Hollywood reject breaks US film record
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
(Filed: 04/01/2005)

It was rejected by Hollywood and has only ever played in one cinema. But Uncle Nino, a low-budget, feel-good comedy about the importance of family, is quietly emerging as one of 2004's most enduring films.

The gentle tale of an eccentric Italian relative whose visit helps heal a fractured American family has beaten Superman II and even The Passion of the Christ to become last year's longest playing release.

	Uncle Nino cost less than £1.54 million and was shot in 25 days

What was supposed to be a brief trial showing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, turned into a year-long run after Uncle Nino proved an enormous hit with local cinema-goers. The test screening turned into the longest in history -currently in its 55th week.

Now the rest of the US will discover what the fuss is about after a distributor secured a deal to show it across America from February. It is also hoping to take the film to an international audience later in the year.

The independent production, which cost less than £1.54 million and was shot in 25 days, is the work of Robert Shallcross, a Chicago director who wrote the 1994 film Little Giants and has spent years directing television adverts.

He was inspired by his hectic lifestyle which left him too little time for his four children.

"I wanted to tell a story about an American family that was missing out on some of the simple, important pleasures in life."

Shallcross took the finished film to Hollywood, but all the major studios turned it down. Eventually a friend persuaded the president of Celebration Cinema, a regional, family-owned cinema in Michigan, to show it in Grand Rapids for two weeks in December 2003.

"We didn't think it would survive Christmas," said Ron Van Timmeren, an executive vice president for Celebration Cinema. "But it opened well and then went up.

"I think the film's wholesomeness appeals to an older generation without cutting out the younger audience."

Uncle Nino stars Joe Mantegna and Anne Archer as disconnected suburban parents and Pierrino Mascarino as the Italian uncle.

Mascarino has made numerous trips to Michigan, appearing at screenings unannounced and in character and hugging audience members as they leave

Georgia Sheriff Fires Workers, but Then a Judge Intervenes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 5, 2005

JONESBORO, Ga., Jan. 4 (AP) - On his first day at work, the new sheriff of Clayton County called 27 employees into his office on Monday, fired them and had snipers stand guard on the roof as they were escorted out the door.

A judge on Tuesday ordered him to rehire the employees.

The sheriff, Victor Hill, 39, defended the firings and said he had the right to shake up the department in whatever way he felt necessary.

Sheriff Hill also said it was necessary to fire the workers the way he did, including taking some deputies home in vans normally used to transport prisoners because the deputies were barred from using county cars.

Sheriff Hill was among a spate of black candidates elected last year in the county, which was once dominated by rural whites. The fired employees included four of the highest-ranking officers, all of them white. Sheriff Hill told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that their replacements would be black.

Sheriff Hill's move provoked an angry reaction from the newly elected chairman of the county commission, Eldrin Bell, who is black. He called the move illegal and filed for the restraining order granted by the judge, Stephen Boswell.

Judge Boswell granted a 30-day restraining order, halting the firings, and wrote that it appeared that "employees of the sheriff were terminated without cause" and in violation of the county's civil service rules.

Sheriff Hill disagreed.

"A lot of people are under the impression that the sheriff's office is under civil service laws," he said. "But my research shows the employees work at the pleasure of the sheriff."

Sheriff Hill said one of the reasons for the security accompanying the firings was the assassination of Sheriff Derwin Brown in neighboring DeKalb County in 2000. Sheriff Brown was gunned down in the driveway of his home three days before he was to be sworn in. The former sheriff, Sidney Dorsey, was found guilty of plotting to kill him and sentenced to life in prison.

"Derwin Brown sent out letters to 25 to 30 people letting them know they would not be reappointed when he took office," Sheriff Hill said.

The Clayton County Sheriff's Department employs 345 people.
 

Bush's Counsel Sought Ruling About Torture

By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: January 5, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 - Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday.
 
Mr. Gonzales's role in seeking a legal opinion on the definition of torture and the legal limits on the force that could be used on terrorist suspects in captivity is expected to be a central issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings scheduled to begin on Thursday on Mr. Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general.

The request by Mr. Gonzales produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

Until now, administration officials have been unwilling to provide details about the role Mr. Gonzales had in the production of the memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Gonzales has spoken of the memorandum as a response to questions, without saying that most of the questions were his.

Current and former officials who talked about the memorandum have been provided with firsthand accounts about how it was prepared. Some discussed it in an effort to clear up what they viewed as a murky record in advance of Mr. Gonzales's confirmation hearings. Others spoke of the matter apparently believing that the Justice Department had unfairly taken the blame for the memorandum.

A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Tuesday that while Mr. Gonzales personally requested the August opinion, he was only seeking "objective legal advice and did not ask the Office of Legal Counsel to reach any specific conclusion."

As the White House's chief lawyer, Mr. Gonzales supervised the production of a number of legal memorandums that shaped the administration's legal framework for conducting its battle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Of the documents that have been made public, only one was written by Mr. Gonzales. In that memorandum, dated January 2002, he advised Mr. Bush that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to fighters captured in Afghanistan. The next month the White House decided that the Geneva Conventions would be applied to Taliban captives but not to detainees linked to Al Qaeda.

As a result, a major area of questioning at his confirmation hearing is expected to be the role he played in the production of the other documents, like the August 2002 memorandum. That memorandum concluded that interrogators had great leeway to question detainees using coercive techniques that they could assert were not torture.

The Justice Department formally rescinded the August memorandum last week and in its place issued a legal opinion saying that torture should be more broadly defined and that there was no need to say that Mr. Bush had the authority to sanction torture because he has said unequivocally that it is not permitted.

The revision stated that "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms." It rejected the language in the earlier memorandum, which said that only physical pain "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure" constituted torture punishable by law.

Administration officials said over the last few days that Mr. Gonzales had played a role in the decision to issue the new legal opinion as well, but they did not offer specifics.

Mr. Gonzales's request resulting in the original August 2002 memorandum was somewhat unusual, the officials said, because he went directly to lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, bypassing the office of the deputy attorney general, which is often notified of politically delicate requests for legal opinions made by executive-branch agencies, including the White House.

The memorandum has become one of the most hotly debated legal documents in the so-called war on terror. Democrats and human rights groups have complained that it created a permissive atmosphere that led to serious abuses of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The memorandum was addressed to Mr. Gonzales and was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.
 
Officials dispute how much senior Justice Department officials knew of the memorandum as it was being prepared. A former official and a current one said that neither Attorney General John Ashcroft nor his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were aware of the memorandum until it was about to be submitted to the White House.

Another former official said, however, that they were given progress reports as the memorandum took shape.

John Yoo, a senior Justice Department lawyer who wrote much of the memorandum, exchanged draft language with lawyers at the White House, the officials said. Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an article published Sunday in The San Jose Mercury News that Mr. Gonzales did not apply any pressure on him to tailor the memorandum to accommodate the White House.

Instead, Mr. Yoo said that Mr. Gonzales was merely seeking to "understand all available options" in a perilous time, when the United States faced unprecedented threats.

But a senior administration official disagreed, saying that the memorandum's conclusions appeared to closely align with the prevailing White House view of interrogation practices. The official said the memorandum raised questions about whether the Office of Legal Counsel had maintained its longstanding tradition of dispensing objective legal advice to its clients in executive-branch agencies.

While the nature of Mr. Gonzales's specific discussions with the Justice Department remains unclear, administration officials said that Mr. Gonzales's customary way of dealing with Justice Department lawyers was to pose questions about issues rather than offer his own conclusions, although one said his preferences could sometimes be inferred easily from his questions.

Justice Department officials said that the timing of the revised memorandum, which was posted on the Justice Department's Internet site without announcement late on Dec. 30, was a result of instructions from James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general.

Mr. Comey, the officials said, told lawyers to complete the revised opinion before the end of the year. At the same time, officials said they were mindful that issuance of the new opinion might help neutralize the issue for Mr. Gonzales even as it served as a sharp critique of the earlier opinion.

Mr. Gonzales talked about the August 2002 memorandum in a meeting with reporters last June, when the White House sought to defend its actions at the height of the uproar over abuses of prisoners in Iraq.

Without discussing his own role in soliciting the document, Mr. Gonzales said that the memorandum was not a policy directive to officials in the field but a response to questions about the scope of the federal law prohibiting torture and the international convention on torture.

"The president has given no order or directive that would immunize from prosecution anyone engaged in conduct that constitutes torture," Mr. Gonzales said. "All interrogation techniques actually authorized have been carefully vetted, are lawful, and do not constitute torture."

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who has signaled an intent to question Mr. Gonzales vigorously about his role in the memorandums, said Tuesday that he has been continually frustrated by the White House in trying to obtain answers and documents.

In a letter to Mr. Gonzales on Tuesday, Mr. Leahy wrote, "I am disappointed that, contrary to your promises to me to engage in an open exchange and answer my questions in connection with your confirmation process, you have not answered my letters" requesting documents.

But Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and the new chairman of the committee, said that Mr. Leahy's complaints appeared unjustified.

GAZA, Palestine, January 3, 2005 (IPC + WAFA) - - The Ministry of Prisoners and Ex-Detainees Affairs considered on Sunday that 2004 was the worst year for Palestinian prisoners, as detention conditions inside Israeli jails deteriorated to a level never seen in 30 years.

A report issued by the ministry's information department indicated that the year 2004 witnessed fierce attacks inside Israeli jails that reached all prisoner categories, pointing out that the most dangerous measure Israeli authorities attempted was to label those prisoners as terrorists, and treat them in the same way as Guantanamo prisoners in order to strip them of international sympathy.

The report pointed out that the Israeli government has given the administration of prisons to radical military generals who deal with the prisoners in an absolute military sense, leading to the increase of oppression, persecution and aggression against those prisoners.

Mr. Riyadh Al Ashqar, director of the information department, said that since 1967 more than half a million Palestinian prisoners have been imprisoned in Israeli jails.

"Since Al Aqsa Intifada, Israeli occupation forces arrested about 35 thousand prisoners, eight thousands of them still inside the different Israeli jails. Of those still imprisoned, 361 children and 126 females in addition to about a thousand patients suffering different diseases, including paralysis, blindness and amputations.

Al Ashqar noted that the administrative detention frequencies have increased drastically, a thing that caused the administrative detainees to boycott the court hearings to protest the renewal of their terms. 2464 administrative detainees are still inside Israeli jails, of them 434 have spent more than ten years, 140 spent more than 15 years and 16 spent more than 20 years, while five prisoners, including the oldest Palestinian prisoner Saeed Al Ataba, have spent more than 25 years in prison.

The Ministry documented more than 2000 arrests this year, compared with 500 cases in 2001. The number of deaths among the prisoners also increased during 2004, as 176 prisoners died inside Israeli jails, compared with 165 deaths until 2003.

Also, the year 2004 recorded an increase in the number of life terms, as the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one life terms in Israeli jails reached 444 prisoners, including Abdullah Barghouti, who was sentenced to 67 life terms in prison, which is considered the highest verdict ever made in Israeli courts.

As for detention conditions inside the jails, the year 2004 witnessed the revoking of kitchen access to Palestinian prisoners, and instead the kitchen was handed over to Israeli criminal convicts, and thus Palestinian prisoners refused to eat what those convicts cook as it contradicts their beliefs and traditions, forcing them to prepare their own food and incur more expenses due to the increase in foodstuffs prices.

The prisoners also complained of the bad food being served in Israeli jails, which resulted in many food-poisoning cases among them. Additionally, Israeli jail administrations imposed many penal measures against Palestinian prisoners, including banning family visits, imposing high fines for worthless reasons, frequent transfer of prisoners from one jail to another to destabilize the prisoners.

One of the prisoners, Aladdin Al Bezyan, who is a blind man sentenced to 20 years in jail, has been denied family visits for four years now.

Al Ashqar further mentioned that during 2004 a large number of female prisoners was recorded, as 63 out of a total of 126 prisoners remain inside Israeli jails.

The Ministry of Prisoners Affairs report asserted that the number of patient prisoners soared inside Israeli jails, due to the bad detention conditions as well as decreased hygiene and lack of proper health care.

The number of sick prisoners rose from 700 in 2003 to more than a thousand in 2004 including dozens whose conditions are serious and require immediate surgeries, according to outside doctors who reviewed their medical files.

The report confirmed that there have been a deliberate lack of medical attention by the Israeli Prison Service towards Palestinian prisoners, especially those hospitalized at Al Ramleh prison hospital, where 140 prisoners are staying there with minimum attention.

the year 2004 also saw the opening of new jails to accommodate the large number of prisoners being arrested everyday by random arrest campaigns and raids throughout the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The 'Gilboa' prison was recently opened in the Bisan Valley near 'Shatta' prison, and can accommodate 200 prisoners.

The Israeli Prison Service made this new prison to isolate the leaders of the prisoners' movement.

Israeli authorities also opened a new block in 'Ayalon' prison, which was previously a horse stable, and will be used to detain civilians, and later turned it into a block for Palestinian prisoners. Another new block was also opened in 'Negev' desert prison.

As for weapons, Israeli authorities used a variety of chemical agents against the prisoners, such as hot pepper rounds that paralyze the prisoner and cause him to suffer excruciating pains.

The year 2004 also witnessed a grave escalation towards minor prisoners, as Israeli authorities dealt with them as 'ticking bombs', imprisoning and torturing them as adult prisoners, which is a blatant violation of all human rights law and international conventions.

The number of patient children inside Israeli jails rose to 48, compared with 34 in 2003.

At the end of its report, the Ministry of Prisoners Affairs demanded all the legal and human rights organizations to urgently interfere and help the Palestinian prisoners, as well as expose the Israeli violations against them and intensify visits to Israeli jails to get a closer picture on the prisoner's catastrophic conditions, especially patients and minors, whose detention lacks the simplest rights stated by the Fourth Geneva Convention

Lawsuit Says Agency Urged False Reporting on Iraqi Arms

A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused.

The operative, who remains under cover, asserts in a lawsuit made public yesterday that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma."

"Our mission is to . . . report the facts," Anya Guilsher, a CIA spokeswoman, says of the agency.

The subject of that reporting has been blacked out by the CIA, and the word "Iraq" does not appear in the heavily redacted version of the legal complaint, but the remaining language and context make clear that the officer's work related to prewar intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

In the lawsuit, the officer asserts that CIA managers retaliated against him for refusing their demands by beginning a counterintelligence investigation of allegations that he had sex with a female asset and by initiating an inspector general's investigation into allegations that he stole money meant to be used to pay human assets.

Those investigations, the lawsuit asserts, were "initiated for the sole purpose of discrediting him and retaliating against him for questioning the integrity of the WMD reporting . . . and for refusing to falsify his intelligence reporting to support the politically mandated conclusion" of matters that are redacted in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit marks the first public instance in which a CIA employee has charged directly that agency officials pressured him to produce intelligence to support the administration's prewar position that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a grave and gathering threat, and to suppress information that ran counter to that view.

"Their official dogma was contradicted by his reporting and they did not want to hear it," said Roy Krieger, the officer's attorney.

Anya Guilsher, a CIA spokeswoman, said the agency could not comment on the lawsuit but added, "The notion that CIA managers order officers to falsify reports is flat wrong. Our mission is to call it like we see it and report the facts."

Critics of the Iraq war have asserted the administration pressured analysts and operators to produce information that bolstered the administration's case for invading Iraq. Congressional investigations did not find evidence to support that charge, but found that the CIA did not have enough spies in Iraq and that the analysis of the highly circumstantial evidence was mischaracterized as firmer than it was.

No biological or chemical weapons have been found in Iraq. A subsequent CIA-led investigation found that Iraq was nowhere near producing a nuclear weapon, as the administration had asserted.

The unnamed operative is a 23-year officer of Middle Eastern descent who spent much of his career on secret and covert operations to collect intelligence on and interdict weapons of mass destruction, the lawsuit says.

In 2002, the lawsuit says, the CIA officer "attempted to report routine intelligence" from a human asset "but was thwarted by CIA superiors." It goes on to say that he was subsequently approached by a senior desk officer "who insisted that Plaintiff falsify his reporting," and that when he refused, the "management" of the CIA's Counterproliferation Division ordered that he "remove himself from any further 'handling' " of the unnamed asset, who is referred elsewhere in the document as "a highly respected human asset."

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday and placed in the public court docket yesterday after a judge said it could proceed using a pseudonym for the plaintiff, says his superiors falsely promised him that they would report his findings to President Bush and falsely claimed that they had disseminated some of his other reports through normal channels.

In 2003, the lawsuit says, the CIA officer learned of the counterintelligence investigation of allegations that he was having sex with a female asset. Five days later, it says, he was told that a promotion was being canceled "because of pressure from the DDO [Deputy Director of Operations] James Pavitt."

Pavitt declined to comment.

In September 2003, the CIA placed the officer on administrative leave without explanation, the lawsuit says. Eight months later, it says, the inspector general's office advised him that he was under investigation for "diverting to his own use monies provided him for payment to human assets." The document says the allegations were made by the same managers who had asked him to falsify reports.

In August 2004, he was terminated "for unspecified reasons," the lawsuit says. It requests that his employment, salary and promotions be restored and that the CIA pay compensatory damages and legal fees.

In a letter to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo dated Dec. 6, Krieger requested a meeting between the officer and CIA Director Porter J. Goss because of "the serious nature of the allegations in this case, including deliberately misleading the President on intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction."

The Real Lock Box

The good news: Social Security is still solvent. The bad news: It's all in T-Bonds!

by Mary Pitt

01/03/05 "ICH" -- When a bank is robbed by a common criminal, the police at all levels are on high alert and the thieves are pursued until they are caught. However, when the theft is by a bank insider with access to the books, the theft can be covered up for a long time while the guilty parties make their getaway to live a long, luxurious life in a foreign country. The victims, the depositors have theiir money replaced by tax funds, and the only losers are the American taxpayers. Now we find that there is an "inside job" going on that is stealing a vitally important trust fund and all indications are that the thieves are going to get away with it, due to adept manipulation of the funds and obfuscation of the truth.

Back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the people in our beleaguered government realized that the elderly of our nation were doomed to be a burden on the children whom they had carefully and patiently reared in the hope for a better life for them and those children were faced with bitter choices on a daily basis. No family was ever able to provide the necessities of life for everybody and the choices were whether to provide for the needs of elderly parents or for their own children. In most cases, the choice was for all to share what little there was and for everyone to go hungry. The nation was in the grip of the Great Depression; those who had carefully saved money had lost it all in the stock market crash and the bank closures, the only earnings that were available were from what one had and could sell, what one could grow and trade for products and services, and hungry people worked all day at heavy labor for a meal handed out the back door by a householder. Nobody who was not alive in those days can comprehend their misery. This level of privation had not been experienced since the earliest days of the settlement of this continent.

In that climate, while there was little that could be done for the immediate problem, it was resolved that this should never be allowed to happen again. Many programs and regulations were instituted in order to restore the monetary system, the business climate, and the culture which had been established over the years. Among these programs was that of Social Security. This allowed people to contribute to a fund during their working years so that they could draw from it when they became too old to work. It took many years to pay enough into the fund to qualify, but elderly people worked assiduously to establish this entitlement so that they would not burden their own children as they had been burdened in the past. It was considered to be a trust fund, much like the one to which people now contribute in order to prepare for the education of their children.

At first, it was not complete. Only wage earners were allowed to participate. Farmers were left out as well as the self-employed and, during World War II, soldiers were not covered for their service pay. But, over time, more people were covered and adjustments to the rate of investment were made so that surviving dependents and those who became disabled before reaching the age of 65 were also included. Social Security became a uniquely American institution, providing the much-needed "safety net" for those who could not hope to save enough money from their meager wages to plan for all contingencies. To the working class it was a God-send, an investment in their futures, over and above the income tax which they paid.

Initially, the accounting separated the funds paid into the Social Security account from the general fund and the balances grew in preparation for the needs. However, once the war was over the time came, as it always does, to pay the bills for the post-war rebuilding of our own and other nations. This threw the Federal budget into deficits and the Presidents and Congress feared the repercussions when the people became aware of it. (Even then, government officials were loath to increase taxes to meet needs.) It was decided to cease that separate accounting practice and to list all the money received into the same general fund to hide the degree of national indebtedness. With time and the increases in the amounts withheld from payroll, the fund went into "surplus" because more was paid in than than was paid out to beneficiaries, and this money was "borrowed" in order to keep the deficit down and to pay for all the spending which Congress found so essential.

In 2001, when the current administration took office, there was a "projected surplus" of 1.75 trillion dollars over the next ten years which would carry the program for many years into the future. However, this money was spent for tax cuts and pre-emptive wars, and for subsidies to the multi-national corporations. Now, we are told, not enough money will be paid into the system to pay for the benefits that are going to be drawn out by retirees. They project huge increases in the amounts of deductions that will be necessary when the "baby-boomers" reach retirement age. The alarms are being sounded on a daily basis by the Conservatives and we are being pounded with their theory that the only way to save Social Security is to "privatize" it because the system will go broke under the increased load and be an unreasonable burden on the taxpayer. The "shortage" in the fund now requires that enough tax be paid in each year to pay the current benefits. Once that is done, the "excess" is spent and simply disappears into the general budget for war and pork.

However, noted economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, tells us that the Social Security System is sufficiently funded to last for another forty years without alteration. Currently the Federal General Fund is indebted to the Social Security Fund in the amount of $800 billion dollars and this amount should be included in the projections which are being made to determine the future of this vital program. After about 2043, according to Mr. Krugman, the program will fall about 20% short of total solvency. Taken in context, this is not a bad situation, since our national budget currently falls 30% short of available income. The arguments for its dissolution are not only fallacious, they are simply politically motivated. The necessary adjustments only require across-the-board tax increases or restraint in other government spending.

So, let's explore the reasons why the demise of this program, so essential to the welfare of the working poor, has been targeted for extinction by this administration. Common sense tells us that we cannot "repair" the program by taking even more money from it to put in the stock market. However, we could make it last a lot longer by increasing the maximum earnings on which the tax is paid or, in a worst-case scenario, adding a "means test" so that people who do not need it won't be drawing the same benefits as those for whom it is a matter of life or death. There are many ways to ensure that the original intent of the Social Security Act remains in force for the welfare of society as a whole but the policy-makers of the Republican Party refuse to consider them. In short, the money is in the bank, but the bankers won't release it because, in doing so, they will expose the fact that the bank itself is insolvent!

This program was designed, first, as "insurance" in which holders pay premiums. Later, it was changed to a "trust fund" concept wherein the money was held for future needs. However, once the government started "borrowing" the money, it was changed to an "entitlement", as are Medicaid and Public Welfare. In short, our money was taken by those into whose trust it was given, and put to other purposes and now they fear that they will not be able to repay it. If you were to start a trust fund at your bank into which you placed your "nest-egg" only to find later that it had disappeared, you would be preferring charges and demanding that the thieves be put behind bars. This time, the thieves are IN the bank and they blandly tell us, "There is no trust fund. The money is gone!" We should tell them, in no uncertain terms, that the money is not gone. It has been wrongfully spent by the officers in charge, it is owed to us, and we demand that they pay it back. If they cannot or will not make restitution, they should go to prison for a very long time.

Mary Pitt is a septuagenarian Kansan who is self-employed and active in the political arena. Her concerns are her four-generation family and the continuance of the United States as a democracy with a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people". Comments and criticism may be addressed to mpitt@cox.net . 

Copyright: Mary Pitt

As the death toll continues to rise following Sunday's Indian Ocean tsunami, Indian churches and Christian organizations are speeding up their relief efforts.

The 9.0 magnitude quake and its resulting tsunami devastated life along 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) of South India's coast, so far leaving more than 12,000 dead in India and many thousands missing. The overall death toll from the affected countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, the Maldives, and Somalia is now above 114,000—far more than earlier feared.

India's Christian community was not spared. "It has been a terrible tragedy since it all happened on Sunday when the church service was on, and it occurred during the Christmas period," Donald H.R. De Souza, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, said earlier this week. "In the Kottar area of Tamil Nadu, about 300 Christians who were attending a religious service died."

One of the country's holiest Christian sites, the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health in Velankanni, was hit severely. The shrine, typically busiest during the Christmas season, has reported at least 700 deaths, and that number is expected to rise dramatically.

John Dayal, secretary general of the All India Christian Council, calls the tsunami "a greater tragedy than many others faced in the past" by the country's Christians. It's especially hard on the Christian community, he said, since "most of the boatmen and fishermen in the coastal areas are Christians."

The areas most affected by the tsunami are in the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Pondicherry, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Anthropologists fear that some of the 72 indigenous tribes living in isolation on the 319 islands in the Andaman and Nicobar chains might have been wiped out by the tsunami.

Besides the terrible loss of human life, fear of massive disease haunts medical authorities. The United Nations has warned of an epidemic as corpses rot and drinking water, food, and shelter become scarce. In India, dead bodies are being disposed of in mass burials and cremations.

The country has also had to face panic in the wake of the devastation: A tsunami alert was issued yesterday, and the government urged people to leave coastal areas. Hours later, the alert was retracted, with Science Minister Kapil Sibal explaining that it had been based on faulty information.

The unprecedented tragedy has shattered the local economies of small towns and villages in the coastal areas. The basic infrastructure and amenities have been wiped away by the waves, and the local communities have been impoverished.

"Providing livelihood to the fisher folks would be our main focus to begin with," says Dayal. "Fishermen need nets and boats. We will be focusing on that along with giving them trauma counseling and providing long-term rehabilitation."

Indian churches and Christian organizations are "deeply involved" in aid and relief efforts, says Richard Howell, secretary general of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. "We have been on site from day one providing relief. We have already sent appeals for funds within India and abroad. We see it as a tragedy of human family. We will serve every needy person irrespective of his caste or religion."

James Christian, Bishop's Chaplain for the Church of South India's Diocese of Madras, told Christianity Today that his denomination is providing shelter and clothes and collecting money for relief, but the situation remains "terrible and sad."

"We are doing our best but our resources are insufficient," he said. "A lot more needs to be done. It is a time of great tragedy and we need prayers."

India's churches are organizing a nation-wide day of prayer January 2, but their work with the tsunami victims will likely continue for years.

"It won't be a one-time relief," says Howell. "We are going to be with them, walking with them until they are rehabilitated."