Israel Leader Outlines Points Before U.S. Trip

He also made clear that if the recent reconciliation accord between Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian parties, led to Hamas becoming part of a Palestinian government, no peace would be negotiated.

“A government, half of whose members declare daily their intention to destroy the State of Israel, is not a partner for peace,” he said, speaking at the opening session of Parliament.

Mr. Netanyahu spoke a day after an unprecedented wave of Palestinian protesters marched toward Israel’s borders from four directions and Israeli troops responded with gunfire, killing more than a dozen people. The occasion was Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark Israel’s creation and mourn the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

Commentary in newspapers and on airwaves in both Israel and the Palestinian areas suggested that what took place Sunday might serve as a dress rehearsal for the coming year, posing a serious challenge to Israel. While Palestinians and critics abroad questioned the killing of protesters, many Israelis focused on why the military was not prepared for the breaching of the border fence in the Golan Heights.

Mr. Netanyahu said in Parliament that those who sought to enter Israel on Sunday were not clamoring for a Palestinian state but for Israel’s destruction.

“We must stop beating ourselves up and blaming ourselves,” he said. “The reason there is no peace is that the Palestinians refuse to recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish people’s nation-state.”

He added: “As for those who orchestrated these riots, 63 years of our independence has not changed a thing. They yelled that they want to return to Jaffa, to the Galilee. And the head of Hamas in Gaza yelled that they want to see the end of the Zionist enterprise, repeating the words voiced by his Iranian patron.”

At the same time, Mr. Netanyahu showed more willingness to yield territory than he had before, strongly implying that he would give up the vast majority of the West Bank for a demilitarized Palestinian state. He said Israel needed to hold onto all of Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs in the West Bank, thereby suggesting that he would yield the rest.

The other principles he enumerated included Palestinian recognition of Israel as the home of the Jewish people, an agreement to end the conflict, resolving the refugee problem only within the new state of Palestine and an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley.

Palestinian leaders have repeatedly rejected every one of those. As a result of the impasse, they have been pursuing other approaches to statehood, including political unity with Hamas and a plan to ask the United Nations in September to recognize a state of Palestine within the 1967 boundaries. That would include East Jerusalem and all of the West Bank and Gaza.

After the unity deal between Fatah and Hamas was announced, Israel said it was suspending its monthly transfer of nearly $100 million in Palestinian tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority. But on Monday it announced that it would most likely hand the money over, after assurances that it would not fall into Hamas hands.

Sunday’s protests, involving thousands of Palestinians who live in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, showed how the populist spirit spreading across North Africa and the Middle East has reached the Palestinians and the edges of Israel.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the country was facing a whole new approach to anti-Israel activism.

“We are just at the start of this matter, and it could be that we’ll face far more complex challenges,” he said on television.

Some Palestinian analysts also suggested that Sunday’s events marked a new phase of their struggle.

“This is a new era for the Palestinian people and the Arab nations,” wrote Talal Okal, a commentator in Al Ayyam, a Palestinian newspaper. “This new Arab age shows how to conduct the struggle in a totally different way.”

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to meet Mr. Obama at the White House on Friday, address a large gathering of American supporters on Monday and then a joint meeting of Congress next Tuesday. His aides have indicated that since the Hamas-Fatah accord, he believes the likelihood of negotiated peace has declined and he is less obliged to make a strong offer to the Palestinians.

After he spoke in Parliament, the head of the opposition, Tzipi Livni of the center-left Kadima party, accused Mr. Netanyahu of having failed.

“If you do not initiate, decisions will be made for Israel,” Ms. Livni said. “You have missed your opportunity to provide Israel with a vision. You are going to the United States without initiatives for peace.”

 

Chicago News Cooperative : Sheriff Points the Way to Ending the Mess With Patronage Hiring

Tom Dart made Rahm Emanuel’s campaign easier by not running for mayor. Now Mr. Dart, the Cook County sheriff, might have simplified Mr. Emanuel’s governing by giving him a road map — and an amateur video — to solve a 42-year-old city mess.

The untidiness is the anti-patronage Shakman case, the suit filed against the City of Chicago and other local government bodies in 1969. The case prompted federal court decrees barring hiring, promoting and firing based on political factors for most public jobs and prohibited political work during office hours.

It drones on after decades of resistance — until now. Last week, Mr. Dart’s office became the first defendant found in compliance. That, inevitably, raised questions as to what Mayor Richard M. Daley’s problem has been in doing likewise.

“Dart just did a bang-up job,” said Clifford Meacham, a former Cook County judge who in 2008 was appointed by a federal judge to oversee compliance at the then-wildly disorganized 7,000-employee sheriff’s office.

Twenty-nine months later, a federal magistrate just dismissed the sheriff from the Shakman case because he has dealt ably with illegal and other dubious practices. The legal tab is $5.3 million, including $2.4 million for Mr. Meacham and his staff, $1.3 million for outside lawyers at Hinshaw & Culbertson, $918,000 for the lawyer Michael Shakman and aides and $762,000 to claimants.

Mr. Shakman, who brought the suit the year Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon and Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, concurred with the magistrate’s decision “because we think the sheriff has done a good job,” he said. “He’s sent the message that patronage practices are not tolerated.”

That meant personally telling managers that there would be consequences if they didn’t comply. The sheriff’s office developed comprehensive employment rules and hired both a former prosecutor to head a Compliance Office and a former F.B.I. agent to oversee an existing Office of Professional Review to deal with claims of political discrimination.

“It’s just a question of will, to want to see it resolved” Mr. Dart said. “I’d be lying if I said it was easy. But we decided it was something we wanted to put behind us. How can you expect a work force to operate well if they think everything is rigged?”

I watched a training video for employees that Mr. Meacham had produced. Its production values suit public-access cable TV — and that’s being charitable. But Mr. Emanuel should view it.

Mr. Meacham beckoned lawyer, judge and even receptionist chums to act out six miniscenes. After introductory remarks by Mr. Meacham and Mr. Dart, his not-quite-ready-for-prime-time players haltingly portrayed a job interviewer soliciting political support for a boss from an applicant; a supervisor turning a deaf ear to a worker’s claim that a secretary colleague with clout does scant work; and a jail guard flaunting political ties to get a promotion, among others.

The sixth scene is a small, rough gem: Judge Jesse Reyes of Cook County Circuit Court plays a boss firing a jail guard — Rod, played by Matthew Lakoma, a lawyer — for incompetence. But a door swings opens for an alderman right out of “The Front Page,” with fat cigar and fedora, played by Ricardo Meza, Gov. Pat Quinn’s real-life inspector general.

“You know who I am?” thunders the alderman. “Rod’s one of us! And you want to bounce him? Can’t we work this out?”

After each scene, Mr. Meacham appears. “This is completely wrong, completely unlawful,” he says after the scene with the guard trying to get a promotion and the willing supervisor.

Mr. Meacham works for a private dispute-resolution firm, JAMS, where his colleagues include Wayne Andersen, the newly retired federal judge who had jurisdiction over the entire Shakman case for a decade. Mr. Andersen told me that, three years ago, he had an “extended meeting” with Mr. Daley, held at the office of a friend of Mr. Andersen to avoid rampant speculation at the courthouse.

Mr. Daley’s relationship to illegal personnel practices has long been debated. Is it really possible that 49 administration aides and others could be convicted of criminal fraud over the past seven years, starting with the Hired Truck scandal, and he had not known of the illegalities?

“I don’t doubt his sincerity,” Mr. Andersen said, noting that “there has never been evidence Daley knew.” He conceded Mr. Daley probably did not give the subject “the attention it deserved.”

Of course, Mr. Daley, a master of detail, might well have known about kinky doings.

As for Mr. Emanuel, he has bigger fish to fry with budget and schools ills. But when it comes to the Shakman cesspool, he has to let everybody know he means business. And there may be low-hanging fruit among 80 current workers “directly implicated” in illegal practices, according to federal records.

As Mr. Meacham put it, he has to take some people on and take them out.

 

Labor Board Case Against Boeing Points to Fights to Come

These fears and hopes were stirred this week when the labor board’s top lawyer filed a case against Boeing, seeking to force it to move airplane production from a nonunion plant in South Carolina to a unionized one in Washington State. Boeing executives had publicly said they were making the move to avoid the kind of strikes the airplane maker had repeatedly faced in Washington; Lafe Solomon, the labor board’s acting general counsel, said the company’s motive constituted illegal retaliation against workers for exercising their right to strike.

The agency’s unusually bold action angered business groups and some politicians, who said it was an unwarranted attempt by the government to interfere with a fundamental corporate decision.

But under President Obama’s appointees, the agency, including Mr. Solomon and his staff, has sought to reinterpret and more vigorously enforce the rules governing employers and employees, from what workers can say about their bosses on Twitter to the use of Internet and phone voting in union elections.

How much ultimately changes will depend in large part on the decisions made by the five-member board, led by Wilma Liebman, that sits atop the agency. That panel hears cases brought by the board’s regional offices — overseen by Mr. Solomon — after employers, workers or unions file complaints.

Democratic-dominated boards often tilt toward unions and reverse the decisions of Republican-leaning boards, which usually tilt toward management, and vice versa. The current board — made up of three Democrats and one Republican, with one vacancy — is expected to reverse a Bush-era decision that stripped graduate teaching assistants at private universities of their right to bargain collectively. Labor experts also predict that the board will adopt a policy that makes it easier to organize nursing home workers by allowing unions to go after smaller units of workers inside those homes.

The biggest surprise has been the activist stance taken by Mr. Solomon, a career civil servant at the board for 39 years. He became acting general counsel in June 2010, and President Obama nominated him to be the permanent general counsel last January. The Senate has not yet confirmed him to the post.

In the Boeing case, Mr. Solomon charged that the company had illegally moved some production work of the 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina to punish workers for past strikes and to avoid future ones. The remedy proposed by Mr. Solomon has been denounced as extreme by many business leaders: that Boeing essentially abandon a $2 billion investment and 1,000 nonunion workers it hired in South Carolina and move the work back to its unionized Puget Sound facilities.

Outraged, the National Association of Manufacturers warned that if the agency won this case, “no company will be safe from the N.L.R.B. stepping in to second-guess its business decisions on where to expand.”

Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, complained, “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign.”

The Boeing case was not the first time that Mr. Solomon has riled the business community and its Republican allies. Saying it is federal domain, he recently threatened to sue four Republican-heavy states — Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah — in an effort to invalidate recent constitutional amendments that prohibit private sector workers from choosing a union by signing cards, a process known as card check.

He has also sought to extend the labor board’s reach into the world of the Internet. He approved requests from regional labor board officials to bring complaints against businesses that punished employees for Facebook and Twitter posts, including one case against Reuters. Mr. Solomon has also proposed that electronic voting be used when workers decide whether they want to unionize their workplace — a proposal that business groups maintain will make it easier for unions to coerce workers.

In an interview, Mr. Solomon, a 61-year-old Arkansas native, insisted that he was no radical.

“My goal is to enforce the National Labor Relations Act,” he said. That law, enacted in 1935, governs private sector workers’ right to unionize as well as relations between tens of thousands of companies and employees.

Mr. Solomon, who has worked for board members of both parties, said this case was straightforward: Boeing had retaliated against workers for exercising their federally protected right to strike. “They had a consistent message that they were doing this to punish their employees for having struck and having the power to strike in the future,” he said. “I can’t not issue a complaint in the face of such evidence.”

 

Purported Verizon screenshot points to LTE-upgradable 16GB Motorola Xoom

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
By Donald Melanson posted Apr 8th 2011 3:11PM The Motorola Xoom might be starting to look a bit pricey compared to some of its new competitors, but it seems that the company may have a solution in the offing. According to a leaked, supposedly authentic Verizon screenshot obtained by Droid Life, Motorola is apparently planning to launch an LTE-upgradable Xoom with just 16GB of storage instead of the current 32GB, which would presumably also open the door for a cheaper 16GB WiFi-only model. Of course, that's still a long way from being official, but cutting the storage in half is certainly one sure way to make a (seemingly necessary) price drop a bit more bearable.

[Thanks, Josh S]

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