In recent weeks, with Christmas approaching, I’ve been writing about moral courage. Each day, the stack of manuscript has grown on the corner of my desk, keeping pace with the gradual appearance of Christmas decorations about the house and around town.

But what does Christmas have to do with moral courage? It’s a season of rejoicing and cheer, of course, but also traditionally of peace and goodwill. Those are needed qualities these days. It sometimes seems, looking over the world’s palette of grotesquerie, that we’re beset instead by complaint and gloom, turbulence and bad will. And while there’s still an obbligato of optimism, there’s an unsettled sense of the future and a consequent harking back to the good old days when . . .

When what? What is it we’re missing? Perhaps it’s just my immersion in this topic, but I see great public concern about a loss of moral fiber. There’s a sense of ethics unraveling and integrity in abatement. Where, people seem to be asking, are the virtues of yesteryear? Where, to rephrase that old Peter, Paul, and Mary tune, has all the courage gone?

I too have felt that sense of decline — but less this year than before. Why should that be? It’s not because the headlines are getting any better. So I suspect it’s because I’ve had the privilege of spending a year immersed in accounts of moral courage. I’m learning that moral courage isn’t something demonstrated once every other decade by a few chosen luminaries like Winston Churchill or Vaclav Havel. It’s on display daily, hourly, by people in our own communities.

People like Nate Haasis, a 17-year-old quarterback in Illinois who, in the last play of his last game, threw a 37-yard pass that put him over the top for a state record. But when he learned that his coach had conspired to let it happen — making sure the other team wouldn’t interfere — he asked that his record be withdrawn since rigging the game that way did not, he wrote, “represent the values of the athletes of [my] football team.”

Or like Martha Kirkpatrick of Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection, who found one March day that her department had issued the wrong paperwork to a coastal town for safety-related seawall reconstruction. The work had to be done by the coming weekend lest it disturb the nesting of the endangered piping plover. But the law required a 14-day wait for revised paperwork. Martha, knowing the risk to her career and reputation, put common sense above bureaucracy and issued the permit.

Or like imon Pánek, a student in Prague during the Velvet Revolution of 1989. One moment, he told me, he was milling about with a thousand other students, wondering what to do. The next moment, somebody overturned a garbage can. He found himself standing on top of it, explaining what was happening and urging his friends forward — and becoming, through his courage, one of the student leaders in that historic event.

Or like Nisha Sharma, a 21-year-old woman in India who, incensed that her groom and his family were shaking down her father for additional dowry in the middle of her traditional Hindu wedding ceremony, had the guts to pick up her cell phone, dial the police, and have the groom arrested.

Moral courage, it seems, is alive and well. What’s more, it doesn’t always (as cynics want us to think) turn out badly for the courageous. Nate lost his record — and ended up as “Person of the Week” on ABC television news. Martha won praise for slicing through red tape. The Velvet Revolution bloodlessly ousted the Communists, brought in President Havel, and made imon a local hero. And while Nisha called off her marriage, she’s become a national icon in the fight against “dowry deaths” in India — and recently married a man who asked for no dowry.

These are heartening illustrations for a morally discouraged world. But they’re not new. Had I been writing 2,000 years ago, think of the examples. A bride willing to hear an angel tell her of the child she didn’t know she would have. A fiancé willing to marry her even so. Wise men courageous enough to follow a star — and astute enough to set bureaucracy aside, go home by another way, and avoid the rage of Herod. Shepherds so compelled by the story that, at risk of sounding absurd, they leapt upon the Judean equivalent of a garbage can to tell about that birth in a manger.

Would I, as a writer, have known those stories? Probably not. At the time, they never made it into the news. But what examples they were of simple people courageously doing what was right despite the risks.

The good news, this Christmas season, is that moral courage is still happening — whether or not it makes it into the papers. Look around your own community and you’ll see it.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“Going forward, one of the principal pillars of ethics in government will be that there’s a clear division between the political role and the administrative role.

– New Canadian prime minister Paul Martin, discussing reforms to a corruption-riddled $40 million program aimed at boosting commerce and event attendance through advertising. (“Paul Martin Cancels Troubled $40-Million Ad Sponsorship Program,” Canadian Press, Dec. 13.)

NEW YORK
Dealing a setback to one of the key tactics of the Bush administration’s war on terror, a federal appellate court in New York ruled last week that the government cannot detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil and hold him incommunicado.

In a 2-to-1 ruling, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that accused al Qaeda member and “dirty-bomb” suspect Jose Padilla must be released from military custody within 30 days.

The court held that Padilla — who was seized in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport after a return flight from Pakistan and has been held ever since in a navy prison in South Carolina, without access to an attorney — could be handed over to a civilian authority and charged with a crime or, if appropriate, held as a material witness for a grand jury.

According to the Reuters news agency, the court stated in its opinion that “presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum and this case involves not whether those responsibilities should be aggressively pursued, but whether the president is obligated in the circumstances presented here to share them with Congress.”

The court, the AP reported, did not lightly brush aside arguments of threats to national security. In its opinion, the court stated: “As this court sits only a short distance from where the World Trade Center stood, we are as keenly aware as anyone of the threat al Qaeda poses to our country and of the responsibilities the president and law enforcement officials bear for protecting the nation.”

Nevertheless, the three-judge panel rejected the government’s claim that releasing Padilla to a civilian authority and granting him access to an attorney would be a threat to national security.

The New York Times reports that White House spokesman Scott McClellan, calling the opinion “troubling and flawed,” stated that it is the White House’s belief that the ruling is “really inconsistent with the clear constitutional authority of the president and his responsibility.”

According to the Times, the Justice Department will seek a stay of the ruling and will appeal the decision. It is currently deciding whether to appeal to the full Second Circuit or instead to the U.S. Supreme Court.

SYDNEY
The Australian government last week faced a courtroom battle over its treatment of 285 Afghan and Iraqi refugees who sought asylum but were isolated instead in detention camps on a South Pacific island.

Human rights lawyers have sued the government for shunting the refugees to the camps on Nauru, where they were isolated without access to lawyers or journalists, reported the BBC.

The refugees fled Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, claiming persecution by the Taliban and others. Australia, weary of immigration fights and preparing for national elections, blocked the refugees from docking and forced them to turn back from the continent.

Under escort by the Australian navy, the refugees were taken to Papua New Guinea and Nauru, which was paid $30 million in aid to deal with the refugees — a deal dubbed by Australia as the “Pacific Solution,” according to the BBC.

Cut off from the outside world on Nauru, which is struggling with a collapsing environment, asylum seekers have attempted suicide and suffered depression, according to press reports. Twenty-four are currently waging a hunger strike.

“By isolating asylum seekers, denying them access to appropriate independent legal counsel, and shutting them out of the public eye, we are inviting desperate measures such as the ones we are seeing at present,” warned David Bitel, president of the Refugee Council of Australia.

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone last week said the Australian government effectively had washed its hands of the refugees, saying their welfare was not Australia’s responsibility.

The detention centers on Nauru are “being run by the International Organization for Migration, they are in charge. It is not in Australian territory,” she told reporters. “If someone doesn’t want to be there, they can go home.”

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear arguments in a case testing the federal separation of powers, saying it would let Vice President Dick Cheney try to justify why he should be allowed to keep secret the details of how he devised the nation’s controversial energy plan.

That plan, assailed by critics as tailored to meet the wish list of Cheney’s former energy industry colleagues, sparked a lawsuit in 2001 by the conservative Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club, an environmental group.

Those groups argue that Cheney and his taskforce should be required to disclose who was involved in crafting the nation’s energy plan, which favors expanded extraction and drilling and more nuclear energy.

While the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have cooperated, turning over thousands of pages of documents, the White House has refused to provide any information, reported the Reuters news agency.

Cheney and the U.S. Justice Department say the courts and Congress have no power to force such disclosure, insisting that Cheney’s executive branch is immune to certain demands.

“Legislative power and judicial power cannot extend to compelling the vice president to disclose … the details of the process,” Justice Department solicitor general Theodore Olson has maintained.

The Sierra Club dismisses the White House’s argument that providing details about who met with Cheney’s taskforce would compromise the government’s ability to obtain candid information.

“If they are not violating the law, what are they hiding?” Alan Morrison, a Washington lawyer representing the Sierra Club, asked the Los Angeles Times. “All we want to know is who participated in the meetings.”

Over a year ago, a U.S. district court judge said such information should be disclosed, ordering the White House to provide the details. After a U.S. Court of Appeals refused to intercede this year, Cheney asked the Supreme Court to step in.

Arguments are scheduled for next spring, with a decision due by June, reported Reuters.

CHICAGO
George Ryan, the former governor of Illinois widely known for shutting down the state’s death row, was indicted last week on a wide range of criminal charges, including racketeering and fraud.

Ryan was charged with 18 counts of racketeering, conspiracy, mail and tax fraud, and lying to law enforcement officials looking into allegations that he accepted cash and gifts while doling out favors.

“Basically the state of Illinois was for sale for friends and family at times,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald alleged.

Last week’s charges center on more than a decade of Ryan’s political career, including his time as Illinois secretary of state and then as governor, reported the New York Times.

Former federal prosecutor Dan Webb, who is serving as Ryan’s attorney, rejected the charges as “false, unfair, and malicious,” promising a fight.

Over the last five years, prosecutors have charged 65 other defendants, including some of Ryan’s friends and former employees, with related crimes.

WASHINGTON
Hours before the beginning of snowmobile season in Yellowstone National Park, a federal district judge issued a sharp rebuke to the Bush administration, criticizing its plan to increase snowmobile access as unscientific and politically driven.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Park Service to reduce the number of snowmobiles allowed in Yellowstone and nearby Grand Teton National Park to a total of 543 — nearly half the number Bush wanted.

Sullivan’s decision reverses White House efforts to undo a Clinton-era law that phased out the use of snowmobiles in the country’s first national park.

In 2001, Clinton banned snowmobiles after studies found that the machines were harming park wildlife and that exhaust fumes were endangering rangers’ health. Bush reversed that order. Last week’s ruling puts it back into effect, with a total phase-out scheduled for next year.

In announcing his decision, Sullivan harshly criticized the Bush administration’s efforts last year to weaken Clinton’s 2001 ban, reported the New York Times.

“In 2001, the rule-making process culminated in a finding that snowmobiling so adversely impacted the wildlife and resources of the parks that all snowmobile use must be halted,” Sullivan noted. “A scant three years later, the rule-making process culminated in the conclusion that nearly 1,000 snowmobiles will be allowed to enter the park each day.

“There is evidence in the record that there isn’t an explanation for this change,” Sullivan wrote in a footnote, adding that the revised environmental impact statement “was completely politically driven and result oriented.”

Interior Secretary Gale Norton defended the Bush policy, saying new engine technology made snowmobiles less damaging — an argument dismissed by Sullivan, who said “the prospect of new technology is not ‘new’” and was considered before the 2001 ban, according to the Associated Press.

Environmental groups that had sued the Bush administration over the issue celebrated the ruling.

“Yellowstone is where our country first said, ‘This is what our national parks mean to us.’” said Denis Galvin, a former deputy director of the National Park Service, said in a statement. “This ruling reaffirms that fundamental purpose.”

The state of Wyoming, where Yellowstone is located and where many local tour operators say their businesses may collapse because of the ban, said it will appeal last week’s ruling.

ROME
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was dealt a sharp blow last week by the country’s president, who refused to sign a controversial bill that would have eased media ownership restrictions.

Berlusconi, a media tycoon, wanted the bill to pass. Critics claimed that it would hurt media diversity and concentrate Berlusconi’s power over the national airwaves.

Between his family’s media holdings and his power over state-owned media, the bill would have extended Berlusconi’s influence to cover 95 percent of Italian TV, reported the Reuters news agency.

Media watchdogs and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe cautioned that increasing Berlusconi’s reach over the national media could jeopardize diversity and hinder the ability of the media to criticize the government.

Although Italy’s upper and lower houses of parliament both approved the bill, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi defied strong political pressure and refused to sign the measure into law.

“It’s a significant setback and it has certainly angered Berlusconi,” Franco Pavoncello, a professor of political science at John Cabot University in Rome, told Reuters.

Ciampi sent the bill back to parliament for changes. Under Italian law, the bill can be modified or voted on once more in its present state. If it is passed by parliament twice, the measure automatically becomes law.

ABUJA, Nigeria
The worldwide effort to protect elephant populations is being undermined by a rampant illegal trade in ivory in the African countries of Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Senegal, conservation groups claimed last week.

The groups — Traffic and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) — accused the countries of allowing a black market in ivory to thrive, stimulating illegal poaching both at home and in neighboring nations.

Investigators recently found more than four tons of illegal ivory on public sale in nine cities in the named countries, reported the Guardian.

“These studies show just a snapshot of the problem,” said Tom Milliken, director of Traffic for eastern and southern Africa. “When we factor in all of the uncontrolled manufacturing, buying, and selling over a year, these numbers climb to frightening dimensions.”

“Not only is there a lack of political will to implement [international protections], allowing traders to act with immunity from prosecution, corruption is preventing effective controls on the ivory trade,” added WWF official Susan Lieberman.

Conservation groups say much of the blame goes to those who purchase the illegal ivory — China, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand, as well as Western tourists and importers, reported the Guardian.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

TORONTO
A blue chip committee appointed by the federal government is recommending that Canada’s patchwork system of 13 provincial and territorial securities regulatory agencies be replaced with a national regulatory body based in Ottawa.

The report recognizes that there will be stiff provincial opposition, especially from Quebec, to a single regulatory agency akin to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

However, given the need for Canada’s capital markets to attract foreign and domestic investors and to ensure uniform standards in the wake of securities scandals in the United States and elsewhere, the committee cites legal opinions that the Canadian federal government can act unilaterally under the constitution to establish the single national securities regulator.

The report recommends that the national agency be run by a nine-member board of commissioners representing the regions of the country.

From Public Agenda:

“An informal canvass of travel industry workers conducted by the nonpartisan opinion organization Public Agenda, with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, and a survey of passengers conducted by the online travel site Travelocity together suggest that stressful travel conditions, a general decline in values and parents who don’t control their children are sore spots for Americans on the move.

“Of those responding to the Public Agenda and Travelocity feedback polls:

• “Sixty-five percent of passengers say rudeness is a serious problem in travel these days, and 52 percent of travelers say rudeness is a major cause of stress. Fifty-four percent of travel employees say passenger rudeness is a top cause of their on-the-job stress and tension.
• “Nearly half (49 percent) of travel workers say they have personally seen a situation where disrespectful behavior threatened to escalate into physical confrontation….
• “62 percent of travel personnel say they sometimes or often see their fellow workers being rude, and another 50 percent admit that they have lost patience and been impolite to passengers themselves. But when this happens, 56 percent say it is typically because employees were provoked and treated badly by passengers…..”

“Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.”

– David Starr Jordan (U.S. biologist and educator, 1851-1931)

For democracies struggling against despotism, last Saturday’s capture of Saddam Hussein holds three richly symbolic moral lessons: Understand the thinness of tyranny, coordinate your forces, and be modest when you win.

Understand the thinness. Tyrants can bully or buy loyalty from cowed subjects or frightened neighbors, but they can’t earn real trust. They have no moral base, no galvanizing idea to rally support for their actions. Despotism, instead, is focused on ego.

So tyrants depend on symbols — statues, palaces, crisply uniformed guards, ruthless raids, lavish handouts. Even the murder of individual foes has a larger purpose, telegraphing a message of dread to the world. Their prime claim to power is their ability to remain in power. So the most important thing they do is communicate, by every means possible, an image of impervious strength.

As tyrannies unravel, they lose their channels of communication. Symbols begin collapsing: Statues are toppled, palaces burned, security dissolved, and handouts stopped. And since the structure is inherently symbolic rather than substantial, the demise of tyrannies often comes suddenly and gracelessly, in some dirty and undignified corner.

In its symbolism, Saddam’s capture was a textbook case of such demise. Although habituated to spacious grandeur, he was trapped in a foul barnyard hole. Once fanatically devoted to personal hygiene, he was ratty, unkempt, and unwashed. Accustomed to being in total control, he was disoriented and subdued. Most notably, he was utterly alone, with no one to defend or console him. All he had to cling to, literally, were the two core symbols of his power: a suitcase full of $100 bills, and a pistol. The former was powerless to save him. The latter he chose not to use — a blessing to his captors, who took him without a fight, but a shock to those admirers who imagined him a fierce warrior more willing to die than surrender. But then, he had always created his own versions of reality: Told of crowds in Baghdad rejoicing over his capture, he dismissed them as “mobs.”

Coordinate your forces. In fighting terror and despots, weapons are worthwhile but intelligence is essential. A combination of U.S. conventional forces and Task Force 121 operatives threw 600 skilled personnel into the raid that captured Saddam. While in this case a half dozen would have been ample, the memories of the four-hour firefight that killed Saddam’s sons in July were still fresh. And this was no easy target: Eleven similar raids in recent months failed to capture Saddam, missing him at times by a matter of hours.

But the key was intelligence — itself a symbolic art. If the lack of galvanizing ideas undercut Saddam’s ability to remain in power, the presence of the precisely right idea led to his capture. Finding that piece of intelligence — his location in real time — was the result of a sustained, massive, and dogged gathering and analysis of intelligence. It required new levels of coordination among sometimes turf-conscious intelligence agencies and a speedy delivery to the military.

But mostly it required something that’s tough for a democracy to admit it needs: human resources on the ground, cultivated long enough to develop trust in their handlers and willing to divulge vital secrets at great personal risk, usually for money. We’d like to think we’re above such things. We wish we could do it all through electronic eavesdropping and spy satellites. Saddam’s capture reminds us of the value of old-fashioned, on-the-ground, expensive intelligence work.

Be modest when you win. The announcements of Saddam’s bloodless capture stood in sharp contrast to both President Bush’s exultation aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1 and the administration’s self-congratulatory gloating when Saddam’s sons Uday and Quasay were killed in July. This time, British Prime Minister Tony Blair struck the note about the need for reconciliation. Picking up the same theme, the U.S. Civil Administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, didn’t need to cheerlead: He addressed a roomful of Iraqi journalists, who burst into sustained cheering and arm-waving when he broke the news. President Bush later offered a brief, sober message that turned attention to the Iraqi people as the real winners and warned Americans that the fighting probably was not over.

Compared to tyranny, democracy has few symbols. But the moral tone it sets on symbolic occasions like this one sends a powerful message that tyrants aren’t to be dreaded, that intelligence gathering and analysis must be sustained and constant, and that the real winners are Iraqis who are free at last of Saddam’s nightmare regime.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“They threatened — here’s what they did. They started out by offering the carrot, and they know what’s important to every member, and what’s important to me is my family and my kids. And I’ve sure limited myself, and so Bradley my son is running for office and so the first offer was to give him $100,000-plus for his campaign and endorsement by national leadership. And I said, No, I’m gonna stick to my guns on what I think is right for the constituents in my district. And so what they did then is come forth with sort of the stick, and they said, Well, if you don’t change your vote — this was about 4 A.M. Saturday morn — then some of us are going to work to make sure your son doesn’t get to Congress.”

– U.S. Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.), describing pressure from “House GOP leaders” to vote for the narrowly approved Medicare reform bill earlier this month. Smith, who refused to switch his “no” vote, is retiring from Congress next year; his son Bradley is running to replace him. Reversing from previous statements, Smith now says no dollar figure was named. Some Democratic lawmakers have asked the Justice Department to investigate the alleged bribery, which would be a federal crime. Republican leaders say no investigation in warranted. (“Why Smith Can’t Recant,” Slate, Dec. 6.)

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court last week narrowly upheld key provisions of the nation’s new campaign-finance reform law, ruling that its salutary effects on politics outweigh any infringements of free-speech rights.

The court’s 5-to-4 decision backs two fundamental changes ushered in by the November 2002 law known popularly as McCain-Feingold: a sharp restriction on “soft money” donations, and limits on campaign-season advertisements.

Critics, including some of the court’s own justices, argued that those restrictions impinge on the Constitution’s free-speech guarantees by curbing the right of people to raise their voices — via their wallets — against the government.

“This is a sad day for the freedom of speech,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent, saying the ruling “cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.”

The court’s majority spurned that argument, saying that while the law may step lightly on the toes of free-speech rights, it more importantly stamps out a large source of likely government corruption: soft money.

Soft money — unregulated donations to political parties from wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions — has imperiled the public’s trust in government, the backers of McCain-Feingold posited.

Congress agreed, making McCain-Feingold law in 2002. Last week, the court’s majority said it would defer to Congress’s effort to restore public trust by bettering the system through McCain-Feingold.

McCain-Feingold combats “the danger that officeholders will decide issues not on the merits or the desires of their constituencies, but according to the wishes of those who have made large financial contributions valued by the officeholder,” justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority.

The law’s provisions effectively eliminate soft money, leaving in place annual “hard money” limits of up to $2,000 per donor to a candidate and $25,000 per donor to political parties. Also upheld last week were strict limits on TV and radio ads for candidates in the last weeks before an election.

A report from the Associated Press noted that in the year since McCain-Feingold took effect, third-party groups and political action committees already have begun to find ways around the soft-money limits.

“This law will not remove one dime from politics,” McCain-Feingold critic Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued in a statement last week. “Soft money is not gone; it has just changed its address.”

Last week, the court said such backward steps are inevitable and expected, noted the New York Times.

The court is “under no illusion that [McCain-Feingold] will be the last congressional statement on the matter,” the justices wrote. “Money, like water, will always find an outlet. What problems will arise, and how Congress will respond, are concerns for another day.”

WASHINGTON
After initially barring companies from countries that did not support the U.S.-led war from competing for contacts to rebuild Iraq, the Bush administration later in the week appeared to be moderating its stance.

Announcing the policy via the Coalition Provisional Authority Web site on December 8, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz stated that the restrictions were “necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States” without elaborating, according to the Associated Press.

The policy applies to prime contracts only and does not apply to subcontractors, meaning that those countries not on the approved list — France, Germany, and Russia among them — could be awarded work in that capacity.

Additionally, the Los Angeles Times reports that “White House officials noted that the directive applied only to the $18.6 billion in U.S. reconstruction aid and not to an additional $13 billion pledged by countries during a conference in Madrid, or to any other funds that might come through international organizations or to subcontractors.”

However, due to international and domestic outcry after the policy’s announcement — and perhaps due to some embarrassment concerning the timing of the announcement, just days before former secretary of state James Baker is due to travel to five European countries seeking their agreement to forgive Iraqi debt — the White House appeared to be reconsidering its decision.

According to the Washington Post, President Bush called outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to reassure him that Canada would ultimately be allowed to compete for the contracts. Describing the conversation, Chrétien told reporters, “He said he would take steps so that we weren’t on the list [of countries banned from securing prime contracts] any more.”

The Post also reports that the White House had initially “vigorously opposed” the policy when it was first considered by Congress earlier this year. “They didn’t like it. They thought it was reactionary,” one congressional aide stated, according to the paper.

The administration’s policy change comes amid growing criticism from a variety of sources, including domestic lawmakers, foreign leaders, diplomats, and the media. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the decision “unfortunate,” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder suggested that the policy may violate international law, and U.S. Senate majority leader Bill Frist expressed concerned with the decision, according to the Post.

Still, the White House did not seem to be capitulating completely. Speaking to reporters after a Cabinet meeting, President Bush said, “The taxpayers understand why it makes sense for countries that risk lives to participate in the contracts in Iraq. It’s very simple. Our people risk their lives. Coalition, friendly coalition folks risk their lives, and, therefore, the contracting is going to reflect that.”

PARIS
A panel commissioned by the French government last week recommended a ban on the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols in French public schools, saying the welfare of the republic was at risk.

The 20-member panel urged a ban on Muslim headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes, and large Christian crosses, saying such displays should be replaced by the wearing of modest, discreet, and smaller items.

The panel’s report comes amid increasing tensions between many French communities including religious orders, women’s rights groups, teachers unions, and political officials — that have taken sides on the issue, reported the New York Times.

Bernard Stasi, who headed the panel, said last week’s decision was aimed at easing tensions between the country’s growing religious communities and its longstanding principle of church-state separation.

“There are without any doubt forces in France that try to destabilize the republic, and it’s time for the republic to react,” Stasi said, according to the Times.

France is struggling with a new wave of anti-Semitism as well as a swelling Muslim population of five million — 8 percent of the country’s total population, reported the Associated Press.

“In one century, because of immigration, French society has become diverse in terms of its spiritual and religious aspect,” the report said. “The challenge today is to give space to new religions while at the same time to succeed in integration and struggle against political-religious manipulation.”

The recommended ban on religious attire, which also would apply at hospitals and government offices, will be addressed in mid-December by President Jacques Chirac, who is expected to support the measure, noted the BBC.

SACRAMENTO
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last week reversed his pre-election promise to investigate claims that he groped at least 16 women, saying trying to clear his name would be an exercise in futility.

Two day’s before the October 7 recall election that ousted Governor Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger tried to stamp out a flare-up of misconduct allegations highlighted in the Los Angeles Times and other national media.

Those reports cited allegations by 16 women who claimed that Schwarzenegger groped them or behaved inappropriately toward them. Schwarzenegger tried to calm the situation by promising to hire a private investigator to look into the charges.

Last week, California’s new governor said he had changed his mind, reported the Times.

“The governor, in talking with counsel and advisors, concluded that there was very little point to the investigation,” Schwarzenegger’s communications director, Rob Stutzman, told the Times. “The issue has become quite too political. He has apologized and continues to be sincerely sorry for anyone he has offended, but also thinks the time has come to move on.”

Some women’s groups felt differently, demanding an independent investigation. Alleged victim Rhonda Miller, a stuntwoman on at least two of Schwarzenegger’s films, also filed suit last week, accusing the governor of smearing her name “in a calculated act” by falsely implying to reporters that she had a criminal record.

Schwarzenegger’s lawyer said he will contest the lawsuit, reported the Sacramento Bee.