CHICAGO – Polish immigrants and their descendants around the world are sharing the anguish of their mother country after a plane crash that devastated the government.
In Polish communities in the U.S. and elsewhere, people crowded into Masses and held vigils.
Anna Szpindor, who was born in Poland and now lives in South Barrington, Ill., says when the Polish people have any kind of a tragedy, they pray and go to church.
The plane carrying President Lech Kaczynski (kuh-CHIN'-skee) and other officials crashed Saturday in Russia. They were headed to events marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, in which thousands of Polish military officers were killed by Soviet secret police.
In Chicago, Teresa Karwowska says what happened will open people's eyes to the Katyn massacre.
BONN, Germany – Climate talks nearly ground to a halt before they began in earnest Sunday, with delegates squabbling over how to conduct negotiations for the rest of the year on a new agreement to control global warming.
Talks about talks appeared at times on the verge of breakdown over seemingly minor procedural issues, but that reflected a deep divide on how to treat the hastily crafted political deal struck at the Copenhagen summit last December by President Barack Obama with a small group of other world leaders.
The lengthy battle ostensibly was over the authorization of a committee chairwoman to prepare a draft negotiating text for the next meeting in June.
But it provided an early warning that the rancor evident during the Copenhagen summit had not faded, and that the split between industrial countries and the developing world is likely to continue characterizing the talks.
After the letdown of Copenhagen, delegates and officials appeared determine to dampen expectations of a final deal this year, and said negotiations are almost certain to stretch past the next major conference in Cancun, Mexico, in December.
"We should not be striving to get answers to each and every question in Cancun," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate secretariat, said Sunday. "The quest to address climate change is a long journey, and achieving perfection takes practice."
The agreement is meant to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which has provisions capping greenhouse gas emissions by industrial countries that expire in 2012. The new accord would be expanded to curtail emissions by swiftly developing countries like China, which already has surpassed the United States as the world's biggest polluter.
With hotel workers dismantling the meeting rooms around them, the unusual three-day meeting in Bonn debated an agreement to intensify the negotiations this year leading up to the decisive ministerial conference in Cancun. Two extra preparatory conferences were to be scheduled, each lasting at least a week.
At a final session, delegates from 175 parties wrangled over wording that implied a lesser status for the Copenhagen Accord, which failed to win consensus approval in Copenhagen. Also on the table is a draft treaty that had made slow and painful progress through negotiations among more than 190 countries over the last two years, but which left many of the core issues unresolved.
"This is not even a negotiating decision," chairwoman Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe said in frustration, trying to cut off the debate. "If we can't agree on this then we may have problems when we really start negotiating."
The accord, cobbled together in the final 36 hours at Copenhagen, set a goal of limiting the increase in the Earth's average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) from preindustrial levels, but did not specify how that would be done.
It asked industrial countries to set targets for reducing carbon dioxide and other polluting gases causing global warming, and developing countries to submit national plans for slowing emissions growth. It also called for international monitoring to ensure those goals were met, but did not set any penalties.
Many countries — even among the 120 countries that supported the Copenhagen Accord — denounced the closed-door manner in which it was done and voiced disappointment that its emissions requirements were voluntary.
U.S. chief delegate Jonathan Pershing said the accord was a package deal and rejected suggestions "in which certain elements are cherry picked."
Pershing also confirmed Washington opposed granting financial help to countries that refused to sign on to the Copenhagen deal, which included a $30 billion three-year package of aid for handling climate emergencies and helping poor countries turn to low-carbon growth.
"Countries that are not part of the accord would not be given substantial funding under the accord," Pershing told reporters. "It's not a free rider process."
On Saturday, Bolivian delegate Pablo Solon protested the cutoff of funds from the U.S. Global Climate Change initiative as "a very bad practice" and an attempt to put pressure countries to support the agreement. Solon said Bolivia would not change its policies.
Here are today's news items from Media Matters for America, click on the title or 'read more' to read the entirety of each story.
Goldberg falsely suggests health care reform isn't paid for Jonah Goldberg claimed that the Obama administration "is now floating the idea of imposing a value-added tax" "to pay for" the "recently passed health-care legislation." In fact, CBO found that the health care law more than pays for itself over the next ten years and beyond. Read More
Daily Caller plays along with fabricated conflict over "empathy standard" An April 9 Daily Caller post claimed that "[t]he clearest example of disagreement between the legal philosophies of Obama, who was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, and conservatives is the president's "empathy standard." In fact, conservative justices cited the importance of personal experience during their own confirmation hearings, and conservatives have repeatedly cited empathy or compassion as an "important" quality for judicial nominees. Read More
WARSAW, Poland -- He died en route to the most sensitive mission possible -- a visit to the place that has driven a wedge between Poles and Russians for three generations.
The death of Lech Kaczynski, Poland's president and dozens of his high-level countrymen in a plane crash, and the purpose behind the journey, laid bare the deep divisions that remain between two nations still struggling to be more than uneasy neighbors who watch each other with skepticism and suspicion.
Saturday's planned visit to the Katyn forest was somber in purpose but underscored his suspicious eye of the massive neighbor and former taskmaster to the east. The memorial service was to mark the 70th anniversary of the killing of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviet secret security during World War II.
Katyn. The site of the massacre of Polish military officers, priests, shopkeepers. Men shot in the back of the head by Josef Stalin's NKVD, the precursor of the KGB.
''It is an accursed place,'' former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24 after the crash.
''It brought to the forefront again an event that Moscow would like to forget or, if not to forget, to sideline,'' he said, noting that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took a significant step by attending the Katyn commemorations last Wednesday with Polish counterpart Donald Tusk.
The ancient city of Smolensk has long played a significant and somewhat symbolic role in Russian-Polish relations.
Russian and Polish rulers fiercely fought over it for centuries, as well as over other contested territories in today's Ukraine and Belarus, and the Russian takeover of the city in the mid-17th century preceded Moscow's takeover of eastern Polish lands.
Earlier this week, Poles took deep satisfaction in Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's presence at the memorial for the 22,000 killed there.
Putin was the first Russian leader to commemorate the Katyn massacres with a Polish leader and noted that both nations' ''fates had been inexorably joined'' by the atrocities that saw 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners and intellectuals massacred by Stalin's secret police in 1940 in and around Katyn, a village near Russia's border with Belarus.
''In our country there has been a clear political, legal and moral judgment made of the evil acts of this totalitarian regime, and this judgment cannot be revised,'' he said, but he did not apologize or call it a war crime.
Listening to the remarks was the Polish prime minister, Tusk, not Kaczynski who, as president, was not invited to the event.
''It was a step forward. He could have not shown up, he could have not invited Tusk,'' Bugajski said.
Instead Kaczynski, along with others, made their own trip Saturday for Polish-only commemorations.
''I think in a way this is a God-given opportunity to really talk honestly about Katyn and what led to Katyn,'' Bugajski said. ''We know who killed these people.''
For half a century, Soviet officials claimed that the mass executions had been carried out by Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. But the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev's rule admitted in 1990 that the crimes had been committed by Stalin's NKVD secret police.
''Without a doubt, there is evident symbolism in this tragedy that we cannot even grasp now,'' Slawomir Debski, the head of Poland's Institute of International Affairs, said. ''At a time when it seemed we were reaching a conclusion of the Katyn issue between Poland and Russia, after the ceremonies and good gestures, we have another tragedy.''
Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, said Kaczynski's death could fuel anti-Russian sentiments among some Poles.
''There will be certain people who'll say 'It was Russians who organized the whole thing,''' Lukyanov was quoted by the gazeta.ru news portal as saying.
He said only an open investigation by the Russian authorities could put to rest any suspicion but there was optimism, too.
''But we may also look for a grain of hope in that it can mend our relations because it is such a tragedy that we may see a kind of catharsis,'' Anna Materska-Sosnowska, a political scientist with Warsaw University.
Russia and Poland have always kept a wary eye on each other. Poland, after communism's collapse, eagerly embraced the west, joining the European Union and NATO, partly to anchor itself in Europe and give itself a security blanket against Russia.
Now Katyn, which has long divided the two countries, could further erode already testy national relations or, analysts said Saturday, could provide the chance for them to move forward and extend hands.
''We cannot understand why people representing the Polish state died at the same place where thousands of Poland's officers had been murdered,'' Debski said. ''Apparently this soil must like Polish blood.''
WASHINGTON – As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington's Embassy Row in 1976, a newly released State Department cable shows.
Whether Kissinger played a role in blocking the delivery of the warning against assassination to the governments of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay has long been a topic of controversy.
Discovered in recent weeks by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization, the Sept. 16, 1976 cable is among tens of thousands of declassified State Department documents recently made available to the public.
In 1976, the South American nations of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were engaged in a program of repression code-named Operation Condor that targeted those governments' political opponents throughout Latin America, Europe and even the United States.
Based on information from the CIA, the U.S. State Department became concerned that Condor included plans for political assassination around the world. The State Department drafted a plan to deliver a stern message to the three governments not to engage in such murders.
In the Sept. 16, 1976 cable, the topic of one paragraph is listed as "Operation Condor," preceded by the words "(KISSINGER, HENRY A.) SUBJECT: ACTIONS TAKEN." The cable states that "secretary declined to approve message to Montevideo" Uruguay "and has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter."
"The Sept. 16 cable is the missing piece of the historical puzzle on Kissinger's role in the action, and inaction, of the U.S. government after learning of Condor assassination plots," Peter Kornbluh, the National Security Archive's senior analyst on Chile, said Saturday. Kornbluh is the author of "The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability."
Jessica LePorin, a spokeswoman for Kissinger, says that the former secretary of state dealt many years ago with questions concerning the cancellation of the warnings to the South American governments and had no further comment on the matter.
Kissinger has dealt with the issue indirectly. Writing in defense of Kissinger in 2004 when the issue arose, William D. Rogers, Kissinger's former assistant secretary of state, said Kissinger "had nothing to do with" a Sept. 20, 1976 cable instructing that the warnings to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay be canceled. Rogers died in 2007.
"You can instruct" the U.S. ambassadors "to take no further action" on the subject of Operation Condor, said the Sept. 20 cable by Harry Shlaudeman, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, to Shlaudeman's deputy.
The next day, on Sept. 21, 1976, agents of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet planted a car bomb and exploded it on a Washington, D.C., street, killing both former AmbassadorOrlando Letelier, and an American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Letelier was one of the most outspoken critics of the Pinochet government.
Nearly a month before the blast, the State Department seemed intent on delivering a strong message to the governments engaged in Operation Condor.
An Aug. 23, 1976 State Department cable instructs the U.S. embassies in the capitals of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay to "seek appointment as soon as possible with highest appropriate official, preferably the chief of state."
The message that was to be conveyed: the U.S. government knows that Operation Condor may "include plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain ... countries and abroad."
"What we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved," Shlaudeman wrote in a memo to Kissinger dated Aug. 30, 1976. That memo is referenced in the newly disclosed Sept. 16, 1976 cable containing Kissinger's name.
Concerns among the ambassadors may have led to cancellation of the planned warning.
In the Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed a possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.
WASHINGTON – Emboldened by success the first time around, President Barack Obama is likely to pick the Supreme Court nominee he wants and let the confirmation fight proceed from there, putting huge emphasis on a justice who would bring a fight-for-the-little-guy sensibility to the job.
Politics will certainly play into Obama's calculus: He no longer has the votes in the Senate to overcome the delaying tactic known as the filibuster, and a minority Republican Party in fierce opposition to Obama's agenda has little incentive to hand him a win just months before House and Senate elections.
But Obama's strategy worked when he chose Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter last year — announce the criteria he deems the most vital for a nominee, vet the nominees with no embarrassing gaffes or leaks, and pick the one with whom he feels the most comfort.
Confirmability was a factor then, not a driver. Expect much the same now.
Obama's task is to replace the liberal lion of the court, Justice John Paul Stevens, who on Friday announced his coming retirement.
In quick succession, Obama has a rare chance to choose two justices who could shape the court's rulings for decades. He has given every sign that he approaches this decision the way aggressive coaches prefer to call strategy — playing to win, as opposed to playing not to lose.
In choosing a nominee over the next few weeks, Obama is inclined to stick with his formula of going all in, like he did in getting a health care reform law, the biggest and most consuming fight of his presidency. The view from the White House is that the president is almost certain to face a political and ideological fight in this election year no matter whom he nominates to the court; the only issue is to what degree.
So why scale back?
What's more, Obama has shown an aggressive streak when it comes to the nation's highest court, one sure to shape his thinking in picking a nominee.
Obama openly criticized the court for a January ruling that allowed corporations to spend freely to influence elections. And he did that during his State of the Union address with six justices sitting in front of him, drawing a rare, dismissive reaction from Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court's conservative members.
Stevens had strongly dissented in that corporate-friendly campaign finance case, saying it did nothing less than threaten "to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation." And Obama all but referenced the court ruling when he said from the Rose Garden on Friday that he is poised to choose a nominee who "like Justice Stevens, knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens."
It is this criterion — Obama has called it empathy, or seeing life and the law through others' eyes — that defined his choice of Sotomayor.
It seems sure to do so again this time, inviting a political fight.
Sotomayor's confirmation itself was, for the most part, a hardened partisan battle. The vote was 68-31, with Democrats unanimously behind her and most Republicans opposing her choice and Obama's judicial standards. Yet not lost in all that was that nine Republicans voted to confirm Sotomayor.
Among them was conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He offered sharp questioning during confirmation hearings and found some of Sotomayor's views troubling, but ultimately considered her well qualified and, importantly, showed deference to Obama's prerogative by saying "elections matter."
Obama hopes to get at least one such Republican supporter this time — and in purely practical terms, one is all he needs. Democrats and their allied independents hold 59 seats in the Senate, one short of the 60 needed to overcome a vote-killing delay maneuver.
Confirmation itself would require a simple majority. And while senators take their "advise and consent" role seriously and members of the president's own party don't like their votes taken for granted, Obama clearly enters the process in a strong position, unless surprising questions emerge about his nominee's record or behavior.
Barring that kind of trouble, Obama's biggest risk is choosing someone that so riles Republicans that all 41 unite against him or her.
Obama's White House does not appear to be giving that consideration any extra weight in relation to all the other factors he will consider. Among them: intellectual rigor, integrity, experience, gender, race, philosophy, plus any controversial rulings or statements that could turn confirmation from tough to untenable.
The Sotomayor experience gives Obama a head start in other important ways.
Many candidates have been vetted, and a few were even interviewed last time. So the White House already has its list of names under consideration. The confirmed number is about 10, and it is likely only to shrink, not grow.
The three names that come up the most are Solicitor GeneralElena Kagan and federal appellate judges Merrick Garland of Washington and Diane Wood of Chicago. The White House has done nothing to squelch speculation about those three but also revels in knowing Obama could blow away conventional wisdom.
Even the timeline will likely be replicated, putting hearings in midsummer and an up-or-down vote for the nominee before the Senate breaks in August.
Obama promises to pick a nominee quickly. There seems no obvious reason he could not do so within the same timeframe — 25 days — that elapsed between Souter's retirement announcement and Obama's selection of Sotomayor.
The partisan atmosphere is only worse this time. But Obama's game plan seems the same: choosing a nominee on his terms.
NEW ORLEANS-- Former Sen. Rick Santorum is telling fellow Republicans that the party failed the conservative movement when the GOP controlled Congress and the White House.
Santorum is one of several potential presidential candidates who addressed the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, a three-day gathering of GOP activists.
The former Pennsylvania senator says some Republicans were guilty of growing the size of government earlier this decade.
''Conservatives didn't fail America,'' he said. ''Conservatives failed conservatism.''
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Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat at the center of a furor over insurance coverage for abortion in the new health-care law, said Friday he wouldn't seek re-election.
The Dow Jones industrial average briefly traded above 11000 points on Friday, the latest mile marker in a yearlong rally that has catapulted the stock market from the depths of the financial crisis.
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BANGKOK – Thai soldiers and police fought pitched battles Saturday night with anti-government demonstrators in streets enveloped in tear gas, but troops later retreated and asked protesters to do the same. Eleven people were killed, including a Japanese journalist, and more than 500 wounded, according to hospital officials.
Beleaguered Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva went on national television shortly before midnight to pay condolences to the families of victims and indirectly assert that he would not bow to protesters' demands to dissolve Parliament.
"The government and I are still responsible for easing the situation and trying to bring peace and order to the country," Abhisit said, vowing a transparent investigation into Thailand's worst political violence in nearly 20 years.
The army had vowed to clear the "Red Shirt" protesters out of one of their two bases in Bangkok by nightfall, but the push instead set off street fighting. There was a continuous sound of gunfire and explosions, mostly from Molotov cocktails. After more than two hours of fierce clashes, the soldiers pulled back.
Army spokesman Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd went on television to ask the protesters to retreat as well. He also accused them of firing live rounds and throwing grenades during the fighting. An APTN cameraman saw two Red Shirt security guards carrying assault rifles.
"The security forces have now retreated to a certain extent from the Red Shirts," Sansern said. He said a senior government official had been asked to coordinate with the protesters to restore peace.
The Red Shirt protesters are demanding that Abhisit dissolve Parliament and call new elections. Their demonstrations are part of a long-running battle between the mostly poor and rural supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the ruling elite they say orchestrated the 2006 military coup that removed him from power.
The Red Shirts see the Oxford-educated Abhisit as a symbol of an elite impervious to the plight of Thailand's poor and claim he took office illegitimately in December 2008 after the military pressured Parliament to vote for him.
The government's Erawan emergency center said tallies from four Bangkok hospitals showed the death toll Saturday evening had risen to at least 11 — two soldiers and nine civilians.
Among them was Japanese cameraman Hiro Muramoto who worked for Thomson Reuters news agency. In a statement, Reuters said he was shot in the chest while covering the fighting.
The protesters marched the body of a man they said was killed in the fighting to one of their encampments. They carried the man — who had part of his head blown off — on a stretcher.
The injury toll for the day rose to 521, according to the Erawan emergency center. The army said any live rounds were fired only into the air, but confirmed that two of its soldiers had been shot. Government spokesman Panithan Wattanayakorn said more than 60 troops had been injured.
Most of Saturday's fighting took place around Democracy Monument, which is near one of the encampments of the Red Shirt protesters. But it spread to the Khao San Road area, a favorite of foreign backpackers.
Soldiers made repeated charges to clear the Red Shirts, while some tourists stood by watching. Two protesters and a Buddhist monk with them were badly beaten by soldiers and taken away by ambulance.
A Japanese tourist who was wearing a red shirt was also clubbed by soldiers until bystanders rescued him.
Red Shirt leaders at the second rally site in the capital's main shopping district said they were leading followers to reinforce their comrades at the site of the fighting.
Government forces have confronted the protesters before but pulled back rather than risk bloodshed.
On Friday, the army failed to prevent demonstrators from breaking into the compound of a satellite transmission station and briefly restarting a pro-Red Shirt television station that had been shut down by the government under a state of emergency. The humiliating rout of troops and riot police raised questions about how much control Abhisit has over the police and army.
To effectively confront the protesters, Siripan Nogsuan Sawasdee of Chulalongkorn University said the government needs the cooperation of the military, but the army may be reluctant to use force against the protesters.
Thailand's military has traditionally played a major role in politics, staging almost a score of coups since the country became a constitutional monarchy in 1932.
On Saturday afternoon, army spokesman Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd said the military planned to clear out the protesters from their original rally site in the old section of Bangkok by dusk. More troops were also sent to the second rally site in the heart of Bangkok's upscale shopping district. The city's elevated mass transit system known as the Skytrain, which runs past that site, stopped running and closed all its stations.
The deployment came after protesters were pushed back by water cannons and rubber bullets from the headquarters of the 1st Army Region. Although they have two main rally sites, the Red Shirts use trucks and motorcycles to send followers all over the city on short notice.
Arrest warrants have been issued for 27 Red Shirt leaders, but none is known to have been taken into custody.
Merchants say the demonstrations have cost them hundreds of millions of baht (tens of millions of dollars), and luxury hotels near the site have been under virtual siege.