World and Nation

[HTML_REMOVED]Court upholds Vermont jurisdiction in lesbian custody fight[HTML_REMOVED]

A Virginia appellate court ruled Tuesday in a closely watched lesbian custody dispute that the biological mother must answer to the laws of Vermont, where she and her former partner entered into a civil union and raised a child together.

The ruling skirted a broader question key to the national debate over gay and lesbian partnerships: whether Virginia can be forced to recognize such a union sanctioned in another state.

But it was celebrated by gay and lesbian organizations across the country for treating the parental relationship as it would any heterosexual one.

Lisa Miller, who was ordered by the Vermont courts to grant her former partner visitation rights, is barred by the federal Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act from turning to a different state to seek a more favorable outcome, the Virginia court ruled.

"It is a big deal," said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which filed briefs in support of the nonbiological parent, Janet Jenkins.

"The fact that the court would apply that rule of law objectively and fairly to a lesbian plaintiff is an enormously important victory for not only Janet Jenkins but for any lesbian or gay parent who may stand in her shoes," Kendell said. "This closes down a Draconian option that biological parents have been using to shut the door on a continued parent-child relationship."

Miller, who lives in Virginia, was represented by faith-based Liberty Counsel, which opposes legal rights for same-sex unions and vowed to appeal the decision.

President Mathew Staver called the case "the tip of the iceberg of what's to come if one state cannot define its own marriage policy and must be subservient to the same-sex marriage policy of a sister state."

[HTML_REMOVED]UCLA lures Harvard's Civil Rights Project[HTML_REMOVED]

Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, perhaps the most prominent U.S. academic research center on issues of civil rights and racial inequality, will relocate to the University of California, Los Angeles after the first of the year.

With the move, scheduled to be announced Wednesday, the project will expand its historic focus to include a greater emphasis on topics of crucial interest to the West and Southwest, including immigration and language discrimination. To underline those new interests, it will issue reports in Spanish as well as English and be renamed the Civil Rights Project/El Proyecto de CRP when it takes up its new home in UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in January.

Many called the project's westward shift a coup for UCLA, which has not always succeeded in its efforts to steal stars from the Ivy League.

"Harvard's loss really is California's gain," said Christopher Edley Jr., who helped found the project during his tenure as a Harvard law professor and was lured west himself in 2003, where he is dean of UC-Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school.

At UCLA, Gary Orfield, the project's current director and its co-founder will be joined as co-director by Patricia Gandara, a UC-Davis education professor since 1990 and frequent collaborator in Civil Rights Project research. The pair, who were married last year, were attracted by the idea of being able to work at the same institution and live on a single coast, Orfield said.

The two also were offered a package that included start-up funding, research assistants, office space and full professor appointments for both in the education school, said Aimee Dorr, the school's dean. Both Orfield and Gandara will teach undergraduate and graduate courses and mentor students, Dorr said.

"We wanted them very, very much and think the work they do is just very compatible with the work we do," she said.

Since its founding a decade ago, the Civil Rights Project has been a prominent voice on issues related to affirmative action, school segregation, dropouts and the No Child Left Behind Act. Its affirmative action research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2003 decision affirming limited consideration of race in university admissions.

[HTML_REMOVED] Iraqi prime minister to seek more control[HTML_REMOVED]

BAGHDAD, Iraq [HTML_REMOVED] Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will push for the U.S. military to relinquish control over his nation's security forces when he meets President Bush on Wednesday to discuss a strategy to quell raging violence in Iraq, aids and political insiders said Tuesday.

Frustrated by U.S. accusations that he isn't doing enough, al-Maliki says his hands are tied as long as he does not have the authority to deploy forces as he sees fit. He wants Bush to accelerate the training of the army and police, fund more recruits and provide them with bigger and better weapons, lawmakers briefed by al-Maliki said Tuesday.

Al-Maliki's emboldened stand comes at a time of uncertainty for U.S. strategy in Iraq. Bush is under pressure to make changes after Democrats swept midterm congressional elections on a wave of unhappiness about the war's results.

Bush is waiting for recommendations from a bipartisan commission headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, D-Ind.

Democrats want Bush to set a timeline to start drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq. But Bush maintained Tuesday there was no question of an immediate pullout.

"There's one thing I'm not going to do," he said during an afternoon speech in Riga, Latvia, site of a NATO summit. "I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is completed."