First Lady Michelle Obama Visits South Africa

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — First Lady Michelle Obama is beginning a goodwill visit to sub-Saharan Africa and Botswana, accompanied by her two daughters, a niece, a nephew and her mom.


Mrs. Obama received a warm welcome upon her arrival Monday night at the air force base in the capital of South Africa, Pretoria, after 18 hours and more than 1,800 miles of travel.


Throughout the week, the First Lady will promote youth leadership, education and HIV/AIDS prevention programs.


She'll also pay tribute to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and others like him whose struggles and sacrifices ultimately led to the undoing of South Africa's system of segregation.

Michelle Obama is fond of saying there's no magic to her being First Lady.


She didn't come from a wealthy or well-connected family. She came from the South Side of Chicago and is a descendant of slaves. But she says it's a passion for an education that she and President Barack Obama shared and a willingness to work hard that helped them become successful.


It's a message that young leaders in Africa soon will hear when Mrs. Obama makes her second solo trip abroad as first lady, visiting South Africa and Botswana this coming week.


"In so many ways, I see myself in you all. And I want you to see yourselves in me," she recently told Washington high school students, hoping to inspire them with her personal story.


The weeklong visit, beginning with the First Lady's arrival Monday in Johannesburg, is intended to improve relations between the U.S. and Africa and promote youth engagement, education, health and wellness. In the centerpiece speech of the trip, she will appear Wednesday before a U.S.-sponsored forum of young women leaders from sub-Saharan Africa.


The President is not going, but Mrs. Obama is being joined by her daughters, Malia and Sasha, as well as her mother, Marian Robinson, and a niece and nephew, Leslie and Avery Robinson. Her family will join her on most outings, probably exposing her daughters to more of the media spotlight than they're used to.


It was during her first solo trip outside the U.S., to Mexico in April 2010, that the first lady started an effort to encourage young people to become involved in their communities and countries and not shy away from trying to solve persistent global problems.


The youth population outside the U.S. is growing fast, with young people ages 15 to 24 making up 20 percent of the world's population.


"The fact is is that responsibility for meeting the defining challenges of our time will soon fall to all of you," Mrs. Obama told thousands of university students in Mexico City. "Soon, the world will be looking to your generation to make the discoveries and to build the industries that will fuel our prosperity and ensure our well-being for decades to come."


That message is likely to resonate in a place such as South Africa, where two of three residents are younger than 30, said Jennifer Cooke, an Africa scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.


Botswana is a regular stop for U.S. officials. Well governed, it is considered one of Africa's best functioning democracies, Cooke said.


Many of the stops on Mrs. Obama's trip will highlight South Africa's past under apartheid, the system of white-minority rule. She'll also pay tribute to the legacy of Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for his role in the anti-apartheid movement. He later became South Africa's first elected black president.


The size of Mrs. Obama's traveling party is sure to invite comparisons to her vacation last August in Spain with Sasha and friends. The five-day trip to Spain's Costa del Sol stoked a bit of a firestorm about the wisdom of taking a glamorous trip with such economic hurt at home and raised speculation about who was paying the bill.


Attempting to head off similar criticism this time, the White House said Mrs. Obama is allowed to bring guests with her on the plane because she's on official U.S. business, as the President is allowed on his official trips. All other costs regarding her family are to be paid for privately.


Mrs. Obama's visit opens Tuesday in Pretoria, the South African capital, at a meeting with Nompumelelo Ntuli-Zuma, one of President Jacob Zuma's three wives, at his official residence. Zuma was scheduled to be out of the country. Back in Johannesburg, Mrs. Obama meets with Mandela's wife, Graca Machel, and tours the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Apartheid Museum.


A meeting between America's first black First Lady and the 92-year-old former president is hoped for but remained in doubt, given his fragile health. Mandela had an acute respiratory infection in late January that led to a two-day hospital stay. He retired from public life after leaving office in 1999 after one term, but remains a larger-than-life figure in his country and around the world.


Mrs. Obama delivers her speech Wednesday at the Regina Mundi Church in the black township of Soweto, one of many churches that became hubs of activity for political gatherings after such meetings were banned during the anti-apartheid movement. She'll also view a memorial honoring a 13-year-old boy shot and killed by government police during a June 1976 student uprising in Soweto.



In Cape Town on Thursday, Mrs. Obama and her family will ride a ferry to Robben Island for a moving visit to the closet-sized cell where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison.


She'll highlight education by inviting disadvantaged students to spend the day immersed at the University of Cape Town, before meeting with groups that work to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, including by using soccer to teach children about the deadly disease. Between 5 million and 6 million South Africans live with HIV/AIDS.


Mrs. Obama also was scheduled to meet with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and key figure in the struggle against apartheid and in later helping South Africa overcome its past.


She heads to Botswana on Friday to call on President Ian Khama in Gaborone, the capital, and drop in at a combination clinic and center for teenagers that teaches about leadership and HIV/AIDS.


With the official business concluded by Saturday, the First Lady and her family will head off for private time, including a safari and an overnight stay in the animal park.

President Obama Unveils Plans For Troop Withdrawl From Afghanistan

The White House



Office of the Press Secretary


For Immediate Release June 22, 2011 Remarks by the President on the Way Forward in Afghanistan


East Room


8:01 P.M. EDT


THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Nearly 10 years ago, America suffered the worst attack on our shores since Pearl Harbor. This mass murder was planned by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan, and signaled a new threat to our security –- one in which the targets were no longer soldiers on a battlefield, but innocent men, women and children going about their daily lives.


In the days that followed, our nation was united as we struck at al Qaeda and routed the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, our focus shifted. A second war was launched in Iraq, and we spent enormous blood and treasure to support a new government there. By the time I took office, the war in Afghanistan had entered its seventh year. But al Qaeda’s leaders had escaped into Pakistan and were plotting new attacks, while the Taliban had regrouped and gone on the offensive. Without a new strategy and decisive action, our military commanders warned that we could face a resurgent al Qaeda and a Taliban taking over large parts of Afghanistan.


For this reason, in one of the most difficult decisions that I’ve made as President, I ordered an additional 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan. When I announced this surge at West Point, we set clear objectives: to refocus on al Qaeda, to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and train Afghan security forces to defend their own country. I also made it clear that our commitment would not be open-ended, and that we would begin to draw down our forces this July.


Tonight, I can tell you that we are fulfilling that commitment. Thanks to our extraordinary men and women in uniform, our civilian personnel, and our many coalition partners, we are meeting our goals. As a result, starting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, and we will bring home a total of 33,000 troops by next summer, fully recovering the surge I announced at West Point. After this initial reduction, our troops will continue coming home at a steady pace as Afghan security forces move into the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.


We’re starting this drawdown from a position of strength. Al Qaeda is under more pressure than at any time since 9/11. Together with the Pakistanis, we have taken out more than half of al Qaeda’s leadership. And thanks to our intelligence professionals and Special Forces, we killed Osama bin Laden, the only leader that al Qaeda had ever known. This was a victory for all who have served since 9/11. One soldier summed it up well. “The message,” he said, “is we don’t forget. You will be held accountable, no matter how long it takes.”


The information that we recovered from bin Laden’s compound shows al Qaeda under enormous strain. Bin Laden expressed concern that al Qaeda had been unable to effectively replace senior terrorists that had been killed, and that al Qaeda has failed in its effort to portray America as a nation at war with Islam -– thereby draining more widespread support. Al Qaeda remains dangerous, and we must be vigilant against attacks. But we have put al Qaeda on a path to defeat, and we will not relent until the job is done.


In Afghanistan, we’ve inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds. Along with our surge, our allies also increased their commitments, which helped stabilize more of the country. Afghan security forces have grown by over 100,000 troops, and in some provinces and municipalities we’ve already begun to transition responsibility for security to the Afghan people. In the face of violence and intimidation, Afghans are fighting and dying for their country, establishing local police forces, opening markets and schools, creating new opportunities for women and girls, and trying to turn the page on decades of war.


Of course, huge challenges remain. This is the beginning -- but not the end –- of our effort to wind down this war. We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we’ve made, while we draw down our forces and transition responsibility for security to the Afghan government. And next May, in Chicago, we will host a summit with our NATO allies and partners to shape the next phase of this transition.


We do know that peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement. So as we strengthen the Afghan government and security forces, America will join initiatives that reconcile the Afghan people, including the Taliban. Our position on these talks is clear: They must be led by the Afghan government, and those who want to be a part of a peaceful Afghanistan must break from al Qaeda, abandon violence, and abide by the Afghan constitution. But, in part because of our military effort, we have reason to believe that progress can be made.


The goal that we seek is achievable, and can be expressed simply: No safe haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland or our allies. We won't try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government, which must step up its ability to protect its people, and move from an economy shaped by war to one that can sustain a lasting peace. What we can do, and will do, is build a partnership with the Afghan people that endures –- one that ensures that we will be able to continue targeting terrorists and supporting a sovereign Afghan government.


Of course, our efforts must also address terrorist safe havens in Pakistan. No country is more endangered by the presence of violent extremists, which is why we will continue to press Pakistan to expand its participation in securing a more peaceful future for this war-torn region. We'll work with the Pakistani government to root out the cancer of violent extremism, and we will insist that it keeps its commitments. For there should be no doubt that so long as I am President, the United States will never tolerate a safe haven for those who aim to kill us. They cannot elude us, nor escape the justice they deserve.


My fellow Americans, this has been a difficult decade for our country. We've learned anew the profound cost of war -- a cost that's been paid by the nearly 4,500 Americans who have given their lives in Iraq, and the over 1,500 who have done so in Afghanistan -– men and women who will not live to enjoy the freedom that they defended. Thousands more have been wounded. Some have lost limbs on the battlefield, and others still battle the demons that have followed them home.


Yet tonight, we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding. Fewer of our sons and daughters are serving in harm’s way. We’ve ended our combat mission in Iraq, with 100,000 American troops already out of that country. And even as there will be dark days ahead in Afghanistan, the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance. These long wars will come to a responsible end.


As they do, we must learn their lessons. Already this decade of war has caused many to question the nature of America’s engagement around the world. Some would have America retreat from our responsibility as an anchor of global security, and embrace an isolation that ignores the very real threats that we face. Others would have America over-extended, confronting every evil that can be found abroad.


We must chart a more centered course. Like generations before, we must embrace America’s singular role in the course of human events. But we must be as pragmatic as we are passionate; as strategic as we are resolute. When threatened, we must respond with force –- but when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas. When innocents are being slaughtered and global security endangered, we don’t have to choose between standing idly by or acting on our own. Instead, we must rally international action, which we’re doing in Libya, where we do not have a single soldier on the ground, but are supporting allies in protecting the Libyan people and giving them the chance to determine their own destiny.


In all that we do, we must remember that what sets America apart is not solely our power -– it is the principles upon which our union was founded. We’re a nation that brings our enemies to justice while adhering to the rule of law, and respecting the rights of all our citizens. We protect our own freedom and prosperity by extending it to others. We stand not for empire, but for self-determination. That is why we have a stake in the democratic aspirations that are now washing across the Arab world. We will support those revolutions with fidelity to our ideals, with the power of our example, and with an unwavering belief that all human beings deserve to live with freedom and dignity.


Above all, we are a nation whose strength abroad has been anchored in opportunity for our citizens here at home. Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times. Now, we must invest in America’s greatest resource –- our people. We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industries, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy. And most of all, after a decade of passionate debate, we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war. For our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.


America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.


In this effort, we draw inspiration from our fellow Americans who have sacrificed so much on our behalf. To our troops, our veterans and their families, I speak for all Americans when I say that we will keep our sacred trust with you, and provide you with the care and benefits and opportunity that you deserve.


I met some of these patriotic Americans at Fort Campbell. A while back, I spoke to the 101st Airborne that has fought to turn the tide in Afghanistan, and to the team that took out Osama bin Laden. Standing in front of a model of bin Laden’s compound, the Navy SEAL who led that effort paid tribute to those who had been lost –- brothers and sisters in arms whose names are now written on bases where our troops stand guard overseas, and on headstones in quiet corners of our country where their memory will never be forgotten. This officer -- like so many others I’ve met on bases, in Baghdad and Bagram, and at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital -– spoke with humility about how his unit worked together as one, depending on each other, and trusting one another, as a family might do in a time of peril.


That’s a lesson worth remembering -– that we are all a part of one American family. Though we have known disagreement and division, we are bound together by the creed that is written into our founding documents, and a conviction that the United States of America is a country that can achieve whatever it sets out to accomplish. Now, let us finish the work at hand. Let us responsibly end these wars, and reclaim the American Dream that is at the center of our story. With confidence in our cause, with faith in our fellow citizens, and with hope in our hearts, let us go about the work of extending the promise of America -– for this generation, and the next.


May God bless our troops. And may God bless the United States of America.


END 8:16 P.M. EDT

JP Morgan Chase To Pay $153.6 Million To Settle Fraud Charges

WASHINGTON (AP) -- JPMorgan Chase Co. has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was collapsing.



J.P. Morgan Securities, a division of the powerful Wall Street bank, failed to tell investors that a hedge fund helped select the investment portfolio and then bet that the portfolio would fail, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.


Among the investors who lost money on the deal were autoworkers for General Motors, a Lutheran financial organization in Minneapolis and a retirement services company in Topeka, Kan.


The settlement announced Tuesday is one of the most significant legal actions targeting Wall Street's role in the 2008 financial crisis. It comes a year after Goldman Sachs & Co. paid $550 million to settle similar charges.


Still, the settlement amounts to less than 1 percent of the bank's 2010 net income of $17.4 billion -- or less than what JPMorgan earns in one week.


In its announcement, the SEC also said it had charged Edward Steffelin with misleading investors. Steffelin headed the team at GSCP, an investment firm that was supposed to have been selecting the portfolio of mortgage securities in the $1.1 billion deal.


The SEC alleged that Steffelin knew that hedge fund Magnetar Capital was directly involved in choosing the securities and was seeking a job with Magnetar at the time. Steffelin has not reached a settlement with regulators.


His lawyer, Alex Lipman, said the SEC was making Steffelin a scapegoat in its case against JPMorgan, "to attach a name and a face" to it.


As part of the JPMorgan settlement, investors who were harmed will get back all of their money, the SEC said. JPMorgan also agreed to improve the way it reviews and approves mortgage securities transactions.


JPMorgan neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing under the settlement. The bank released a statement saying it lost nearly $900 million on the investment. It also noted that it reviewed similar mortgage investments and voluntarily paid $56 million to compensate some investors in those deals.


The bank agreed to settle the charges two weeks after Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., complained to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that new financial regulations designed to prevent another financial crisis were too burdensome on banks.


In a related action Monday, another federal agency, the National Credit Union Administration, sued JPMorgan Securities seeking to recover $278 million in losses on securities tied to risky mortgages that were purchased by five wholesale credit unions that failed in 2009 and 2010. The NCUA also sued Royal Bank of Scotland PLC for $565 million in damages over the same issue.


Regulators have been investigating a number of major banks' actions ahead of the financial crisis. More charges are expected.


Magnetar wasn't charged in the SEC action. SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami said the hedge fund "was not responsible for those disclosures to investors." But he said such deals "remain a high priority for the SEC."


Magnetar essentially made a $600 million bet that the investments would fail once the deal closed in May 2007, the SEC said. Just one month earlier, JPMorgan had launched a "frantic global sales effort" going beyond its traditional customers to sell mortgage securities, according to the agency's suit.


Khuzami said the JPMorgan case, at its core, is about getting investors truthful information about their investment options.


"The appropriate disclosures would have been to inform investors that an entity with economic interests adverse to their own was involved in selecting the portfolio," he said.


JPMorgan sold about $150 million in those securities to more than a dozen financial institutions that lost nearly their entire investment, the SEC said. Under the settlement, nearly $126 million of the $153.6 million will be returned to investors. The rest will go to the U.S. Treasury.


The investors included Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a faith-based membership organization based in Minneapolis; Security Benefit Corp., an insurance and retirement services company based in Topeka, Kan.; General Motors Asset Management, which manages the automaker's pension plans; and several Asian financial institutions such as Tokyo Star Bank, Far Glory Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Taiwan Life Insurance Co. Ltd. and East Asia Asset Management Ltd.


The penalty is the biggest since Goldman Sachs & Co. settled civil fraud charges last summer. The $550 million that Goldman paid was the largest penalty against a Wall Street firm in SEC history. The Goldman settlement amounted to less than 5 percent of Goldman's 2009 net income of $12.2 billion after payment of dividends to preferred shareholders -- or a little more than two weeks of net income.


Goldman was accused of steering investors toward mortgage investments without telling the buyers that the securities had been crafted with input from a client that was betting on them to fail.

Congressman Alcee Hastings Investigated For Sexual Harrassment

Hours after Rep. Anthony Weiner's resignation became official, a sexual harassment case involving Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) resurfaced.


Gary Fields and Brody Mullins report for the Wall Street Journal that the independent Office of Congressional Ethics is now investigating a claim that Hastings sexually harassed a woman working on his staff.


Fields and Mullins write that the Office investigation was opened after conservative group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in March as the legal counsel for Republican staffer Winsome Packer. Packer, who served on the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe--a group headed by the congressman--alleges that Hastings retaliated when Packer attempted to report the harassment, according to the paper. Judicial Watch has targeted Hastings in the past.


Accusations include "unwelcome sexual advances," and "unwelcome touching," according to March reports of the lawsuit. Packer had accused Hastings of offering her invitations to his hotel room, asking inappropriate questions in public including "What kind of underwear are you wearing?" as well as pressuring her to give him gifts and donate to his re-election campaign.


Hastings, a 74-year-old 10-term lawmaker, strongly denies all charges. He stated back in March when reports of the lawsuit became public that he "never sexually harassed anyone."


"That is a certainty: In a race with a lie, the truth always wins. And when the truth comes to light and the personal agendas of my accusers are exposed, I will be vindicated."


Democrats this week had hoped that Weiner's resignation, effective Tuesday, would finally end talk of sex scandals concerning their members and shift focus back to legislating, as well as campaign-based efforts to attack Republicans on Medicare and other issues. The Ethics Committee announced prior to Weiner's resignation that it had opened an investigation into Weiner's risque online communications.


The Office of Congressional Ethics is not the House Ethics Committee-- which investigates House members and metes out punishments (as it did for New York Democrat Charlie Rangel last winter). The Office was established by then- Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2008 to better connect the House Ethics Committee with the public and to process public complaints. The Office's investigation is a precursor to a formal Ethics Committee investigation, which would proceed largely on the recommendation of the Office.


The Wall Street Journal notes that even if the Office passes on recommending an Committee investigation, "its findings must be made public."


The House Ethics process has drawn heavy criticism for what detractors say is a persistent failure to effectively punish and police its members.

Man Robs Bank To Get Medical Care In Jail

Some people who need medical care but can't afford it go to the emergency room. Others just hope they'll get better. James Richard Verone robbed a bank.


Earlier this month, Verone (pictured), a 59-year-old convenience store clerk, walked into a Gastonia, N.C., bank and handed the cashier a note demanding $1 and medical attention. Then he waited calmly for police to show up.


He's now in jail and has an appointment with a doctor this week.


Verone's problems started when he lost the job he'd held for 17 years as a Coca Cola deliveryman, amid the economic downturn. He found new work driving a truck, but it didn't last. Eventually, he took a part-time position at the convenience store.


But Verone's body wasn't up to it. The bending and lifting made his back ache. He had problems with his left foot, making him limp. He also suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis.


Then he noticed a protrusion on his chest. "The pain was beyond the tolerance that I could accept," Verone told the Gaston Gazette. "I kind of hit a brick wall with everything."


Verone knew he needed help--and he didn't want to be a burden on his sister and brothers. He applied for food stamps, but they weren't enough either.


So he hatched a plan. On June 9, he woke up, showered, ironed his shirt. He mailed a letter to the Gazette, listing the return address as the Gaston County Jail.


"When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me," Verone wrote in the letter. "This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body."


Then Verone hailed a cab to take him to the RBC Bank. Inside, he handed the teller his $1 robbery demand.


"I didn't have any fears," said Verone. "I told the teller that I would sit over here and wait for police."


The teller was so frightened that she had to be taken to the hospital to be checked out. Verone, meanwhile, was taken to jail, just as he'd planned it.


Because he only asked for $1, Verone was charged with larceny, not bank robbery. But he said that if his punishment isn't severe enough, he plans to tell the judge that he'll do it again. His $100,000 bond has been reduced to $2,000, but he says he doesn't plan to pay it.


In jail, Verone said he skips dinner to avoid too much contact with the other inmates. He's already seen some nurses and is scheduled to see a doctor on Friday. He said he's hoping to receive back and foot surgery, and get the protrusion on his chest treated. Then he plans to spend a few years in jail, before getting out in time to collect Social Security and move to the beach.


Verone also presented the view that if the United States had a health-care system which offered people more government support, he wouldn't have had to make the choice he did.


"If you don't have your health you don't have anything," Verone said.


The Affordable Care Act, President Obama's health-care overhaul passed by Congress last year, was designed to make it easier for Americans in situations like Verone's to get health insurance. But most of its provisions don't go into effect until 2014.


As it is, Verone said he thinks he chose the best of a bunch of bad options. "I picked jail."

U.S. Supreme Court Orders California To Reduce Prison Overcrowding By 33,000 Inmates

LOS ANGELES- A U.S. Supreme Court order for California to reduce overcrowding in its prisons by 33,000 inmates over the next two years is long overdue but the lack of jobs and resources in communities awaiting them could have a devastating outcome, ex-offender advocates say.



The court's 5-4 decision issued May 23 has put California and the rest of the country on notice again about a serious problem.


“We're not prepared in the way that we need to be prepared,” said Roberta Meyers-Peeples, director of the National Helping Individuals with Criminal Records Re-enter through Employment Network.It is a litigation, services and policy advocacy clearinghouse based in New York and Washington, D.C.


People can stop short when they think about men and women returning home but their families are also affected and resources are limited for organizations committed to improving their lives, the advocate told The Final Call.


Funding opportunities are scarce, particularly because of the economic recession and because so many people are being routinely released from prisons and jails, she said.


Advocacy groups are seeking sophisticated and innovative ways to leverage resources and forge partnerships to meet re-entry needs while also tracking their progress.In California, a bill introduced by Assemblyman Sandre Swanson that would make non-violent drug offenders eligible for food stamps is pending a vote in the state Senate.


Ms. Meyers-Peeples called jobs as a key to re-entry success because employment is the link to self-sufficiency, being able to provide for self and family and avoid going back to prison.Another major problem is a lack of transitional housing and access to appropriate mental and medical care, said Dr. Ronald Beavers, a psychologist with the Positive Imagery Foundation, Inc. in South Los Angeles.


“If people are released without adequate safety nets, they will get frustrated and sadly, their natural reaction could be to do what they have to do to survive, but that can be averted,” whether it is for one inmate or thousands, Dr. Beavers said.


The court-ordered inmate reductions will not occur in a mass exodus from prison or in a way that threatens public safety, according to David Muhammad, newly-appointed chief probation officer for Alameda County. There actually could be no difference whatsoever in the number of returns people see in their communities, he added.


Non-violent, non-serious offenders would be released at their regularly-appointed time under probation supervision rather than parole under a plan introduced by Governor Jerry Brown.The plan has been adopted but currently lacks funding.The difference is parole's ability to immediately arrest and detain people, Mr. Muhammad said.


“This is a huge point because fear mongers will say, ‘Oh my God! All these violent and dangerous people will get out of jail,' but California's prison system is overburdened primarily because of technical violations of parole and probation and that's really who we're talking about,” Mr. Muhammad said.


California spends about $50,000 per year for an inmate but transferring a reasonable portion of that amount to local jurisdiction would move the process along appropriately, Mr. Muhammad said.He supports the plan and feels it is more effective for justice to be administered locally.


“Folks coming out of jail primarily need education and employment and we need to transfer the kind of gross amount of money that has been spent on ineffective incarceration to serving, supporting and supervising people at the local level,” Mr. Muhammad argued.


He explained that “ineffective incarceration” is imprisoning vast numbers of people from poor neighborhoods, with failing education systems, high unemployment, liquor stores on most corners and ready access to guns.


Prison officials recently reclassified approximately 3,000 women as low-level offenders and expect to release them to their South Los Angeles neighborhoods within about six weeks, according to Dr. Beavers, who said the women were prioritized because they are mothers.


“I think about the women, who, probably more than the men, have burned more bridges.Their families are not as sympathetic and their boyfriends or husbands are not standing there waiting for them to come home.Many of these mothers will come back without any connections to get on their feet and somebody has to plan for them,” Ms. Meyers-Peeples said.

In Memoriam: Dr. Jack Kevorkian (1928-2011)

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the medical pathologist who willfully helped dozens of terminally ill people end their lives, becoming the central figure in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died on Friday in Royal Oak., Mich. He was 83. He died at William Beaumont Hospital, where he had been admitted recently with kidney and respiratory problems, said Geoffrey N. Fieger, the lawyer who represented Dr. Kevorkian in several of his trials in the 1990s.



Mayer Morganroth, a friend and lawyer, told The Associated Press that the official cause of death would most likely be pulmonary thrombosis, a blood clot.


In arguing for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, Dr. Kevorkian challenged social taboos about disease and dying while defying prosecutors and the courts. He spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of about 130 ailing patients whose lives he had helped end, beginning in 1990.


Originally sentenced in 1999 to 10 to 25 years in a maximum security prison, he was released after assuring the authorities that he would never conduct another assisted suicide.


His critics were as impassioned as his supporters, but all generally agreed that his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy of assisted suicide helped spur the growth of hospice care in the United States and made many doctors more sympathetic to those in severe pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it.


In Oregon, where a schoolteacher had become Dr. Kevorkian’s first assisted suicide patient, state lawmakers in 1997 approved a statute making it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medications to help terminally ill patients end their lives. In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found that Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act protected assisted suicide as a legitimate medical practice.


During the period that Oregon was considering its law, Dr. Kevorkian’s confrontational strategy gained wide publicity, which he actively sought. National magazines put his picture on their covers, and he drew the attention of television programs like “60 Minutes.” His nickname, Dr. Death, and his self-made suicide machine, which he variously called the “Mercitron” or the “Thanatron,” became fodder for late-night television comedians.


In 2010 his story was dramatized in the HBO movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” starring Al Pacino as Dr. Kevorkian. Mr. Pacino received Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his performance. In his Emmy acceptance speech, he said he had been gratified to “try to portray someone as brilliant and interesting and unique” as Dr. Kevorkian. Dr. Kevorkian, who was in the audience, smiled in appreciation.


Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying medical critics as “hypocritical oafs,” Dr. Kevorkian invited and reveled in the public’s attention, regardless of its sting.


The American Medical Association in 1995 called him “a reckless instrument of death” who “poses a great threat to the public.”


Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet, which describes itself as a disability-rights advocacy group and that once picketed Dr. Kevorkian’s home in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, attacked his approach. “It’s the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people with disabilities help to die,” she said, “without having offered real options to live.”


But Jack Lessenberry, a prominent Michigan journalist who covered Dr. Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, wrote in The Detroit Metro Times: “Jack Kevorkian, faults and all, was a major force for good in this society. He forced us to pay attention to one of the biggest elephants in society’s living room: the fact that today vast numbers of people are alive who would rather be dead, who have lives not worth living.”


In the late 1980s, after an undistinguished career in medicine and an unsuccessful try at a career in the arts, Dr. Kevorkian rediscovered a fascination with death that he had developed during his early years in medicine, only now his interest in it was not as a private event but as a matter of public policy.


As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, from which he graduated in 1952, and later as a resident at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Dr. Kevorkian proposed giving murderers condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958.


In the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic campaign to engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely itinerant career as a medical pathologist. Though his friends described him as funny, witty, personable and engaging in private, those he met in work and social situations portrayed him as awkward, grim, driven, quick to anger and unpredictable.


Fiercely principled and equally inflexible, he rarely dated and never married. He lived a penurious life, eating little, avoiding luxury and dressing in threadbare clothing that he often bought at the Salvation Army. In 1976, bored with medicine, he moved to Long Beach, Calif., where he spent 12 years painting and writing, producing an unsuccessful film about Handel’s “Messiah,” and supporting himself with part-time pathology positions at two hospitals.


In 1984, prompted by the growing number of executions in the United States, Dr. Kevorkian revisited his idea of giving death row inmates a choice. He was invited to brief members of the California Legislature on a bill that would enable prisoners to donate their organs and die by anesthesia instead of poison gas or the electric chair.


The experience was a turning point. Energized by the attention of lawmakers and the news media, he became involved in the growing national debate on dying with dignity. In 1987 he visited the Netherlands, where he studied techniques that allowed Dutch physicians to assist in the suicides of terminally ill patients without interference from the legal authorities.


A year later, he returned to Michigan and began advertising in Detroit-area newspapers for a new medical practice in what he called “bioethics and obiatry,” which would offer patients and their families “death counseling.” He made reporters aware of his intentions, explaining that he did not charge for his services and bore all the expenses of euthanasia himself. He showed journalists the simple metal frame from which he suspended vials of drugs — thiopental, a sedative, and potassium chloride, which paralyzed the heart — that allowed patients to end their own lives.


First Patient


He also talked about the “doctrine” he had developed to achieve two goals: ensuring the patient’s comfort and protecting himself against criminal conviction. He required patients to express clearly a wish to die. Family physicians and mental health professionals were consulted. Patients were given at least a month to consider their decision and possibly change their minds. Dr. Kevorkian videotaped interviews with patients, their families and their friends, and he videotaped the suicides, which he called medicides.


On June 4, 1990, Janet Adkins, an Oregon teacher who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, was the first patient to avail herself of Dr. Kevorkian’s assistance. Mrs. Adkins’s life ended on the bed inside Dr. Kevorkian’s rusting 1968 Volkswagen van, which was parked in a campground near his home.


Immediately afterward Dr. Kevorkian called the police, who arrested and briefly detained him. The next day Ron Adkins, her husband, and two of his sons held a news conference in Portland and read the suicide note Mrs. Adkins had prepared. In an interview with The New York Times that day, Dr. Kevorkian alerted the nation to his campaign.


“My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience,” he said. “I’m trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.”


By his account, he assisted in some 130 suicides over the next eight years. Patients from across the country traveled to the Detroit region to seek his help. Sometimes the procedure was done in homes, cars and campgrounds.


Prosecutors, jurists, the State Legislature, the Michigan health authorities and Gov. John Engler seemed helpless to stop him, though they spent years trying. In 1991 a state judge, Alice Gilbert, issued a permanent injunction barring Dr. Kevorkian from using his suicide machine. The same year, the state suspended his license to practice medicine. In 1993, Michigan approved a statute outlawing assisted suicide. The statute was declared unlawful by a state judge and the state Court of Appeals, but in 1994 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that assisting in a suicide, while not specifically prohibited by statute, was a common-law felony and that there was no protected right to suicide assistance under the state Constitution.


None of the legal restrictions seemed to matter to Dr. Kevorkian. Several times he assisted in patient suicides just hours after being released from custody for helping in a previous one. After one arrest in 1993 he refused to post bond, and a day later he said he was on a hunger strike. During another arrest he fought with police officers and seemed to invite the opportunity to be jailed.


He liked the attention. At the start of his third trial, on April 1, 1996, he showed up in court wearing Colonial-era clothing to show how antiquated he thought the charges were.


From May 1994 to June 1997, Dr. Kevorkian stood trial four times in the deaths of six patients. With the help of his young and flamboyant defense lawyer, Mr. Fieger, three of those trials ended in acquittals, and the fourth was declared a mistrial.


Mr. Fieger based his winning defense on the compassion and mercy that he said Dr. Kevorkian had shown his patients. Prosecutors felt differently. “He’s basically thumbed his nose at law enforcement, in part because he feels he has public support,” Richard Thompson, the prosecutor in Oakland County, Mich., told Time magazine in 1993.


But on March 26, 1999, after a trial that lasted less than two days, a Michigan jury found Dr. Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder. That trial came six months after Dr. Kevorkian had videotaped himself injecting Thomas Youk, a patient suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), with the lethal drugs that caused Mr. Youk’s death on Sept. 17, 1998.


Dr. Kevorkian sent the videotape to “60 Minutes,” which broadcast it on Nov. 22. The tape showed Dr. Kevorkian going well beyond assisting a patient in causing his own death by performing the injection himself. The program portrayed him as a zealot with an agenda. “They must charge me; either they go or I go,” he told Mike Wallace. “If they go, that means they’ll never convict me in a court of law.” The broadcast, which prompted a national debate about medical ethics and media responsibility, also served as prime evidence for a first-degree murder charge brought by the Oakland County prosecutor’s office. In a departure from his previous trials, Dr. Kevorkian ignored Mr. Fieger’s advice and defended himself — and not at all well. It was an act of arrogance he regretted, he said later.


‘Stopped’


“You had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you,” said Judge Jessica R. Cooper, who presided over the trial in Oakland County Circuit Court. “Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.”


On June 1, 2007, Dr. Kevorkian was released from prison after he promised not to conduct another assisted suicide.


He was born Murad Kevorkian in Pontiac, Mich., on May 26, 1928, the second of three children and the only son born to Levon and Satenig Kevorkian, Armenian refugees. His father founded and owned a small excavation company.


The young Jack Kevorkian was described by his friends as an able student interested in art and music. He graduated from the University of Michigan, where he pursued a degree in engineering before switching to medicine.


He was the author of four books, including “Prescription: Medicide, the Goodness of Planned Death” (Prometheus, 1991). He is survived by his sister, Flora Holzheimer. Another sister, Margo Janus, died in 1994.


Mr. Fieger said that Dr. Kevorkian, weakened as he lay in the hospital, could not take advantage of the option that he had offered others and that he had wished for himself. “This is something I would want,” Dr. Kevorkian once said.


“If he had enough strength to do something about it, he would have,” Mr. Fieger said at a news conference Friday in Southfield, Mich. “Had he been able to go home, Jack Kevorkian probably would not have allowed himself to go back to the hospital.”


Dr. Kevorkian was a lover of classical music, and before he died, his friend Mr. Morganroth said, nurses played recordings of Bach for him in his room.

In Memoriam: Elmer Geronimo Pratt (1947-2011)

Elmer Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther leader who was imprisoned for 27 years for murder and whose marathon fight to prove he had been framed attracted support from civil rights groups and led to the overturning of his conviction, died on Thursday in a village in Tanzania, where he was living. He was 63. Mr. Pratt, who was widely known by his Panther name, Geronimo ji-Jaga, had high blood pressure and other ailments, his longtime lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, said. Mr. Hanlon said he did not know the exact cause of death.

To his supporters — among them Amnesty International, the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Civil Liberties Union — Mr. Pratt came to symbolize a politically motivated attack on the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and other radical groups. But from the start, the grisly facts of the murder of a 27-year-old teacher dominated discussions of the case, including those of the parole board that denied parole to Mr. Pratt 16 times.


The teacher, Caroline Olsen, and her husband, Kenneth, were accosted by two young black men with guns on Dec. 18, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif. They took $18 from Mrs. Olsen’s purse. “This ain’t enough,” one said, according to the police, and ordered the couple to “lie down and pray.”


Shots were fired, hitting Mr. Olsen five times and his wife twice. Mrs. Olsen died 11 days later. Mr. Pratt was arrested.


The case against Mr. Pratt included evidence that both the pistol used as the murder weapon and the red-and-white GTO convertible used as the getaway car belonged to him. An informant wrote an eight-page letter asserting Mr. Pratt had bragged to him that he committed the murder.


Fellow Panthers did not support Mr. Pratt’s alibi that he was in Oakland, more than 300 miles away, at the time of the killing. A witness identified Mr. Pratt as one of two men who tried to rob a store shortly before the murder. And Mr. Olsen identified Mr. Pratt as the assailant.


Mr. Pratt was convicted of first-degree murder on July 28, 1972, and sentenced to life imprisonment a month later.


Information gradually surfaced that the jury had not known about when it reached its verdict. Mr. Olsen had identified someone else before he identified Mr. Pratt. Documents showed that the informant who said that Mr. Pratt had confessed to him had lied about himself. Wiretap evidence that might have supported Mr. Pratt’s alibi mysteriously vanished from F.B.I. files.


A public debate erupted over the extent to which Mr. Pratt and the Black Panthers had been singled out by law enforcement agencies. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I., called the Panthers a threat to national security, and an F.B.I. report spoke of “neutralizing” Mr. Pratt. Others saw the Panthers and their leaders as a voice of black empowerment and as a service group that provided free breakfasts to the poor.


In an interview with The New York Times in 1997, John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, said, “The Geronimo Pratt case is one of the most compelling and painful examples of a political assassination on an African-American activist.”


As Mr. Pratt languished in solitary confinement, his supporters shed light on his case by hanging a banner from the Statue of Liberty. His lawyers, led by Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. — famed for defending O.J. Simpson — assembled ammunition for an appeal.


In 1997 a California Superior Court judge, Everett W. Dickey, vacated Mr. Pratt’s conviction on the grounds that the government informant, Julius C. Butler, had lied about being one. Moreover, it was learned that the Los Angeles Police Department, the F.B.I. and prosecutors had not shared with the defense their knowledge that Mr. Butler was an informant.


A juror, Jeanne Rook Hamilton, told The Times: “If we had known about Butler’s background, there’s no way Pratt would have been convicted.”


California lost its appeal to nullify Judge Dickey’s decision in 1999, and the Los Angeles County district attorney ruled out a new trial. In 2000, Mr. Pratt received $4.5 million from the federal and local governments as settlement in a wrongful-imprisonment suit.


Mr. Pratt said he would have preferred to press the matter in a trial so he could air the government’s “evil scheme,” but decided to accept his lawyers’ advice and take the settlement.


Elmer Gerard Pratt, the name he rejected at 20 as that of a “dirty dog” slave master, was born on Sept. 13, 1947, in Morgan City, La. His father was in the scrap-metal business. Elmer liked to shoot rabbits and sell them. He was a high school quarterback, then joined the Army, serving two tours in Vietnam, earning two Purple Hearts and emerging a sergeant.


Mr. Pratt attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied political science and joined the Panthers. He rose to lead the Los Angeles branch. He moved to Tanzania because he had friends there and had always wanted to live in Africa.


He is survived by a daughter, three sons, two sisters and two brothers. He was godfather to the slain rapper Tupac Shakur.

In Memoriam: Clarice Taylor (1917-2011)

Clarice Taylor, an actress who was best known as the endearing, self-possessed grandmother on “The Cosby Show” and who also won an Obie Award for her Off Broadway portrayal of the vaudeville comedienne Moms Mabley, died on Monday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93.The cause was congestive heart failure, her spokesman, Ulysses Carter, said.

In a recurring role, Ms. Taylor played Anna Huxtable, Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable’s mother, during the nine-year run of the program starting in 1984. Both she and Earle Hyman, who played Dr. Huxtable’s father, Russell, received Emmy nominations in 1986.


“Clarice was a hip mother, fearless,” Bill Cosby said in a statement, adding that she was “perfect” in the role even though “she looked young enough to play my sister.”


When she tried out for the part, Ms. Taylor told The Associated Press in 1987: “I put on a gray wig, a bandana over that, flat-heeled shoes and a long dress with no shape to it. Bill saw through my act. I read five lines, and he said, ‘If you’re going to go through all of this, you’ve got the part.’ ”


Ms. Taylor played another grandmother on television, Harriet, on “Sesame Street,” a farm woman who sometimes visited her grandson, David, in the city. That recurring role, starting in the 1960s, was a big break in her career. It led, in 1971, to her casting as Birdie, the housekeeper who is almost killed in Clint Eastwood’s thriller “Play Misty for Me.” Ms. Taylor’s stage credits include the hit musical “The Wiz,” in which she played Addaperle, the Good Witch of the North.


As a teenager growing up in Harlem, Ms. Taylor sometimes skipped school to see Moms Mabley perform at the Apollo Theater. In the mid-1980s, Ms. Taylor decided to put together a show that paid tribute to a woman renowned for racy sexual humor that relied on innuendo rather than obscenity. The show, “Moms,” written by Alice Childress, wove comedy with the poignant memories of Jackie Mabley, a great-granddaughter of a slave, who was raped twice as a young girl, the second time by the white sheriff of her North Carolina town. Clarice Taylor was born in Buckingham County, Va., on Sept. 20, 1917, to Leon and Shirley Taylor. The family moved to Harlem in the 1920s.


Ms. Taylor is survived by two sons, William and James, and five grandchildren.


She began her acting career with the American Negro Theater in Harlem. In 1967 she was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, based in the East Village.


“I certainly know about the oppression and prejudices of being black and a woman and from the South,” Ms. Taylor told The New York Times in 1987.


“I was told I would have to survive in an oppressed land,” she continued. “My family thought it was insanity for me to go into the theater rather than to get an education.”