Thứ Hai, 30 tháng 4, 2012

US Delegation Remembers Holocaust Hero Wallenberg in Hungary

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A United States Congressional delegation and other officials have gathered in Hungary"s capital Budapest to remember Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who is credited with saving the lives of as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II. Friday"s commemoration was part of a series of events marking the Raoul Wallenberg Year to commemorate his centennial birth.

Photo: AP

World War II hero, Sweden's envoy to Nazi-occupied Hungary Raoul Wallenberg (undated photo)

On a chilly day, representatives of the U.S. Congress and other officials laid a wreath at the Budapest monument of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, hidden behind old trees.

While serving as Swedish envoy in Budapest from July 1944, Wallenberg gave Hungarian Jews Swedish travel documents and set up safe houses for them.

Among the thousands he saved was the late Tom Lantos, who was the first Holocaust survivor to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

Wallenberg is also credited with dissuading German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of Budapest's main Jewish ghetto.

Republican Representative Dan Burton, who led the Congressional Delegation, described Wallenberg as a special humanitarian. "Raoul Wallenberg is one of those people that throughout history is very, very rare. He risked his life, saved over 100,000 people and paid dearly for it," he said.

It was a reference to the difficult life of the young diplomat. Wallenberg eventually died in what was the Soviet Union where he had been taken by the invading Soviet Red Army, recalled the political director of Hungary's Foreign Ministry, Peter Sztaray.

"Wallenberg fought against a dictatorship and consequently disappeared in the prisons of another totalitarian power, the Soviet Communist regime," he said.

Moscow claims he died of a heart attack on June 17, 1947, in Soviet custody, but unverified witness accounts and newly uncovered evidence suggest he may have lived beyond that date.

Last month, Sweden announced it wants to reopen an investigation into Wallenberg's disappearance. Whatever the outcome of that research, the United States has already made Wallenberg an honorary citizen.

It's a rare honor that was only bestowed on two other persons, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Mother Theresa.

And, marking the Raoul Wallenberg Year commemorating his 100th year of birth, U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks, a Democrat, wants to go even further.

"I have the privilege along with Nan Hayworth in the United States to sponsor a bill to give him the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest medal that the U.S. Congress can give," he said.

Friday's ceremony comes amid concerns over growing far-right extremism in Hungary, as well as elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the world.

Sweden's Chargé d'Affaires, Eddy Fonyodi, says Wallenberg's work isn't finished yet. "As long as minorities are discriminated against, as long as democracy and freedom of speech is threatened, as long as anti-semitism, Islamophobia or xenophobia still exists, Raoul Wallenberg's ideals are not fulfilled and his work is not done," he said.

About 600,000 Hungarian Jews died during World War II, when Hungary for the most part was a close ally of Nazi Germany.

There is frustration in Hungary that there is still no known grave of Raoul Wallenberg to lay flowers.

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Letter

Giao duc | summer school registration |

American Catholics can be distinguished as practicing or nonpracticing, usual distinctions including weekly attendance at Mass and differing attitudes toward abortion.

Santorum and Catholics

Published: April 4, 2012

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To the Editor:

Re " Despite Shared Faith, Catholic Voters Haven't Been Thronging to Santorum " (news article, March 27):

But Rick Santorum has engaged neither group, both because of his effective rejection of Catholic social teaching and his embrace of practices like home schooling, which, partly because of the church's teaching function (the magisterium), has not been a Catholic practice except when necessary.

The widely held belief that "there is no Catholic voter, per se" needs to be inflected by these distinctions, particularly, perhaps, in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and California — and not only in the Republican primaries.

JOHN C. HIRSH
Washington, March 27, 2012

The writer is a professor of English at Georgetown University.

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Obama Women are Not an Interest Group

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The White House is hosting a conference Friday to highlight ways the Obama administration has "helped create economic security for women," which coincides with the release of a report on women"s progress under his administration.

Photo: AP

President Obama addresses White House Forum on Women and the Economy, April 6, 2012.

Opening the White House Forum on Women and the Economy, Valerie Jarrett, chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, said President Barack Obama has taken "historic steps" to appoint more women to key positions and empowered them to drive policy promoting the interests of women and girls both at home and abroad.

"Women make up nearly half of the workforce, and they're the breadwinners for a growing number of families," said Jarrett. "So it's clear that the success of women in America is critical to the success and sustainability of our families, of our communities and of the national economy."

Friday's conference comes at a key time for the president, a speaker at the forum, as he campaigns for re-election. Recent public opinion polls have shown women supporting Obama over Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.

Asked Thursday about the political implications of staging an event focused on women during an election year, White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed the idea that the forum is political.

"This administration has engaged in a number of policy approaches designed to address women in the economy, including the very first bill that the President signed into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Act Fair Pay Act," he said.

The president created the White House Council on Women and Girls in March of 2009. The stated mission of the council is to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges facing women and ensure federal agencies pay attention to the way their policies impact women and families.

Obama said its purpose is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy.

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Top State Court Allows Testimony of False-Confession Experts at Trial, but Bar Is Set High

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ALBANY — New York’s highest court said for the first time on Thursday that expert testimony about false confessions should be allowed at trial if it is relevant to the facts of a case.

By JOHN ELIGON

Published: March 29, 2012

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But the court also seemed to set a high bar for determining that relevance: In a 5-to-2 decision, the judges upheld the conviction of a defendant , Khemwatie Bedessie, in the rape of a 4-year-old boy, arguing that the testimony of her expert witness was not germane to the specifics of her confession.

Still, the decision by the New York Court of Appeals was a welcome sign for defense lawyers and innocence advocates who have argued that police interrogation tactics can lead people to admit to crimes they did not commit. About a quarter of the convicts exonerated by DNA evidence nationwide gave false confessions, made self-incriminating statements or pleaded guilty, according to the Innocence Project.

"That the phenomenon of false confessions is genuine has moved from the realm of startling hypothesis into that of common knowledge, if not conventional wisdom," Judge Susan P. Read wrote in the majority opinion.

Vincent M. Bonventre , an Albany Law School professor, called the ruling "a big step."

"The kind of evidence, which in the past people relied on more heavily than anything else, now the Court of Appeals is saying, 'Yeah, we understand a lot of these confessions might be false,’ " he said.

In her 21-page opinion, Judge Read also acknowledged what has become a hot-button issue at the Capitol: the videotaping of police interrogations.

"While electronic recording of interrogations should facilitate the discovery of false confession and is becoming standard police practice, the neglect to record is not a factor or circumstance that might induce a false confession," she wrote.

Peter J. Neufeld, a co-director of the Innocence Project , said he hoped that acknowledgment would spur the State Legislature to act on a proposed measure to require the videotaping of all interrogations, a key piece of legislation for defense lawyers.

"We’ll never know what actually happened there, because there was no videotape of the interrogation," Mr. Neufeld said of the Bedessie case. (In fact, she confessed twice, and the second one was videotaped.)

Not surprisingly, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman joined Judge Theodore T. Jones in his dissent, because both thought that the expert in the Bedessie case should have been allowed to testify. Judge Lippman has long advocated for greater protection against wrongful convictions through methods like the videotaping of confessions and changes in the way lineups are conducted. Judge Lippman commissioned a task force, presided over in part by Judge Jones, that in January recommended legislation to put those measures in place.

Although the court refused to overturn the conviction of Ms. Bedessie, who is serving a 20-year sentence, "It’s a wonderful decision for defendants in the future," said Ronald L. Kuby , who represented her in the appeal.

Ms. Bedessie, a teacher’s assistant, was charged in 2006 with performing sexual acts on a 4-year-old boy under her supervision.

At her trial the next year, Ms. Bedessie testified that she did not do the things she had described doing with the boy, and had confessed to them only after a police detective told her she could either tell the truth and go home or "go to Rikers Island jail, where she would be beaten," according to Judge Read’s decision.

Before her trial started, Ms. Bedessie’s lawyer asked the court to allow Dr. Richard J. Ofshe, an expert on false confessions who interviewed the defendant, to testify. The trial judge denied the request, declaring, among other things, that Dr. Ofshe’s testimony would not be of value to the jury.

The Court of Appeals ruled that Dr. Ofshe’s testimony would not have been relevant to this case after examining a report he had submitted on behalf of Ms. Bedessie. "The body of his report was filled with discussion of extraneous matters, speculation and conclusions based on facts unsupported even by defendant’s version of her interrogation," Judge Read wrote.

For instance, Judge Read wrote, Dr. Ofshe provided an analysis suggesting that the boy was coerced into the allegations, but that had nothing to do with whether Ms. Bedessie falsely confessed. And no link was shown between studies of false confessions and the tactics that the detective used on Ms. Bedessie, the judge wrote.

Judge Jones, in the dissenting opinion, called the majority’s conclusion "curious." The report, he wrote, "involved research concerning incidents that lead to false confessions and the tactics in this case that may have compromised the reliability of the confession."

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US Wants to Open Consulate to Reach Northern Nigerians

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U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Terence P. McCulley (file photo)

Photo: AP

The U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Terence McCulley says the United States is looking at expanding its outreach in the West African nation's Muslim north by opening a consulate in the restive northern city of Kano.

Nigeria, which is divided between a largely Christian south and a mostly Muslim north, has seen escalating sectarian violence in recent months. President Goodluck Jonathan has declared a state of emergency in many parts of the north in response to the unrest. But the attacks have continued.

Speaking with journalists in Lagos on a teleconference Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador Terence McCulley says opening a consulate in Kano will bring a better relationship with the Muslim north.

"We don't have enough of a presence in the north, said McCulley. "We need to open a consulate in Kano so that we can continue our public outreach, so we can organize programs to explain American policy to the populations in the north."

The United States once had a consulate in Kaduna, but closed it when it opened its Abuja Embassy. McCulley says opening a consulate takes time but he hopes to have one open in the next few years.

Ambassador McCulley said the United States understands the importance of addressing Nigerians' underlying grievances in the north, such as under development in education, sanitation, clean water, infrastructure and power. He said the U.S. recognizes that the extremist ideology propagated by militants groups like Boko Haram hurts hurting fellow Muslims along with all Nigerians.

Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sacrilegious" in Hausa, the main language of the north, says it is working to implement Islamic law across Nigeria - Africa's most populous country.

In response to a question about U.S. security interests in the region, McCulley ruled out the idea of deploying U.S. security forces in northern Nigeria. But he says the United States is providing support to Nigeria in terms of better coordination and sharing of information in the security arena.

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Study Highlights Limits to Gene-Based Medicine

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A new study casts doubt on the ability of advances in genetic science to predict whether people will get, or not get, a particular disease. The researchers stress that genes play only a partial role in causing illness, and so genetic information can provide only limited guidance on prevention or treatment.

Photo: AP

Genes play a partial role in illness, so genetic information can provide only limited guidance on prevention or treatment.

As genetic sequencing becomes cheaper and cheaper, there is a lot of excitement about how knowing our own, individual genes will give us a road map of our future health prospects.

Not so fast, says Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University. "For the vast majority of individuals, whole-genome sequencing will never be a crystal ball that can reliably predict future health."

The problem is that disease can also be caused by environmental factors, like air pollution, or by random, unpredictable genetic mutations.

So for most people, being told that they have a genetic predisposition to disease when there isn't already a family history, is not really very useful information. "What is useful?" Vogelstein asks. "For example, suppose your risk for disease is one percent, and the testing increases it by five percent over that one percent. That's only 1.05 percent - not a significant difference."

That said, Vogelstein says some people may gain a lot from genetic testing. "For individuals with a strong family history of disease, whole-genome sequencing may well become extremely valuable."

To assess the value of whole-genome sequencing, Vogelstein and his colleagues used information about 55,000 pairs of identical twins - who start life with identical DNA, but often have very different medical histories as they age. By analyzing the differences in the medical history of each set of twin, the scientists were able to calculate the power of genes to predict future disease.

As the cost of this sort of genetic testing comes down, the companies that offer it are increasingly selling their service directly to consumers. Vogelstein and other scientists talk about the importance of having the results interpreted by a family physician or genetic counselor.

University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist Timothy Rebbeck, who was not involved in this research, puts it this way, "You wouldn't want to unleash this information on people without systems that allowed them to properly use and act on that information. And people could make all kinds of decisions that could harm them if they weren't completely aware of what it meant."

Vogelstein and Rebbeck spoke with reporters in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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