NPI Blog: News and Commentary

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Acting Director Kenneth Melson is being moved out of the top job at the bureau, ATF special agents in charge announced during an internal conference call today. He will transfer to the Justice Department and assume the position of senior advisor on forensic science, Office of Legal Programs.

The DOJ announced Melson will be replaced by the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Todd Jones.

“As a seasoned prosecutor and former military judge advocate, U.S. Attorney Jones is a demonstrated leader who brings a wealth of experience to this position,” said Attorney General Eric Holder.

Also, U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke has submitted his resignation to President Obama, effective immediately. In an email sent to his staff Tuesday, Burke says his long tenure in public office has been intensely gratifying and intensely demanding.

Boris Tadic

A top Serbian official yesterday sharply criticised the West’s policy towards Kosovo, saying the conditions for Belgrade’s approach to European Union membership was tantamount to a call to Kosovo’s Serbs to flee their homes.

“It is a message for the Serbs to move from Kosovo … even if it comes from European politicians, it is a call for further ethnic cleansing,” Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said on a tour of southern Serbia and the border with the former province.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week in Belgrade that Serbia must stop supporting its compatriots’ resistance to the authority of the government in Pristina.

Ethnic Serbs are an overall minority to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but they dominate its northern section and have so far managed to fight Pristina’s authorities off.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution making August 2011 “Immigrant Pride Month” in to provide “a positive counter example to the current anti-immigrant policies in many states like Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama.”

Image“The City of Los Angeles is home to at least 1.6 million immigrants or 40% of the total City population,” and “anti-immigrant legislation like SB 1070 in Arizona and other ‘copy-cat’ measures now circulating across the nation inherently cause racial profiling and discrimination against certain ethno-racial groups that ‘look/sound’ like immigrant populations,” the Council said in a resolution back in July.

It was passed August 3rd, making it the second year in a row to have an Immigrant Pride Month in L.A. Throughout the month, corporations, schools, and the community were asked to show their support for the contribution made my immigrants to the Los Angeles area and the U.S.

This is the cover to Blackest Terror, a new comic published by Moonstone in October.

Written by Eric M Esquivel and drawn by Ander Sarabia, it takes the classic pulp character currently published by Dynamite, and, well… makes him a black man.

And this character is the first of a “collection of racial and social minorities who feel underserved by the mainstream legal system and have decided to take matters into their own costumed hands. How will the world react to these benevolent outlaws? Will they become celebrated symbols of humankind’s capacity for good or hated catalysts of a bloody revolution?”

It’s the first of five one shots written by Esquivel reinterpreting golden age, and out of copyright, comic characters. Blackest Terror will be followed by Thor: Unkillable Thunder Christ, Super American: The Red, White And Blue Knight, Moon Girl: Princess With A Punch and the team-up, Modern Myths: In The Company of Immortals.

Rasul Mirzayev

Ivan Agafonov, a 19-year-old Muscovite college dropout, died after Rasul Mirzayev, 25, struck him during a quarrel outside a Moscow nightclub earlier this month.

Agafonov’s family said Friday that they would sue the Russian Sambo Federation, of which Mirzayev was also a member, for at least 1 million euros in damages, Interfax reported, citing celebrity lawyer Igor Trunov, who represents the family.

The federation, which has suspended Mirzayev’s membership indefinitely, denied responsibility for his actions outside the mat.

Mirzayev apparently hit Agafonov after the latter flirted with his girlfriend.

The death has fueled simmering racial tensions in Moscow, and the Spartak Moscow football club asked its fans ahead of a Sunday night derby with CSKA to stay away from a banned rally scheduled by ultranationalists for after the game, Interfax said.

Texas parole officials can soon use a new state law to begin deporting some of the 11,000 foreign citizens who are incarcerated in state prisons.

The Austin American-Statesman reports the deportations could save taxpayers millions of dollars.

The state law, which takes effect Sept. 1, allows the parole board to approve convicts for parole on the condition that they are deported to their home country. The law covers foreigners convicted of both violent and nonviolent crimes.

During a meeting Wednesday in Austin, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was assured by federal immigration officials that foreign citizens who are deported — most probably back to Mexico — will actually be sent to their home countries and not turned loose in Texas.

Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement assured state officials convicts not deported will be handed back to state prison officials.

“That’s nothing we can’t take care of,” Cari Cephas-Kimbrough, an ICE assistant field office director in Houston, told the board.

Lawyers for casino developers are objecting to the state’s proposed casino gambling legislation’s preference for Native Americans as an unconstitutional breach of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, a special deal based on ethnicity.

KG Urban Enterprises, which is proposing a casino at the abandoned NStar plant on Cannon Street, hired attorney Marsha Sajer to look into the matter. She claims “the states have no power to enact a state law preference for tribes” and that only the federal government can deal with tribes as sovereign nations.

The opinion, a copy of which was given to The Standard-Times by KG Urban, signals that a legal battle lies ahead even if the Legislature and Gov. Deval Patrick enact by the end of September as expected a compromise bill that would authorize three casinos and one slot parlor statewide.

The bill state carves out a narrow opportunity — only in Bristol and Plymouth counties, plus the Cape and Islands, an area called Region C — for tribes to find land, win a local referendum and negotiate a compact with the governor.

Chester Arthur was a most unlikely reformer.

A crucial cog in the political machine of the Empire State’s Sen. Roscoe Conkling, he was named by President Grant to the powerful and lucrative post of collector of customs for the Port of New York.

Arthur was removed in 1878 by President Rutherford B. Hayes, who wanted to clean up the federal patronage system. But when James Garfield of Ohio was nominated to succeed Hayes, he sought to unite his party by picking the Stalwart Arthur as running mate.

Six months into the new administration, a deranged office-seeker shot Garfield. Arthur was president. And in a dramatic turnabout, he became the president forever associated with civil service reform, converting the U.S. government into a meritocracy where individuals were hired based upon examinations and advanced based upon merit.

In our time, however, Arthur’s achievement has been undone, as a racial spoils system in federal hiring and promotions has been imposed by Democratic presidents, unresisted by Republicans who rarely exhibit the courage to stand up for their principles when the subject is race.

A week ago, an item buried in the Washington Post reported that Obama had “issued an executive order requiring government agencies to develop plans for improving federal workforce diversity.”

Obama, wrote Isaac Arnsdorf, is targeting “a problem that has been on the administration’s radar. Whites still hold more than 81 percent of senior pay-level positions.”

At a ceremony to honor the opening of the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in our nation’s capital Friday, the late civil rights leader’s daughter Bernice made an historical error that would evoke tremendous ridicule and derision if she were a conservative.

“Lincoln remembered for signing the Declaration of Independence” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

BERNICE KING: But as I close, I close with the recognition that daddy is standing, Lincoln is seated. Lincoln remembered for signing the Declaration of Independence. Daddy being remembered as standing up for truth and standing up for justice and standing up for righteousness and standing up for peace and standing up for freedom. Daddy is now standing on the National Mall in our nation’s capital.

Kofi Annan holding baby Adnan Nevic in 1999

Adnan Nevic is a sturdy, good-natured 11-year-old living in the Bosnian town of Visoko, just outside the capital, Sarajevo.

Like many children around the world, Adnan worries over his grades at school — and willingly admits there’s some room for improvement.

“I have straight A’s at school. I only have a B in English,” he says. “My favorite subjects are sports, history, and geography. I have a huge responsibility to be a better student, that’s all.”

But Adnan is more than just an average schoolchild with the usual concerns about classes and grades. He also bears a distinction as the baby who, nearly 12 years ago, became the symbol of a major population milestone when he was named the world’s 6 billionth inhabitant.

Adnan was given the title after he was born at two minutes after midnight on October 12, 1999 — a day UN experts had dubbed “D6B” in preparation for the moment when the Earth’s rapidly growing human population passed the historic threshold.

Kofi Annan, who was then UN secretary-general — and went on to serve as Adnan’s namesake — was photographed holding the tightly swaddled Baby Six Billion, as he was called, in a Sarajevo hospital.