CPBO Spotlight On: The Williams Companies ? The PBEye

The Williams Companies*, a nationwide energy company based in Tulsa, Okla., has a strong pro bono program.? The program?s success is due in large part to the support and encouragement of its past and present general counsels.

Craig Rainey, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, The Williams Companies

Elder Care
Adopting one of the most efficient pro bono service models, the Williams legal department has committed to handling all of Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, Inc.?s (Oklahoma Legal Aid) cases concerning estate planning and other end-of-life issues for the elderly poor in its community. ?

For several years, the University of Tulsa Law School operated a clinic providing free legal services to persons suffering from poverty and 60 years old or older living in Tulsa, Creek, and Osage counties in northeast Oklahoma.? The clinic, called the Older Americans Law Project, has served hundreds of clients over nine years.? When the University discontinued the clinic, Williams? legal department stepped in to sustain the clinic and recruited one of its outside firms and Tulsa?s largest law firm, Hall, Estill, Hardwick, Gable, Golden & Nelson, P.C., to help.? Initially, 40 lawyers and paralegals volunteered.? It was the single largest influx of volunteers in Oklahoma Legal Aid?s history.?

Williams? pro bono committee began by recruiting a local expert attorney and two district court judges to teach the volunteers about a variety of elder law issues.? Williams videotaped the training sessions and housed them on Oklahoma Legal Aid?s website to be accessed by subsequent volunteers.? James Bender, senior vice president and general counsel at the time, took the first case, while? current Senior Vice President and General Counsel Craig Rainey took the second.?

Typical cases for elderly poor clients involve preparation of wills or trusts, real or personal property transactions, advanced medical directives, powers of attorney, or guardianships.? Volunteers occasionally encounter other needs such as consumer problems or issues concerning government benefits.?

During 2009 and 2010, the legal department not only sustained the program, but added more volunteers and significantly expanded the scope of the program.??More than?two-thirds of the company?s Tulsa-based attorneys participate in the program along with a majority of paralegals and several administrative assistants.?

Guardian Ad Litem Cases
In addition to work on behalf of the elderly poor, the Williams legal department has undertaken guardian ad litem cases representing Oklahoma Legal Aid clients in garnishment proceedings.? The work includes cases such as children seeking guardianship of elderly parents, grandparents seeking guardianship of grandchildren, or guardianship concerning the financial support of a minor.? Several of the department?s paralegals and other non-lawyers have taken on guardian ad litem work, since the court may appoint non-lawyers to that role.?

Courthouse Assistance Program
Together with?Hall Estill?and Oklahoma Legal Aid, the Williams legal department has worked with the Tulsa County judiciary to establish a Courthouse Assistance Program. ?The objective of the program is for a volunteer attorney to be available at the Forcible Entry and Detainer (FED) Docket to meet with unrepresented parties in the courtroom after the docket is called and, if necessary, to provide representation at the hearings or conferences which take place that same day. ?One common case that arises on the FED Docket involves landlords who are trying to evict and/or recover rent from tenants.?

New Collaboration between Old Colleagues
On January 1 of this year, Williams spun off its exploration and production business into a new entity ? WPX Energy, Inc. As a result, a number of the lawyers who had worked on the Legal Aid projects at Williams are now in-house at WPX Energy, including Bender.? The two general counsels, Rainey and Bender, and their staffs have implemented processes to enable both legal departments to collaborate on future cases.? The two companies hope to use the new model as a means to recruit other legal departments into the effort.

*denotes a Signatory to the Corporate Pro Bono Challenge^SM

Source: http://thepbeye.probonoinst.org/2012/02/15/cpbo-spotlight-on-the-williams-companies/

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Cornell University Athletics - Track and Field Teams Set to Host ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]ITHACA, N.Y. ? The Cornell men's and women's track and field teams will be hosting the Kane Invitational this weekend in Barton Hall, the teams' largest event this year with more than 20 other teams on hand. Most of the ...

Source: http://www.cornellbigred.com/news/2012/2/9/MTRACK_0209124909.aspx

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CoE takes step towards allowing women bishops (Reuters)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - The Church of England moved closer to the consecration of women bishops Wednesday when it voted against giving strengthened legal protection to traditionalists who favor an all-male clergy, a decision that could lead more to switch to Rome.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/religion/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120208/lf_nm_life/us_britain_religion_women

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Syria's Homs bombarded again, Turks push for solution (Reuters)

AMMAN (Reuters) ? Armoured reinforcements poured into Homs as President Bashar al-Assad's forces bombarded the Syrian city for a fourth day, opposition sources said on Thursday, worsening the humanitarian situation and prompting a new diplomatic push from Turkey.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Reuters before flying to Washington for talks on Syria that Turkey, which once saw Assad as a valuable ally but now wants him out, could no longer stand by and watch.

He said Turkey wanted to host an international meeting to agree ways to end the killing and provide aid.

"It is not enough being an observer," he said. "It is time now to send a strong message to the Syrian people that we are with them," he added, while refusing to be drawn on what kind of action Turkey or its allies would be prepared to consider.

Scores were killed in Homs Wednesday, according to the opposition, drawing comparison with the plight of the city of Benghazi which triggered Western attacks on Libya last year and accelerating a global diplomatic showdown whose outcome is far from clear.

Activists said that at least 40 tanks and 50 infantry fighting vehicles accompanied by 1,000 soldiers were transported from the nearby border with Lebanon and from the coast and deployed in Homs.

Large Sunni neighborhoods that have been the target of the heaviest rocket and mortar bombardment by Alawite-led forces loyal to Assad remained without electricity and water and basic supplies were running low, activists in Homs said.

There was no comment from the Syrian authorities, who have placed tight restrictions on access to the country and it was not possible to verify the reports.

"We have seen in the last 24 hours incursions into neighborhoods such as Khalidiya, Bab Amro and Inshaat. Tanks went in after heavy bombardment and then pulled back," activist Mohammad Hassan told Reuters by satellite phone.

Mazen Adi, a prominent Syrian opposition figure who fled to Paris several weeks ago, said rebels loosely organized under the Free Syrian Army were fighting back and staging hit-and-run guerrilla attacks against loyalist forces in Homs.

"The Free Syrian Army is still managing to hit strategic targets in Homs, such as the secret police headquarters," Adi said.

"The regime cannot keep tanks for long inside opposition neighborhoods because they will be ambushed, and it is retaliating by hysteric bombing that is killing mostly civilians and with mass executions."

He was referring to the reported killing of three unarmed Sunni families in their homes Wednesday by militiamen loyal to Assad and known as 'shabbiha'.

Adi said that unlike a military onslaught on Hama in 1982 that razed large sections of the city and finished off armed resistance to Assad family rule, Homs was a bigger metropolis and rebels still had lots of cover.

The Syrian opposition intensified calls for international intervention to protect civilians. Activist-in-exile Massoud Akko said Turkey and Western countries needed to organize an airlift to Homs and other stricken cities and towns that have borne the brunt of five months of a sustained military crackdown to put down a mass protest movement against Assad's rule.

"What the people of Homs need right now is basic supplies such as medicine and baby food. This could be done by air drops into Homs similar to what the United States did in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1990s," Akko said.

"It is not enough to say to this regime 'stop the killings', because it won't listen. We are dealing with a system based on political prostitution. The regime is acting as if it is not attacking Homs at all and says the bombardment the whole world is seeing is being done by terrorists."

A statement by the Syrian Revolution General Commission activists' group said friendly countries should call for "an immediate halt to the shelling of cities and residential neighborhoods," establish safe corridors to supply humanitarian assistance to stricken regions and support the Free Syrian Army.

Syria's position at the heart of the Middle East, allied to Iran and home to a powder-keg religious and ethnic mix, means Assad's opponents have strenuously ruled out the kind of military action they took against Gaddafi.

RUSSIAN WRATH

Russia and China, which let the United Nations support the air campaign in Libya, provoked strong condemnation from the United States, European powers and Arab governments when they vetoed a much less interventionist resolution in the Security Council last week that called on Assad to step down.

Moscow sees Assad as a buyer of arms and host to a Soviet-era naval base. For both Russia and China, Syria is also a test case for efforts to resist U.N. encroachment on sovereign governments' freedom to deal with rebels as they see fit.

Campaigning for next month's presidential election that he is certain to win, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who first won the presidency after storming the rebel Russian city of Grozny, said: "A cult of violence has been coming to the fore in international affairs ... This cannot fail to cause concern.

"We of course condemn all violence regardless of its source, but one cannot act like an elephant in a china shop.

"Help them, advise them, limit, for instance, their ability to use weapons but not interfere under any circumstances."

It is unclear what Turkey, a NATO member and rising Muslim, democratic force in the Middle East, could do to bring Moscow into any international initiative alongside those regional and world powers which have sided with the rebels against Assad.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who had described the Russian and Chinese veto at the U.N. as a "fiasco," telephoned outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Wednesday.

The Kremlin said Medvedev told Erdogan that the search for a solution should continue, including in the Security Council, but that foreign interference was not an option.

Medvedev also spoke with French President Nicolas Sarkozy asking him and other Western countries to avoid "hasty, unilateral moves" toward Syria, the Kremlin said.

Officials in Washington said they hoped to meet soon with international partners to consider how to halt Syria's violence and provide humanitarian aid.

(Additional reporting by Simon Cameron-Moore and Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara, Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Erika Solomon in Beirut, John Irish in Paris, Yasmine Saleh and Ayman Samir in Cairo and Alister Bull, Matt Spetalnick and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120209/wl_nm/us_syria

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Fasting Plus Chemo May Help in Cancer Fight: Study (HealthDay)

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Fasting, especially when combined with chemotherapy, appears to slow the growth of cancerous tumors in mice, new research suggests.

Experts note that the results of animal studies often don't hold up when tried in humans.

However, researchers have started testing whether fasting can help human patients with breast, ovarian and urinary tract cancer.

In the mouse study, published in the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, researchers found that fasting slowed the growth of growth of breast cancer, melanoma, glioma and human neuroblastoma in mice.

In some cases, fasting was as effective as chemotherapy, according to the study.

"The combination of fasting cycles plus chemotherapy was either more or much more effective than chemo alone," senior study author Valter Longo, a professor of gerontology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California, said in a university news release.

Researchers said that normal cells deprived of nutrients during fasting enter a dormant state, whereas when studied in the lab, a type of cancer cell attempted to keep growing and dividing.

That, in turn, led to a "cascade of events" that damaged the cancer cells' DNA and led to cell death.

"A way to beat cancer cells may not be to try to find drugs that kill them specifically but to confuse them by generating extreme environments, such as fasting, that only normal cells can quickly respond to," Longo concluded.

The study authors noted that results from the initial phase of a clinical trial, which involved patients with breast, urinary tract and ovarian cancer conducted at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, have been submitted for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cancer Oncologists. This trial tested the safety of short-term fasts two days before and one day after chemotherapy.

"We don't know whether in humans it's effective," Longo said. "It should be off limits to patients, but a patient should be able to go to their oncologist and say, 'What about fasting with chemotherapy or without' if chemotherapy was not recommended or considered?"

The researchers warned that fasting may not be safe for all cancer patients, particularly those who have already lost a significant amount of weight or have other conditions, such as diabetes. They added that fasting can cause headaches and a drop in blood pressure. The study also pointed out that cancer-free survival resulting from fasting may not extend to large tumors.

According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that fasting is effective for preventing or treating cancer. Even a short-term fast can have negative health effects, while fasting for a longer time could cause serious health problems."

More information

The American Cancer Society provides more information on fasting and cancer.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/cancer/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20120209/hl_hsn/fastingpluschemomayhelpincancerfightstudy

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The Tea Party's waning influence: 4 theories (The Week)

New York ? Tea Party rallies were everywhere in 2010. But the small-government movement has slipped from view as Mitt Romney surges toward the GOP nomination. Why?

Nevada was a hotbed of Tea Party activity in the 2010 midterms, but in the weekend's GOP presidential caucuses, the Silver State activists' least favorite candidate, Mitt Romney, trounced the field. In Colorado ? which, along with Minnesota and Missouri, picks its preference for the GOP presidential nominee on Tuesday ? the Tea Partiers who dominated the political scene two years ago are no longer holding many rallies. And now an Ohio Tea Party leader tells The Daily Beast that while the movement may have been a giant killer in 2010, it's "dead" and "gone" this year. What happened? Here, four theories:

1. Tea Partiers never settled on one candidate
"If the Tea Party could get behind one person and call it a day," says Patricia Murphy at The Daily Beast, it could be a force in the presidential election. But the conservative politicians that small-government, anti-tax activists truly love ? Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), for example ? aren't running. Instead, Tea Partiers must choose from a field of candidates that all have "original sins against constitutional freedom or fiscal sanity." Tea Partiers aren't excited or in sync, and as a result, "for the Tea Party movement, the 2012 presidential primaries have been a bust."

SEE MORE: Is the GOP presidential field a Tea Party failure?

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2. And now they're reluctantly settling for Romney
"Not Romney" has been the favorite choice of Tea Party activists, Chris Littleton, co-founder of a Tea Party coalition called the Ohio Liberty Council, tells The Daily Beast. But after consecutive wins in Florida and Nevada, the former Massachusetts governor looks increasingly like the inevitable Republican nominee. So Romney has begun picking up an increasing share of the Tea Party vote, says Kristen Wyatt for the Associated Press. It seems many Tea Partiers are "reluctantly backing him after abandoning hope of finding a nominee they like better."

3. The Tea Party's influence was overstated in the first place
Maybe Tea Partiers never really were the backbone of the GOP base,?says Gene Smith at the Fayetteville, N.C., Observer. Instead, they made up "a mere appendage (albeit a large one) that achieved a fleeting fame" while doing battle with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Once they succeeded in "bullying a tremulous speaker," Tea Partiers simply went back to the sidelines.

4. Tea Party influence isn't waning ? it has evolved
Tea Party rallies are so 2010. "People realize it is time to move beyond rallies and into other efforts," Jeff Crank, head of the Colorado chapter of the Tea Party-linked Americans for Prosperity, tells the Durango, Colo., Herald. While many activists have rolled up their "Don't tread on me" flags and gone home, the core of the movement still wields considerable influence through the 85 new Republican congressional representatives they helped elect in 2010. "On their own, the small, decentralized Tea Party groups have had a hard time getting involved in the presidential race," says Joe Hanel in the Herald. But they'll still make their presence known in local congressional races. They haven't disappeared; they've just "evolved."

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politicsopinion/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/theweek/20120207/cm_theweek/224126

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