Year: 2014

WASHINGTON (TIP): US First Lady Michelle Obama has felicitated Indian acid attack victim Laxmi after she won the International Women of Courage Award for successfully leading the campaign against acid attacks on women in India.

Michelle Obama and the large crowd at the US State Department auditorium was moved and touched when Laxmi, a standard-bearer of the movement to end acid attacks, recited a poem recounting her experience on the occasion on march 4. “You haven’t thrown acid on my face; you threw it on my dreams.

You didn’t have love in your heart; you had acid in it,” Laxmi recited soon after receiving the prestigious award along with several other women from different parts of the world including Afghanistan and Fiji. The original poem was in Hindi. Laxmi was 16 when an acquaintance threw acid on her face while she waited at a bus stop in New Delhi’s busy Khan Market in 2005, disfiguring her permanently.

Her attacker, a friend’s 32-year-old brother, threw the acid to destroy Laxmi’s face after she refused to respond to his romantic advances. Recognition for her effort through this award, is a great encouragement and motivation for the girls and women of India, many of whom still are not able to speak out against the atrocities inflicted upon them, Laxmi said soon after receiving the award. “After this award, girls of India would think, if Laxmi can do this, I can also raise my voice against injustice,” Laxmi told in an interview.

Last year, Nirbhaya, the courageous 23-year-old girl whose brutal gang rape and murder on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012 triggered widespread protests, was honoured with the award. Ruing that acid is still being sold without following the recent Supreme Court order in this regard; Laxmi demanded the creation of a high level committee at the national level to prevent acid attacks against women.

“Victims of acid attacks not only be given compensation, but also the entire medical expense be meted by the government. The victim should be given a government job and given justice through fast track courts,” Laxmi said and urged the political parties to incorporate this in their election manifesto for the forthcoming elections. “There was never any love in your eyes. They burn me with caustic glance. I am sad that your corrosive name will always be the part of my identity that I carry with this face. Time will not come to my rescue.

Every Thursday will remind me of you,” Laxmi said reciting her poem with the First Lady and other top US officials on the dais. “When we see these women raise their voices and move their feet and empower others to create change, we need to realize that each of us has that same power and that same obligation,” the First Lady said in her speech. “And as I learned about this year?s honorees and I thought about how we could support their work, I realized that for most of these women, there is a common foundation for their efforts. It’s a foundation of education,” she said.

Observing that she always walks away feeling inspired by these women, determined to reflect their courage in her own life, Obama said she is not alone in that feeling because every day with every life they touch and every spirit they raise, these women are creating ripples that stretch across the globe. “Last year on this stage, we honoured the memory of a tremendous young Indian woman known simply as Nirbhaya. This tragedy sparked outrage and inspired people all over the world to come together to say no more looking the other way when genderbased violence happens, no more stigma against victim or survivors,” said Deputy Secretary of State, Heather A Higginbottom.

“That is also the message of Laxmi from India. Acid attacks are committed almost exclusively on women, particularly on young women,” she said. “Many of the victims feel they have no choice but to withdraw from society or even commit suicide, and they’re more common than you might realise, in part because it’s such an easy weapon to get your hands on. Until recently, anyone could walk into a store and buy a litre of acid as cheaply and as easily as a bottle of window cleaner,” she said.

“But after her attack, Laxmi became a tireless campaigner against acid attacks. Thanks to her hard work and tremendous diligence, Laxmi was successful in petitioning the Supreme Court to order the Indian government to regulate the sale of acid and to make prosecutions of acid attacks easier to pursue. And she continues to push for progress still today,” she said. “For fearless advocacy on behalf of victims of acid attacks and for bringing hope to survivors of gender-based violence and disfigurement, we name Laxmi a Woman of Courage,” Higginbottom said.

WASHINGTON (TIP): President Barack Obama proposed a budget on Tuesday for the coming fiscal year that has less to do with managing US finances than with stemming his party’s losses in congressional elections.

The mildly expansionary $3.9-trillion plan has little chance of passing Congress but Obama will use it as a platform to underline his populist voter-friendly narrative ahead of the polls in November.

Obama’s Democrats have almost no chance of winning back the House of Representatives and are in grave peril of losing the Senate — a scenario that would guarantee a miserable last two years in office for the president. A Washington Post/ABC News poll on Tuesday revealed the challenge, showing that of 34 states with Senate races, 50 percent of voters favor Republicans and 42 percent favor Democrats.

Obama, however, sought to stay positive and reiterated the vision that saw him reelected in 2012, telling supporters in a speech at a Washington elementary school, that the budget was about “choices” and “values”. “As a country, we have to make a decision, if we are going to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, or create jobs, grow our economy, and expand opportunity for every American,” he said.

Senior White House officials admit the budget document is largely aspirational, given that the president’s top priorities are routinely blocked by Republicans in Congress. Broad spending levels have also already been set by a two year budget agreement reached by top Democratic and Republican negotiators in Congress in December. But Obama used the budget to showcase ideas he thinks will give him, and his beleaguered supporters in Congress, the edge, despite his 41 percent approval rating which is heavily attributed to an unpopular health care law.

The president’s budget director Sylvia Matthews Burwell, hailed the document as a “fiscal road map for accelerating economic growth, expanding opportunity and ensuring fiscal responsibility.” “It includes fully paid for investments in infrastructure, job training, preschool and pro-work tax cuts,” she said. “At the same time it reduces deficits and strengthens our long-term fiscal outlook through additional health care reforms, tax reform and by fixing our broken immigration system.”

Obama proposed an extra $56-billion in spending above agreed budget levels, to be financed by closing tax loopholes which benefit the rich and in mandatory spending reform. The budget foresees the American economy growing by 3.1 percent this year and by 3.4 per cent the next, with inflation remaining under control, rising to only 2.0 per cent in 2015. It also predicts growing revenue, so that the government can reach a primary surplus — spending excluding debt service — by 2018. It suggests the country’s budget deficit, which boomed after the 2008 crisis, can be brought down to $564-billion, or 3.1 per cent of GDP, in the fiscal year beginning October 1, and to 2.2 per cent by 2020.

While the absolute level of US debt — now $17.3 trillion — will continue to grow, its ratio to the overall size of the economy will fall, from nearly 75 perc ent this year to 69 per cent by 2024. The White House said the budget would expand the Earned Income Tax credit, which would cut taxes for 13.5 million working Americans and expand tax cuts to finance child care and college education. And the plan would close a loophole that allows wealthy people to treat investment income as capital gains, and thus avoid the 40 per cent top federal tax rate on this income.

Obama is also pinning his hopes for November’s poll, in which a third of the Senate and all of the House of Representatives is up for grabs, on a rise to the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. The proposal is popular with voters but opposed by Republicans, who say it would squeeze small businesses and cost jobs. The spending blueprint effectively rescinds an offer from Obama to Republicans to recalculate inflation in a way that would gradually reduce benefits to senior citizens from social programs.

The offer — known as chained CPI — was included in the budget last year as Obama held out hope of concluding a “grand bargain” on taxes, spending and the deficit with Republicans on Capitol Hill. But negotiations have collapsed, and senior Obama aides say they have omitted the concession. In effect, the move means that there is now little chance of a lasting fiscal agreement between Obama and his Republican foes for the rest of his presidency, which ends in January 2017.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Bipartisan Senate opposition blocked swift confirmation on Wednesday for President Barack Obama’s choice to head the US justice department’s civil rights division, the emotional residue of the long-ago murder of a policeman and the legal representation his killer received.

The vote against advancing Debo Adegbile toward confirmation was 47- 52, short of the majority needed under new procedures Democrats put in place earlier this year to overcome Republican stalling tactics. In this case, all 44 voting Republicans and eight Democrats lined up to block confirmation, leaving the nomination is grave jeopardy. Obama swiftly condemned the vote.

In a statement, he called it a “travesty based on wildly unfair character attacks.” Administration officials declined to say if they would seek a second vote in the hopes they could change the minds of a few Democrats. The vote was a victory for Republicans and the National Fraternal Order of Police, who said Adegbile’s connection with the legal case of Mumia Abu-Jamal disqualified him from holding high public office.

Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Officer Daniel Faulkner. Prosecutors agreed to a life term after a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing, citing flawed jury instructions. Abu-Jamal, a one-time radio journalist and former Black Panther, garnered worldwide support for his claims that he was the victim of a racist justice system. Shortly before the vote, Sen.

Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, read from a letter written by Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the policeman. “Today, as my husband lies 33 years in his grave, his killer has become a wealthy celebrity,” she wrote. “Old wounds have once again been ripped open, and additional insult is brought upon our law enforcement community in this country by President Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile.” Supporters also noted that Adegbile was working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at the time it intervened in the case — years after Abu-Jamal had been convicted, but that he had not made the decision to join the effort on his behalf.