent U.S. drone attacks killed at least 10 suspected al Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen on Saturday, while Yemeni government forces killed 15 others in a new offensive against insurgents, local and military officials said.

U.S. officials said this week they had thwarted a plot by the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to arm a suicide bomber with a non-metallic device, an upgraded version of the “underwear bomb” carried onto an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

AQAP, a regional branch of the militant network, has plotted overseas attacks that have been prevented but raised major concern for Washington, which is trying to wipe out suspected AQAP operatives with drone and missile strikes.

Two air strikes destroyed three vehicles and killed 10 militants in the eastern oil-producing Maarib province and near the border of the southeastern Shabwa province, the Defense Ministry website said, without elaborating.

Yemen and Washington do not acknowledge U.S. drone attacks.

Local officials told Reuters the strikes were believed to have been carried out by U.S. drones and up to 12 militants were killed, including an Egyptian and two Saudis.

It was the latest in a series of reported drone attacks on militants in the south of the impoverished Arab country who exploited mass protests last year against then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh to seize large swathes of territory, including Zinjibar, the capital of restive Abyan province.

Last week, the U.S. Defense Department said Washington had resumed training Yemeni armed forces to bolster the fight against al Qaeda, after a suspension during the political upheaval that ousted Saleh.

In a sign of growing lawlessness after more than a year of unrest, Bulgaria’s ambassador to Yemen escaped with minor injuries on Saturday after masked gunmen opened fire on his car in the capital and tried to kidnap him, a Western diplomat said.

RESIDENTS TOLD LEAVE BATTLE ZONES

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/u-drone-strike-kills-6-suspected-militants-yemen-204019551.html