Canada natives block Harper's office, threaten unrest

First Nations protesters march towards Parliament Hill before the start of a meeting between chiefs and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa January 11, 2013. REUTERS/Chris Wattie

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Aboriginal protesters blocked the main entrance to a building where Canada's prime minister was preparing to meet some native leaders on Friday, highlighting a deep divide within the country's First Nations on how to push Ottawa to heed their demands.

The noisy blockade, which lasted about an hour, ended just before Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his aides met with about 20 native chiefs, even as other leaders opted to boycott the session.

Chiefs have warned that the Idle No More aboriginal protest movement is prepared to bring the economy to its knees unless Ottawa addresses the poor living conditions and high jobless rates facing many of Canada's 1.2 million natives.

Native groups complain that successive Canadian governments have ignored treaties aboriginals signed with British settlers and explorers hundreds of years ago, treaties they say granted them significant rights over their territory.

The meeting was hastily arranged under pressure from an Ontario chief who says she has been subsiding only on liquids for a month. It took place in the Langevin Block, a building near Parliament in central Ottawa where the prime minister and his staff work.

Outside in the freezing rain, demonstrators in traditional feathered headgear shouted, waved burning tapers, banged drums and brandished banners with slogans such as "Treaty rights not greedy whites" and "The natives are restless."

Until midday on Friday, it was uncertain if the meeting would go ahead, with many native leaders urging a boycott and others saying it was important to talk to the government.

"Harper, if you want our lands, our native land, meaning everyone of us, over my dead body, Harper, you're going to do this," said Raymond Robinson, a Cree from Manitoba.

"You'll have to come through me first. You'll have to bury me first before you get them," he shouted toward the prime minister's office from the steps outside Parliament.

The aboriginal movement is deeply split over tactics and not all the chiefs invited to the meeting turned up. Some leaders wanted Governor-General David Johnston, the official representative of Queen Elizabeth, Canada's head of state, to participate.

Johnston has declined the invitation, saying it is not his place to get involved in policy discussions. He instead was later hosting a ceremonial meeting with native leaders at his residence.

The elected leader of the natives, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo, was one of those who attended the meeting with Harper.

He said his people wanted a fundamental transformation in their relationship with the federal government, and would press for a fair share of revenues from resource development as well as action on schools and drinking water.

BANGED ON THE DOOR

Gordon Peters, grand chief of the association of Iroquois and Allied Nations in Ontario, threatened to "block all the corridors of this province" next Wednesday unless natives' demands were met. Ontario is Canada's most populous province and has rich natural resources.

Peters told reporters that investors in Canada should know their money was not safe.

"Canada cannot give certainty to their investors any longer. That certainty for investors can only come from us," he said.

Manitoba Grand Chief Derek Nepinak, who said on Thursday that aboriginal activists have the power to bring the Canadian economy to its knees, was one of the leaders of the protest at the Langevin Block.

"We're asking him to come out here and explain why he won't speak to the people," said Nepinak, who banged on the door at the main entrance to Harper's offices after choosing to boycott the meeting.

Nepinak and other Manitoba chiefs are also demanding that Ottawa rescind parts of recent budget acts that they say reduce environmental protection for lakes and rivers. The most recent budget act also makes it easier to lease lands on the reserves where many natives live, a change some natives had requested to spur development but which others regard with suspicion.

Ottawa spends around C$11 billion ($11.1 billion) a year on its aboriginal population, but living conditions for many are poor, and some reserves have high rates of poverty, addiction, joblessness and suicide.

Harper agreed to the meeting with chiefs after pressure from Ontario chief Theresa Spence, who has been surviving on water and fish broth for the last month as part of a campaign to draw attention to the community's problems. Spence, citing Johnston's absence, said she would not attend.

"We shared the land all these years and we never got anything from it. All the benefits are going to Canadian citizens, except for us," Spence told reporters. "This government has been abusing us, raping the land."

In Nova Scotia, a group of about 10 protesters blockaded a Canadian National Railway Co line near the town of Truro on Friday afternoon, CN spokesman Jim Feeny said.

A truck had been partially moved onto the tracks and was cutting off the movement of container traffic on CN's main line between the Port of Halifax and Eastern Canada, he said. Passenger services by Via Rail had also been disrupted.

The incident was the latest in a series of rail blockades staged by protestors in recent weeks to press the demands.

($1=$0.98 Canadian)

(Additional reporting by Louise Egan in Ottawa and Nicole Mordant in Vancouver; Editing by Vicki Allen and Dan Grebler)

Video: Idle No More's momentum

Article: Idle No More targets North America's busiest border

India gang rape hearing to determine whether suspect is adult; could be life-or-death ruling

NEW DELHI - Defence lawyers say a suspect in the gang rape and slaying of a young woman on a New Delhi bus will appear in a hearing intended to determine whether he is a juvenile.

If the suspect is 17, as he claims, he will be tried in a juvenile court and face up to three years in a reform facility if found guilty. A conviction as an adult could bring the death penalty.

The hearing is expected Tuesday, defence lawyers said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of a judge's gag order on the case.

Five men also have been charged in the case, though one of them also claims to be a minor.

The woman died of internal injuries. The attack sparked outrage over widespread violence against India's women.

How the Government Stifled Gun Research

What should be done about guns?

In the wake of the mass murder of elementary schoolers and their teachers in Newtown, Conn., last month, that question is getting more attention than it has in many years. Vice President Joe Biden, who is chairing a working group on gun violence, has already met with lawmakers on new gun policy proposals, which President Barack Obama promised to unveil publically this week.

But scientific evidence for exactly which kind of legislation would be most effective at stemming gun violence is lacking — a situation that is in many ways of the government's own creation. Several congressional efforts in the 1990s and up to 2011 have limited federal research on gun violence, vastly reducing the scientific data available for policymakers today.

What's left is piecemeal and often small-scale research that fails to answer big questions about effective restrictions, the link between gun violence and mental health and cultural factors such as media, said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and former president of the American Psychological Association. Farley has been calling for what he dubs a "national violence project" that would approach the question of gun violence with the same gusto as the Manhattan project developing the atomic bomb, or the Apollo missions to the moon.

"I don't think we're going to get there by piecemeal efforts," Farley told LiveScience. "It's got to be big."

How we got here

In the 1980s and 1990s, research on gun violence in the United States was going strong. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) funded studies on gun violence, and research was bearing fruit, said Fred Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital. In particular, Rivara said, agency-funded research had revealed that residents of homes with guns had a higher likelihood of violent death in the home. [The History of Human Aggression]

However, once those findings came to the attention of the National Rifle Association (NRA), a political firestorm ensued. Congress members who supported the NRA first attempted to remove all funding from the NCIPC. That failed, but Congress did manage to remove $2.6 million from the CDC's overall budget, the exact amount spent on firearm injury research in the past year, Rivara wrote Dec. 21 in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More chillingly, Congress added language to the budget appropriations bill forbidding any CDC funding that might "advocate or promote gun control."

"The net effect is that we don't have any research going on in the public health sector about ways to prevent gun violence," Rivara told LiveScience.

In 2011, the wording on budget appropriations was expanded to include funding from all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the National Institutes of Health. In other words, Congress let it be known that attempts to get at the root of the more than 31,000 U.S. deaths from firearms each year would be punished, Rivara said.

Similar efforts to hamper gun safety and education abound. In Florida, the Privacy of Firearm Owners bill would make it a crime for a health-care professional to ask a patient if they kept a gun in the home — although a study in the journal Pediatrics in 2008 found that counseling by a family doctor increased the rate at which families with guns either removed the guns from the home or stored them safely out of the reach of children.

The Florida legislature passed the bill in 2011, but it was challenged on First Amendment freedom of speech grounds and currently remains blocked pending continuing court action. A similar "gag rule" remains in effect in the military, however, thanks to a provision in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act that prevents commanders and noncommissioned officers from asking evensuicidal service members if they have access to private firearms. [5 Biggest Gun-Control Milestones in History]

"It flies in the face of science, which is to identify causal connections and statistical relationships, and then, in medicine, to do something about it," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and an editor-in-chief emeritus of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment about the research restrictions.

Bringing science to the table

Biden's working group may address some of these scientific issues. On Thursday (Jan. 10), Biden told reporters that federal agencies need to collect information about what kinds of weapons are most frequently used in homicides as well as what kinds of weapons are most often sold illegally. And more than 100 scientists from universities around the country have petitioned Biden's group to lift the research restrictions.

If the federal government begins funding gun-violence research again, challenges will still remain. In the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, mental illness has been a buzzword, said Temple University's Farley. But better mental-health care is no panacea when the psychology and psychiatry community is in an uproar over questions as basic as how to properly diagnose psychiatric problems, Farley said.

"We're having major internal battles over such a basic issue of diagnosis," he said, citing controversy over the ongoing revisions to the "psychiatrist's bible," the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DMS). "We need to get our own house in order, also," Farley said.

Adding to the confusion, there is no clear link between mental illness and violence. In fact, the mentally ill are more likely than the average person to be victims of violence, not perpetrators.

Guns are the low-hanging fruit of the violence conversation, Farley said, because they're the standout difference between the United States and other developed nations such as Canada, which have stricter gun control but many of the same cultural factors such as violent media. (According to a report released Jan. 9 by the National Research Council and the National Institute of Medicine, 1.6 Canadians per 100,000 died from all forms of violence in 2008 compared with 6.5 Americans per every 100,000 that same year.)

Other researchers agree. Kassirer said he wants to see substantial funding for research projects on what kinds of gun protections best reduce violence. Research on links between media violence andgun violence is another target area, he said. [The 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

"It is difficult," Kassirer told LiveScience. "But the more advanced we get in terms of social science research, the better we are in identifying the relationships between variables."

To Farley, this sort of work requires a concerted, centralized effort. In many ways, researchers remain in the dark on what causes violence and what solves it. Overall, violent crime is down and has been dropping since the 1970s, according to the Bureau of Justice. No one knows why. Nor does anyone know why mass shootings haven't fallen along with the general trend.

Part of the problem is that too many studies of violence focus on "small-v violence," Farley said. These sorts of studies might simulate a scenario with college students and measure their aggression through questionnaires or the like, he said. It's not clear that such research sheds much light on "big-v violence" such as real-life mass killings, he added.

"We need big integrative, cooperative, multisite studies of real perpetrators, not simulations in university laboratories," Farley said.

Small-scale studies are driven by lack of funding and academic pressure to produce constant research publications, Farley said, suggesting that academia needs to rethink its priorities as well.

"We should be ashamed of ourselves if we don't stand up, get it together, and deal with the violence issue," he said.

Bernanke says it's important for US Congress to raise government's debt ceiling soon

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says it's important that Congress raise America's borrowing limit before the Treasury runs out of manoeuvring room to avoid a potential default on U.S. debt.

Bernanke, speaking at the University of Michigan, says the approaching debt limit is one of the "critical fiscal watersheds" for the government in coming weeks.

President Barack Obama also spoke Monday about the urgency of raising the limit. Obama said he wouldn't let congressional Republicans use the debt limit as leverage in negotiations over spending cuts.

Bernanke notes that an impasse over the debt ceiling in 2011 led to a rating downgrade of long-term U.S. debt, the first time that's occurred.

He says Congress should raise the ceiling to "avoid a situation where our government doesn't pay its bills."

Obama digs in heels, refuses to negotiate debt ceiling

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday rejected any negotiations with Republicans over raising the U.S. borrowing limit, accusing his opponents of trying to extract a ransom for not ruining the economy in the latest fiscal fight.

At a White House news conference called to promote his position on the budget, Obama vowed not to trade cuts in government spending sought by Republicans in exchange for raising the borrowing limit.

"What I will not do is to have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people," he said.

With an agreement to prevent the economy falling over a "fiscal cliff" barely two weeks old, Washington has already begun skirmishing over a new fiscal issue: the debt ceiling, which fixes a limit on how much the government can borrow.

The United States could default on its debt if Congress does not increase the borrowing limit, a prospect Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned against in separate comments on Monday.

Obama has tangled repeatedly with Congress over budget and spending issues, and on Monday he said Republicans would bear the responsibility for the consequences of a default.

"They can act responsibly, and pay America's bills or they can act irresponsibly, and put Americathrough another economic crisis," he said. "But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy."

Republicans want Obama to cut some spending to rein in the deficit before they agree to raise the debt limit again.

Obama must get "serious about spending and the debt limit is the perfect time for it," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said. "The American people do not support raising the debt ceiling without reducing government spending at the same time," said Republican John Boehner, the House of Representatives speaker.

The last debt ceiling fight, in 2011, upset world financial markets. Obama cast the borrowing issue as one that will affect many Americans and sensitive industries.

"If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America's bills on time, Social Security checks and veterans' benefits will be delayed. We might not be able to pay our troops, or honor our contracts with small business owners. Food inspectors, air traffic controllers, specialists who track down loose nuclear material wouldn't get their paychecks," he said.

Obama reminded Republicans that he won the November election partly on his approach to fiscal issues.

The debt limit is one of a trio of deadlines looming around the end of February, including automatic deep spending cuts that were temporarily put off in the "fiscal cliff" deal, and the end of a stopgap government funding measure.

A number of Republicans have said they would be willing to allow a U.S. debt default or a government shutdown to force the Obama administration to accept deeper spending cuts than the White Housewould like.

Obama's unexpected news conference could have been a pre-emptive strike aimed at influencing strategy sessions among Republican lawmakers scheduled for later this week.

The Treasury Department warned on Monday that the United States will run out of ways to prevent a default in mid-February or early March if the $16.4 trillion ceiling on borrowing is not raised.

NOT A "DEADBEAT NATION"

Obama said he would agree to talk about steps to trim the U.S. budget deficit, but made clear he wants to keep that discussion separate from the debt ceiling increase.

"The issue here is whether or not America pays its bills," he said. "We are not a deadbeat nation. And so there's a very simple solution to this: Congress authorizes us to pay our bills."

He held to his position that deficit reduction should include measures to raise revenue and not come from spending cuts alone.

Republicans have rejected that approach, saying the "fiscal cliff" deal, which raised taxes for the wealthy while maintaining low tax rates for most Americans, should have put to rest any more discussion over tax increases.

Fiscal issues loomed large during what was the final news conference of Obama's first term, which came a week before an inauguration ceremony that will launch his next four years.

Fights with Congress over taxes and spending have overshadowed much of his domestic agenda during most of the last two years, with the president facing legislative gridlock that shows little sign of abating.

Obama raised the specter of a severe setback to the U.S. economy if congressional Republicanspersist with the threat of a debt default.

"It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy," he said. "Even entertaining the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It's absurd."

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, top White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett later held a conference call with three dozen business leaders to discuss the president's fiscal plans and insist that Congress must raise the debt limit "without drama or delay," a White House official said.

Participants included Honeywell International Inc CEO David Cote, Evercore Partners chairman Roger Altman, Goldman Sachs Group Inc chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, Marriott International Inc chief executive Arne Sorenson, AT&T Inc CEO Randall Stephenson, Xerox Corp chief Executive Ursula Burns, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Deloitte LLP's U.S. chief executive, Joe Echevarria.

(Additional reporting byu Matt Spetalnick, Jeff Mason and Steve Holland, Editing by Alistair Bell and Christopher Wilson)

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