200 arrested in US anti-war protests

More than 200 people were arrested across the United States on Wednesday as protesters marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq obstructed downtown traffic and tried to block access to government offices.

There were 32 arrests in Washington after demonstrators attempted to block entrances to the Internal Revenue Service, while 30 others were arrested outside a congressional office building, police said.

Protesters had hoped to shut down the IRS, the U.S. tax collection agency, to highlight the cost of the war. Police cleared the building’s entrances within an hour.

In San Francisco, long a center of anti-Iraq war sentiment, police arrested more than 100 people who protested through the day along Market Street in the central business district, a spokesman said.

Sgt. Steve Maninna said officers had arrested 143 people on charges including trespassing, resisting arrest and obstructing traffic.

Four women were also detained for hanging a large banner off the city’s famous Golden Gate Bridge and then released, said bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie.

On Washington’s National Mall, about 100 protesters carried signs that read: “The Endlessness Justifies the Meaninglessness” and waved upside-down U.S. flags, a traditional sign of distress.

“Bush and Cheney, leaders failed, Bush and Cheney belong in jail,” they chanted, referring to U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

One hour after the IRS standoff, several dozen protesters waved signs that read: “Stop Paying to Kill” and “How Much Longer?” as a ragtag brass band played. IRS employees were easily able to enter the building.

“We wanted to put our bodies between the money and what that money goes to fund — the war, the occupation, the bombs,” said Frida Berrigan, an organizer with the War Resisters League.

The war has cost the United States $500 billion since the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein began in March 2003 and is a major issue in November’s U.S. presidential election. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and millions more displaced, with almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed.

BLOCKING TRAFFIC

Later, scores of noisy protesters blocked a busy intersection in Washington’s business district. They picketed in front of the offices of The Washington Post and threw red paint on the building that houses the Examiner newspaper and Bechtel National Inc, which has handled major reconstruction projects in Iraq.

In New York, about 30 members of the “Granny Peace Brigade” gathered in Times Square, knitting in hand, to demand troops be brought home now.

“We’re out here to show people that this war is madness. We never should have gotten into this war in the first place,” said Shirley Weiner, 80.

Police in Boston arrested five people who blocked access to a military recruitment center by lying on a sidewalk dressed as slain Iraqi civilians, an Iraqi mourner, a slain U.S. soldier and an American citizen in mourning.

“We went to this military recruiting station today because we want to see the war end immediately,” said activist Joe Previtera in a statement. “Silently waiting for Congress to act on this war in 2009 will condemn thousands more people to injury and senseless death. Enough is enough.”

Problems creep out past official front in China

Last month, Olympic organizers were showing off a new basketball arena and denied that any residents were forcibly evicted to build the many sites for the Summer Games. But the Olympic Media Village sits where Li Yukui and his neighbors had to leave their homes.

Olympic officials promised to clean Beijing’s severe air pollution, but an Ethiopian runner said last week that he won’t run the marathon because breathing the air could harm his health.

And the neighborhood volunteers touted for learning English to give directions to visitors instead spend their time monitoring residents and even confronted one pregnant woman about whether she was violating China’s one-child policy.

Five months before the Olympics, China is discovering the difficult line between promotion of its many successes and concealment of deep problems that dog the communist nation.

China’s crackdown on pro-independence protests in Tibet is just one front of this struggle. The world’s most populous nation wants to present a united image of harmony and prosperity. But the ruling Communist Party, which bristles at outside criticism, sometimes contains dissidents and ignores human rights complaints.

“You host an international event like this, you open yourself up to international scrutiny. China underestimated the risks,” says David Zweig, director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations in Hong Kong. “China is hoping to say, ‘We’re doing great,’ and they are, on many fronts. But on other fronts, they are vulnerable.”

After Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia said he would skip the Olympic marathon because of pollution, Beijing announced it would close every construction site and ban half the cars from the roads before the Games on Aug. 8-24.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao admitted this week that “problems of one kind and another in preparing for the Olympic Games are unavoidable.” At his first news conference of the year Tuesday, he remained upbeat about the Olympics: “I believe the smiles of 1.3 billion people will be reciprocated by the smiles of the world’s people.”

‘The truth, but not the whole truth’

At the Games, “you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg,” human rights activist Hu Jia and Beijing lawyer Teng Biao, wrote in an open letter published on websites of human rights groups and elsewhere last September.

Tuesday, Hu was tried in a Beijing court for “inciting subversion of state power.” Teng was taken by police to the suburbs, so he could not attend the trial.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other world figures have pressed Beijing on Hu’s case. Wen said at his news conference that the matter would be “handled according to the law,” and he denied there was a crackdown on dissidents before the Games.

Teng, who was detained for two days last week, disagrees. “Look at Hu Jia, Yang Chunlin and others who have been arrested because of the Olympics,” he says. Yang, a land rights activist who organized a petition drive titled “We want human rights not the Olympics,” was tried last month for the same crime as Hu. Five other Beijing lawyers wanting to attend Hu’s trial were detained briefly.

“There was an instruction at a senior level to prevent us attending,” lawyer Zhang Tianyong says.

“It is highly possible that people like myself will be detained this August during the Games,” Zhang says. “They are illegally infringing our basic freedoms, but I will continue to offer people legal help.”

Violating the government’s code of silence can bring severe consequences. Li Yukui and his neighbors say their homes are now the Olympic Media Village. Li says he was forcibly evicted, and his wife was sent to a labor camp after they protested the way the government calculated compensation for their property.

The government closely controls what people can see on TV or read in the newspapers. When CNN broadcast images of Tibet protests during the past week, TV screens went blank. In recent days, websites such as YouTube have been blocked.

“There has definitely been a ratcheting up of both website blocking and the technology they have to filter and slow down information,” says Jeremy Goldkorn, the Beijing-based editor of the website danwei.org.

Restaurant owner Sun Ruonan says there have been positive changes. “A few years before, I could not even think of opposing a government policy, let alone actually say something. So there has been progress, but much still needs to be changed and improved.”

Sun is fighting to save her old family restaurant from demolition near Tiananmen Square. Her building is the last on her street after developers bulldozed neighbors’ homes.

“There is no transparency about how this area will be developed. The officials don’t act according to the law but for personal gain,” she says.

Minutes after Sun began talking with a USA TODAY reporter, policeman Zhao Liang demanded to see the reporter’s credentials and warned Sun to “be very careful what you say, don’t just say whatever you like.”

Volunteer patrols

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games recently showed off neighborhood volunteers who wear bright red armbands and normally patrol Beijing’s streets. Wang Naijin, 53, is one of the volunteers, typically retirees.

“One of our duties is monitoring family planning,” Wang explains. “To give you an example, last year, I spotted a woman with a swelling belly, but she already had a daughter. I went to see her and her husband many times, to urge her not to have the baby. They said they still wanted a son, but in the end, I persuaded them, though we can’t use force.”

A U.S. State Department report last week highlighted forced abortions as one example of China’s “poor” human rights situation.

China’s Health Ministry acknowledged the problem when lawyer Chen Guangcheng exposed the issue in an area of Shandong province in 2005. Chen was later jailed for four years.

Outdoor cafes and bars on Sanlitun, a popular Beijing street, bar people from sitting outside to prevent any public disturbance.

“It is much stricter this year,” says Wang Huayou, who manages an ice cream store. “The police are worried about any kind of incident. We don’t know if we will be able to have outdoor seating during the Games. Our foreign guests like to sit outside, but the city management officials won’t let us.”

Brown proposes changes in Britain’s security strategy

Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed an overhaul of Britain’s security strategy Wednesday, ranking climate change and disease alongside terrorism as national threats.

The British government had billed the changes as the biggest shift in protocol since the end of the Cold War. The announcement included no major new policies but seemed designed to refocus Britons’ attentions on security issues nearly three years after bombings on the London transit system that killed 52 passengers.

Terrorism leads the list of threats, Brown said, as Britain still faces upward of 30 possible terrorist plots involving roughly 2,000 people in about 200 terror networks.

“For most of the last half-century the main threat was unmistakable: a Cold War adversary,” Brown said in a speech at the House of Commons. “Now it comes from loosely affiliated global networks that threaten us and other nations across continents.”

Among his new anti-terrorism proposals:
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Iraq | Afghanistan | London | Britain | Islamic | Muslims | Brown | Cold War | Parliament | Britons | Labor Party | House of Commons | Guardian | Conservative | Patrick Mercer

•Making a registry of risks public so Britons are aware of dangers and more easily enlisted in the fight against them.

•Establishing four regional intelligence units to help local police in anti-terrorism activities.

•Inviting academics, military and outside security experts to sit on a national security forum to advise government intelligence committees.

•Creating a 1,000-member civilian response team that could be dispatched rapidly to failing nations to help bring economic and political stability in areas that could be breeding grounds for terrorists.

The announcement comes amid public opposition to continued British involvement in Iraq and concern over having troops stretched between Iraq and Afghanistan.

A new poll published Monday in The Guardian newspaper indicated that public confidence in Brown’s ruling Labor Party was at a 24-year low.

Opposition politicians and terrorism analysts praised Brown for recognizing that Britain faced new dangers. But they complained it was overdue, short on details or simply a rehash of what already was underway.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Patrick Mercer, a former army officer and Conservative opposition member of Parliament. “But we don’t seem to have anything of a strategy here. We just have a list of threats and a list of what’s already in place.”

Simon Barrett, director of the International Media Intelligence Analysis think tank in London, said Brown’s strategy was short on new actions against the source of the terrorism threat.

“You have got to crack down on Islamic extremism, stop the promotion of hate and keep young British Muslims from becoming radical,” he said.

Obama photo causes stir

WASHINGTON - A photograph circulating in the Internet of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama dressed in traditional local garments during a visit to Kenya in 2006 is causing a dustup in the presidential campaign over what constitutes a smear.
The Associated Press photograph portrays Obama wearing a white turban and a wraparound white robe presented to him by elders in Wajir, in northeastern Kenya. Obama’s estranged late father was Kenyan and Obama visited the country in 2006, attracting thousands of well-wishers.

The gossip and news Web site The Drudge Report posted the photograph Monday and said it was being circulated by “Clinton staffers” and quoted an e-mail from an unidentified campaign aide.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe immediately accused Clinton’s campaign of “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election.”

Obama’s foreign policy adviser, Susan Rice, said the circulation of the photograph was divisive and suggests “that the customs and cultures of other parts of the world are worthy of ridicule or condemnation.”

The Clinton campaign did not comment on the distribution of the photo, but campaign manager Maggie Williams said the Obama campaign’s reaction was inflaming passions and distracting voters.

“Enough,” Williams said in a statement. “If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.

“This is nothing more than an obvious and transparent attempt to distract from the serious issues confronting our country today and to attempt to create the very divisions they claim to decry.”

In a teleconference with reporters, retired Air Force Gen. Scott Gration, an Obama adviser who accompanied the Illinois senator to Kenya two years ago, said the senator was there to learn how tribes were organizing themselves.

“And in the course of this, Senator Obama was given an outfit and as the guest that he was, the great guest, he took this outfit and they encouraged him to try some of it on,” Gration said. “It was a thing that we all do.”

In December, two Clinton Iowa volunteers resigned after forwarding a hoax e-mail that falsely said Obama is a Muslim possibly intent on destroying the United States. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ and says he has never been a Muslim, but false rumors about Islamic ties are circulating on the Internet.