7/07/2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

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Emergency Protest Against the US Bombing in Syria
No to US Intervention in the Middle East!
Wed. Sept. 24th at 5:30pm
Powell and Market Sts.

 A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545

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End the Siege of Gaza!
Picket the Zim Shanghai

Saturday, September 27! Port of Oakland                                         

            Israel and Hamas agreed to a set of conditions for a ceasefire on August 26th, after Israel had killed more than 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza – the majority civilians, more than a quarter of them children – and destroyed much of Gaza's infrastructure, housing, hospitals and schools.

            Israel claims it does not “occupy” Gaza, however it has complete control of Gaza's land crossings, seacoast and air space and severely restricts the movement of people and the amount of food, medical supplies, and construction materials.

             In 1984, in protest against South African Apartheid, the Bay Area longshore workers union, ILWU Local 10, went on strike for 11 days against the Nedlloyd Kimberly, a ship carrying South African cargo. In 2010, in response to the deadly Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Local 10 honored a picket by 1,200 community and labor activists of an Israeli-owned ZIM ship, refusing to unload the ship for 24 hours. And in August 2014, in a historic victory, community and labor activists blocked the Zim Piraeus from loading and completely unloading for five days, until it left the Bay.

             We ask the ILWU to carry on its long historical tradition of opposing injustice and honoring community picket lines. Let’s keep the pressure on and continue this tradition of labor blockades against imperialist war and genocide.

            Please come to a sustained community and labor activist picket beginning on September 27th to stop the Zim Shanghai from loading or unloading any cargo, from when it arrives in Oakland until it leaves. This will also send a message to stevedoring companies such as SSA who are pushing for concessions right now against longshore workers who are working without a contract.

Picket Lines Mean Don't Cross!

An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

Solidarity with the People of Palestine!

Stop ZIM Action Committee 
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Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC)
Endorses September 27th community picket of Zim Shanghai at Port of Oakland

The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) has given a ringing endorsement of the sustained community picket of the Zim Shanghai this Saturday, September 27th at the Port of Oakland.

Citing the historic four-day blockade of the Zim Piraeus initiated by the Block the Boat coalition last August, the endorsement salutes Oakland dockworkers and community activists for their “principled, ongoing and effective solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality”.

The Stop ZIM Action Committee, an ad hoc committee formed to organize the September 27th blockade, appeals to all activists to join the picket lines when the Zim Shanghai arrives.

We are currently projecting the first assembly at the West Oakland BART Station at 5am on Saturday, September 27th. Please text “Join” to 88202 or monitor @StopZimOak on Twitter for updates closer to the picket date, since the ship may arrive earlier or later.

Inquiries and press contact: stopzimoak@gmail.com or (415)282-1908

Endorsers

BDS National Committee (Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee)
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists - Social Justice Committee
Coalition of Lebanese Civil Societies
CodePink, Golden Gate Chapter
CodePink, SF Chapter
East Bay Veterans for Peace
14 Friends of Palestine - Marin
Free Gaza Movement
Free Palestine Movement
Global Campaign for the Return to Palestine
Global March to Jerusalem
International Bolshevik Tendency
ISM - NorCal
Justice for Palestinians (San Jose)
Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace (LMNOP)
Muslim American Society
Palestinian Association (Hamilton, Ontario)
Palestinian Solidarity Committee Stuttgart, Germany
Socialist Organizer
Transport Workers Solidarity Committee
United Public Workers for Action
Voices for Palestine
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs


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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

 *---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Emergency Protest Against the US Bombing in Syria
No to US Intervention in the Middle East!
Wed. Sept. 24th at 5:30pm
Powell and Market Sts.

 A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545

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End the Siege of Gaza!
Picket the Zim Shanghai

September 27! Port of Oakland                                         

            Israel and Hamas agreed to a set of conditions for a ceasefire on August 26th, after Israel had killed more than 2,100 Palestinians in Gaza – the majority civilians, more than a quarter of them children – and destroyed much of Gaza's infrastructure, housing, hospitals and schools.

            Israel claims it does not “occupy” Gaza, however it has complete control of Gaza's land crossings, seacoast and air space and severely restricts the movement of people and the amount of food, medical supplies, and construction materials.

             In 1984, in protest against South African Apartheid, the Bay Area longshore workers union, ILWU Local 10, went on strike for 11 days against the Nedlloyd Kimberly, a ship carrying South African cargo. In 2010, in response to the deadly Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Local 10 honored a picket by 1,200 community and labor activists of an Israeli-owned ZIM ship, refusing to unload the ship for 24 hours. And in August 2014, in a historic victory, community and labor activists blocked the Zim Piraeus from loading and completely unloading for five days, until it left the Bay.

             We ask the ILWU to carry on its long historical tradition of opposing injustice and honoring community picket lines. Let’s keep the pressure on and continue this tradition of labor blockades against imperialist war and genocide.

            Please come to a sustained community and labor activist picket beginning on September 27th to stop the Zim Shanghai from loading or unloading any cargo, from when it arrives in Oakland until it leaves. This will also send a message to stevedoring companies such as SSA who are pushing for concessions right now against longshore workers who are working without a contract.

Picket Lines Mean Don't Cross!

An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

Solidarity with the People of Palestine!

Stop ZIM Action Committee 
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Please forward and post widely

Protest Now! No To Police Censorship of Mumia, and Teachers! 

Reinstate the Urban Dreams Website!

Action Still Needed! Please send messages to the School Board!

- Scroll down for School Board addresses -


Here’s what happened: Under pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)—operating through a friendly publicity agent called Fox News—the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) earlier this year shut down an entire website composed of teacher-drafted curriculum material called Urban Dreams.  Why?  Because this site included course guidelines on the censorship of innocent political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal!  The course material compared the censorship of Mumia’s extensive radio commentaries and writings, with that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s later writings, which focused on class exploitation and his opposition to the US’ imperialist War against Vietnam. Both were effectively silenced by the big media, including in Mumia’s case, by National Public Radio (NPR).

Mumia Is Innocent! But He’s Still a Top Target of FOP

Abu-Jamal has long been a top-row target for the FOP, which tried to get him legally killed for decades.  Mumia was framed by the Philadelphia police and falsely convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman in 1982, with the extensive collaboration of lying prosecutors, corrupt courts, the US Justice Department, and key political figures.

Mumia’s death sentence was dropped only when a federal appeals court judge set it aside because of blatantly illegal jury instructions by the original highly racist trial judge.  (The same federal judge upheld every bogus detail of Mumia’s conviction.)  The local Philadelphia prosecutor and politicians chickened out of trying to get Mumia’s original death sentence reinstated due to the fact that all their evidence of his guilt had long been exposed as totally fraudulent! 

FOP: Can’t Kill Him? Silence Him!

The FOP had to swallow the fact that the local mucky-mucks had dropped the ball on executing Mumia, but they were rewarded with a substitute sentence of life without the possibility of parole, imposed by a local court acting in secret.  Mumia is now serving this new and equally unjust sentence of “slow death.”

This gets us back to the FOP’s main point here, which is to silence Mumia. They can’t stop Mumia from writing and recording his world-renownd commentaries (which are available at Prison Radio, www.prisonradio.org). But they look for any opportunity to smear and discredit Mumia, and keep him out of the public eye; and these snakes have found a morsel on the Urban Dreams web site to go after!

Urban Dreams Was Well Used by Teachers

Urban Dreams was initially set up under a grant from the federal Dept. of Education in 1999-2004 and contains teacher-written material on a wide variety of issues.  It is (was) used extensively in California and beyond. The OUSD’s knee-jerk reaction to shut the whole site down because of a complaint from police, broadcast on the all-powerful Fox News network, shows the rapid decline of the US into police-state status.  Why should we let a bunch of lying, vicious cops, whose only real job is to protect the wealthy and powerful from all of us, get away with this?

Fresh from defeating Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department because he served for a period as Mumia’s attorney, the FOP is attacking a school lesson plan that asks students to think outside the box of system propaganda. But the grave-diggers of capitalist oppression are stirring.

Labor Says No To Police Persecution of Mumia!

In 1999, the Oakland teachers union, Oakland Education Association (OEA), held an unauthorized teach-in on Mumia and the death penalty.  Later the same year, longshore workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down all West-Coast ports to Free Mumia.  Other teacher actions happened around the country and internationally.  And now the Alameda County Labor Council, acting on a resolution submitted by an OEA member, has denounced the FOP-inspired shutdown of Urban Dreams, and called for the site’s complete restoration (ie no deletions).

Labor Says No To Censorship of Mumia, and Teachers!

We are asking union members particularly, and everyone else as well, if you abhor police-sponsored censorship of school curricula, and want to see justice and freedom for the wrongfully convicted such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, send your message of protest now to the Oakland School Board, at the three addresses below.

Union members: take the resolution below to your local union or labor council, and get it passed!

 Whatever you do, send a copy of your protest letter or resolution, or a report of your actions, to Oakland Teachers for Mumia, at communard2@juno.com.

Here is the Alameda County Labor Council resolution:

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Labor Speaks: Urban Dreams Censorship Resolution

Alameda County Labor Council

Whereas Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award winning journalist, defender of the rights of the working class, people of color, and oppressed people has been imprisoned since 1982 without parole for a crime he didn’t commit after his death sentence was finally overturned;

Whereas the Oakland Unified School District’s censorship of the Urban Dreams website was in reaction to a Fox News and Fraternal Order of Police attack on a lesson plan asking students to consider a parallel between censorship of Martin Luther King’s radical ideas and censorship of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and;

Whereas it is dangerous and unacceptable to allow the police to determine the curriculum of a major school district like Oakland, or any school district;

Whereas removal of the Urban Dreams OUSD website denies educators and student access to invaluable curriculum resources by Oakland teachers with social justice themes promoting critical thinking, and;

Whereas in 1999, the Oakland Education Association led the teach-in on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the death penalty which helped deepen the debate in the U.S. on the death penalty itself, and greatly intensified the spotlight on the widespread issue of wrongful conviction and demanded justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and;

Whereas OEA and Alameda Contra Costa County Service Center of CTA cited the Mumia teach-in and the censored unit on Martin Luther King Jr. in its Human Rights WHO AWARD for 2013;

Be it resolved that the Alameda Labor Council condemns OUSD’s censorship of the Urban Dreams website and demands that it immediately restore access to all materials on the website, reaffirms its demand for justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and issues a press release to seek the widest possible support from defenders of free speech and those who seek justice for Mumia.

- Submitted by Keith Brown, OEA

- Passed, Alameda County Labor Council, 14 July 2014
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Now It’s your turn!
Join with Ed Asner, and with the Alameda County Labor Council, in protesting the
Oakland School Board’s censorship of the Urban Dreams web site!
    • Ask your local union, labor council or other organization to endorse the resolution by the Alameda County Labor Council.
    • Demand the School Board reinstate the Urban Dreams website without any deletions!
    • Send your union resolutions or letters of protest to the following; 
        1. Oakland Board of Education: boe@ousd.k12.ca.us 
        2. Board President Davd Kakishiba: David.Kakishiba@ousd.k12.ca.us 
        3. Superintendent Antwan Wilson: Antwan.Wilson@ousd.k12.ca.us

Important: Send a copy of your resolution or email to:
Bob Mandel/Teachers for Mumia at: communard2@juno.com.
Thank you for your support!

-This message is from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
and Oakland Teachers for Mumia.
communard2@juno.com.

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Washington: Marijuana-Use Tickets Are Nullified
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




2) Deaths From Faulty Switch in G.M. Cars Edge Higher
By HILARY STOUT





3) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
By




4) A California Dream: Not Having to Settle for Just One Bedroom
By




5) Cleared After Nearly 23 Years in Prison, but Not Free
By
6)  Don’t Execute Those We Tortured
By JONATHAN HAFETZ




7) Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car
By and
8) In a Mississippi Jail, Convictions and Counsel Appear Optional
By




9)  In Sunset Park, Videos of Confrontations Elevate Mistrust of Police
By BENJAMIN MUELLER




10) Larry Ellison Bought an Island in Hawaii. Now What?
By JON MOOALLEM



























 








































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1) Washington: Marijuana-Use Tickets Are Nullified
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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2) Deaths From Faulty Switch in G.M. Cars Edge Higher
By HILARY STOUT


 
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3) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
By

ARVADA, Colo. — A new conservative school board majority here in the Denver suburbs recently proposed a curriculum-review committee to promote patriotism, respect for authority and free enterprise and to guard against educational materials that “encourage or condone civil disorder.” In response, hundreds of students, teachers and parents gave the board their own lesson in civil disobedience.

On Tuesday, hundreds of students from high schools across the Jefferson County school district, the second largest in Colorado, streamed out of school and along busy thoroughfares, waving signs and championing the value of learning about the fractious and tumultuous chapters of American history.

“It’s gotten bad,” said Griffin Guttormsson, a junior at Arvada High School who wants to become a teacher and spent the school day soliciting honks from passing cars. “The school board is insane. You can’t erase our history. It’s not patriotic. It’s stupid.”The student walkout came after a bitter school board election last year and months of acrimony over charter schools, teacher pay, kindergarten expansion and, now, the proposed review committee, which would evaluate Advanced Placement United States history and elementary school health classes.

The teachers’ union, whose members forced two high schools to close Friday by calling in sick, has been in continual conflict with the new board; the board, in turn, has drawn praise from Americans for Prosperity-Colorado, a conservative group affiliated with the Koch family foundations. In April, Dustin Zvonek, the group’s director, wrote in an op-ed that the board’s election was an “exciting and hopeful moment for the county and the school district.”

So far, nothing is settled in Jefferson County. The board put off a discussion of the curriculum-review committee until a meeting in October, and Ken Witt, the board president, suggested that some of its proposed language about not promoting “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law” might be cut.

“A lot of those words were more specific and more pointed than they have to be,” Mr. Witt said. He said that the school board was responsible for making decisions about curriculum and that the review committee would give a wider spectrum of parents and community members the power to examine what was taught in schools. He said that some had made censorship allegations “to incite and upset the student population.”

But on Tuesday, those allegations were more than enough to draw hundreds of students into the sun. They waved signs declaring, “It’s world history, not white history,” and talked about Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leaders of the walkout urged others to stay out of the streets and not to curse, and sympathetic parents brought poster board, magic markers and bottles of water.

Almost from the outset, the three conservative newcomers to the five-person board clashed with the two others, and a steady stream of 3-to-2 votes came to represent the sharp divisions on the board and in the community. Critics of the new majority have assailed the board for hiring its own lawyer, calling it a needless expense, and accused them of conducting school business outside of public meetings. In February, the district’s superintendent, Cindy Stevenson, announced during a packed, emotional meeting that she was leaving after 12 years because the board did not trust or respect her. Her replacement, an assistant superintendent from Douglas County, prompted more accusations that the new majority in Jefferson County was trying to steer the district far to the right.

“We’ve had conservatives on our board before,” said Michele Patterson, the president of the district’s parent-teacher association. “They were wonderful. These people, they’re not interested in balance or compromise. They have a political agenda that they’re intent on pushing through.”

Mr. Witt rejected the criticism, saying he was dedicated to improving student achievement, giving equal footing to charter-school students and rewarding educators for doing their jobs well.“I would rather be able to do those things without conflict, but at the end of the day, it’s very important that we align with those goals,” he said.

In March 2010, a similar debate roiled the Texas Board of Education as its members voted overwhelmingly to adopt a social studies curriculum that heralded American capitalism and ensured that students would learn about the conservative movement’s rise in the 1980s.

In Colorado, students said the protests had been organized over the weekend on Facebook groups after they read about the teacher sick day on Friday. Some on Tuesday wandered off after a while or returned to class. Others stayed out for hours.

Leighanne Grey, a senior at Arvada High School, said that after second period, a student ran through the halls yelling, “The protest is still on!” and she and scores of her classmates got up and left.

She said that learning about history, strife and all, had given her a clearer understanding of the country.

“As we grow up, you always hear that America’s the greatest, the land of the free and the home of the brave,” she said. “For all the good things we’ve done, we’ve done some terrible things. It’s important to learn about those things, or we’re doomed to repeat the past.”


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4) A California Dream: Not Having to Settle for Just One Bedroom
By

IRVINE, Calif. — This was the state that embodied the middle-class American dream: Move west, acquire a small slice of property, perhaps with a palm tree or two.

For decades, comfortable suburbs like this one just south of Los Angeles boomed with new housing tracts designed to attract the latest arrivals. When space started to come at a premium, developers moved inland, building more homes for people who could not afford the more expensive coastal areas.

But now, cities across the state are grappling with a dwindling stock of housing that can be considered affordable for anyone but the wealthiest. In much of the state, a two-bedroom apartment or home is virtually impossible to acquire with anything less than a six-figure salary.

“It’s hard to imagine how all of California doesn’t become like New York City and San Francisco, where you have very rich people and poor people but nothing in between,” said Richard K. Green, an economist and director of the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California. “That’s socially unhealthy and unsustainable, but it’s where we are going right now — affordability is its worst ever, and we’re seeing a hollowing-out of the middle class here.”

The problem extends far beyond San Francisco, where wealth from the technology industry has sent housing costs skyrocketing. In Los Angeles and Orange Counties, less than 25 percent of homes for sale are within reach of the region’s middle-class earners, according to an analysis by Trulia, a real estate website. Of 10 markets nationwide that Trulia ranked as least affordable for the middle class, six were in California.

“I talk a lot of buyers out of sticker shock,” said Linda Ginex, a real estate agent in Orange County. She routinely steers clients to suburbs they might not have initially considered or, for people who insist on living in the most desirable cities, into condominiums instead of houses. “A lot of people who grow up here think they can afford what their parents had, but that’s not always realistic,” she said.

In Los Angeles, the average renter spends nearly half of his or her income on rent, according to a study released this year by the University of California, Los Angeles. To make the rent, many families have opted to double up with other families, sometimes cramming six or seven people into a small apartment.

Denny Bak, 31, who grew up as a son of a minister in Aliso Viejo, a small city in southern Orange County, figured that with his salary as a police officer and his wife’s as a nurse, they would easily be able to find a three-bedroom house with a small yard. But when the couple set out searching in the neighborhoods he knew best, homes were at least $800,000 — more than double what they could afford.

Eventually, they found an older, ranch-style home in La Mirada, another small city south of Los Angeles.

“We both grew up here and had this notion that we would have the same promises our parents had,” Mr. Bak said. “It’s just not that easy. We make good money — probably more than our parents did — and it still feels like a struggle to stay here.”

It is not only would-be homeowners who are feeling the effect. A renter in Los Angeles County would have to make at least $27 an hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which estimated that the state is short of roughly one million homes for the working poor. And while housing prices are increasing rapidly, incomes in the state remain flat.

“We can’t find any way for people earning a median income to keep up pace; that’s what’s really scary,” said Matt Schwartz, the chief executive of the California Housing Partnership Corporation, which monitors affordable housing throughout the state. “We’ve seen this happening for a long time in San Francisco, but now it’s going on in Sacramento, in the Central Valley — the demand is far outpacing the supply. It’s no longer just that the low-income folks are getting squeezed out of a decent place to live.”

Abel Ruiz has lived with his family in Santa Ana, an inland city in Orange County, for more than a decade. Their landlord recently increased the rent on their one-bedroom apartment to $1,100, plus an $18 surcharge per resident, an increase of more than $300.

Mr. Ruiz, 30, works for the local parks department and has considered getting his own place. Instead, he helps his parents make the rent. The living room is divided in half, his mother and father sleeping on one side and his 18-year-old sister on the other. He and his 12-year-old brother share the bedroom in the back.

“Everything is multiuse,” he said. “Do we think about moving? Sure, but that means I have to find another job, and who knows how hard that might be.”

Banks and other investors have been buying up single-family homes all over the region, particularly in parts of the state that were hit hardest during the foreclosure crisis, like the northern suburbs of Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire, a metropolitan area east of Los Angeles. Foreign investors are paying cash for properties, as investments or as pieds-à-terre. Some renters have complained of neglect, saying that absentee landlords ignore complaints about cockroaches or leaky pipes.

But local investors have also been buying modest single-family homes, either to lease them to tenants or to “flip” them, renovating them and selling at a profit. Robert Ganem, a former mortgage broker, has bought more than 65 properties in the last four years.

“Things are not too far off the peak prices now, and we just see them going up and up,” Mr. Ganem said. “In one complex, I bought a condo for $400,000, and six months later, the exact same model on the same floor sold for $500,000. The market is certainly there.”

When Mr. Ganem rents out condos in the suburbs, he typically charges $2,500 to $3,000 for a three-bedroom — and immediately has more than a dozen applicants, he said.

“It’s usually good people who got stuck in the crash — a married couple with one or two kids who need a stable place,” he said. “I’m getting to choose who looks to be the most attractive, so I look at who has the most extra in the bank, who has the most stable job, all those kinds of things.”

Steve Twardowski, who works as an engineer for an oil company, has been looking for a home in Southern California for himself and his wife for the last year and said the process had become “a bit of a nightmare.”

“If you make six figures, you should not have trouble finding a single-family home, but we have this crazy cost of living here,” Mr. Twardowski said. “I don’t know how people are coming to this state because right now, it feels like it is just for rich folks.” The couple considered leaving for Texas but eventually found a modest three-bedroom home in Long Beach.

“This is gentrification on steroids,” said Stan Humphries, the chief economist at Zillow.com, which shows homes for sale and their valuations. “What is unique here is you have an entire state really shifting — people are bidding up prices all over the place. These were quintessential suburbs and cities built for people working as secretaries, but the newest generation is simply not going to be able to stay anymore.”
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5) Cleared After Nearly 23 Years in Prison, but Not Free
By


Striding across a jailhouse visiting room on Saturday, Everton Wagstaffe — innocent in the eyes of the law, a prisoner of the persistence that liberated him — craned his neck to see who was waiting. He grinned broadly, stuck out his hand to welcome visitors, then apologized for an undetectable shortfall in personal hygiene.

“I don’t have my soaps or anything,” Mr. Wagstaffe explained. “I’m locked in all day, just get out for chow and then come back. No showers, no telephone.”

These were slight matters.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wagstaffe left the custody of New York authorities for the first time since his arrest in January 1992 on charges that he had kidnapped and murdered a teenage girl, Jennifer Negron.Having been cleared last week by an appellate court after nearly 23 years behind bars, Mr. Wagstaffe spent the weekend moving across various state prisons before being transferred to a federal immigration detention center outside Buffalo. Mr. Wagstaffe, 45, is a Jamaican citizen. He now hopes to contest a deportation order filed many years ago.

“The conviction was a tragedy,” Mr. Wagstaffe said, “but I have made the best of it.”

He and a co-defendant, Reginald Connor, were convicted of kidnapping on the testimony of a single eyewitness, a drug addict who was a police informer in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct. She claimed to have seen Mr. Wagstaffe drag the girl from the street and force her into a car with Mr. Connor at the wheel. From the beginning, both insisted that they were innocent and did not know each other.

In its ruling last week, the court said there was evidence of possible fraud and deception at the heart of the case. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office was responsible for “burying” evidence that contradicted testimony by detectives that the informer had led them to Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor, according to the decision.

When he first entered prison, Mr. Wagstaffe said, he was barely literate.

“You are here and ask yourself: Why hope?” he said. “Why not just pass the time, and let the universe do what it will?”

He dueled with despair, beginning slowly. “I used cartons of cigarettes to get guys to write letters for me,” Mr. Wagstaffe said. Then he decided he had better handle his own affairs, and sold clothes so he could buy books and get his high school equivalency diploma.

Ten years ago this Wednesday, on Sept. 24, 2004, he filed his first motion requesting DNA testing of the physical evidence. He had no lawyer at the time.

Every comma, every verb in all of his legal papers was fought by teams of lawyers, first under Charles J. Hynes, the former Brooklyn district attorney, and then by his successor, Kenneth P. Thompson. The physical evidence was lost for years, then found. Testing took more than two years. None of the evidence matched Mr. Wagstaffe or Mr. Connor, but prosecutors argued that the results were not compelling enough to upend the conviction.

An alibi witness was located. The owner of a car supposedly used in the kidnapping swore that she had it at church when the crime was committed. A neighbor said that he saw a teenage boyfriend trying to drag Ms. Negron into a car, and that neither Mr. Connor nor Mr. Wagstaffe was involved.

A judge named Sheryl L. Parker heard arguments on most of this in 2010, then a year later ruled against them. On procedural grounds, she said, she did not have to decide whether the detectives and informer had lied about the investigation.

But the appellate court said last week that this was the most important matter of all: Computer records showed that the police had been pursuing the two men 24 hours before they spoke with the only witness to implicate them. Anne M. Gutmann, the prosecutor in the trial, had turned over those records as jury selection was beginning, along with a pile of other documents.

Mr. Wagstaffe first noticed the time stamps after nearly a decade behind bars. This information would have hurt the credibility of the sole witness and the detectives.

That was so important, the appellate court ruled, that it did not have to delve into the other issues raised by lawyers for the men.

“Once there is a fraud, it stays a fraud,” Mr. Wagstaffe said. “It doesn’t matter if there is a failure by a litigator to raise it.”

Mr. Thompson, the district attorney, issued a terse statement on Tuesday: “We disagree on the basis for which they vacated the conviction and set aside the verdict. We are reviewing our options.”

On Saturday, Mr. Wagstaffe said he was trying to find peace. “The universe will work with us,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much wealth and resources the district attorney may have. I have one thing, that I’m in the right. I’ve outlived this place.”


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6)  Don’t Execute Those We Tortured
By JONATHAN HAFETZ

AFTER years of legal battles, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will finally be put on trial before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, though a trial date hasn’t yet been set. If he is convicted, as expected, he will almost certainly face the death penalty. And, assuming one believes in the death penalty, it would be hard to think of a stronger candidate for its use.

But there are reasons Mr. Mohammed should not be executed, irrespective of how one feels about capital punishment. He was the victim of blatantly illegal treatment — the C.I.A. waterboarded him 183 times in March 2003, and threatened to kill his children while imprisoning him in a secret jail — at the hands of the government.

What happens in his case particularly matters, because President Obama has declined to pursue criminal charges against officials of George W. Bush’s administration for torture and other illegal conduct as part of the war on terror, declaring that the United States must “look forward, as opposed to looking backwards.” His administration declined not only to bring criminal prosecutions, but also to undertake a comprehensive investigation into torture. In contrast, a Senate committee is about to release a long-awaited summary of a 6,200-page “torture report,” after years of legal review and redactions.

The absence of accountability for those who encouraged and conducted torture leaves the criminal sentencing of convicted terrorists as one of the few tools, however imperfect, that remain for addressing past abuses of law, and restoring America’s reputation for dedication to the norms of international law. If convicted, Mr. Mohammed should be spared, because his execution — after years of mistreatment in a series of secret C.I.A.-run prisons before he was moved to Guantánamo — would send a disastrous message about impunity for torture and about the rule of law.

The recent case of another prisoner charged in the war on terror, Jose Padilla, shows how sentencing can provide a modicum of accountability.

This month, a federal judge in Miami, Marcia G. Cooke, sentenced Mr. Padilla to 21 years in prison, after a jury convicted him of terrorism conspiracy. In 2002, Mr. Bush declared Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member who turned to radical Islam, an enemy combatant. He was then imprisoned in a navy brig in South Carolina for more than three years before he was charged.

When Judge Cooke first sentenced Mr. Padilla in 2008, to 17 years in prison, she concluded that his living conditions at the brig “were so harsh” that they “warranted consideration in sentencing.” She credited his claims that he had been cut off completely from the outside world, and subjected to sleep deprivation, painful stress positions and extreme sensory deprivation, including alternating periods of bright light and total darkness.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found the original sentence too lenient, given the severity of Mr. Padilla’s offense, and returned the case for resentencing. But it also acknowledged that judges had the authority to take a defendant’s mistreatment into account, under exceptional circumstances. Judge Cooke’s new sentence again fell beneath the range provided in the federal sentencing guidelines.

Criminal sentencing, to be sure, would not normally be the vehicle for holding the government accountable for torture. The primary goals in sentencing are retribution and deterrence.Under normal circumstances, we would focus on those who abetted or committed torture. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, has ordered Poland and Macedonia to pay damages to detainees for their complicity in the C.I.A.’s secret torture program. The court, moreover, provided this remedy even though two of those detainees are still at Guantánamo.

But the United States has bucked prevailing trends in international justice. Although Mr. Obama recently acknowledged that “we tortured some folks,” he continues to resist the consequences of that admission. His administration has even pressed federal judges to close the door on civil suits by former detainees, citing state secrets.

This accountability void is what makes Mr. Mohammed’s sentencing so important. Unlike in a criminal trial, which determines guilt or innocence, the sentencing phase allows courts to consider mitigating or extenuating circumstances. That assessment is rightly applied even more broadly in death penalty cases.

To execute Mr. Mohammed after his brutal torture would make a mockery of the rule of law, and effectively condone torture by depriving it of all legal consequence. Worse, it would reinforce the perception that the United States applies a double standard in fighting terrorism — extolling liberal values in the abstract, but ignoring them in practice. A life sentence, in contrast, would acknowledge the egregious conduct. It would not redress the wholesale human rights abuses committed after 9/11. But it would offer one last chance to demonstrate that the government, too, must pay a price when it breaks the law.

Jonathan Hafetz is an associate professor of law at Seton Hall University.


 
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7) Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car
By and


The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old’s asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start.

The cause was not a mechanical problem — it was her lender.

Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car’s dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March.

“I felt absolutely helpless,” said Ms. Bolender, a single mother who stopped working to care for her daughter. It was not the only time this happened: Her car was shut down that March, once in April and again in June.

This new technology is bringing auto loans — and Wall Street’s version of Big Brother — into the lives of people with credit scores battered by the financial downturn.

Auto loans to borrowers considered subprime, those with credit scores at or below 640, have spiked in the last five years. The jump has been driven in large part by the demand among investors for securities backed by the loans, which offer high returns at a time of low interest rates. Roughly 25 percent of all new auto loans made last year were subprime, and the volume of subprime auto loans reached more than $145 billion in the first three months of this year.

But before they can drive off the lot, many subprime borrowers like Ms. Bolender must have their car outfitted with a so-called starter interrupt device, which allows lenders to remotely disable the ignition. Using the GPS technology on the devices, the lenders can also track the cars’ location and movements.

The devices, which have been installed in about two million vehicles, are helping feed the subprime boom by enabling more high-risk borrowers to get loans. But there is a big catch. By simply clicking a mouse or tapping a smartphone, lenders retain the ultimate control. Borrowers must stay current with their payments, or lose access to their vehicle.

“I have disabled a car while I was shopping at Walmart,” said Lionel M. Vead Jr., the head of collections at First Castle Federal Credit Union in Covington, La. Roughly 30 percent of customers with an auto loan at the credit union have starter interrupt devices.

Now used in about one-quarter of subprime auto loans nationwide, the devices are reshaping the dynamics of auto lending by making timely payments as vital to driving a car as gasoline.

Seizing on such technological advances, lenders are reaching deeper and deeper into the ranks of Americans on the financial margins, with interest rates on some of the loans exceeding 29 percent. Concerns raised by regulators and some rating firms about loose lending standards have disturbing echoes of the subprime-mortgage crisis.

As the ignition devices proliferate, so have complaints from troubled borrowers, many of whom are finding that credit comes at a steep price to their privacy and, at times, their dignity, according to interviews with state and federal regulators, borrowers and consumer lawyers.

Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctor’s appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway.

Beyond the ability to disable a vehicle, the devices have tracking capabilities that allow lenders and others to know the movements of borrowers, a major concern for privacy advocates. And the warnings the devices emit — beeps that become more persistent as the due date for the loan payment approaches — are seen by some borrowers as more degrading than helpful.

“No middle-class person would ever be hounded for being a day late,” said Robert Swearingen, a lawyer with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, in St. Louis. “But for poor people, there is a debt collector right there in the car with them.”

Lenders and manufacturers of the technology say borrowers consent to having these devices installed in their cars. And without them, they say, millions of Americans might not qualify for a car loan at all.

From his office outside New Orleans, Mr. Vead can monitor the movements of about 880 subprime borrowers on a computerized map that shows the location of their cars with a red marker. Mr. Vead can spot drivers who have fallen behind on their payments and remotely disable their vehicles on his computer or mobile phone.

The devices are reshaping how people like Mr. Vead collect on debts. He can quickly locate the collateral without relying on a repo man to hunt down delinquent borrowers.

Gone are the days when Mr. Vead, a debt collector for nearly 20 years, had to hire someone to scour neighborhoods for cars belonging to delinquent borrowers. Sometimes locating one could take years. Now, within minutes of a car’s ignition being disabled, Mr. Vead said, the borrower calls him offering to pay.

“It gets their attention,” he said.

Mr. Vead, who has a coffee cup that reads “The GPS Man,” has been encouraging other credit unions to use the technology. And the devices — one version was first used to help pet owners keep track of their animals — are catching on with a range of subprime auto lenders, including companies backed by private equity firms and credit unions.Mr. Vead says that first, he tries reaching a delinquent borrower on the phone or in person. Then, only after at least 30 days of missed payments, he typically shuts down cars when they are parked at the borrower’s house or workplace. If there is an emergency, he says, he will turn a car back on.

None of the borrowers or consumer lawyers interviewed by The New York Times raised concerns about the way Mr. Vead’s credit union uses the devices. But other lenders, they said, were not as considerate, marooning drivers in far-flung places and often giving no advance notice of a shut-off. Lenders say that they exercise caution when disabling vehicles and that the devices enable them to extend more credit.

Without the use of such devices, said John Pena, general manager of C.A.G. Acceptance, “we would be unable to extend loans because of the high-risk nature of the loans.”

The growth in the subprime market has been good for the devices’ manufacturers. At Lender Systems of Temecula, Calif., which sells a range of starter interrupt devices, revenue has more than doubled so far this year, buoyed by an influx of new credit union customers, said David Sailors, the company’s executive vice president.

Mr. Sailors noted that GPS tracking on his company’s devices could be turned on only when borrowers were in default — a policy, he said, that has cost it business.

The devices, manufacturers say, are selling well because they are proving effective in coaxing payments from even the most troubled borrowers.

A leading device maker, PassTime of Littleton, Colo., says its technology has reduced late payments to roughly 7 percent from nearly 29 percent. Spireon, which offers a GPS device called the Talon, has a tool on its website where lenders can calculate their return on capital.

While the devices make life easier for lenders, their ability to track drivers’ movements has struck a nerve with a number of borrowers and some government authorities, who say they are a particularly troubling example of personal-data gathering and surveillance.

At its extreme, consumer lawyers say, such surveillance can compromise borrowers’ safety. In Austin, Tex., a large subprime lender used a device to track down and repossess the car of a woman who had fled to a shelter to escape her abusive husband, said her lawyer, Amy Clark Kleinpeter.

The move to the shelter violated a clause in her auto loan contract that restricted her from driving outside a four-county radius, and that prompted the lender to send a tow truck to take back the vehicle. If the lender could so easily locate the client, Ms. Kleinpeter said, what was stopping her husband?

“She was terrified her husband would be able to find out where she was from the tow truck company,” said Ms. Kleinpeter, a consumer lawyer in Austin, who said a growing number of her clients had the devices installed in their cars.

Lenders and manufacturers emphasize that they have strict guidelines in place to protect drivers’ information. The GPS devices, they say, are predominantly intended to help lenders and car dealerships locate a car if they need to repossess it, not to put borrowers under surveillance.

Spireon says it can help lenders identify signs of trouble by analyzing data on a borrower’s behavior. Lenders using Spireon’s software can create “geo-fences” that alert them if borrowers are no longer traveling to their regular place of employment — a development that could affect a person’s ability to repay the loan.

A Spireon spokeswoman said the company takes privacy seriously and works to ensure that it complies with all state regulations.

Corinne Kirkendall, vice president for compliance and public relations for PassTime, which has sold 1.5 million devices worldwide, says the company also calls lenders “if we see an excessive use” of the tracking device.

Even though the device made her squeamish, Michelle Fahy of Jacksonville, Fla., agreed to have one installed in her 2001 Dodge Ram because she needed the pickup truck for her job delivering pizza.

Shortly after picking up her four children from school one afternoon in January, Ms. Fahy, 42, said she pulled into a gas station to fill up. But when she tried to restart the truck, she was not able to do so.

Then she looked at her cellphone and noticed a string of missed calls from her lender. She called back and asked, “Did you just shut down my truck?” and the response was “Yes, I did.”

To get her truck restarted, Ms. Fahy had to agree to pay the $255.99 she owed. As she pleaded for more time, her children grew confused and worried. “They were in panic mode,” she said. Finally, she said she would pay, and within minutes she was able to start her engine.

Borrowers are typically provided with codes that are supposed to restart the vehicle for 24 hours in case of an emergency. But some drivers say the codes fail. Others say they are given only one code a month, even though their cars are shut down more often.

Some drivers take matters into their own hands. Homemade videos on the Internet teach borrowers how to disable their devices, and Spireon has started selling lenders a fake GPS device called the Decoy, which is meant to trick borrowers into thinking they have removed the actual tracking system, which is installed along with the Decoy.

Oscar Fabela Jr., who said his 2007 Dodge Magnum was routinely shut down even when he was current on his $362 monthly car payment, discovered a way to circumvent the system.

That trick came in handy when he returned from seeing a movie with a date, only to find his car would not start and the payment reminder was screaming like a burglar alarm.

“It sounded like I was breaking into my own car,” said Mr. Fabela, 26, who works at a phone company in San Antonio.

While his date turned the ignition switch, Mr. Fabela used a screwdriver to rig the starter, allowing him to bypass the starter interruption device.

Mr. Fabela’s car eventually started, but it was their only date.

“It didn’t end well,” he said.

Across the country, state and federal authorities are grappling with how to regulate the new technology.

Consumer lawyers, including dozens whose clients’ cars have been shut down, argue that the devices amount to “electronic repossession” and their use should be governed by state laws, which outline how much time borrowers have before their cars can be seized.

State laws governing repossession typically prevent lenders from seizing cars until the borrowers are in default, which often means that they have not made their payments for at least 30 days.

The devices, lawyers for borrowers argue, violate those laws because they may effectively repossess the car only days after a missed payment. Payment records show that Ms. Bolender, the Las Vegas mother with the sick daughter, was not in default in any of the four instances her ignition was disabled this year.

PassTime and the other manufacturers say they ensure that their devices comply with state laws. C.A.G. declined to comment on Ms. Bolender’s experiences.

State regulators are also examining whether a defective device could endanger the borrowers or other drivers on the road, according to people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Last year, Nevada’s Legislature heard testimony from T. Candice Smith, 31, who said she thought she was going to die when her car suddenly shut down, sending her careening across a three-lane Las Vegas highway.

“It was horrifying,” she recalled.

Ms. Smith said that her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance, had remotely activated her ignition interruption device.

“It’s a safety hazard for the driver and for all others on the road,” said her lawyer, Sophia A. Medina, with the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.

Mr. Pena of C.A.G. Acceptance said, “It is impossible to cause a vehicle to shut off while it is operating,” He added, “We take extra precautions to try and work with and be professional with our customers.” While PassTime, the device’s maker, declined to comment on Ms. Smith’s case, the company emphasized that its products were designed to prevent a car from starting, not to shut it down while it was in operation.

“PassTime has no recognition of our devices shutting off a customer while driving,” Ms. Kirkendall of PassTime said.

In her testimony, Ms. Smith, who reached a confidential settlement with C.A.G., said the device made her feel helpless.

“I felt like even though I made my payments and was never late under my contract, these people could do whatever they wanted,” she testified, “and there was nothing I could do to stop them.”






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8) In a Mississippi Jail, Convictions and Counsel Appear Optional
By


RALEIGH, Miss. — Sheila Burks has not seen her nephew Octavious much over the past few years.

Sitting in her house far out in the Mississippi countryside, she ticked off his stints in the Scott County jail: There was the 18-month stay that ended in 2011; the year that ended in June 2013; and a stretch that began with an arrest last November and is still going.

It is hard to figure out what all this jail time has actually been about. While the arrests that led to these jail stays have been on serious felony charges, Octavious Burks, 37, a poultry plant worker, has not been convicted of or even faced trial on any of the charges. For nearly all of his time in jail, including his current 10-month stay, Mr. Burks has not even had access to a lawyer.

“He’s always at the jailhouse,” Ms. Burks said. “And he don’t ever go to court.”

On Tuesday, civil liberties groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Burks and others in jail in Scott County, a rural area about a 45-minute drive east from Jackson, the state capital. The suit charges that inmates at the jail have been “indefinitely detained” and “indefinitely denied counsel,” in violation of their constitutional rights.

The suit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the MacArthur Justice Center, says that when Mr. Burks and others are arrested, steep and “arbitrary” bail amounts are set, with no consideration of a person’s ability to pay.

If a defendant applies for indigent defense, as Mr. Burks did on the day of his arrest in November, the senior circuit judge, Marcus D. Gordon, generally approves the request. But it is the judge’s policy not to appoint a public defense lawyer until a person is indicted. And there is no state law setting a time limit on detention before an indictment.

So Mr. Burks sits in jail and waits, with no lawyer and no end in sight.

Legal experts said such circumstances were widespread, even if this was an extreme example. Steep bail amounts and long jail stays without access to a lawyer are particularly common for those charged with misdemeanors, said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

It is somewhat less common for felony cases. But common or not, Professor Natapoff said, it is still wrong.

“This is clearly not what we mean by due process, and this is not what we mean by justice,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be unique to be absurd.”

In a brief interview, Judge Gordon said it was indeed his policy to appoint indigent defense only at indictment, even though he might approve a defendant’s request for counsel long before that.

“The reason is, that public defender would go out and spend his time and money and cost the county money in investigating the matter,” Judge Gordon said. “And then sometimes, the defendant is not indicted by the grand jury. So I wait until he’s been indicted.”

Judge Gordon then said that he did not have the jurisdiction to appoint a public defender at all until a defendant was indicted in his courtroom, even if someone were to request a preliminary hearing or a bail hearing. In those cases, the judge said, a defendant “can represent himself, or he can employ an attorney.”

This came as a surprise to those who are familiar with the courts in Scott County and in Mississippi generally. “A judge has the power to appoint a lawyer anytime,” said Robert B. McDuff, a criminal defense lawyer in the state. But he said he was not surprised by the allegations in the lawsuit.“My sense is that this goes on in most places in Mississippi,” he said. “Poor people are sitting in jail for weeks and even months before they ever see a lawyer.”

The public defender system in the state is a patchwork, varying from county to county. Most public defenders work part-time or on contract. Mississippi and six other states do not contribute any money for indigent defense for trial-level, noncapital cases. Those costs are borne entirely by local governments, usually from court fines and fees.

In 2011, the legislature created the Office of State Public Defender and directed it to study the landscape and possibly lay the groundwork for a statewide system. The office, however, does not have any oversight over public defenders in counties across the state.

“We don’t know a lot of what’s going on in some of these counties,” said Leslie Lee, the state public defender. What appears to be going on Scott County, she said, is unconstitutional.

“If you don’t have an attorney, how is a defendant supposed to know what his rights are?” she asked. “He doesn’t realize that he can ask for a bond reduction or he can ask for a preliminary hearing to find out if there is enough evidence. He’s just at the mercy of the pace of the prosecution.”

According to Brandon Buskey, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U.’s Criminal Law Reform Project, 53 of the 129 inmates in the Scott County Detention Center have not been indicted.

Among them is Joshua Bassett, 31, the only other plaintiff named in the suit, along with Mr. Burks. Mr. Bassett is not a stranger to trouble, said his mother, Brenda, but he has never been through anything like this. “He was always going in the door of the jailhouse, but he was coming back out as soon as he went in,” she said.

In January, he went in and has not come back out. The police charged him with stealing a hitch trailer and possessing meth (burglary and petty larceny charges were added months later). Ms. Bassett said she had tried to see her son but had been told for weeks that he was in solitary confinement. When she did finally see him, he told her that his bail had been set at $100,000.

“I tried to help Joshua as much as I could, but I only draw a little over $600 a month,” said Ms. Bassett, 64, who worked as a janitor in a nursing home until she had a stroke last year. “I would give everything I have to get my son out of this mess. But I don’t have anything.”

It is still unclear what became of the felonies, including aggravated assault and armed robbery, that led to Mr. Burks’s stints in jail. The lawsuit, based on his recollection, says that he was indicted on some charges in 2010, though he never went to trial.

Mark Duncan, the district attorney and a defendant in the suit, said Wednesday that his office had not yet been able to find any case involving Mr. Burks. Mr. Duncan added that his office was still double-checking.

Sheila Burks does not remember any indictment. In the past, she said, after months of waiting, she would receive a phone call from her nephew out of the blue, asking her to come by the jail to pick him up.

“I told him, ‘You keep your nose clean in there,’ ” Ms. Burks said. “ ‘And when you get out this time, you better leave Mississippi.’ ”




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9)  In Sunset Park, Videos of Confrontations Elevate Mistrust of Police
By BENJAMIN MUELLER

For the second time this month, video of a violent confrontation between the police and residents in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, has aroused concerns in the neighborhood about arrest tactics.

The latest video emerged after a fight early Saturday morning. According to the police, Jhohan Lemos, 17, was fighting officers who were trying to arrest him for carrying a “gravity knife,” a type of folding knife that can easily be swung open.

The footage shows his mother, Sandra Amezquita, who is five months pregnant, first trying to intervene, then being grabbed from behind by an officer and falling to the street on her abdomen. A second woman, Mercedes Hidalgo, approached the police to tell them that Ms. Amezquita, 44, was pregnant. Moments later, the same officer who grabbed Ms. Amezquita can be seen shoving Ms. Hidalgo, propelling her about 10 feet away as she rolled on the asphalt.

The video was shot by a police watchdog group, El Grito de Sunset Park, that has fanned out in recent months to document what the group describes as an overly aggressive response to quality-of-life concerns in the neighborhood, which has a sizable population of Central American immigrants. Earlier this month, the group recorded an officer kicking a street vendor who was being restrained on the ground, an episode that prompted William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, to suspend the officer.

Saturday’s episode is being investigated by the Internal Affairs Bureau, the police said.

Especially on warm nights, residents say, music blares from stereos and residents cool off by drinking beer.

For some, the heavy police presence has been a welcome response to that behavior, promising quieter nights and a departure from decades ago when gang violence overwhelmed local parks.

But for other residents, the actions seen on the videos have heightened fear and mistrust toward the police, who they say have clamped down on minor crimes with an unforgiving hand. People avoid congregating with friends outside and participating in Latin American-themed celebrations because they fear their ethnicity makes them targets.

“There’s excessive force being used to come down on small, qualify-of-life concerns,” said Dennis Flores, the founder of El Grito de Sunset Park. Of officers, he said, “They feel like they’re above the law.”

The police said Mr. Lemos’s family threatened several officers. Mr. Lemos’s father, Ronel Lemos, 50, and another man were arrested after, the police said, they repeatedly punched an officer on the ground, leaving the officer with injuries to his hand.

The younger Mr. Lemos, who is shown in photos after his arrest with scrapes and bruises to his face, also attacked officers, the police said. He ran away from officers after they noticed a knife clip on his pants, the police said, and then fought with officers who were trying to arrest him.

At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, the family’s lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, who has been involved in several high-profile cases of police misconduct, said that officers struck Ms. Amezquita with a police baton, leaving her with marks on her abdomen. Mr. Rubenstein said she was treated at a hospital, and while she had vaginal bleeding, it was unclear if her injuries had affected the child.

“I am afraid of what might happen to my baby,” Ms. Amezquita said at the news conference, speaking through an interpreter.

Carlos Menchaca, a Democratic City Council member from Sunset Park, said that “all eyes” were on the neighborhood after the release of the two videos.

“The community is gathering on street corners to discuss what is happening,” he said.

Outside the Lemos family’s apartment on Wednesday, a neighbor, who identified himself only as Mr. Ramires because he said he feared retaliation by officers who knew him, said he had stopped hanging out on the sidewalk. Officers routinely searched him for offenses as innocuous as holding a cup of soda, he said. Mr. Ramires, who is gay, also said that gay and transgender Latino residents felt particularly targeted.

“I’m not afraid of the criminals,” he said. “I’m afraid of the cops.”

Other residents praised the police for remaining attentive to quality-of-life concerns.

“They keep things in order here,” said Pedro Duran, 54, a regular customer at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue near 41st Street, the same block where the Lemos encounter occurred. “It’s more peaceful now.”





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10) Larry Ellison Bought an Island in Hawaii. Now What?
By JON MOOALLEM

Henry Jolicoeur is a retired French Canadian hypnotherapist and a glass-products importer who enjoys making very low-budget documentary films. In the summer of 2012, Jolicoeur read that Larry Ellison, a founder of the Silicon Valley giant Oracle and the fifth-richest man in the world, had bought 97 percent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai — not a 97 percent stake in some kind of company, but 97 percent of the physical place. Jolicoeur was curious, so he booked a flight and packed his camera.Jolicoeur knew a little about Lanai, having lived in Hawaii in the ’90s. It is among the smallest and least trafficked of Hawaiian islands — a quiet, spectacular place where Cook Island pine trees vault up everywhere, like spires or giant peacock feathers — and can feel like a charming wormhole to an earlier era. There is only one town, Lanai City, where virtually all of the island’s 3,200 residents live. Ellison now owned a third of all their houses and apartments; the island’s two Four Seasons-run hotels; the central commons at the heart of Lanai City, called Dole Park, and all the buildings around it; the town swimming pool; the community center; the theater; a grocery store; two golf courses; a wastewater treatment plant; the water company; and a cemetery. In a single sweeping real estate deal, reported to cost $300 million, he had acquired 87,000 of the island’s 90,000 acres. And he would subsequently buy an airline that connects Lanai to Honolulu as well. On all of Lanai, I heard of only a handful of businesses — the gas station, the rental-car company, two banks, a credit union and a cafe called Coffee Works — that are neither owned by Ellison nor pay him rent.


Jolicoeur spent about three weeks strolling around the island, asking locals to hold his ungainly, foam-sheathed microphone and tell the camera how they felt about the big acquisition. Everyone seemed to feel very, very good. “I want to thank Mr. Ellison,” one fishing-boat captain says. “He’s got a vision, and he’s taking care of us over here on Lanai.” A pack of landscapers, shown assiduously raking dirt, say things like: “Thank you for work, Mr. Ellison! Thank you very much!” The owner of a salon: “I just want to take this time to thank Mr. Ellison for the unbelievable, incredible takeover of Lanai.” Inside the island’s Catholic church, a priest in a purple robe, surrounded by children, says: “Heavenly father. . . . We ask for your blessings for Mr. Ellison, particularly, and those who work with him, that all the good plans and intentions that he has for Lanai be fruitful.” Elsewhere, a woman shouts a little breathlessly: “Mr. Ellison! Thank you for being here! We love you! I’ve never met you before and really would like to, and I can imagine that you will do awesome wonders for this place!”

Jolicoeur is still working on his film but has posted some footage on YouTube in the meantime. From time to time, he makes an appearance himself, pontificating about the bewildering new relationship between Ellison and everyone else. Introducing one segment, Jolicoeur announces, “The great philosopher Plato said, 2,500 years ago, that rulers of man must be philosophers.” A title card reads, “ORACLE = A person who delivers authoritative, wise or highly regarded and influential pronouncements.”

Ninety seven percent of Lanai may be a lot of Lanai, but it’s a tiny part of Ellison’s overall empire. Ellison, who stepped down as C.E.O. of Oracle on Sept. 18, is estimated to be worth $46 billion. He made an estimated $78.4 million last year, or about $38,000 an hour. He owns a tremendous amount of stuff — cars, boats, real estate, Japanese antiquities, the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament, an America’s Cup sailing team, one of Bono’s guitars — and has a reputation for intensity and excess. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that when Ellison has played basketball on the courts on his yachts, he has positioned “someone in a powerboat following the yacht to retrieve balls that go overboard.” One biographer called him “a modern-day Genghis Khan.”

At a public meeting on Lanai last year, an Ellison representative explained that his boss wasn’t drawn to the island by the potential for profits but by the potential for a great accomplishment — the satisfaction one day of having made the place work. For Ellison, it seemed, Lanai was less like an investment than like a classic car, up on blocks in the middle of the Pacific, that he had become obsessed with restoring. He wants to transform it into a premier tourist destination and what he has called “the first economically viable, 100 percent green community”: an innovative, self-sufficient dreamscape of renewable energy, electric cars and sustainable agriculture.

Ellison has explained that Lanai feels to him like “this really cool 21st-century engineering project” — and so far, his approach, which seems steeped in the ethos of Silicon Valley, has boiled down to rooting out the many inefficiencies of daily life on Lanai and replacing them with a single, elegantly designed system. It’s the sort of sweeping challenge that engineering types get giddy over: a full-scale model. Of course, there are actual people living inside Ellison’s engineering project — a community being hit by an unimaginable wave of wealth. But unlike all the more familiar versions of that story, Lanai isn’t being remade by some vague socioeconomic energy you can only gesture at with words like “techies” or “hipsters” or “Wall Street” but by one guy, whose name everyone knows, in a room somewhere, whiteboarding out the whole project.

Jolicoeur seemed to understand the precariousness that power imbalance created: the staggering responsibility, the incomprehensible control. At one point, standing on a beach, he announces theatrically to the camera, “The Bible says, ‘Where there is no vision, people perish.’ ” Eventually he visits the island’s animal-rescue center, where a young employee explains that because there are no natural predators on Lanai, the feral-cat population just explodes. Right now, she tells him, the shelter is housing 380 cats.

From behind the camera, Jolicoeur hollers: “So basically, these are 380 cats of Mr. Ellison’s?”

“They’re his cats!” the woman says, laughing and laughing.

Next we see a half-dozen cats, occupying different areas of a multitiered bungalow-style dollhouse for cats, licking themselves and lapping water and napping. More cats appear as Jolicoeur enters the shot, holding his long microphone, extending his free hand to stroke whichever cat looks most cooperative. His eyes are bright. He looks thrilled with his wonderful discovery: He has reached an unanticipated edge of the island’s new reality.

Clasping an animal with a meaty palm, he turns back to the camera and says, “Mr. Ellison, do you know that you have, now, 380 cats?”

For thousands of years, Lanai was ruled by the god of nightmares. No humans lived there until, according to Hawaiian legend, a teenage chief from Maui was banished to the island for bad behavior. The chief killed the nightmare god and routed his army of spirits. Then he lit a fire. People on Maui, eight miles to the east, saw the fire. It was a signal — an all-clear. They got in their canoes and came over.

Hawaiians lived happily on Lanai for about 800 years. Then the Mormons started arriving, eventually led in 1861 by Walter Murray Gibson, who, in retrospect, may have been only a megalomaniac con man masquerading as a Mormon. An article published by the Hawaiian Historical Society in 1960 describes Gibson as “ambitious and romantic and interested in ruling a tropical government.” Gibson spent his early years tramping through Southeast Asia, stoking a native revolt against the Dutch in the hope of commandeering one. He converted to Mormonism only one year before showing up on Lanai. After building a Mormon colony in the island’s interior, Gibson began buying land on Lanai until he controlled nearly the entire island. He paid for the land with the church’s money but put the titles in his own name. When the Mormons figured this out, they excommunicated him.

Gibson retained the land, though. By the time he died in 1888, it had passed to his daughter, then through a few other owners as a single holding. None of them could figure out what to do with Lanai. They tried ranching sheep. They tried sugar cane. One crop that grew well was pineapples, and this caught the attention of James Drummond Dole, a Harvard Business School grad with a fledgling pineapple company on Oahu.

In 1922, Dole paid $1.1 million for the land Gibson and his successors had accumulated. Just like that, The New York Times reported, “an entire island, Lanai, has been taken over by a pineapple company.” Dole plowed the interior into fields, built a harbor and roads and laid out an idyllic town near the center of Lanai — a grid of plantation-style cottages, with Dole Park in the middle — to house his mostly Japanese and Filipino workers. By 1930, Lanai City had 3,000 residents, nearly all of them Dole employees, and the island was exporting 65,000 tons of pineapples a year. The company sent landscaping crews to weed and mow workers’ lawns. It ran an athletics program and built a golf course. Life on Lanai was good; Dole insisted it should be. His motto was: “Have happy workers, grow better pineapples.”

For 70 years, Lanai was among the world’s largest pineapple plantations. Then in 1992, the island harvested its last crop. Overseas production had driven down prices, and Lanai was left behind. By that point, the island had changed hands two more times. It was now controlled by the California billionaire David Murdock, who acquired the company Castle & Cooke, which took over Dole Foods’ holdings on Lanai in the ’60s. Murdock was a somewhat imperial presence on Lanai. He referred to residents as his “children.”

As the pineapple era wound down, Murdock pivoted Lanai’s economy toward tourism. He built two resorts — the first developments on the island besides Lanai City and still the only major ones — and eventually contracted the Four Seasons to run them. Pineapple pickers were retrained as hotel staff and landscapers. Lanai was still a company town; the company just did something different now.

The transition did not go well. Murdock had to steadily infuse the island with money — as much as $20 million or $30 million a year, he’d later report. By the mid-2000s, he started cutting back. He laid off large numbers of workers and began abandoning some of his quasi-governmental responsibilities as the island’s majority landowner. Buildings fell into disrepair. The Chamber of Commerce disbanded. As one resident put it, “Economically, there was real potential that we might dry up and blow away.”

Eventually, Murdock proposed a way forward: He would build an array of 45-story wind turbines on 20 square miles of the island and sell the electricity they produced to Oahu. The idea was controversial. It would be a mammoth development on an insistently small-scale island. Lanai had been settled by disparate immigrants who had to figure out how to get along, and that history, locals told me, keeps people from dwelling on divisions and differences. (“That’s what makes the place so special,” one woman explained. “We still have aloha together.”) But the long fight over what the locals called Big Wind was brutal and divisive. Family members stopped talking to one another. There were protests in the street. Many people who supported the wind turbines saw the protesters as reckless idealists; they were handcuffing the man the community relied on and driving the island into the ground. Murdock seemed to feel the same way. By the summer of 2011, he confessed to the editor of the island’s newspaper that Lanai had been “the poorest financial investment I’ve made in my entire life.” He had only so many options. One was to “close it all down and leave.” Instead, he put Lanai up for sale.

The island rippled with anxiety. People worried that Murdock might sell off parts of Lanai to multiple owners, tossing the community into some uncharted, joint-custody arrangement. Or that he’d sell to a big resort developer who would shatter the character of the place. “Oh, my God, he could sell to a Russian oligarch,” one woman remembered thinking. Another said, “We were praying it wasn’t some sheikh!” It wasn’t some sheikh. It was Larry Ellison.

It was easy to be hopeful, and the civil war over Big Wind had left people scarred and exhausted with fighting. Now Ellison wanted to revive the island, and he had the money to fund his dreams until they came true. But was he a utopian businessman like Dole? Or a slippery autocrat like Gibson? Was he the nightmare god — or the renegade chief who finally came to vanquish him?

One morning, nearly two years later, at the Blue Ginger Cafe, I asked Pat Reilly, a 74-year-old regular with a thin white mustache and oversize glasses who has lived on Lanai for more than 30 years, how he felt when he heard that Ellison bought the island. Reilly reached over his coffee mug and drew a big, slow question mark in the air, then jabbed his index finger at me to dot the question mark, hard.

“And it’s still that way,” he said.

Like a lot of omnipotent forces, Ellison has remained mostly invisible. He has visited Lanai many times — locals told me they can tell he’s on the island when they see his yacht hitched in the harbor — but he seems determined to keep a formal distance from the community, shielding himself behind the executive team of Pulama Lanai, the management company he set up to oversee the island’s transformation. Although Pulama holds frequent public meetings on Lanai, Ellison has declined to attend any or to address residents directly. Several residents told me that they’d resorted to reading biographies of Ellison to learn more about the man — books that have somewhat disquieting titles like “Everyone Else Must Fail” and “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison,” the punch line being: “God doesn’t think he’s Larry Ellison.”

Ellison’s vision for the island was first delivered, by proxy, early last year, at a meeting of the island’s Community Plan Advisory Committee. These meetings were part of a county-government process to update the island’s comprehensive planning document, which dictates everything from zoning and land use to cultural preservation. Butch Gima, a Lanai native and social worker who was chairman of the committee, told me that Ellison’s takeover put them in a tricky position. On one hand, it allowed for greater ambition. (“A new world has opened up,” one member told the committee.) But it also felt strange to chart a course for an island that someone else had taken control of. Even the committee’s economic research and growth projections might now be obsolete, depending on what Ellison wanted to do. And so they invited Pulama’s new chief operating officer, Kurt Matsumoto, to brief them.

Matsumoto was hired to oversee operations on Lanai a couple of months earlier. He had a background in running large resorts, but he was also a “Lanai Boy,” as people kept putting it to me — he grew up on the island. “He doesn’t come off as being real slick,” Gima told me. (As kids, Gima and Matsumoto were in Boy Scouts together.) His appointment was encouraging; the relationship between the island and its new owner had been brought down to a more human scale.

Matsumoto appeared before the committee in mid-January — a middle-management Moses coming down the mountain with an important PowerPoint. He prefaced his presentation by explaining that Ellison didn’t have any firm plans yet, only “intentions.” Then he put up his first slide.

That night, and in other meetings, Matsumoto unveiled a startlingly ambitious vision for the island. He explained that Ellison aimed to build a third resort, this time on the uninhabited southwestern coast, as well as a complex of private estates — maybe 50 of them, each five or more acres. Ellison intended to expand Lanai’s airport, adding a bigger runway to accommodate direct flights from the mainland for the first time. The limiting factor on Lanai has always been water, but Ellison would build a state-of-the-art desalination plant to produce more fresh water. Ellison would expand Lanai City; build an “energy park,” where electricity produced with solar panels or photosynthesizing algae would be fed into a new smart grid; and bring commercial agriculture back to the island, in fields outfitted with sensors to control fertilization and irrigation, so that Lanai could begin to feed itself and even export products, rather than depend on weekly food barges from Oahu. Eventually Matsumoto would tell The Wall Street Journal that Ellison hoped to see the island’s population double to about 6,000. Elsewhere, there was talk of organic wineries and flower farms and an innovative aquaponics-and-hydroponics operation that would raise fish and fruits and vegetables in a sustainable symphony of positive feedback loops. Better health care. A bowling alley. An institute for the study of sustainability. A 22-acre film studio. A top-flight, residential tennis academy for competitive youth.

Matsumoto’s tone at that first meeting was low-key, humble and inclusive. He used words like “respect” and “empower,” “sharing” and “investing.” Then, eventually, he hit his last slide: “Mahalo” — Hawaiian for “Thank you” — and was done.

“It was hard to formulate any thought-out questions,” Gima recalled about the presentation. “I think people just went, ‘Whoa.’ ”

By the time I visited Lanai last March, there was almost too much happening for one person to keep track of. Pulama had gone to work around the island on long-deferred maintenance, renovations and full-bore beautification. They’d painted the shops around Dole Park, ripped out old hedges and thinned or chopped down trees to air out the ambience. Herds of construction workers moved around Lanai in fluorescent green or orange shirts, then gathered outside Richard’s Market at quitting time for drinks and snacks. “He is renewing, refreshing, rejuvenating every part of the island,” said a woman named Mimi Evangelista. “I feel blessed, blessed beyond my wildest dreams.”

After several years of terrible unemployment, people on Lanai were back to work. Within four months of Ellison’s purchase, unemployment shot down to 1.2 percent. There were new faces everywhere, new luxury cars on the road and lines of new Mercedes vans and Nissan Leafs parked in the company’s lot near the center of town. Pulama had started a summer program for kids and another program to help high-school students pursue college scholarships, screened “Frozen” in the park and held an “animal-care day” so people could get their cats dewormed free. They’d opened a Nobu restaurant at one hotel. I saw posters advertising free water-aerobics classes at the new community pool. There were ukulele lessons and Pilates. A month earlier, at an Oracle event in Las Vegas to unveil the company’s new cloud software, someone asked Ellison about Lanai, and he pointed out that “for the first time, Lanai has a football field where the high school can have home games.” He also noted, “We’re empowering the locals to start their own businesses,” whether it’s “in agriculture or a juice bar in Lanai City.”

The juice bar occupies a cabana-like building at one corner of Dole Park and is owned and operated by Tammy Ringbauer, an effusive woman with bright flowers tattooed up her right arm. Ringbauer is deep into juicing — I never saw anyone juice a turmeric root before — and charges 12 bucks for a large.

Ringbauer told me she moved to Lanai from Maui just weeks before the change in ownership, and this storefront caught her eye immediately. It was the only vacant commercial space in Lanai City, though she had heard that, for some reason, Pulama Lanai kept rejecting entrepreneurs who wanted to lease it. (Pulama says that it did not turn down any previous applicants.)

When I asked Ringbauer why the company finally gave the lease to her, she hesitated. “I don’t want to say anything wrong,” she said. “Because of the changes that are happening, there’s sort of a model we’re trying to move in the direction of. And I think certain businesses may not fit into that model.” She thought her vision was aligned with Pulama’s: She was using locally grown, organic produce and compostable to-go cups. “I’m explaining the benefits of juicing, I’m educating,” she said. Later, I heard that Ellison himself had come in for a juice a couple of times, sitting on a stool and sipping away like a regular person.

I couldn’t find any other small businesses that had started up on Lanai since Ellison’s purchase. But there were stories about entrepreneurs, like the owners of the island’s wood shop, who had approached Pulama for leases or partnerships only to be offered a job with the company instead — which was good but allowed Pulama to preserve its hold on the economy. Ringbauer had no complaints. “If we all work together,” she said, “we’re going to thrive.” The wooden sign hanging behind her register read: “No whining. No complaining. No frowning. Only hugs, smiles and warm feelings are allowed. Thank you.”

Despite my many phone calls and emails to Pulama Lanai’s office, requesting interviews with its senior staff members, the company basically wanted nothing to do with me. A couple of walk-in visits to the office, and to the standoffish man named Roger who worked the reception desk there, also got me nowhere. (One time, trying to at least make small talk with Roger before he turned me away, I said, “It’s beautiful, what you’ve done here,” by which I meant the renovated office lobby, with its marble floors and Pier 1-esque furnishings and the carved, hardwood box where locals drop their rent checks. “Yes, it is,” Roger replied, barely looking up from his computer.) Eventually a public-relations contractor based in Honolulu told me that “the company is still in the planning phase” and would not be participating in this article.

Another obstacle: Roughly half of the adults on the island are employed by Pulama Lanai or its hotels, and nearly everyone else, it seems, has a sister or uncle who is — or else relies on the company indirectly for a livelihood or lives in a house that Pulama Lanai owns. Lots of people told me that they were instructed not to talk to reporters or that they just didn’t want to risk upsetting the company. One young man delivered a long, seemingly rehearsed preamble, insisting that he absolutely had to remain anonymous and that any opinions he expressed were his alone and did not reflect the views of either Pulama Lanai or his employer, which did business with Pulama and which I also shouldn’t name. I expected something inflammatory, but his opinion was this: “There’s a lot of complainers — some people aren’t happy — but they don’t realize how much they have. It’s just awesome!”Well, yes and no. As it turns out, my perception of Pulama Lanai — as a vast, mostly incommunicative force — was pretty close to that of many residents I was meeting. They didn’t necessarily understand how that force operated either, but they saw its handiwork everywhere. And some of it didn’t feel awesome at all.

For starters, Pulama had inadvertently intensified a housing shortage on Lanai. There was so much work that contractors had to be shuttled in daily or weekly from other islands or relocated. A few off-island construction companies bought up housing in Lanai City in anticipation of winning contracts from Pulama, and the island’s independent landlords found they could demand higher rents from the remaining workers. Though the company was busily fixing up cottages to rent out, many displaced locals wound up on Pulama’s indeterminably long waiting list for housing, which they believed Pulama employees were bypassing. The process didn’t feel transparent or fair, and Pulama was resisting calls for a town-hall meeting about the issue. (Later, I attended one of the company’s informational meetings about renovations at the Four Seasons — “We’re adding two new teppanyaki stations,” a Pulama representative explained — and watched residents try to derail its narrow agenda. “It’s something you folks never even anticipated!” one older man said. He was leaning on his walker, raising his voice. “You took all the housing! It all went poof!”)

By now, there was growing awareness that Pulama’s rhetoric of openness and collaboration didn’t always match its actions. Some people wondered whether the company was hiding its real agenda behind a veneer of egalitarianism and good manners. As a schoolteacher named Karen de Brum put it: “At the end of the day, Mr. Ellison can and will do what he wants. He asks for input, but that’s like me asking for input on what to do with my backyard. I own my backyard.”

A 27-year-old Lanai native named Zane de la Cruz told me that he was “starting to think that communication is actually worse” than under the previous owner, “because there’s a false sense of good communication.” He elaborated: “They give out a lot worthless information. They give you buzzwords.” At one meeting, a Pulama executive, Arlan Chun, was asked how much residents would pay for water from the new desalination plant and how Ellison expected to recoup his costs. Chun suggested that Ellison wasn’t concerned with costs. “The mandate we have is to move the island forward,” he said.

De la Cruz told me: “Well, yeah, that’s a fun and fancy thing to say, but someone is going to need to pay for this. And if Larry Ellison decides, five years from now, that he doesn’t want to play this game anymore, we’ll be paying for it then.” John Ornellas, chairman of the island’s planning commission, said he was struggling to get a straight answer about what would happen if Ellison dies. (“He does do a lot adventurous things,” Ornellas noted; for example, there’s a rumor — the truth of which remains murky — that Ellison once flew a fighter jet under the Golden Gate Bridge.) And Diana Shaw, who directs the Lanai Community Health Center, one of two medical providers on the island, said that Pulama ignored her requests for an introductory meeting for months. “They kept talking publicly about the health care system and how they were going to improve it and enhance it and change it,” Shaw said. “But nobody came and talked to us. We are the health care system — at least 50 percent of it.” Finally Pulama reps sat down with her. The meeting didn’t go well. Shaw described one executive as “the master of spin.”

At a small gathering one night, over pizza and beer, a retired school principal, Pierce Myers, explained it to me this way: “The hope is real. The potential is fantastic.” And yet lots of residents can’t help seeing everything Ellison does through a scrim of “suspicion and uncertainty.” He went on: “This place was developed on the backs of humble people; people who cared for each other. When you live on an island, you can’t afford to make enemies. A compassion grows from that. Now it feels like everything’s being driven from outside by some force that is not part of that tradition.”

Eventually the man sitting next to Myers spoke up. “Any changes are going to be uncomfortable, but the changes are happening so fast,” he said quietly. His name was Anthony Kaauamo Pacheco. He is 29 and was born on Lanai but left to study filmmaking on Oahu. Two years ago, he came back to the island. He wanted to inspire would-be filmmakers there to tell their own stories; he even imagined drawing Hollywood productions to Lanai. But there wasn’t an obvious way to start. For the last two years, he’d been teaching film at the school, unpaid.

That afternoon, as a critical exercise, Pacheco had shown his students a promotional video produced by Love Lanai, a new branding campaign that Pulama was using to pitch the island to affluent tourists. Love Lanai is the brainchild of a Southern Californian “approachable luxury” brand consultant named Audrey Cavenecia. (Cavenecia has previously worked as a personal “life redesigner” and developed a reality show for E!, “The Apology Concierge,” which curates “high-end apologies” — like for wealthy people who cheat on their wives.) The video showed swirling aerial footage of the island’s beaches and cliffs, a man on a windy ridge getting down on one knee to propose and a woman on horseback rising from her saddle slightly, feeling free. It had been posted to YouTube with the caption: “For Love Lanai, compassionate luxury is more than just a phrase, it’s an action of purpose,” which doesn’t really make sense.

In an interview that Pachecho found online and showed to his students, Cavenecia explained that she created Love Lanai to tell the stories of everyday Lanaians as their lives, under Ellison, improved. It was the kind of work Pacheco had come home to encourage. But for a branding consultant to tell those stories, as promotional material for high-end tourists, felt a little exploitative. “I’m not a spectacle,” he said.

He seemed to be having trouble sorting out his feelings — deciding whether his skepticism was warranted or just reflexive. Most of the island was private property when Pacheco was growing up too, but Murdock left a smaller footprint, tending to focus mainly on his hotels. “It never felt like I was trespassing,” Pacheco said. Now it did. He said he wasn’t sure he wanted to live on Lanai anymore.Then, two weeks later, in the middle of April, Pacheco’s situation improved. Pulama Lanai funded his teaching position as part of its commitment to improve education. He had a way to support his family now and resources to start the idealistic work he’d come back to Lanai to do. He’d also signed a nondisclosure agreement with the company and couldn’t talk to me anymore.

Different people told different stories, but for a local named Gail Allen, the first sign that things had started to go wrong this summer came when Pulama Lanai inexplicably abandoned its renovation of the golf course behind her house, and the weeds and thistles grew waist-high and thick as a broom head, and the fish in the ponds died, and their bodies were left to knock around the algae-clouded edges of the water, floating on their sides.

The course, which is attached to the smaller of the two Four Seasons hotels and abuts Allen’s neighborhood on the hillside above Lanai City, had been slated for renovation at the beginning of the year. Pulama ripped out the turf and irrigation systems, but little else happened after that. Finally in May, the Jack Nicklaus design-company employee who had been relocated with his family to Lanai to oversee the redesign was abruptly sent home. He told neighbors that the golf-course renovation had been put off until 2015 or 2016. By then, mosquitoes were breeding on the course. The ponds’ stench blew through peoples’ homes. “It smells like a sewer up here,” Allen told me in early July when I called for an update.

Allen owns a gift shop in town and looks a little like Meryl Streep when she smiles. When we met on her patio back in March, she was adamantly optimistic; she went on and on, telling me “I feel like I’m living in a utopia!” and claiming to have inside information that Ellison was outfitting Lanai with 4G cellular service. “Not even Honolulu has 4G!” she said. (Actually it does.) Now she was distraught. It wasn’t just the golf course; there were other signs of Pulama Lanai’s incompetence, or maybe just its insensitivity — it was tough to tell which. “I don’t think Mr. Ellison’s trying to hurt people,” she told me on the phone, “but I don’t think he realizes what a delicate little ecosystem the economy is here. We were so zealous: ‘Oh, my God, he’s coming to save our island!’ It just feels like everything’s in limbo now. All of a sudden, there’s a fear factor: ‘What are we going to do if this thing falls apart?’ ”

I flew back to Lanai a few days later. A lot had gone subtly sideways since my first visit, as the company transitioned from the easy work of sprucing up the island to rolling out its reimagined version. A central problem seemed to be that Pulama underestimated the difficulties that came with building on Lanai, where materials and labor have to be brought in. In May, with work on the island consuming more and more resources, Philip Simon — an accountant, and president of another of Ellison’s companies, Lawrence Investments — was called in to consult with Pulama executives. At public meetings, Pulama was now explaining that it had given up on the second airport runway and was also downshifting the $27 million makeover of the existing Four Seasons at Manele Bay too: The company would renovate only half the resort this year and was scrambling to finish in time for a large booking in October. (Around town, the event was rumored to be a giant party for Ellison’s daughter, Megan.) There were now 360 contractors on the job, many of them living at the hotel and in half of the other Four Seasons as well. Just before I arrived, Ellison bought the small Hotel Lanai at the top of Dole Park — the last hotel on the island — and was filling it with workers every Monday through Friday, too. Ornellas, head of the Lanai Planning Commission, told me that lately the gist of his conversations with company executives was: “The infrastructure can’t support their lofty goals.”

On such a small island, every adjustment Pulama made to its plans had repercussions, and the strain of disenfranchisement I encountered in the spring was spreading, as more stories of the company’s apparent carelessness or undependability surfaced. Late last year, for example, Pulama told the owners of Trilogy Excursions — a large family-owned business based in Maui that, among other things, runs diving tours for hotel guests on Lanai and whose employees hand out a free turkey and a bag of rice to every family on the island at Thanksgiving — that in October, the Four Seasons would begin running its own dive operation. Then this spring, Pulama recanted; they were delaying that plan. This was good news for Trilogy, except that several of its employees, presuming they’d be out of work, had already taken other jobs, and the company was now short-staffed.

It’s possible that, internally, Ellison’s management team had reasonable explanations for what was being experienced as aloofness and disarray. But down here, on Lanai, locals worried that the inscrutable engineer remaking their island was either turning away from his creation or — worse — incapable of manning all those knobs and switches as competently as they’d believed. People’s lives were entangled in each decision; all the instability was upsetting their sense of the future.

“Pretty soon, it’s not going to be the Lanaian way of living here anymore,” Mike Lopez, Trilogy’s director of operations, told me one afternoon. “Everybody feels that now.” Then, all of a sudden, he shot out: “See, this guy here!” and gestured across the street, to a willowy man with a gray beard, in a ball cap and sunglasses, standing at the edge of Dole Park. It was a new face that Lopez kept noticing around, always alone. “I don’t know if they put people in to observe the atmosphere or what,” he said.

I turned around. The man, who’d paused next to a garbage can, quickly walked away. I’m not really equipped to judge whether a stranger on Lanai looks sinister or not. But neither was Lopez anymore, and that was the point.

The week I returned, those feelings of suspicion on Lanai were coming to a head over what has been the most volatile political issue on the island for generations: water.

The planned desalination plant, already in its first phase of construction near the Four Seasons at Manele Bay, was a linchpin in Ellison’s vision; by converting up to 10 million gallons of salinated groundwater into fresh water a day, it would make more development and population growth possible. Earlier this year, the company went to the Lanai Planning Commission for a 30-year special-use permit to operate the plant. (The commission, made up of nine residents, is the one body of truly local government on Lanai. Everything else on the island gets decided by the county government, on Maui, or the state, in Honolulu. And it’s worth noting that while Ellison has declined to meet with Lanai residents, he hosted Alan Arakawa — the mayor of Maui County, which includes Lanai — for lunch on his yacht and held two big-ticket fund-raisers for Gov. Neil Abercrombie before Abercrombie lost his primary in August.) But after months of hearings, the Planning Commission rejected Pulama’s request and decided to issue a permit for 15 years instead. The move may sound insignificant, but as Robin Kaye, a longtime resident, who helped lead the resistance to Murdock’s wind farm, pointed out, “This is the first time in two years, in a formal way, that any part of the community has said no to something Pulama has asked.” And it provoked the first instance of outright intransigence the community had seen from Pulama. During one of the final meetings about the plant in June, Kurt Matsumoto kept issuing the same ultimatum: Without a guarantee of 30 years of operation, he said, the company probably wouldn’t build the plant. It just wouldn’t be worth the investment. “It’s not a threat,” Matsumoto explained, adding later: “But we’re not here to negotiate that tonight.”

When I ran into Pat Reilly, the gentleman I met at the Blue Ginger Cafe in the spring, he broke down the altercation for me. It was starting to feel as if Matsumoto and his team saw the local political process as an annoyance, he said. They weren’t acting like elected officials, building public support for their agenda; they were acting like they owned the place — because they did. “The local people want a say,” Reilly explained. “And this was their chance. It was a display of power. Psychologically, it makes all kinds of sense to me.”

By now, the standoff was taking on an ugly feel. Many residents felt the commission had acted impetuously, handcuffing Ellison the same way activists sabotaged Murdock’s wind-farm proposal — even if, in this case, the commission wasn’t actually opposed to the plant and had, in fact, given the project a green light. The commission, meanwhile, had just received a stern letter from Pulama’s attorney on Maui, laying out a complicated argument attacking a separate restriction written into the permit. (The restriction stipulated that, once the plant was up and running, the hotel and surrounding homes could only draw water from the island’s main aquifer in emergencies, and only then for human consumption.)

One afternoon, I was waiting out a rain shower in one of Pulama’s Four Seasons, enjoying a very expensive ginger ale and some free popcorn, when I overheard a woman venting to the bartender about the commission’s audacity and underhandedness. “This is a lot of money they’re playing with!” she said. She grumbled about one former commissioner in particular, whom she saw as a ringleader, and huffed, “What was she thinking?” She went on and got louder, until she’d finally talked herself out.

Thirty minutes later, I walked into a public meeting that Pulama was holding at the old union hall in town and saw the owner of a luxury home near the resort — a very large man in a polo shirt — standing over Pat Reilly, pointing and shouting: “Talk some sense into those people! They want to shut off our water!” I also saw the woman from the bar, smiling and offering people pastries and bottled water: it was Lynn McCrory, Pulama’s senior vice president of government affairs.

On Sept. 12, Pulama suddenly stopped construction at the desalination plant. It was unclear when — or even if — it would restart. “Sounds like the baby couldn’t get his way,” Ornellas, the head of the Planning Commission, told me. “It’s sad it had to come to this.”

Before I’d ever been to Lanai, I watched a public-television interview online with a man named Kepa Maly, who was an authority on the island’s cultural history, and an unlikely one. He wasn’t Hawaiian but a white man in a faded aloha shirt, with large, wire-frame glasses and a soft, breathy voice. Even on the Internet, everything about him felt welcoming and also a little square. He reminded me of a children’s folk singer from the ’70s.

Maly was born on Oahu, he explained to the interviewer. As a child, he felt disconnected and lost, and eventually he was taken in by the Kaopuikis, one of Lanai’s oldest families. Mr. and Mrs. Kaopuiki were born in the 1890s, 30 years before James Dole planted his first pineapple on Lanai, and they raised Maly the way they raised their 14 other children: speaking Hawaiian and steeped in the island’s history and traditions. Maly was enthralled, and ever since he has dedicated his life to perpetuating traditional Hawaiian culture. He was now executive director of the Lanai Culture and Heritage Center, a nonprofit museum at the top of Dole Park. Kepa was the name the Kaopuikis gave him. It means “to embrace.”

I called Maly, but never heard back. So one afternoon in March, I knocked on the door of the small blue house where I was told he worked. I’d just started to introduce myself when the openness on his face collapsed into what seemed like embarrassment. He knew who I was, he said. “I guess it was rude not to call you back. But I have to be cautious.” The thing was, he’d taken a job at Pulama Lanai. He wanted to talk with me, but I needed to clear it with the company first. After some phone calls, and another fruitless face-off with the impregnable Roger, the company surprised me: I would be allowed to interview Maly the next day.

“My experience with the previous owner was a challenging one,” he explained when we reconvened. But all that difficulty went away when Ellison arrived. “It was really awesome!” he said. Last year, Pulama hired him as its senior vice president of culture and historic preservation. He has 10 employees now. A crew was out that afternoon clearing the area around the religious center of ancient Lanai, and they’d soon be restoring ancient fish ponds and taro fields. It was the sort of stewardship he’d continually asked the island’s previous ownership to support. “Now, all the things we were talking about, but really struggling on, we are out in the field doing,” he said.

Maly had not yet met Ellison, but he believed that Ellison understood that investing in the preservation of Lanai’s culture and history is, at the very least, good business. Today’s tourists, especially wealthy ones, value more than beaches and mai tais. “It’s place-based now. People want ‘authentic.’ People want real experiences,” he said.

I’d heard the same explanation that morning from Tom Roelens, the manager of the Four Seasons at Manele Bay. Roelens led me through a newly renovated room, noting all the local touches, like the wall panel illustrating the story of the demigod Maui and the canoe paddle over the toilet. (“It’s just a stunning room product,” Roelens beamed. “It truly reflects Hawaii.”) Often, he said, resorts insulate guests from the community. But on Lanai, the owner of the resort wasn’t in competition with the surroundings; he owned most of those, too. “Lanai is this entire experience,” Roelens said. And the people of Lanai are part of that experience, as well. Nearly a quarter of the island works at the two hotels, he explained, and the company believes improving residents’ quality of life will “truly translate to the guest experience.” Ellison had once articulated this philosophy himself: “We think, If we do a good job taking care of the locals, the locals will do a good job taking care of our visitors.”

It sounded like the same Silicon Valley philosophy that spawned all the epicurean cafeterias, yoga classes and nap pods on tech-company campuses — amenities designed to keep engineers happy and maximize their productivity. But now, in his office, Kepa Maly reminded me that it was a much older model too, and one that Lanai had fared pretty well under. “It’s just like Dole said,” he said. “Have happy workers, grow better pineapples.”

I asked Maly if he had doubts about going to work for Pulama. Yes, initially, he said. “And I have to tell you, sometimes I question my ability to be a good assessor of people’s integrity.” But he pressed company executives, and they assured him that they were committed to protecting the island’s cultural resources. “I have to believe that,” he told me. “We have to.” He explained that, when he was a newcomer to Lanai, people could have viewed him with the same mistrust some felt toward Ellison. Instead, they welcomed him. “I was blessed that some of the oldest families on Lanai took aloha for me, and taught me their language and shared their histories. It gave me my whole life,” Maly said. “I realize that we can always be cynical, and question motives,” he added. “But it’s also just a junk way to live.”

He wanted to show me something: There are three words printed on Pulama’s business cards: “Preservation. Progress. Sustainability.” His work — preservation — is one of those words. “It’s the first one,” he noted. He said it with conviction, as if he were lucky enough to live in some unspoiled world where the slogan on a corporation’s business cards reflected its genuine values. Maybe he still did. But maybe he didn’t anymore.






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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING CAMPAIGNS


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Free the Whistle-Blowers

An Appeal from Daniel Ellsberg

July 21, 2014 by Daniel Ellsberg

Time Magazine coversNSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a personal hero of mine, has recently filed to renew his asylum in Russia.  Exiled thousands of miles from friends and family, he awaits his fate. He learned from the example of another top hero of mine, Chelsea Manning.  Manning helped inspire his revelations that if he released his vital information while in this country he would have been held incommunicado in isolation as Chelsea was for over ten months—in Snowden’s case probably for the rest of his life.  And facing comparable charges to Chelsea’s, he would have no more chance than Chelsea to have a truly fair trial—being prevented by the prosecution and judge (as I was, forty years ago) from even raising arguments of public interest or lack of harm in connection with his disclosures.  Contrary to the hollow advice of Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, if he were to return to America he would not be able to “make his case” neither “in court,” nor “to the public” from a prison cell.

 I am immensely thankful to both these young whistle-blowers who have so bravely stood up against the powerful forces of the US government in order to reveal corruption, illegal spying and war crimes.  They were both motivated by their commitments to democracy and justice.  They both chose to reveal information directly to the public, at great cost to themselves, so that citizens and taxpayers could be fully informed of the facts.  They also revealed the amazing potential of new technologies to increase public access to information and strengthen democracy.  It saddens me that our current political leaders, rather than embracing this potential, have chosen to tighten their strangleholds on power and information, turning away from both progress and justice.

 Shockingly, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than every previous president combined. These heroes do not deserve to be thrown in prison or called a traitor for doing the right thing.  Obama’s unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of the Espionage Act—as if it were a British-type Official Secrets Act, never intended by Congress and a violation of our First Amendment—and Manning’s 35-year prison sentence will have a chilling effect on future citizens’ willingness to uncover hidden injustices.  The government has already brought comparable charges against Snowden.

 The only remedy to this chilling precedent, designed to effect government whistle-blowers as a whole, is to overturn the Manning verdict. Given that Manning’s court martial produced the longest trial record in US military history, it will take a top legal team countless hours to prepare their defense.  But as an Advisory Board member for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, I was inspired by the way citizens around the world stepped forward to help fund a strong defense during Manning’s trial.  I remain hopeful that enough people will recognize the immense importance of these appeals and will contribute to help us finish the struggle we started. That struggle, of course, is for a just political system and freedom for our whistle-blowers.

Chelsea Manning has continued to demonstrate uncommon bravery and character, even from behind bars.  With the New York Times Op-Ed she published last month, she has cemented her position as a compelling voice for government reform.  Working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning was privy to a special view of the inner-workings of our military’s propaganda systems.  Despite her personal struggles, she felt compelled to share her knowledge of what was happening in Iraq with the Americans people.  If the military hadn’t hidden the number of civilian casualties and incidences of torture detailed in the Iraq Logs she released, we would have known far sooner to expect the civil war that has gripped Iraq fully today.  Her exposure of US knowledge of the corruption in Tunisia, by the dictator our government supported, was a critical catalyst of the non-violent uprising which toppled that dictator, in turn directly inspiring the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt and then the Occupy movement in the US

 I personally am inspired by Chelsea Manning as I am by Edward Snowden, which is why I have spent countless hours advocating for both of them.  I’m asking you to join me today in supporting what I believe to be one of the most important legal proceedings in our country’s history. We are fortunate to have a truly impressive legal team that has agreed to partner with us.  Already, our new appeals attorney Nancy Hollander and her team have begun to research legal strategies, and are collaborating with Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the international news media to highlight the significance of this case.

 Chelsea is only 26 now, younger than I was when I learned to recognize the injustices of the Vietnam War.  She wishes to complete her education, as I did, and go into public service. Imagine what great things she could both learn and teach the world if she were free. Now imagine if our corrupt government officials are allowed to get their way, holding her behind bars until life has almost passed her by, and extraditing Snowden to suffer the same outcome.  What a sad result that would be for our country and our humanity.

 I have been waiting forty years for a legal process to at long last prove the unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act as applied to whistle-blowers (the Supreme Court has never yet addressed this issue).  This appeals process can accomplish that, and it can reduce Chelsea’s sentence by decades. But unfortunately, without your help today it will not happen. We must raise $100,000 by September 1st, to ensure that Chelsea’s team have the resources to fully fight this stage of the appeals process. 

Unless Manning’s conviction is overturned in appeals, Snowden and many other whistle-blowers, today and in the future, will face a similar fate. And with them will perish one of the most critical lifelines for our democracy.  But you can join me in fighting back.  I’m asking you to do it for Chelsea, to do it for Snowden, and to do it because it’s the right thing to do to preserve our democracy.  We can only win this great struggle with your help. Please contribute to help us fund Chelsea’s legal appeals today.

        It’s time we band together on the right side of history once again.

        Daniel Ellsberg

Please contribute to help us fund Chelsea’s legal appeals today!

Learn now how you can write a letter to be included in Chelsea Manning’s official application for clemency!
Please share this information to friends and community leaders, urging them to add their voice to this important effort before it's too late.
http://www.privatemanning.org/pardonpetition




Help us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591


COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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 Only an Innocent Man Would Voluntarily Return
to Prison to Fight Against his Life Sentence
and For Exoneration —
That Courageous Man is Lorenzo Johnson.

The PA Attorney General’s Office Agrees to Investigate New Facts and Witnesses —
  Send Your Message Now to PA AG
Kathleen Kane: Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson!

On January 29, 2014 Lorenzo Johnson’s attorney, Michael Wiseman, met with representatives of PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane to discuss the new evidence of Lorenzo Johnson’s innocence contained in legal filings now pending in the Pennsylvania courts. This includes affidavits confirming Johnson’s presence in New York City at the time of the Harrisburg murder and the identity of the actual killers, as well as police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorney Wiseman said Kane’s office promised to investigate these new facts in order to assess whether they merit the relief that Lorenzo Johnson seeks in his PCRA petition.

Speaking to AP reporter Mary Claire Dale on February 11, 2014 Wiseman said, “We believe the witnesses we presented to them are credible, and give a coherent version of the events. I take them at their word, that they’re going to do a straightforward, honest review.”  Kane spokesman Joe Peters confirmed the meeting to AP “but said the office won’t comment on the new evidence until the court filing,” (referring to the March 31, 2014 date for the AG’s response to Johnson’s October 2013 court filing).

It is the Office of the PA Attorney General that is responsible for the false prosecution of Lorenzo Johnson from trial through appeals. And just a few months ago, the Attorney General’s office opposed a federal petition based on this new evidence saying there was no prima facie claim for relief. This resulted in the denial of Lorenzo Johnson’s Motion to File a Second Writ of Habeas Corpus in the federal court.

On December 18, 2013 a press conference called by the Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson protested these actions of the PA Attorney General and delivered petitions demanding dismissal of the charges and immediate freedom for Lorenzo. Tazza, Lorenzo’s wife, declared, “1,000 signatures means we are not in this alone…I won't stop until he’s home. There is nothing and no one that can stop me from fighting for what’s right.”

This is Lorenzo Johnson’s second fight for his innocence and freedom. In January 2012, after 16 years of court battles to prove his innocence, a federal appeals court held his sentence was based on insufficient evidence – a judicial acquittal. Lorenzo was freed from prison. But after a petition filed by the PA Attorney General the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Lorenzo Johnson’s conviction and he was re-incarcerated to continue serving a life sentence without parole for a murder he did not commit.

This innocent man drove himself back to prison in June 2012—after less than five months of freedom—leaving his new wife and family, construction job and advocacy on behalf of others wrongfully convicted. The reason Lorenzo Johnson voluntarily returned to prison? Because he is innocent and fighting for full vindication.

In the words of Lorenzo Johnson, “A second is too long to be in prison when you are Innocent, so eighteen years … is Intolerable.”

Add your voices and demand again: Dismiss the charges against Lorenzo Johnson. Free Lorenzo NOW!

 SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

CONTRIBUTE TO HELP TAZZA AND THE OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS VISIT LORENZO AND STAY IN CONTACT!


Write: Lorenzo Johnson
            DF 1036
            SCI Mahanoy
            301 Morea Rd.
            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC


 www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org

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U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.

Stripped of  “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more determined as his PA state court appeal continues.

Increased public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

—Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq.
   October 25, 2013

For more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.
Hear Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”
Go to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and how to help.
 
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 SAVE CCSF!


Two campaigns that need funds – Please donate!
Posted on August 25, 2013

Cartoon by Anthonty Mata for CCSF Guardsman

DOE CAMPAIGN
We are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other side who have much more money and resources than we do.
So please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!

LEGAL CAMPAIGN
Save CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office, Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.
The total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.

PLEASE HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!
Checks can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent to:
Save CCSF Coalition
2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
Or you may donate online:  http://www.gofundme.com/4841ns

http://www.saveccsf.org/
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16 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"

American Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement.

In California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more than a decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's "The Prince."

Gabriel Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the last 16 years:

“Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a living tomb …’ I have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995…I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.”

That’s why over 30,000 prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the state has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their basic conditions.

California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and refuses to negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.

Solitary is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture rapporteur called for an international ban on the practice except in rare occasions. Here’s why:

The majority of the 80,000 people held in solitary in this country are severely mentally ill or because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for violent prisoners)
Even for people with stable mental health, solitary causes severe psychological reactions, often leading people to attempt suicide
It jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time reintegrating into society.

And to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation – their lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are being punished. But the media continues to write about the hunger strike and we can help keep the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing this petition.

Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.

Our criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly. The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals – but little by little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.

Thank you,
Anthony for the ACLU Action team
P.S. The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their basic conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary confinement. They are:

-End group punishment – prisoners say that officials often punish groups to address individual rule violations

-Abolish the debriefing policy, which is often demanded in return for better food or release from solitary

-End long-term solitary confinement

-Provide adequate and nutritious food

-Expand or provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates

Sources
“Solitary - and anger - in California's prisons.” Los Angeles Times July 13, 2013
“Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers' Stories: Gabriel Reyes.” TruthOut July 9, 2013
“Solitary confinement should be banned in most cases, UN expert says.” UN News October 18, 2011
"Stop Solitary - Two Pager" ACLU.org
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What you Didn't know about NYPD's Stop and Frisk program !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rfJHx0Gj6ys#at=990

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Egypt: The Next President -- a little Egyptian boy speaks his remarkable mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I

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Wealth Inequality in America

[This is a must see to believe video...bw]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

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Read the transcription of hero Bradley Manning's 35-page statement explaining why he leaked "state secrets" to WikiLeaks.

March 1, 2013

Alternet

The statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bradley-mannings-surprising-statement-court-details-why-he-made-his-historic?akid=10129.229473.UZvQfK&rd=1&src=newsletter802922&t=7

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You Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters

Posted 1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists – please click here to support the NLG.

We strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number (888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy. This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement Encounters

What Rights Do I Have?

Whether or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your political activities.

Standing Up For Free Speech

The government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a "subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.

What if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?

What if an agent or police officer comes to the door?

Do not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions. Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future. Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.

Do I have to answer questions?

You have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you reside.

Do I have to give my name?

As above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name could in some circumstances be a crime.

Do I need a lawyer?

You have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.

If I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have something to hide?

Anything you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights and refusing to answer questions.

Can agents search my home or office?

You do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of your workspace without your permission.

What if agents have a search warrant?

If you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes, including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first. (Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant is present.)

Do I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?

No. If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.

What if I speak to government agents anyway?

Even if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.

What if the police stop me on the street?

Ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not consent to a search of your bags or other property.

What if police or agents stop me in my car?

Keep your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance. You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one has to answer any questions.

What if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?

Write down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as possible.

What if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer their questions?

A grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.

What if I receive a grand jury subpoena?

Grand jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping ("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense attorney immediately.

The government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and disruption, discouraging continued activism.

Federal grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries, testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony, should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in your testimony.

Frequently prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.

In front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.

What if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?

If you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare instances you may face criminal contempt charges.

What If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the purposes of this pamphlet.

? Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.

? Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney. If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be barred from returning.

Based on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.

Do I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or signing any DHS papers?

Yes. You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you a list of free or low cost legal service providers.

Should I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?

If you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be. Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.

Am I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?

If you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider refusing to talk to the agent at all.

If I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?

Yes. In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief for you.

Can I call my consulate if I am arrested?

Yes. Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the right to refuse help from your consulate.

What happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing is over?

You could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.

What should I do if I want to contact DHS?

Always talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of your options to you.

What Are My Rights at Airports?

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches, detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion, sex or ethnicity.

If I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop and search me?

Yes. Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.

Can my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?

Yes. Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.

If I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get off the plane?

The pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.

What If I Am Under 18?

Do I have to answer questions?

No. Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.

What if I am detained?

If you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no cost.

Do I have the right to express political views at school?

Public school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.

Can my backpack or locker be searched?

School officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.

Disclaimer

This booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.

NLG National Hotline for Activists Contacted by the FBI

888-NLG-ECOL

(888-654-3265)

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Free Mumia NOW!

Prisonradio.org

Write to Mumia:

Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335

SCI Mahanoy

301 Morea Road

Frackville, PA 17932

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Wolkenstein

August 21, 2011 (917) 689-4009

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ILLEGALLY SENTENCED TO

LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE!

FREE MUMIA NOW!

www.FreeMumia.com

http://blacktalkradionetwork.com/profiles/blogs/mumia-is-formally-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-w-out-hearing-he-s



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"A Child's View from Gaza: Palestinian Children's Art and the Fight Against

Censorship" book

https://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=25

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WITNESS GAZA

http://www.witnessgaza.com/

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The Battle Is Still On To

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610

www.laboractionmumia.org

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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!

Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper

Chronicle Editorial

Monday, December 13, 2010

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL

Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's

death row!

http://www.savekevincooper.org/

http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255

URGENT ACTION APPEAL

- From Amnesty International USA

17 December 2010

Click here to take action online:

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&\

b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084

To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to

http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success

For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):

http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf

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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work

The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's

work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown

on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l

Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected

over the past nine years.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl

Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial

support to carry out its work.

To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to

http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html

and follow the simple instructions.

Thank you for your generosity!

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D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:

[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:

http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]

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Prison vs School: The Tour 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI


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Checkpoint - Jasiri X 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6Y6LSjulU

Published on Jan 28, 2014
"Checkpoint" is based on the oppression and discrimination Jasiri X witnessed firsthand during his recent trip to Palestine and Israel "Checkpoint" is produced by Agent of Change, and directed by Haute Muslim. Download "Checkpoint" at https://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/ch....

Follow Jasiri X at https://twitter.com/jasiri_x

 LYRICS
Journal of the hard times tales from the dark side
Evidence of the settlements on my hard drive
Man I swear my heart died at the end of that car ride
When I saw that checkpoint welcome to apartheid
Soldiers wear military green at the checkpoint
Automatic guns that's machine at the checkpoint
Tavors not m16s at the checkpoint
Fingers on the trigger you'll get leaned at the checkpoint
Little children grown adults or teens at the checkpoint
All ya papers better be clean at the checkpoint
You gotta but your finger on the screen at the checkpoint
And pray that red light turns green at the check point

 If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

 Separation walls that's surrounding the checkpoint
On top is barbwire like a crown on the checkpoint
Better have ya permits if your found at the checkpoint
Gunmen on the tower aiming down at the checkpoint
The idea is to keep you in fear of the checkpoint
You enter through the cage in the rear of the checkpoint
It feels like prison on a tier at the check point
I'd rather be anywhere but here at this checkpoint
Nelson Mandela wasn't blind to the check point
He stood for free Palestine not a check point
Support BDS don't give a dime to the checkpoint
This is international crime at the checkpoint
Arabs get treated like dogs at the checkpoint
Cause discrimination is the law at the checkpoint
Criminalized without a cause at the checkpoint
I'm just telling you what I saw at the checkpoint
Soldiers got bad attitudes at the checkpoint
Condescending and real rude at the checkpoint
Don't look em in they eyes when they move at the checkpoint
They might strip a man or woman nude at the checkpoint
Soldiers might blow you out of ya shoes at the checkpoint
Gas you up and then light the fuse at the checkpoint
Everyday you stand to be accused at the checkpoint
Each time your life you could lose at the checkpoint

 If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

 At the airport in Tel Aviv is a checkpoint
They pulled over our taxi at the checkpoint
Passport visa ID at the checkpoint
Soldiers going all through my things at the checkpoint
Said I was high risk security at the checkpoint
Because of the oppression I see at the checkpoint
Occupation in the 3rd degree at the checkpoint
All a nigga wanna do is leave fuck a checkpoint

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Exceptional art from the streets of Oakland:

Oakland Street Dancing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRRnAhmB58

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqH9s5mwTEY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atyTZ8prhCg

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NYC RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded

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On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded

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Fukushima Never Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU

"Fukushima, Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the Japanese government.

This is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.

The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then

when the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.

It also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks

the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.

Production Of Labor Video Project

P.O. Box 720027

San Francisco, CA 94172

www.laborvideo.org

lvpsf@laborvideo.org

For information on obtaining the video go to:

www.fukushimaneveragain.com

(415)282-1908


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1000 year of war through the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share

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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded

Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder

To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures

Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter

(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)

The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in

mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report

confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.

"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common

amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations

that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced

"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious

that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising

alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have

weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the

questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however

is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which

means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my

hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."

A Film By SBS

Distributed By Journeyman Pictures

April 2012

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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-sooti\

ng-of-trayvon-martin.html?hp

SPD Security Cams.wmv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WWDNbQUgm4&feature=player_embedded

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Kids being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate locations" in

Terror Drills

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ

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Private prisons,

a recession resistant investment opportunity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg

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Attack Dogs used on a High School Walkout in MD, Four Students Charged With

"Thought Crimes"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wafMaML17w

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Common forms of misconduct by Law Enforcement Officials and Prosecutors

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSpM4K276w&feature=related

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Organizing and Instigating: OCCUPY - Ronnie Goodman

http://arthazelwood.com/instigator/occupy/occupy-birth-video.html

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Rep News 12: Yes We Kony

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The New Black by The Mavrix - Official Music Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rLfja8488

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Japan One Year Later

http://www.onlineschools.org/japan-one-year-later/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

The CIA's Heart Attack Gun

http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/assassination-studies/the-cias-heart-attack-g\

un-.html

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The Invisible American Workforce

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison

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Labor Beat: NATO vs The 1st Amendment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQxnb4so3U

For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org.


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The Battle of Oakland

by brandon jourdan plus

http://vimeo.com/36256273

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Officers Pulled Off Street After Tape of Beating Surfaces

By ANDY NEWMAN

February 1, 2012, 10:56 am

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/officers-pulled-off-street-after-ta\

pe-of-beating-surfaces/?ref=nyregion

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This is excellent! Michelle Alexander pulls no punches!

Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow, speaks about the political

strategy

behind the War on Drugs and its connection to the mass incarceration of Black

and Brown people in the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75cbEdNo2U&feature=player_embedded

If you think Bill Clinton was "the first black President" you need to watch this

video and see how much damage his administration caused for the black community

as a result of his get tough attitude on crime that appealed to white swing

voters.

This speech took place at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on January 12,

2012.

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FREE BRADLEY MANNING

http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/national-call-in-for-bradley

I received the following reply from the White House November 18, 2011 regarding

the Bradley Manning petition I signed:

"Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning

"Thank you for signing the petition 'Free PFC Bradley Manning, the accused

WikiLeaks whistleblower.' We appreciate your participation in the We the People

platform on WhiteHouse.gov.

The We the People Terms of Participation explain that 'the White House may

decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or

similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or

agencies, federal courts, or state and local government.' The military justice

system is charged with enforcing the Uniform Code of

Military Justice. Accordingly, the White House declines to comment on the

specific case raised in this petition...

That's funny! I guess Obama didn't get this memo. Here's what Obama said about

Bradley:

BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!

"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be

charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the

President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with

a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!

Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-

Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at

fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political

action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be

Release Bradley Manning

Almost Gone (The Ballad Of Bradley Manning)

Written by Graham Nash and James Raymond (son of David Crosby)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYG7yJpBbQ&feature=player_embedded

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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded

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School police increasingly arresting American students?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-efNBvjUU&feature=player_embedded

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FYI:

Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"

The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are

plotted visually and audibly on a world map.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&feature=share&mid=5408

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We Are the 99 Percent

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to

choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are

suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay

and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1

percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

Brought to you by the people who occupy wall street. Why will YOU occupy?

OccupyWallSt.org

Occupytogether.org

wearethe99percentuk.tumblr.com

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

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We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools

YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAOJsBxAxY

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In honor of the 75th Anniversary of the 44-Day Flint Michigan sit-down strike at

GM that began December 30, 1936:

According to Michael Moore, (Although he has done some good things, this clip

isn't one of them) in this clip from his film, "Capitalism a Love Story," it was

Roosevelt who saved the day!):

"After a bloody battle one evening, the Governor of Michigan, with the support

of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, sent in the National

Guard. But the guns and the soldiers weren't used on the workers; they were

pointed at the police and the hired goons warning them to leave these workers

alone. For Mr. Roosevelt believed that the men inside had a right to a redress

of their grievances." -Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'

- Flint Sit-Down Strike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8x1_q9wg58

But those cannons were not aimed at the goons and cops! They were aimed straight

at the factory filled with strikers! Watch what REALLY happened and how the

strike was really won!

'With babies & banners' -- 75 years since the 44-day Flint sit-down strike

http://links.org.au/node/2681

--Inspiring

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HALLELUJAH CORPORATIONS (revised edition).mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g

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ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTS ON YOUTUBE SO FAR!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C-qIgbP9o&feature=share&mid=552

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ILWU Local 10 Longshore Workers Speak-Out At Oakland Port Shutdown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JUpBpZYwms

Uploaded by laborvideo on Dec 13, 2011

ILWU Local 10 longshore workers speak out during a blockade of the Port of

Oakland called for by Occupy Oakland. Anthony Levieges and Clarence Thomas rank

and file members of the union. The action took place on December 12, 2011 and

the interview took place at Pier 30 on the Oakland docks.

For more information on the ILWU Local 21 Longview EGT struggle go to

http://www.facebook.com/groups/256313837734192/

For further info on the action and the press conferernce go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3fE-Vhrw8&feature=youtu.be

Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org

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UC Davis Police Violence Adds Fuel to Fire

By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News

19 November 11

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8485-uc-davis-police-violence-add\

s-fuel-to-fire

UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4&feature=player_embedded

Police PEPPER SPRAY UC Davis STUDENT PROTESTERS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I&feature=player_embedded

Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmJmmnMkuEM&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CZ0t9ez_EGI#!

Occupy Seattle - 84 Year Old Woman Dorli Rainey Pepper Sprayed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTIyE_JlJzw&feature=related

*---------*

THE BEST VIDEO ON "OCCUPY THE WORLD"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S880UldxB1o

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Shot by police with rubber bullet at Occupy Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

Copwatch@Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Infiltrators and Provocateurs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0

*---------*

Occupy Oakland 11-2 Strike: Police Tear Gas, Black Bloc, War in the Streets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tu_D8SFYck&feature=player_embedded

*----*

Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest

were actually undercover Quebec police officers:

POLICE STATE Criminal Cops EXPOSED As Agent Provocateurs @ SPP Protest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoiisMMCFT0&feature=player_embedded

*----*

Quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=player_embedded

G20: Epic Undercover Police Fail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ7aU-n1L8&feature=player_embedded

*----*

WHAT HAPPENED IN OAKLAND TUESDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 25:

Occupy Oakland Protest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlPs-REyl-0&feature=player_embedded

Cops make mass arrests at occupy Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27kD2_7PwU&feature=player_embedded

Raw Video: Protesters Clash With Oakland Police

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpO-lJr2BQY&feature=player_embedded

Occupy Oakland - Flashbangs USED on protesters OPD LIES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqNOPZLw03Q&feature=player_embedded

KTVU TV Video of Police violence

http://www.ktvu.com/video/29587714/index.html

Marine Vet wounded, tear gas & flash-bang grenades thrown in downtown

Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMUgPTCgwcQ&feature=player_embedded

Tear Gas billowing through 14th & Broadway in Downtown Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4Y0pwJtWE&feature=player_embedded

Arrests at Occupy Atlanta -- This is what a police state looks like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStWz6jbeZA&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

Labor Beat: Hey You Billionaire, Pay Your Fair Share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8isD33f-I

*---------*

Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA48gmfGB6U&feature=youtu.be

Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjKZpOk7TyM&feature=related

*---------*

#Occupy Wall Street In Washington Square: Mohammed Ezzeldin, former occupier of

Egypt's Tahrir Square Speaks at Washington Square!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziodsFWEb5Y&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

#OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street

By adele pham

http://vimeo.com/30146870

*---------*

Live arrest at brooklyn bridge #occupywallstreet by We are Change

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULSI-31Pto&feature=player_embedded

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FREE THE CUBAN FIVE!

http://www.thecuban5.org/wordpress/index.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmS4kHC_OlY&feature=player_embedded

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One World One Revolution -- MUST SEE VIDEO -- Powerful and beautiful...bw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded

"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson

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Japan: angry Fukushima citizens confront government (video)

Posted by Xeni Jardin on Monday, Jul 25th at 11:36am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded


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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand

Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.

"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."

"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse

Sharkey, Vice

President, Chicago Teachers Union

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ

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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded

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To unsubscribe go to: bauaw2003-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com


Posted by at No comments:
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Please forward and post widely

Protest Now! No To Police Censorship of Mumia, and Teachers! 

Reinstate the Urban Dreams Website!

Action Still Needed! Please send messages to the School Board!

- Scroll down for School Board addresses -


Here’s what happened: Under pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)—operating through a friendly publicity agent called Fox News—the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) earlier this year shut down an entire website composed of teacher-drafted curriculum material called Urban Dreams.  Why?  Because this site included course guidelines on the censorship of innocent political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal!  The course material compared the censorship of Mumia’s extensive radio commentaries and writings, with that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s later writings, which focused on class exploitation and his opposition to the US’ imperialist War against Vietnam. Both were effectively silenced by the big media, including in Mumia’s case, by National Public Radio (NPR).

Mumia Is Innocent! But He’s Still a Top Target of FOP

Abu-Jamal has long been a top-row target for the FOP, which tried to get him legally killed for decades.  Mumia was framed by the Philadelphia police and falsely convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman in 1982, with the extensive collaboration of lying prosecutors, corrupt courts, the US Justice Department, and key political figures.

Mumia’s death sentence was dropped only when a federal appeals court judge set it aside because of blatantly illegal jury instructions by the original highly racist trial judge.  (The same federal judge upheld every bogus detail of Mumia’s conviction.)  The local Philadelphia prosecutor and politicians chickened out of trying to get Mumia’s original death sentence reinstated due to the fact that all their evidence of his guilt had long been exposed as totally fraudulent! 

FOP: Can’t Kill Him? Silence Him!

The FOP had to swallow the fact that the local mucky-mucks had dropped the ball on executing Mumia, but they were rewarded with a substitute sentence of life without the possibility of parole, imposed by a local court acting in secret.  Mumia is now serving this new and equally unjust sentence of “slow death.”

This gets us back to the FOP’s main point here, which is to silence Mumia. They can’t stop Mumia from writing and recording his world-renownd commentaries (which are available at Prison Radio, www.prisonradio.org). But they look for any opportunity to smear and discredit Mumia, and keep him out of the public eye; and these snakes have found a morsel on the Urban Dreams web site to go after!

Urban Dreams Was Well Used by Teachers

Urban Dreams was initially set up under a grant from the federal Dept. of Education in 1999-2004 and contains teacher-written material on a wide variety of issues.  It is (was) used extensively in California and beyond. The OUSD’s knee-jerk reaction to shut the whole site down because of a complaint from police, broadcast on the all-powerful Fox News network, shows the rapid decline of the US into police-state status.  Why should we let a bunch of lying, vicious cops, whose only real job is to protect the wealthy and powerful from all of us, get away with this?

Fresh from defeating Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department because he served for a period as Mumia’s attorney, the FOP is attacking a school lesson plan that asks students to think outside the box of system propaganda. But the grave-diggers of capitalist oppression are stirring.

Labor Says No To Police Persecution of Mumia!

In 1999, the Oakland teachers union, Oakland Education Association (OEA), held an unauthorized teach-in on Mumia and the death penalty.  Later the same year, longshore workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down all West-Coast ports to Free Mumia.  Other teacher actions happened around the country and internationally.  And now the Alameda County Labor Council, acting on a resolution submitted by an OEA member, has denounced the FOP-inspired shutdown of Urban Dreams, and called for the site’s complete restoration (ie no deletions).

Labor Says No To Censorship of Mumia, and Teachers!

We are asking union members particularly, and everyone else as well, if you abhor police-sponsored censorship of school curricula, and want to see justice and freedom for the wrongfully convicted such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, send your message of protest now to the Oakland School Board, at the three addresses below.

Union members: take the resolution below to your local union or labor council, and get it passed!

 Whatever you do, send a copy of your protest letter or resolution, or a report of your actions, to Oakland Teachers for Mumia, at communard2@juno.com.

Here is the Alameda County Labor Council resolution:

_   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _

Labor Speaks: Urban Dreams Censorship Resolution

Alameda County Labor Council

Whereas Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award winning journalist, defender of the rights of the working class, people of color, and oppressed people has been imprisoned since 1982 without parole for a crime he didn’t commit after his death sentence was finally overturned;

Whereas the Oakland Unified School District’s censorship of the Urban Dreams website was in reaction to a Fox News and Fraternal Order of Police attack on a lesson plan asking students to consider a parallel between censorship of Martin Luther King’s radical ideas and censorship of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and;

Whereas it is dangerous and unacceptable to allow the police to determine the curriculum of a major school district like Oakland, or any school district;

Whereas removal of the Urban Dreams OUSD website denies educators and student access to invaluable curriculum resources by Oakland teachers with social justice themes promoting critical thinking, and;

Whereas in 1999, the Oakland Education Association led the teach-in on Mumia Abu-Jamal and the death penalty which helped deepen the debate in the U.S. on the death penalty itself, and greatly intensified the spotlight on the widespread issue of wrongful conviction and demanded justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and;

Whereas OEA and Alameda Contra Costa County Service Center of CTA cited the Mumia teach-in and the censored unit on Martin Luther King Jr. in its Human Rights WHO AWARD for 2013;

Be it resolved that the Alameda Labor Council condemns OUSD’s censorship of the Urban Dreams website and demands that it immediately restore access to all materials on the website, reaffirms its demand for justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and issues a press release to seek the widest possible support from defenders of free speech and those who seek justice for Mumia.

- Submitted by Keith Brown, OEA

- Passed, Alameda County Labor Council, 14 July 2014
_   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _   _

Now It’s your turn!
Join with Ed Asner, and with the Alameda County Labor Council, in protesting the
Oakland School Board’s censorship of the Urban Dreams web site!
    • Ask your local union, labor council or other organization to endorse the resolution by the Alameda County Labor Council.
    • Demand the School Board reinstate the Urban Dreams website without any deletions!
    • Send your union resolutions or letters of protest to the following; 
        1. Oakland Board of Education: boe@ousd.k12.ca.us 
        2. Board President Davd Kakishiba: David.Kakishiba@ousd.k12.ca.us 
        3. Superintendent Antwan Wilson: Antwan.Wilson@ousd.k12.ca.us

Important: Send a copy of your resolution or email to:
Bob Mandel/Teachers for Mumia at: communard2@juno.com.
Thank you for your support!

-This message is from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
and Oakland Teachers for Mumia.
communard2@juno.com.

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Obama Faulted in Terror Fight, New Poll Finds
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and




2)  Artificial Sweeteners May Disrupt Body’s Blood Sugar Controls
By





3) Busy Days Precede a March Focusing on Climate Change
By





4) We Can Save the Caribbean’s Coral Reefs
By JEREMY JACKSON and AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON




5) Sierra Leone Begins 3-Day Lockdown to Fight Ebola Outbreak
[Does anyone else think this is insane? What about cleaning up the squalor? What about ending the poverty? Is this what the 3,000 U.S. troops are going to do to "fight Ebola?" Are they simply going to arrest those that are ill and take them away to die? ...bw]
By





6) Climate Change March Begins in New York City
By





7) U.S. and Allies Strike ISIS Targets in Syria
By , and




8) The New York Jail Scandal Continues
By




9) Israeli Forces Kill 2 Suspects in Murder of Jewish Teenagers
By




10) Talk in Synagogue of Israel and Gaza Goes From Debate to Wrath to Rage
By




11) Washington: Marijuana-Use Tickets Are Nullified
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




12) Deaths From Faulty Switch in G.M. Cars Edge Higher
By HILARY STOUT





13) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
By




14) A California Dream: Not Having to Settle for Just One Bedroom
By




15) Cleared After Nearly 23 Years in Prison, but Not Free
By






















 








































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1) Obama Faulted in Terror Fight, New Poll Finds
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and

For the first time in his presidency, more Americans disapprove of President Obama’s handling of terrorism than approve of it, as discontent about his management of foreign affairs and the fight against Sunni militants in Iraq and Syria weighs on an anxious and conflicted public, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

As Mr. Obama broadens the military offensive against Islamic extremists, the survey finds broad support for United States airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, but it also demonstrates how torn Americans are about wading back into battle in the Middle East. A majority is opposed to committing ground forces there, amid sweeping concern that increased American participation will lead to a long and costly mission.

With midterm elections approaching, Americans’ fears about a terrorist attack on United States soil are on the rise, and the public is questioning Mr. Obama’s strategy for combating the militant organization calling itself the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Most respondents say the president has no clear plan for confronting the group, and that he has not been tough enough in dealing with it.

“He is ambivalent, and I think it shows,” Jennifer Shelton-Armstrong, a 45-year-old Democrat in Mission Viejo, California, said in a follow-up interview. “There is no clear plan.”

Mr. Obama has lost considerable ground with the public in the month since he announced military action against the Islamic State, which also saw the group release two videotapes showing the beheadings of American journalists. Fifty-eight percent now disapprove of his handling of foreign policy, a 10-point jump from a CBS News poll conducted last month. Fifty percent rate him negatively on handling terrorism, a 12-point increase from March, compared with 41 percent who rate him positively, while the rest had no opinion.

Taken together, the results suggest a profoundly unsettled public mood, with two-thirds of Americans surveyed saying the country is on the wrong track and half disapproving of how Mr. Obama is doing his job, a negative assessment that threatens to be a substantial drag on Democrats in November.

Still, the public is sending some mixed signals. For instance, while Americans give Mr. Obama low marks on handling terrorism, foreign policy and the Islamic State, they say they back the prescription he has laid out to counter the militants — airstrikes and no combat troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Respondents also said Republicans would do a better job on two of their top issues — terrorism and the economy — even though they disapprove of congressional Republicans in greater numbers than they do congressional Democrats.

The poll numbers present a steep climb for the president as he seeks to rally public support for the effort against the Islamic State, just as Democrats are seeking ways to motivate their core supporters, who include antiwar voters. Mr. Obama’s job approval ratings are strikingly similar to those of George W. Bush at the same point in his second term in office in 2006, when Americans’ war fatigue helped Democrats sweep both houses of Congress in what Mr. Bush later called “a thumping.”

The poll shows Republicans having gained sharply with voters ahead of the November balloting, with 45 percent of likely voters saying they will back Republicans in November’s contests for the House of Representatives, compared with 39 percent who say they will back Democrats.

While the survey shows both political parties deeply unpopular, Republicans fare worse than Democrats, with a majority of their own voters giving the Republicans low marks for their performance in Congress. But Mr. Obama’s poor standing is proving a rallying point for his disaffected political opposition; 55 percent of Republicans said their vote for Congress would be a vote against the president.

“It’s a vote for the lesser of two evils and a vote against Obama,” said John Durr, a 71-year-old independent in Virginia Beach, who listed economic issues and recent “scandals” involving the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice’s “Fast and Furious” program, and the attack on an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, as among the reasons he would vote Republican in November. “We’ve lost world respect. I don’t think he has a foreign policy; we’re just reacting.”

The nationwide poll was conducted from Sept. 12 through Sept. 15 by landline and cellphone among 1,009 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for all adults and plus or minus 4 percent for likely voters.

The findings represent the first time since he became president that more Americans rate Mr. Obama negatively on terrorism than they do positively. Despite his low ratings on terrorism and foreign policy, a majority says it has confidence in Mr. Obama’s ability to handle an international crisis. And while most Americans continue to say the United States should not take the leading role in trying to solve international conflicts, that view is losing ground.

Fifty-four percent say the United States should not play the primary role, compared with 58 percent in June and 65 percent in February. The results help explain the political predicament facing Mr. Obama with his Democratic base, which includes an antiwar faction that is less enthusiastic than Republicans about airstrikes, while his Republican critics are considerably more hawkish and worried that the president is projecting weakness.

“My fear is he won’t go far enough — I think he should go further,” said Richard Kline, 56, an engineer and Republican in Indianola, Iowa. “I’d rather see them fought over there than over here.”

While Democrats are more positive about Mr. Obama’s management of foreign policy crises and terrorism, a third of them say he has no clear plan for countering the Islamic State and two fifths of Democrats say he is not being tough enough.

Most Americans — nearly 6 in 10 — say they view the Islamic State as a major threat to the security of the United States, and 7 in 10 support airstrikes against the group, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents. Still, on the issue of sending ground troops, opposed by 55 percent of respondents, the parties diverge, with most Republicans in favor and Democrats and independents opposed.

“I’m glad President Obama is not too hawkish,” said Margaret Scioli, 67, a retired electrocardiogram technician and Democrat in Melrose, Mass. “It’s easy to get into wars, but hard to get out of them.”

The split comes amid a debate, including inside the Obama administration, about whether ground troops may ultimately be necessary to confront the Islamic State.

Mr. Obama on Wednesday renewed his vow not to involve American troops in a ground war, a day after Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, his top military adviser and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that he might recommend deploying them in Syria if airstrikes were not successful.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved by a vote of 273-156 Mr. Obama’s request for authorization to arm and train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, and the Senate takes up the measure on Thursday. The poll finds 48 percent saying they back doing so, while 40 percent are opposed. A majority says it backs sending additional military advisers to Iraq.

While terrorism is a concern for voters, the survey shows the economy is by far their top issue, with 38 percent saying that topic was driving their vote this fall and more voters saying Republicans are likely to do a better job on it. That’s a notable change from last month’s CBS News Poll, which found voters split on which party would do a better job on the economy.

Republicans also get higher marks on handling foreign policy and terrorism, while Democrats have an edge on health care. Voters are split on which party would do a better job on immigration. The environment for incumbents is poisonous, with nearly 9 in 10 voters saying it is time to give new people a chance. And in a striking finding, the poll diverges from the well-worn adage that voters hate Congress but love their congressmen; nearly two-thirds now say they are ready to throw their own representatives out of office as well.

Marina Stefan and Megan Thee-Brenan contributed reporting.




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2)  Artificial Sweeteners May Disrupt Body’s Blood Sugar Controls
By


Artificial sweeteners may disrupt the body’s ability to regulate blood sugar, causing metabolic changes that can be a precursor to diabetes, researchers are reporting.

That is “the very same condition that we often aim to prevent” by consuming sweeteners instead of sugar, said Dr. Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, at a news conference to discuss the findings.

The scientists performed a multitude of experiments, mostly on mice, to back up their assertion that the sweeteners alter the microbiome, the population of bacteria that is in the digestive system.

The different mix of microbes, the researchers contend, changes the metabolism of glucose, causing levels to rise higher after eating and to decline more slowly than they otherwise would.

The findings by Dr. Elinav and his collaborators in Israel, including Eran Segal, a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Weizmann, are being published Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Cathryn R. Nagler, a professor of pathology at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the research but did write an accompanying commentary in Nature, called the results “very compelling.”

She noted that many conditions, including obesity and diabetes, had been linked to changes in the microbiome. “What the study suggests,” she said, “is we should step back and reassess our extensive use of artificial sweeteners.”

Previous studies on the health effects of artificial sweeteners have come to conflicting and confusing findings. Some found that they were associated with weight loss; others found the exact opposite, that people who drank diet soda actually weighed more.

Some found a correlation between artificial sweeteners and diabetes, but those findings were not entirely convincing: Those who switch to the products may already be overweight and prone to the disease.

While acknowledging that it is too early for broad or definitive conclusions, Dr. Elinav said he had already changed his own behavior.

“I’ve consumed very large amounts of coffee, and extensively used sweeteners, thinking like many other people that they are at least not harmful to me and perhaps even beneficial,” he said. “Given the surprising results that we got in our study, I made a personal preference to stop using them.

“We don’t think the body of evidence that we present in humans is sufficient to change the current recommendations,” he continued. “But I would hope it would provoke a healthy discussion.”

In the initial set of experiments, the scientists added saccharin (the sweetener in the pink packets of Sweet’N Low), sucralose (the yellow packets of Splenda) or aspartame (the blue packets of Equal) to the drinking water of 10-week-old mice. Other mice drank plain water or water supplemented with glucose or with ordinary table sugar. After a week, there was little change in the mice who drank water or sugar water, but the group getting artificial sweeteners developed marked intolerance to glucose.

Glucose intolerance, in which the body is less able to cope with large amounts of sugar, can lead to more serious illnesses like metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes.

When the researchers treated the mice with antibiotics, killing much of the bacteria in the digestive system, the glucose intolerance went away.

At present, the scientists cannot explain how the sweeteners affect the bacteria or why the three different molecules of saccharin, aspartame and sucralose result in similar changes in the glucose metabolism.

To further test their hypothesis that the change in glucose metabolism was caused by a change in bacteria, they performed another series of experiments, this time focusing just on saccharin. They took intestinal bacteria from mice who had drank saccharin-laced water and injected them in mice that had never been exposed any saccharin. Those mice developed the same glucose intolerance. And DNA sequencing showed that saccharin had markedly changed the variety of bacteria in the guts of the mice that consumed it.

Next, the researchers turned to a study they were conducting to track the effects of nutrition and gut bacteria on people’s long-term health. For 381 nondiabetic participants in the study, the researchers found a correlation between the reported use of any kind of artificial sweeteners and signs of glucose intolerance. In addition, the gut bacteria of those who used artificial sweeteners were different from those who did not.

Finally, they recruited seven volunteers who normally did not use artificial sweeteners and over six days gave them the maximum amount of saccharin recommended by the United States Food and Drug Administration. In four of the seven, blood-sugar levels were disrupted in the same way as in mice.

Further, when they injected the human participants’ bacteria into the intestines of mice, the animals again developed glucose intolerance, suggesting that effect was the same in both mice and humans.

“That experiment is compelling to me,” Dr. Nagler said.

Intriguingly — “superstriking and interesting to us,” Dr. Segal said — the intestinal bacteria of the people who did experience effects were different from those who did not. This suggests that any effects of artificial sweeteners are not universal. It also suggests probiotics — medicines consisting of live bacteria — could be used to shift gut bacteria to a population that reversed the glucose intolerance.

Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health who did not take part in the study, called it interesting but far from conclusive and added that given the number of participants, “I think the validity of the human study is questionable.”

The researchers said future research would examine aspartame and sucralose in detail as well as other alternative sweeteners like stevia.


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3) Busy Days Precede a March Focusing on Climate Change
By

In a three-story warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, hundreds of people are working to turn the People’s Climate March planned for Sunday into a visual spectacle.

There were victims of Hurricane Sandy from the Rockaways toiling with artists on a 30-foot inflatable life preserver, and immigrant artists constructing a papier-mâché tree embedded with axes. Elsewhere, religious leaders were building an ark and scientists were constructing a chalkboard covered with calculations about carbon.

The run-up to what organizers say will be the largest protest about climate change in the history of the United States has transformed New York City into a beehive of planning and creativity, drawing graying local activists and young artists from as far away as Germany.

“This is the final crunch, the product of six months of work to make the People’s March a big, beautiful expression of the climate movement,” said Rachel Schragis, a Brooklyn-based artist and activist who is coordinating the production of floats, banners and signs.

The march, organized by more than a dozen environmental, labor and social justice groups, is planned to wend its way through Midtown Manhattan along a two-mile route approved by the city’s Police Department last month. It will start at 11:30 a.m. at Columbus Circle, then move east along 59th Street, south on Avenue of the Americas and west on 42nd Street, finishing at 11th Avenue and West 34th Street.

Unlike the nuclear disarmament demonstration that drew more than 500,000 people to Central Park for speeches in 1982, the event on Sunday will rely on the marchers themselves to broadcast a message of frustration and anger at what organizers describe as a lack of action by American and world leaders.

At 1 p.m., after a moment of silence, marchers will be encouraged to use instruments, cellphone alarms and whistles to make as much noise as possible, helped by at least 20 marching bands and the tolling of church bells across the city.

“We’re going to sound the burglar alarm on people who are stealing the future,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of the group 350.org, which is helping to organize the march, and the author of several books about climate change, notably “The End of Nature,” published 25 years ago.

“Since then we’ve watched the summer Arctic disappear and the ocean turn steadily acidic,” Mr. McKibben said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “It’s not just that things are not getting better. They are getting horribly worse. Unlike any other issue we have faced, this one comes with a time limit. If we don’t get it right soon, we’ll never get it right.”

Organizers say it is impossible to predict how many people could show up. But 1,400 “partner organizations” have signed on, ranging from small groups to international coalitions. In addition, students have mobilized marchers at more than 300 college campuses, and more than 2,700 climate events in 158 countries are planned to coincide with the New York march, including rallies in Delhi, Jakarta, London, Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro.

In New York, organizers are expecting 496 buses from as far away as Minnesota and Kansas to bring marchers.

“The most useful gallon of gasoline anyone will ever burn is the one that gets them to the march,” Mr. McKibben said. (By contrast, all floats will be pulled by biodeisel-powered cars and trucks or by hand, organizers said.)

The forecast called for mostly sunny weather with a high temperature of 81, which would encourage a larger turnout. In February 2013, more than 40,000 protesters turned out in Washington to demand action on climate change and to challenge the contentious Keystone XL pipeline.

The police are closing off Central Park West north of Columbus Circle, and organizers are asking marchers to gather from West 65th to West 86th Street, before the start of the march.

Leslie Cagan, a longtime New York activist who coordinated the nuclear disarmament demonstration in 1982, has met numerous times with the Police Department to iron out the logistics of Sunday’s march. “That area on Central Park West can hold a lot of people — we believe between 80,000 and 100,000,” she said. The police would not provide estimates of the number of expected attendees.

Organizers have asked marchers to go to various themed staging areas along Central Park West depending on their leanings.

For example, a contingent of labor, families, students and older adults can congregate north of West 65th Street under the rubric “We Can Build the Future.”

Organizers have run phone banks, blanketed subway stations with fliers and issued weekly news releases.

They also produced a 52-minute documentary, “Disruption,” about planning the march. The film, released on Sept. 7, includes footage of meetings and pre-march rallies — interspersed with lessons on climate change and the lagging efforts so far to stop it.

Organizers say they chose Sunday because it comes ahead of a climate summit at the United Nations on Tuesday. World delegates are expected to hold high-level discussions about climate change that will lay the groundwork for a potential global agreement on emissions next year in Paris. (Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced on Tuesday that he planned to join the march.)

“When the secretary general invited world leaders to this summit, all of us in the climate justice movement thought, ‘Left to their own devices, these guys will do the same thing they’ve done for 25 years — i.e., nothing,’ ” Mr. McKibben said. “So we thought, we better go to New York, too.”



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4) We Can Save the Caribbean’s Coral Reefs
By JEREMY JACKSON and AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON

PARROTFISH eat algae and seaweed. These brightly colored fish with beaklike mouths inhabit coral reefs, the wellsprings of ocean life. Without them and other herbivores, algae and seaweed would overgrow the reefs, suppress coral growth and threaten the incredible array of life that depends on these reefs for shelter and food.

This was happening in Bermuda, until the government in 1990 banned fish traps that were decimating the parrotfish population. Today, Bermuda’s coral reefs are relatively healthy, a bright spot in the wider Caribbean, where total coral cover has declined by half since 1970.

Last month, in a reminder of just how dire the situation facing the world’s coral reefs is, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was listing 20 species of coral as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, including all of what were once the most abundant Caribbean corals. The action focused primarily on the projected impacts of global warming and ocean acidification. Carbon dioxide emissions are increasing ocean temperatures and making them more acidic — and less hospitable for corals.

But climate change is only half the story. Up to now, the impacts of climate change on reefs have been much less destructive than the localized effects of overfishing, runoff pollution from the land and the destruction of habitats from coastal development. Those problems have exploded in intensity over the past century and will continue to increase sharply with population growth.

Proof of the destructive power of those impacts is evident in the central Pacific where, in spite of rising temperatures, coral cover is many times higher around islands unaffected by fishing and pollution, compared with heavily fished and polluted reefs of nearby islands.

A recent detailed assessment of the changing status of Caribbean reefs over the past 40 years by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network and the International Union for Conservation of Nature provides a similarly important finding that offers hope. Across the Caribbean, reefs near islands with effective local protections and governance, like the ones around Bermuda, have double the amount of living coral compared with those that lack those protections. They also have more fish and clearer waters.But in Florida, banning fish traps — which should result in more parrotfish, less algae and more coral — has not stemmed coral decline. That’s because of extreme local pressures from millions of residents and tourists and insufficient controls on development. Similar problems plague the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, which is being damaged by agricultural runoff and the development of huge ports for exporting coal. Fishing is carefully regulated there, but those other threats must be equally well managed.

The few remaining places in the wider Caribbean with relatively healthy reefs have one thing in common: a greater abundance of parrotfish and other herbivores. They also benefit by being adjacent to islands with comparatively small populations, more modest development and less pollution. You find this in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, on reefs around Curaçao and Bonaire and in protected marine areas in the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands.

Stories about coral reefs commonly focus on doom and gloom. But these new findings indicate that there is actually something we can do right now to help reefs recover: prevent overfishing, overdevelopment and pollution from the land.

None of this lessens our concerns about climate change as humanity burns more coal and oil instead of less. But there is increasing evidence that protection from local stresses promotes the resilience of reef corals to climate change.

Several Caribbean islands are moving to control overfishing and pollution. Barbuda just enacted legislation to protect parrotfish, stop overfishing and establish marine sanctuaries. And the Bahamas, Belize, Bonaire, Cuba and Curaçao are working to enhance protections.

In contrast, the condition of the coral reefs of the Florida Keys, the United States Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico is among the worst in the wider Caribbean, despite vast sums invested in the monitoring of reefs and research on the effects of climate change. This monitoring and research are vitally important, but collecting information without strong corrective action is like a doctor analyzing a patient’s decline without doing everything possible to save her life.

We need to move immediately beyond listings of species as threatened and research about climate change and take rigorous action against the local and global stresses killing corals.

Coral reefs are vital to the economies of the 38 Caribbean countries and territories and their millions of people. These reefs generate roughly $3 billion annually in tourism and fishing and provide protection from storms.

To save coral reefs, we need to follow the lead of Barbuda and our other proactive neighbors. We need to stop all forms of overfishing, establish large and effectively enforced marine protected areas and impose strict regulations on coastal development and pollution while at the same time working to reduce fossil fuel emissions driving climate change. It’s not either/or. It’s all of the above.

 
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5) Sierra Leone Begins 3-Day Lockdown to Fight Ebola Outbreak
By

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — One of the most stringent anti-Ebola measures to date began here Friday morning as Sierra Leone imposed a three-day national lockdown, ordering people off the streets and into their homes in an effort to stamp out the deadly disease.

Police officers patrolled the streets of the densely populated capital, telling stragglers to go home and stay indoors. Volunteers in bright jerseys prepared to go house-to-house throughout the country to warn people about Ebola’s dangers and to root out those who might be infected but were staying in hiding.

The normally busy streets of Freetown were empty Friday morning, stores were closed and pedestrians were rare on the main thoroughfares.

The country’s president, justifying the extraordinary move in a radio address Thursday night, suggested that Sierra Leone was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the disease.“Some of the things we are asking you to do are difficult, but life is better than these difficulties,” President Ernest Bai Koroma said.

More than 200 new cases of Ebola have been reported in Sierra Leone in the past week, according to the World Health Organization, with transmission described as particularly high in the capital; nearly 40 percent of cases in the country were identified in the three weeks preceding Sept. 14; and more than 560 people have died in Sierra Leone, about one-fifth of the total from this outbreak.

The campaign that began here Friday morning reflected the desperation of West African governments — and in particular those of the three hardest-hit countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — as they struggle with an epidemic that the health authorities have warned is showing no signs of slowing down.

No country has attempted anything on the scale of what is being tried in Sierra Leone, where more than 20,000 volunteers enlisted to help identify households where the authorities suspect people infected with the Ebola virus are hiding.

Yet there were plenty of indications on Friday that the campaign promised more than it could initially deliver in this country of six million people, at least in the capital.

Well into the morning, the house-to-house visits had yet to begin in Kroo Bay, a densely populated warren of iron-roof shanties where roughly 14,000 people live, despite officials saying they would start at dawn.

The neighborhood, a perennial home of cholera outbreaks, sits in a sea of muddy lanes and open sewers in which pigs forage. The police cruised into Kroo Bay on a pickup truck, yelling at lingering residents to go indoors and warning of imprisonment; people simply stared at the officers and continued lingering as the police drove off.

“The policeman is doing his thing, and I am doing my thing,” said Kerfala Koroma, 22, a building contractor who added that he was waiting for his breakfast. “We can’t even afford something to eat on a normal day. How can we get something now?” (Mr. Koroma is not related to Sierra Leone’s president.)

Residents insisted that there had been no cases of Ebola in Kroo Bay, although there were loud complaints from some that the bodies of victims had been dumped in a nearby cemetery.

As the morning wore on, the house-to-house volunteers began to assemble in a bare-bones community center, with several noting pointedly that they were not being paid. Others stressed the daunting challenge of covering thousands of households with a team of only 50.

By 9 a.m., with two hours of daylight already gone, the volunteers were still being given their marching orders.

“We told them to come at 6:30, but naturally, in this part of the world, people are not too time-cautious,” Sima Conteh, the volunteers’ coordinator, said with a grin. Elsewhere in town, groups of volunteers could be seen sitting on the sidewalk.

Yet some volunteers expressed hope that their efforts would not be wasted. “You have the chance to get the people with the disease out,” said Emmanuel Cole, a 33-year-old taxi driver who said he had refused to take any passengers since the epidemic began, for fear of becoming infected.

“The country is not moving now. We have got to help the country now,” Mr. Cole said. “It is not a normal time.”



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6) Climate Change March Begins in New York City
By

Under leaden skies, throngs of demonstrators stretching as far as the eye could see started to move through Midtown Manhattan late Sunday morning, chanting their demands for action on climate change.

With drums and tubas, banners and floats, the People's Climate March turned Columbus Circle, where the march began just before 11:30 a.m., into a colorful tableau. The demonstrators represented a broad coalition of ages, races, geographic locales and interests, with union members, religious leaders, scientists, politicians and students joining the procession.

“I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together,” said Carol Sutton of Norwalk, Conn., the president of a teachers' union. “It begins in the streets.”With world leaders gathering at the United Nations on Tuesday for a climate summit, marchers said the timing was right for the populist message in support of limits on carbon emissions. The signs marchers held were as varied as the movement: “There is No PlanetB,” “Forests Not for Sale” and “Jobs, Justice, Clean Energy.”“The climate is changing,” said Otis Daniels, 58, of the Bronx. “Everyone knows it; everyone feels it. But no one is doing anything about it.”

The march covers a two-mile route, down Avenue of the Americas, west on 42nd Street to 11th Avenue and south to 34th Street.

The U.N. summit this week is expected to create a framework for a potential global agreement on emissions late next year in Paris.

The timing of the march was also significant in another regard. Last week, meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that this summer — the months of June, July and August — was the hottest on record for the globe, and that 2014 was on track to break the record for the hottest year, set in 2010.

“Climate change is no longer an environmental issue; it’s an everybody issue,” Sam Barratt, a campaign director for the online advocacy group Avaaz, which helped plan the march, said on Friday.“The number of natural disasters has increased and the science is so much more clear,” he added. “This march has many messages, but the one that we’re seeing and hearing is the call for a renewable revolution.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, whose administration announced this weekend a sweeping plan to overhaul energy efficiency standards in all city-owned buildings, was among the high-profile participants expected to join the march, including the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon; former Vice President Al Gore; the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo; at least two United States senators; and one-third of the New York City Council.

Additionally, nearly 2,700 climate events were planned in more than 150 countries to coincide with the march, considered the centerpiece of the international protest. They ranged from a small rally in Tanzania to major demonstrations from Berlin to Bogata.

Participants from across the country began arriving early on Sunday morningat the staging area near the American Museum of Natural History. Rosemary Snow, 75, stretched her legs after a nearly 14-hour bus drive from Georgia.

“I thought we’d have a lot of younger people on the bus,” said Ms. Snow, who made the trip with her grandson. “There’s a really great mix of people.”

Ms. Snow had traveled with dozens of others who came from different parts of the state, including Valdosta, Savannah and Atlanta.

A professor at the University of Georgia, Chris Cuomo of Decatur, Ga., said the group was organized by the Georgia Climate Change Coalition.

She said she hoped the coalition’s presence at the rally would “let the rest of the world know that people from small-town America, urban America, rural America care about climate change.”

Nearby, Ahni Rocheleau of Santa Fe, N.M., was seated while eating a breakfast of organic yogurt and buckwheat pancakes. She is a member of the Great March for Climate Action, a cross-country walk to raise awareness for alternative and sustainable energy practices.

“We hope the heart and mind of the people will be awakened,” she said. “Coal is not the way to go.”

Nearly 500 buses brought marchers from South Carolina, Kansas, Minnesota and Canada, while a “climate train” transported participants from California.

At 12:58 p.m., a moment of silence was to be followed by a blare of noise — a symbolic sounding of the alarm on climate change — from horns, whistles and cellphone alarms. More than 20 marching bands and tolling church bells were expected contribute to the cacophony.

No speeches were planned, but the march was to end with a block party on 11th Avenue between 34th and 38th Streets. There, participants could get a closer look at many of the floats and other artwork created for the march, including a 30-foot inflatable life preserver, 100 sunflowers and a model of the New York City skyline with bicyclists powering its lights.

New York’s political establishment was set to come out in force. On Friday, Mayor de Blasio announced on Twitter his intention to join the protest. “Proud to walk in #PeoplesClimate March on Sunday,” he wrote. “It’s everyone’s responsibility to leave a livable planet for the next generation.”

At least 17 council members planned to march. In a nod to the event, the Council announced a related package of bills on Friday aimed at reducing the city’s carbon footprint by connecting unemployed New Yorkers to green jobs, making buildings more energy-efficient and promoting low-carbon transportation. The legislation seeks an 80 percent reduction in the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

With its bands and colorful floats, the march offered a festive atmosphere, but organizers said that the underlying message was somber. “We are trying to celebrate our lives and this planet in order to show that this is what we are fighting for,” said Leslie Cagan, the logistics coordinator for the march. “It’s the human spirit — and everything else on this planet — that is in danger.”

The march was organized by a dozen environmental, labor and social justice groups, including the Sierra Club, Avaaz, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, 350.org, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and 1199 S.E.I.U. In addition, more than 1,570 “partner organizations” signed on to march.

Organizers were hoping that the warm weather forecasted for the day would yield a large turnout.

“Our biggest problem is the financial power of the fossil fuel industry,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and author of “The End of Nature.”

“We can’t match that money,” he said. “So we have to work in the currency of movements — passion, spirit, creativity and bodies — and it will all be on display on Sunday.”

Kenneth Rosen contributed reporting.
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7) U.S. and Allies Strike ISIS Targets in Syria
By , and

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The United States and five Arab allies launched a wide-ranging air campaign against the Islamic State and at least one other extremist group in Syria for the first time early Tuesday, targeting the groups’ bases, training camps and checkpoints in at least four provinces, according to the United States military and Syrian activists.

The attacks were said to have scattered the jihadist forces and damaged the network of facilities they have built in Syria that helped fuel the group’s seizure of a large part of Iraq this year.

Separate from the attacks on the Islamic State, the United States Central Command, or Centcom, said that American forces acting alone “took action” against “a network of seasoned Al Qaeda veterans” from the Khorasan group in Syria to disrupt “imminent attack planning against the United States and Western interests.”

Officials did not reveal where or when such attacks might take place.Al Qaeda cut ties with the Islamic State earlier this year because the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, disobeyed orders from Al Qaeda to fight only in Iraq. Just days ago, American officials said the Khorasan group, led by a shadowy figure who was once in Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, had emerged in the past year as the Syria-based cell most intent on launching a terrorist attack on the United States or on its installations overseas.

The latest campaign opened with multiple strikes before dawn that focused on the Islamic State’s de facto capital, the city of Raqqa, and on its bases in the surrounding countryside. Other strikes hit in the provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasaka, whose oil wells the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have exploited to finance its operations.

The extent of the damage caused by the strikes remained unclear. Centcom said the wave of fighter planes, bombers, drones and cruise missiles struck 14 targets linked to the Islamic State.

“All aircraft safely exited the strike areas,” the statement said.

Almost 50 cruise missiles were launched from two American vessels in the Red Sea and the north of the Persian Gulf, it said, adding that four other attacks were launched on militant targets in Iraq in the same period, bringing the total there to 194.

The intensity and scale of the strikes were greater than those launched by the United States in Iraq, where it has been bombing select Islamic State targets for months. The air campaign also marks the biggest direct military intervention in Syria since the crisis began more than three years ago.

Centcom identified the Arab states participating in the campaign as Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Their participation is seen as important to limit criticisms that the United States is waging war alone against Muslims. But their role varied between support for the strikes and participation, the military said.

The Jordanian Army said on Tuesday that it had carried out airstrikes against “terrorist groups” that were plotting to attack Jordan, according to Reuters.

In intervening in Syria, the United States is injecting its military might into a brutal civil war between the government of President Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State and a range of rebel groups that originally took up arms to fight Mr. Assad but have also come to oppose the Islamic State.

It was unclear what effect the American-led strikes would have on the larger conflict.

The Islamic State, while having chalked up numerous victories against the Syrian and Iraqi security forces and against Syrian rebels, has proved vulnerable to air power in Iraq, and it is unlikely that it can continue to hold all of its territory and facilities amid a sustained air campaign.

American officials said that the strikes were not coordinated with the government of Mr. Assad, who President Obama has said has lost his legitimacy to rule and should step down. But Syrian state television reported on Monday that the United States had informed Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations before the attacks were launched. This followed weeks of threats by Syrian officials that any uncoordinated strikes on Syria would be considered an act of aggression.

Some of Syria’s allies have suggested that the government in Damascus would benefit from strikes, although analysts question whether the Syrian military has the forces it would need to do so.

Syria also has hundreds of rebels groups, many of which hate the Islamic State, and the United States has been working with allies to build up a small number groups deemed moderate. But these forces remain relatively small and are far from the Islamic State’s locations, so there is little chance that they will soon be able to seize control of any areas vacated by the Islamic State.

Reuters quoted an unidentified ISIS fighter as saying “these attacks will be answered.” The militants have already released videos showing the beheadings of two American hostages and of one British captive, and have threatened a fourth hostage, a Briton, with the same fate.

Additionally, an Algerian group linked to Islamic State has claimed to have kidnapped a French citizen. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told French radio that there would be “no discussion, no negotiation and we will never give in to blackmail” about the hostage’s fate.

France, whose warplanes joined the air campaign in Iraq last week but not the overnight strikes in Syria, has strongly denied persistent reports that it has paid ransom money to free its citizens held hostage by jihadist groups.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported strikes in five Syrian provinces, in the country’s north and east, targeting bases and training camps of the Islamic State and other groups.

In addition to Islamic State bases in the provinces of Raqqa, Hasaka, Deir al-Zour and Aleppo, strikes also hit bases belonging to the Nusra Front further west, killing at least seven Nusra fighters and eight civilians, according to the observatory, which tracks the conflict from Britain through a network of contacts in Syria.

Even for a population that has grown used to the sounds and sights of war, the new strikes proved surprising.

In a video posted online, a man in Idlib Province inspected a greenish metal hunk of what he said was the remainder of the munitions used in a strike.

“No one knows what happened yet,” the man said. “This was the first time we have heard an explosion like this during this revolution.”

Adding to the broader ramifications of the Syrian war, the Israeli military said Tuesday that it had shot down a Syrian fighter jet that had “infiltrated into Israeli airspace,” the first such incident in at least a quarter of a century.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said the Patriot air-defense system had intercepted a Russian-made Sukhoi warplane over the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights around 9:15 a.m.

On Syria’s northern border, meanwhile, more than 130,000 Syrian Kurds have fled into Turkey to escape an advance by Islamic State fighters. The humanitarian catastrophe could worsen within days. The United Nations relief agency in Geneva said on Tuesday that it was possible that all 400,000 inhabitants of a Syrian Kurdish border town, which Arabs refer to as Ayn-al-Arab and Kurds call Kobani, would to try to flee into Turkey.

The United Nations human rights agency said Tuesday that it had received “very alarming” reports from the town of “deliberate killing of civilians, including women and children, the abduction of hundreds of Kurds by ISIL, and widespread looting and destruction of infrastructure and private property.”

Militants had taken over the main source of water, leading to severe shortages, the agency said. “While an estimated 138,000 people have fled the area,” the organization added in a statement, “hundreds of thousands remain in the region, living in fear of the kind of persecution that ISIL has carried out against religious and ethnic minorities elsewhere in Syria and Iraq.”

In Britain, senior officials said Prime Minister David Cameron was weighing whether to seek Parliament’s approval to join the air war, but only in Iraq and at the invitation of the Baghdad government.

Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Alan Cowell from London and Helene Cooper from Washington. Mohammed Ghannam contributed reporting from Beirut. Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from the United Nations. 






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8) The New York Jail Scandal Continues
By

A Justice Department investigation that last month uncovered a chamber of horrors at the Rikers Island jail in New York City was bad enough in its depiction of corruption and brutality in the city jail system. Now comes the news that the Department of Correction had sanitized a 2012 report that it later turned over to federal investigators, eliminating passages recommending demotion for two officials who were derelict in their jobs and failed to supervise the jail they oversaw.The missing information included the fact that hundreds of fights had been omitted from jail statistics. The report said that the warden, William Clemons, and his deputy, Turhan Gumusdere, had “abdicated responsibility” for reporting inmate fights and violence statistics and “turned a blind eye” when the staff submitted false data to make conditions seem better than they were. There is no reason to believe that Mr. Clemons and Mr. Gumusdere, who were recently promoted, can carry out their responsibilities.

As The Times reported on Monday, all this was expunged at the order of the corrections commissioner at the time, Dora Schriro, who not only ordered the scrubbing of information damaging to the two officials but promoted Mr. Clemons to assistant chief of administration, despite an internal investigation raising questions about his conduct. This outrageous behavior lends credence to the charge that the department historically protected and empowered people who were comfortable with misconduct and a deep-seated culture of violence.

The problems did not stop with Ms. Schriro. According to The Times article, Joseph Ponte, who was appointed corrections commissioner by Mayor Bill de Blasio to clean up the troubled department, promoted both men. Mr. Gumusdere became warden of the largest jail at Rikers Island. Mr. Clemons was named the department’s highest-ranking officer, despite the advice of the Department of Investigation, which had reviewed his record and advised against it.

The mayor’s office insists that Mr. Ponte never saw the original report. It also says that after inspecting their work, Mr. Ponte determined the two men to be the best of the pool eligible for promotion. If true, that says volumes about the Bloomberg administration’s inattention to the problems at the corrections department and the mediocre staff it bequeathed to Mr. de Blasio. The city says it is reviewing the issue in light of the latest revelations.

The report, issued in August by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, depicted Rikers Island as a horrific place where teenagers routinely suffered injuries during sadistic beatings by correction officers who acted without fear of being reported or punished. The report said that “inmates are beaten as a form of punishment, sometimes in apparent retribution for some perceived disrespectful conduct,” adding, “correction officers improperly use injurious force in response to refusals to follow orders, verbal taunts, or insults, even when the inmate presents no threat to the safety or security of staff or other inmates.” The Justice Department has called on the city to completely overhaul departmental operations and recommended that it remove adolescents from Rikers.

Mr. Bharara said in a statement on Monday that news of the suppressed information and “questionable promotions” did not instill confidence that the city would quickly meet its constitutional obligation to change the climate at Rikers. He further noted that the Justice Department stood ready to take legal action to compel long-overdue reforms at the city jails.

 
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9) Israeli Forces Kill 2 Suspects in Murder of Jewish Teenagers
By

JERUSALEM — Israeli forces early Tuesday killed the two men they suspected of abducting and murdering three Israeli teenagers from the occupied West Bank in June, according to a military spokesman, closing a crucial chapter in what became the bloodiest period of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said Marwan Qawasmeh, 29, and Amer Abu Aisha, 33, “came out shooting” around 6 a.m. as troops breached a two-story structure in Hebron where the suspects had been holed up for a week. “In that exchange, one of them was killed on the spot,” Colonel Lerner said. “We have one confirmed kill and the second assumed killed. Because of how he fell back into the void and the grenades that we threw after him, it’s very unlikely that he survived.”The June 12 disappearance of Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19, as they hitchhiked home from their West Bank yeshivas, and the subsequent Israeli crackdown in Hebron and surrounding areas, helped set off an escalation of violence that culminated in a seven-week battle between Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. Israel quickly blamed Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza, for the kidnappings; Mr. Qawasmeh and Mr. Abu Aisha are affiliated with Hamas, though the Israeli authorities believe they acted without direction by, or perhaps even without the knowledge of, the movement’s leadership.

After the three teenagers’ bodies were found under a pile of rocks in an open field not far from Hebron, Jewish extremists snatched a Palestinian 16-year-old old, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, in his East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, beat him and burned him alive as an act of revenge. A 29-year-old eyeglass-store owner with a history of psychiatric problems and two 16-year-old relatives, all ultra-Orthodox Jews, face murder charges in that case.

The Israeli military operation that began less than a week later killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, including about 500 children, and destroyed thousands of buildings in Gaza, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and six civilians were killed before an agreement was reached on Aug. 26 to halt the hostilities.

The early-morning shootout threatened to derail the scheduled resumption of talks Tuesday in Cairo on terms for a lasting truce, including: an arrangement for the reconstruction of Gaza; the possible exchange of Israeli soldiers’ remains for Hamas operatives arrested after the kidnapping; the lifting of Israeli restrictions on Gaza travel and trade; and efforts to disarm Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups. Izzat al-Risheq, a Hamas political leader based in Lebanon, wrote on Twitter that Palestinian negotiators en route to the talks had turned around in protest and were “deciding on the next step.”

Hamas leaders praised Mr. Qawasmeh and Mr. Abu Aisha and described the kidnapping as part of the resistance to Israel’s occupation. Some Palestinians described the killings Tuesday morning as an extrajudicial assassination. Several schools in Hebron were closed in mourning.

“This is premeditated murder,” Kamel Hmeid, the governor of Hebron, said on Voice of Palestine Radio. “They have indicated from the start that they are not interested in arrests or confessions; they want them dead. It is a unilateral trial, judgment and verdict.”

Rachel Fraenkel, Naftali’s mother, said she was relieved to hear the kidnappers had been killed because she would be spared having to see them in court or, potentially, released as part of a political deal. She said he had “no emotional reaction” to the news but that her other six children cheered when she told them what happened.

“My kids are happy that the bad guys are gone,” Ms. Fraenkel said in a telephone interview. “We were worried about these two dangerous people, with weapons, having nothing to lose being out there. It’s a relief to know that they won’t hurt any other innocent people.”

Mr. Qawasmeh, who studied Shariah law in college but opened a barbershop after learning to cut hair in prison — he had been arrested a total of eight times, by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, most recently in 2010 — is part of a large and prominent Hebron family with connections to Hamas. A relative, Hussam Qawasmeh, was indicted earlier this month and is suspected of being the logistical commander of the cell, handling $60,000 sent in five installments from Gaza that the Israeli authorities say was used to purchase two cars, two M-16 rifles and two pistols used in the kidnapping.

Mr. Abu Aisha held a series of odd jobs after a swimming accident that put him in a coma in 2007, and was arrested twice by Israel, in 2005 and 2006.

Hussam Bardan, a Hamas spokesman, described Mr. Qawasmeh and Mr. Abu Aisha as members of the group’s armed wing and praised them for “a long life of sacrifice and giving.”

“We are proud of you and our people will not forget your jihad,” Mr. Bardan wrote in statements circulated on social media. “You trampled the occupation’s nose in the dirt and destroyed its so-called security legend.”

Colonel Lerner described the building, in an urban section of northern Hebron, as a two-story “workshop” on a hill, with storefronts on the ground level and an area below not visible from the street. Another military official told Israel radio it was owned by the Qawasmeh family. Three sons of Arafat Qawasmeh, who was arrested in July for assisting in the kidnapping, were arrested at the site Tuesday morning.

Brig. Gen. Avi Yedai, head of the military’s forces in the West Bank, told Israel Radio that the kidnappers were given a chance to surrender, but did not respond. The Israelis then began destroying the building with a tractor and shooting at it, General Yedai said.

Colonel Lerner said of the suspects, “They were armed, they were in hiding, they were fugitives and they understood we were trying to find them.” He added, “The intelligence indicated that their intention was to fight back, and we took the necessary precautions in order to address that threat.”

The kidnapping gripped and united Israeli society, and led to an intense crackdown on Hebron in which hundreds of people, including many Hamas political leaders, were arrested, as well as an extensive 17-day search effort in the surrounding hills. But the authorities believe the three teenagers were killed shortly after they were picked up around 10 p.m. from a hitchhiking post frequented by West Bank yeshiva students.

Soon after the teenagers got into the kidnappers’ car, a stolen Hyundai i35, according to court records revealed with Hussam Qawasmeh’s indictment, one of the Palestinians “pulled out a gun, pointed it at them and told them they had been kidnapped and they should keep quiet.” One of the Israelis, Gilad, managed to dial the police emergency line from his cellphone, but the call was initially dismissed as a prank, even though he said, “I’ve been kidnapped,” followed by what sound like gunshots, a painful groan and then celebratory cheers in Arabic.

Mr. Qawasmeh and Mr. Abu Aisha were named as the prime suspects on June 26, days before the bodies were found in a plot of land owned by the Qawasmeh family. It remains unclear how and where they hid for three months, or how much help they had.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised the intelligence teams and special forces units that had found the men, and said he had called the parents of the teenagers after the operation was complete.

“There is nothing that will take away their pain, and there is nothing that will return these amazing dear boys, but I said to them there is accounting of justice,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, according to a statement from his office. “I told them that we executed the mission that we promised to execute before them and all of the people of Israel.” He also told the cabinet: “We will continue to strike terror in every place.”

Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza City.


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10) Talk in Synagogue of Israel and Gaza Goes From Debate to Wrath to Rage
By

With the war in Gaza still raging, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum offered an unusual prayer for peace last month during a Friday night service at the large predominantly gay synagogue she leads in New York. Cautioning her flock not to “harden our hearts” against any who had suffered, she wove throughout the prayer the names of young Israeli soldiers — as well as Palestinian children — who were killed in Gaza.

The reaction was swift: A member of the board posted his resignation letter on Facebook, accusing Rabbi Kleinbaum of spreading propaganda for the militant Palestinian group Hamas, and three more congregants soon left.

From the other direction, Rabbi Ron Aigen heard criticism at his synagogue in Montreal this month after he gave a sermon asserting that in the recent battle, Israel had endeavored to live up to the highest standards of Jewish teaching on ethical and just war. He said that he received a letter from a member who had not heard the sermon, but announced that she was quitting because there was no room to express criticism of Israel in the synagogue, which is Reconstructionist and one of the most liberal in Montreal.

Forty-seven years after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Middle East war — celebrated by Jews worldwide — Israel’s occupation of Arab lands won in battle and its standoff with the Palestinians have become so divisive that many rabbis say it is impossible to have a civil conversation about Israel in their synagogues. Debate among Jews about Israel is nothing new, but some say the friction is now fire. Rabbis said in interviews that it may be too hot to touch, and many are anguishing over what to say about Israel in their sermons during the High Holy Days, which begin Wednesday evening.

Particularly in the large cohort of rabbis who consider themselves liberals and believers in a “two-state solution,” some said they are now hesitant to speak much about Israel at all. If they defend Israel, they risk alienating younger Jews who, rabbis say they have observed, are more detached from the Jewish state and organized Judaism. If they say anything critical of Israel, they risk angering the older, more conservative members who often are the larger donors and active volunteers.

The recent bloody outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip may have done little to change the military or political status quo there, but rabbis in the North American diaspora say the summertime war brought into focus how the ground under them has shifted.

“It used to be that Israel was always the uniting factor in the Jewish world,” said Rabbi Aigen, who has served Congregation Dorshei Emet in Montreal for 39 years. “But it’s become contentious and sadly, I think it is driving people away from the organized Jewish community. Even trying to be centrist and balanced and present two sides of the issue, it is fraught with danger.”

Israel is still, without a doubt, the spiritual center and the fondest cause of global Jewry. Many rabbis said that Hamas’s summer assaults on Israel, by rocket fire and underground tunnels, the anti-Semitism that erupted around the world and the rise of the terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State in neighboring Syria left them feeling more aware of Israel’s vulnerability and more protective of it than ever.

“There’s just been a tremendous outpouring of support, a sense of real connection and identification with our brothers and sisters in Israel,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, which represents the Conservative movement, summing up what she heard during a recent “webinar” for rabbis preparing for the High Holy Days.

But many rabbis said in interviews conducted in recent weeks that, though they love and support Israel, they feel conflicted about its direction. These are rabbis in the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements — not the Orthodox, who make up about 10 percent of American Jews and tend to lean right on Israel. Some are rabbis who believe that the expansion of settlements in the West Bank is undermining the possibility for Palestinians to have a state of their own. They believe Israel must defend itself, but they questioned the Israeli bomb strikes in Gaza that killed so many women and children. Now, they said, they are more reluctant than ever to be open with their congregants about their views.

“There is the sense that the ability to criticize Israel has been diminished because of the war, because of the atrocities that Hamas perpetrates among its own people, and because Israel needs our support since the international community is so overwhelmingly anti-Israel,” said Rabbi Jonathan A. Stein, a recently retired senior rabbi at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

“The easy sermon for a rabbi to give this year will be on the rise of anti-Semitism across the world. That is a softball,” said Rabbi Stein, who is also the immediate past president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which represents the Reform movement. “The more difficult sermon to give will be one that has any kind of critical posture.”

His sentiments were echoed by others who did not want to be identified because they felt they would risk their jobs. In a recent effort to quantify the phenomenon, one-third of 552 rabbis who responded to a questionnaire put out last year by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs said they were reluctant to express their true views on Israel. (Most who responded were not Orthodox.) The “doves” were far more likely to say they were fearful of speaking their minds than the “hawks.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinical Call for Human Rights, a liberal group with 1,800 member rabbis, said: “Rabbis are just really scared because they get slammed by their right-wing congregants, who are often the ones with the purse strings. They are not necessarily the numerical majority, but they are the loudest.”

One Midwestern rabbi in the Conservative movement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is raising money from Jewish donors, said he was rejected for a position at a temple after he told the board that “there’s not just one Jewish point of view” on Israel. Another rabbi’s board put a note in her file saying she cannot speak about Israel.

After she read the names of children killed in Gaza, Rabbi Kleinbaum found herself vilified on social media. But she retained the backing of her board at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest gay synagogue in the country, and some new members joined, she said. Her message, she said in an interview, is not so controversial. “If we as Jews don’t feel the pain for the loss of life of children,” she said, “we’re losing a piece of our soul.”

There is more space to be critical of Israel in Israel than in North America, said Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, a former president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who wrote an article for the current issue of Reform Judaism magazine on rabbis who feel “muzzled.” He said in an interview, “There are a range of opinions in Israel, and there should be a range of opinions here.”

Rabbi Yoffie suggested that synagogues draw a “red line” excluding those who support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Few rabbis who publicly support the “B.D.S.” movement lead congregations. Rabbi Brant Rosen, one of the few, announced to his congregants in a mournful letter this month that in the coming months he will step down from leadership at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill., after 17 years because “my activism has become a lightning rod for division.”

Rabbi Rosen said in an interview: “For many Jews, Israel is their Judaism, or at least a big part of it. So when someone challenges the centrality of Israel in a public way, it’s very painful and very difficult, especially when that person is their rabbi.”

Last year, the Board of Rabbis of Southern California of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles tried and failed to organize an event exploring how to have a dialogue about Israel, in part because of logistics and in part because it was just too contentious, said Jonathan Freund, vice president of the board.

“It was kind of ironic,” Mr. Freund said, “because we couldn’t in the end figure out how to talk about how to talk about it.”
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11) Washington: Marijuana-Use Tickets Are Nullified
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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12) Deaths From Faulty Switch in G.M. Cars Edge Higher
By HILARY STOUT


 
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13) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
By

ARVADA, Colo. — A new conservative school board majority here in the Denver suburbs recently proposed a curriculum-review committee to promote patriotism, respect for authority and free enterprise and to guard against educational materials that “encourage or condone civil disorder.” In response, hundreds of students, teachers and parents gave the board their own lesson in civil disobedience.

On Tuesday, hundreds of students from high schools across the Jefferson County school district, the second largest in Colorado, streamed out of school and along busy thoroughfares, waving signs and championing the value of learning about the fractious and tumultuous chapters of American history.

“It’s gotten bad,” said Griffin Guttormsson, a junior at Arvada High School who wants to become a teacher and spent the school day soliciting honks from passing cars. “The school board is insane. You can’t erase our history. It’s not patriotic. It’s stupid.”The student walkout came after a bitter school board election last year and months of acrimony over charter schools, teacher pay, kindergarten expansion and, now, the proposed review committee, which would evaluate Advanced Placement United States history and elementary school health classes.

The teachers’ union, whose members forced two high schools to close Friday by calling in sick, has been in continual conflict with the new board; the board, in turn, has drawn praise from Americans for Prosperity-Colorado, a conservative group affiliated with the Koch family foundations. In April, Dustin Zvonek, the group’s director, wrote in an op-ed that the board’s election was an “exciting and hopeful moment for the county and the school district.”

So far, nothing is settled in Jefferson County. The board put off a discussion of the curriculum-review committee until a meeting in October, and Ken Witt, the board president, suggested that some of its proposed language about not promoting “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law” might be cut.

“A lot of those words were more specific and more pointed than they have to be,” Mr. Witt said. He said that the school board was responsible for making decisions about curriculum and that the review committee would give a wider spectrum of parents and community members the power to examine what was taught in schools. He said that some had made censorship allegations “to incite and upset the student population.”

But on Tuesday, those allegations were more than enough to draw hundreds of students into the sun. They waved signs declaring, “It’s world history, not white history,” and talked about Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leaders of the walkout urged others to stay out of the streets and not to curse, and sympathetic parents brought poster board, magic markers and bottles of water.

Almost from the outset, the three conservative newcomers to the five-person board clashed with the two others, and a steady stream of 3-to-2 votes came to represent the sharp divisions on the board and in the community. Critics of the new majority have assailed the board for hiring its own lawyer, calling it a needless expense, and accused them of conducting school business outside of public meetings. In February, the district’s superintendent, Cindy Stevenson, announced during a packed, emotional meeting that she was leaving after 12 years because the board did not trust or respect her. Her replacement, an assistant superintendent from Douglas County, prompted more accusations that the new majority in Jefferson County was trying to steer the district far to the right.

“We’ve had conservatives on our board before,” said Michele Patterson, the president of the district’s parent-teacher association. “They were wonderful. These people, they’re not interested in balance or compromise. They have a political agenda that they’re intent on pushing through.”

Mr. Witt rejected the criticism, saying he was dedicated to improving student achievement, giving equal footing to charter-school students and rewarding educators for doing their jobs well.“I would rather be able to do those things without conflict, but at the end of the day, it’s very important that we align with those goals,” he said.

In March 2010, a similar debate roiled the Texas Board of Education as its members voted overwhelmingly to adopt a social studies curriculum that heralded American capitalism and ensured that students would learn about the conservative movement’s rise in the 1980s.

In Colorado, students said the protests had been organized over the weekend on Facebook groups after they read about the teacher sick day on Friday. Some on Tuesday wandered off after a while or returned to class. Others stayed out for hours.

Leighanne Grey, a senior at Arvada High School, said that after second period, a student ran through the halls yelling, “The protest is still on!” and she and scores of her classmates got up and left.

She said that learning about history, strife and all, had given her a clearer understanding of the country.

“As we grow up, you always hear that America’s the greatest, the land of the free and the home of the brave,” she said. “For all the good things we’ve done, we’ve done some terrible things. It’s important to learn about those things, or we’re doomed to repeat the past.”


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14) A California Dream: Not Having to Settle for Just One Bedroom
By

IRVINE, Calif. — This was the state that embodied the middle-class American dream: Move west, acquire a small slice of property, perhaps with a palm tree or two.

For decades, comfortable suburbs like this one just south of Los Angeles boomed with new housing tracts designed to attract the latest arrivals. When space started to come at a premium, developers moved inland, building more homes for people who could not afford the more expensive coastal areas.

But now, cities across the state are grappling with a dwindling stock of housing that can be considered affordable for anyone but the wealthiest. In much of the state, a two-bedroom apartment or home is virtually impossible to acquire with anything less than a six-figure salary.

“It’s hard to imagine how all of California doesn’t become like New York City and San Francisco, where you have very rich people and poor people but nothing in between,” said Richard K. Green, an economist and director of the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California. “That’s socially unhealthy and unsustainable, but it’s where we are going right now — affordability is its worst ever, and we’re seeing a hollowing-out of the middle class here.”

The problem extends far beyond San Francisco, where wealth from the technology industry has sent housing costs skyrocketing. In Los Angeles and Orange Counties, less than 25 percent of homes for sale are within reach of the region’s middle-class earners, according to an analysis by Trulia, a real estate website. Of 10 markets nationwide that Trulia ranked as least affordable for the middle class, six were in California.

“I talk a lot of buyers out of sticker shock,” said Linda Ginex, a real estate agent in Orange County. She routinely steers clients to suburbs they might not have initially considered or, for people who insist on living in the most desirable cities, into condominiums instead of houses. “A lot of people who grow up here think they can afford what their parents had, but that’s not always realistic,” she said.

In Los Angeles, the average renter spends nearly half of his or her income on rent, according to a study released this year by the University of California, Los Angeles. To make the rent, many families have opted to double up with other families, sometimes cramming six or seven people into a small apartment.

Denny Bak, 31, who grew up as a son of a minister in Aliso Viejo, a small city in southern Orange County, figured that with his salary as a police officer and his wife’s as a nurse, they would easily be able to find a three-bedroom house with a small yard. But when the couple set out searching in the neighborhoods he knew best, homes were at least $800,000 — more than double what they could afford.

Eventually, they found an older, ranch-style home in La Mirada, another small city south of Los Angeles.

“We both grew up here and had this notion that we would have the same promises our parents had,” Mr. Bak said. “It’s just not that easy. We make good money — probably more than our parents did — and it still feels like a struggle to stay here.”

It is not only would-be homeowners who are feeling the effect. A renter in Los Angeles County would have to make at least $27 an hour to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which estimated that the state is short of roughly one million homes for the working poor. And while housing prices are increasing rapidly, incomes in the state remain flat.

“We can’t find any way for people earning a median income to keep up pace; that’s what’s really scary,” said Matt Schwartz, the chief executive of the California Housing Partnership Corporation, which monitors affordable housing throughout the state. “We’ve seen this happening for a long time in San Francisco, but now it’s going on in Sacramento, in the Central Valley — the demand is far outpacing the supply. It’s no longer just that the low-income folks are getting squeezed out of a decent place to live.”

Abel Ruiz has lived with his family in Santa Ana, an inland city in Orange County, for more than a decade. Their landlord recently increased the rent on their one-bedroom apartment to $1,100, plus an $18 surcharge per resident, an increase of more than $300.

Mr. Ruiz, 30, works for the local parks department and has considered getting his own place. Instead, he helps his parents make the rent. The living room is divided in half, his mother and father sleeping on one side and his 18-year-old sister on the other. He and his 12-year-old brother share the bedroom in the back.

“Everything is multiuse,” he said. “Do we think about moving? Sure, but that means I have to find another job, and who knows how hard that might be.”

Banks and other investors have been buying up single-family homes all over the region, particularly in parts of the state that were hit hardest during the foreclosure crisis, like the northern suburbs of Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire, a metropolitan area east of Los Angeles. Foreign investors are paying cash for properties, as investments or as pieds-à-terre. Some renters have complained of neglect, saying that absentee landlords ignore complaints about cockroaches or leaky pipes.

But local investors have also been buying modest single-family homes, either to lease them to tenants or to “flip” them, renovating them and selling at a profit. Robert Ganem, a former mortgage broker, has bought more than 65 properties in the last four years.

“Things are not too far off the peak prices now, and we just see them going up and up,” Mr. Ganem said. “In one complex, I bought a condo for $400,000, and six months later, the exact same model on the same floor sold for $500,000. The market is certainly there.”

When Mr. Ganem rents out condos in the suburbs, he typically charges $2,500 to $3,000 for a three-bedroom — and immediately has more than a dozen applicants, he said.

“It’s usually good people who got stuck in the crash — a married couple with one or two kids who need a stable place,” he said. “I’m getting to choose who looks to be the most attractive, so I look at who has the most extra in the bank, who has the most stable job, all those kinds of things.”

Steve Twardowski, who works as an engineer for an oil company, has been looking for a home in Southern California for himself and his wife for the last year and said the process had become “a bit of a nightmare.”

“If you make six figures, you should not have trouble finding a single-family home, but we have this crazy cost of living here,” Mr. Twardowski said. “I don’t know how people are coming to this state because right now, it feels like it is just for rich folks.” The couple considered leaving for Texas but eventually found a modest three-bedroom home in Long Beach.

“This is gentrification on steroids,” said Stan Humphries, the chief economist at Zillow.com, which shows homes for sale and their valuations. “What is unique here is you have an entire state really shifting — people are bidding up prices all over the place. These were quintessential suburbs and cities built for people working as secretaries, but the newest generation is simply not going to be able to stay anymore.”
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15) Cleared After Nearly 23 Years in Prison, but Not Free
By


Striding across a jailhouse visiting room on Saturday, Everton Wagstaffe — innocent in the eyes of the law, a prisoner of the persistence that liberated him — craned his neck to see who was waiting. He grinned broadly, stuck out his hand to welcome visitors, then apologized for an undetectable shortfall in personal hygiene.

“I don’t have my soaps or anything,” Mr. Wagstaffe explained. “I’m locked in all day, just get out for chow and then come back. No showers, no telephone.”

These were slight matters.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wagstaffe left the custody of New York authorities for the first time since his arrest in January 1992 on charges that he had kidnapped and murdered a teenage girl, Jennifer Negron.Having been cleared last week by an appellate court after nearly 23 years behind bars, Mr. Wagstaffe spent the weekend moving across various state prisons before being transferred to a federal immigration detention center outside Buffalo. Mr. Wagstaffe, 45, is a Jamaican citizen. He now hopes to contest a deportation order filed many years ago.

“The conviction was a tragedy,” Mr. Wagstaffe said, “but I have made the best of it.”

He and a co-defendant, Reginald Connor, were convicted of kidnapping on the testimony of a single eyewitness, a drug addict who was a police informer in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct. She claimed to have seen Mr. Wagstaffe drag the girl from the street and force her into a car with Mr. Connor at the wheel. From the beginning, both insisted that they were innocent and did not know each other.

In its ruling last week, the court said there was evidence of possible fraud and deception at the heart of the case. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office was responsible for “burying” evidence that contradicted testimony by detectives that the informer had led them to Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor, according to the decision.

When he first entered prison, Mr. Wagstaffe said, he was barely literate.

“You are here and ask yourself: Why hope?” he said. “Why not just pass the time, and let the universe do what it will?”

He dueled with despair, beginning slowly. “I used cartons of cigarettes to get guys to write letters for me,” Mr. Wagstaffe said. Then he decided he had better handle his own affairs, and sold clothes so he could buy books and get his high school equivalency diploma.

Ten years ago this Wednesday, on Sept. 24, 2004, he filed his first motion requesting DNA testing of the physical evidence. He had no lawyer at the time.

Every comma, every verb in all of his legal papers was fought by teams of lawyers, first under Charles J. Hynes, the former Brooklyn district attorney, and then by his successor, Kenneth P. Thompson. The physical evidence was lost for years, then found. Testing took more than two years. None of the evidence matched Mr. Wagstaffe or Mr. Connor, but prosecutors argued that the results were not compelling enough to upend the conviction.

An alibi witness was located. The owner of a car supposedly used in the kidnapping swore that she had it at church when the crime was committed. A neighbor said that he saw a teenage boyfriend trying to drag Ms. Negron into a car, and that neither Mr. Connor nor Mr. Wagstaffe was involved.

A judge named Sheryl L. Parker heard arguments on most of this in 2010, then a year later ruled against them. On procedural grounds, she said, she did not have to decide whether the detectives and informer had lied about the investigation.

But the appellate court said last week that this was the most important matter of all: Computer records showed that the police had been pursuing the two men 24 hours before they spoke with the only witness to implicate them. Anne M. Gutmann, the prosecutor in the trial, had turned over those records as jury selection was beginning, along with a pile of other documents.

Mr. Wagstaffe first noticed the time stamps after nearly a decade behind bars. This information would have hurt the credibility of the sole witness and the detectives.

That was so important, the appellate court ruled, that it did not have to delve into the other issues raised by lawyers for the men.

“Once there is a fraud, it stays a fraud,” Mr. Wagstaffe said. “It doesn’t matter if there is a failure by a litigator to raise it.”

Mr. Thompson, the district attorney, issued a terse statement on Tuesday: “We disagree on the basis for which they vacated the conviction and set aside the verdict. We are reviewing our options.”

On Saturday, Mr. Wagstaffe said he was trying to find peace. “The universe will work with us,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much wealth and resources the district attorney may have. I have one thing, that I’m in the right. I’ve outlived this place.”


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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING CAMPAIGNS


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Free the Whistle-Blowers

An Appeal from Daniel Ellsberg

July 21, 2014 by Daniel Ellsberg

Time Magazine coversNSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a personal hero of mine, has recently filed to renew his asylum in Russia.  Exiled thousands of miles from friends and family, he awaits his fate. He learned from the example of another top hero of mine, Chelsea Manning.  Manning helped inspire his revelations that if he released his vital information while in this country he would have been held incommunicado in isolation as Chelsea was for over ten months—in Snowden’s case probably for the rest of his life.  And facing comparable charges to Chelsea’s, he would have no more chance than Chelsea to have a truly fair trial—being prevented by the prosecution and judge (as I was, forty years ago) from even raising arguments of public interest or lack of harm in connection with his disclosures.  Contrary to the hollow advice of Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, if he were to return to America he would not be able to “make his case” neither “in court,” nor “to the public” from a prison cell.

 I am immensely thankful to both these young whistle-blowers who have so bravely stood up against the powerful forces of the US government in order to reveal corruption, illegal spying and war crimes.  They were both motivated by their commitments to democracy and justice.  They both chose to reveal information directly to the public, at great cost to themselves, so that citizens and taxpayers could be fully informed of the facts.  They also revealed the amazing potential of new technologies to increase public access to information and strengthen democracy.  It saddens me that our current political leaders, rather than embracing this potential, have chosen to tighten their strangleholds on power and information, turning away from both progress and justice.

 Shockingly, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than every previous president combined. These heroes do not deserve to be thrown in prison or called a traitor for doing the right thing.  Obama’s unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of the Espionage Act—as if it were a British-type Official Secrets Act, never intended by Congress and a violation of our First Amendment—and Manning’s 35-year prison sentence will have a chilling effect on future citizens’ willingness to uncover hidden injustices.  The government has already brought comparable charges against Snowden.

 The only remedy to this chilling precedent, designed to effect government whistle-blowers as a whole, is to overturn the Manning verdict. Given that Manning’s court martial produced the longest trial record in US military history, it will take a top legal team countless hours to prepare their defense.  But as an Advisory Board member for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, I was inspired by the way citizens around the world stepped forward to help fund a strong defense during Manning’s trial.  I remain hopeful that enough people will recognize the immense importance of these appeals and will contribute to help us finish the struggle we started. That struggle, of course, is for a just political system and freedom for our whistle-blowers.

Chelsea Manning has continued to demonstrate uncommon bravery and character, even from behind bars.  With the New York Times Op-Ed she published last month, she has cemented her position as a compelling voice for government reform.  Working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning was privy to a special view of the inner-workings of our military’s propaganda systems.  Despite her personal struggles, she felt compelled to share her knowledge of what was happening in Iraq with the Americans people.  If the military hadn’t hidden the number of civilian casualties and incidences of torture detailed in the Iraq Logs she released, we would have known far sooner to expect the civil war that has gripped Iraq fully today.  Her exposure of US knowledge of the corruption in Tunisia, by the dictator our government supported, was a critical catalyst of the non-violent uprising which toppled that dictator, in turn directly inspiring the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt and then the Occupy movement in the US

 I personally am inspired by Chelsea Manning as I am by Edward Snowden, which is why I have spent countless hours advocating for both of them.  I’m asking you to join me today in supporting what I believe to be one of the most important legal proceedings in our country’s history. We are fortunate to have a truly impressive legal team that has agreed to partner with us.  Already, our new appeals attorney Nancy Hollander and her team have begun to research legal strategies, and are collaborating with Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the international news media to highlight the significance of this case.

 Chelsea is only 26 now, younger than I was when I learned to recognize the injustices of the Vietnam War.  She wishes to complete her education, as I did, and go into public service. Imagine what great things she could both learn and teach the world if she were free. Now imagine if our corrupt government officials are allowed to get their way, holding her behind bars until life has almost passed her by, and extraditing Snowden to suffer the same outcome.  What a sad result that would be for our country and our humanity.

 I have been waiting forty years for a legal process to at long last prove the unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act as applied to whistle-blowers (the Supreme Court has never yet addressed this issue).  This appeals process can accomplish that, and it can reduce Chelsea’s sentence by decades. But unfortunately, without your help today it will not happen. We must raise $100,000 by September 1st, to ensure that Chelsea’s team have the resources to fully fight this stage of the appeals process. 

Unless Manning’s conviction is overturned in appeals, Snowden and many other whistle-blowers, today and in the future, will face a similar fate. And with them will perish one of the most critical lifelines for our democracy.  But you can join me in fighting back.  I’m asking you to do it for Chelsea, to do it for Snowden, and to do it because it’s the right thing to do to preserve our democracy.  We can only win this great struggle with your help. Please contribute to help us fund Chelsea’s legal appeals today.

        It’s time we band together on the right side of history once again.

        Daniel Ellsberg

Please contribute to help us fund Chelsea’s legal appeals today!

Learn now how you can write a letter to be included in Chelsea Manning’s official application for clemency!
Please share this information to friends and community leaders, urging them to add their voice to this important effort before it's too late.
http://www.privatemanning.org/pardonpetition




Help us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591


COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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 Only an Innocent Man Would Voluntarily Return
to Prison to Fight Against his Life Sentence
and For Exoneration —
That Courageous Man is Lorenzo Johnson.

The PA Attorney General’s Office Agrees to Investigate New Facts and Witnesses —
  Send Your Message Now to PA AG
Kathleen Kane: Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson!

On January 29, 2014 Lorenzo Johnson’s attorney, Michael Wiseman, met with representatives of PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane to discuss the new evidence of Lorenzo Johnson’s innocence contained in legal filings now pending in the Pennsylvania courts. This includes affidavits confirming Johnson’s presence in New York City at the time of the Harrisburg murder and the identity of the actual killers, as well as police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorney Wiseman said Kane’s office promised to investigate these new facts in order to assess whether they merit the relief that Lorenzo Johnson seeks in his PCRA petition.

Speaking to AP reporter Mary Claire Dale on February 11, 2014 Wiseman said, “We believe the witnesses we presented to them are credible, and give a coherent version of the events. I take them at their word, that they’re going to do a straightforward, honest review.”  Kane spokesman Joe Peters confirmed the meeting to AP “but said the office won’t comment on the new evidence until the court filing,” (referring to the March 31, 2014 date for the AG’s response to Johnson’s October 2013 court filing).

It is the Office of the PA Attorney General that is responsible for the false prosecution of Lorenzo Johnson from trial through appeals. And just a few months ago, the Attorney General’s office opposed a federal petition based on this new evidence saying there was no prima facie claim for relief. This resulted in the denial of Lorenzo Johnson’s Motion to File a Second Writ of Habeas Corpus in the federal court.

On December 18, 2013 a press conference called by the Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson protested these actions of the PA Attorney General and delivered petitions demanding dismissal of the charges and immediate freedom for Lorenzo. Tazza, Lorenzo’s wife, declared, “1,000 signatures means we are not in this alone…I won't stop until he’s home. There is nothing and no one that can stop me from fighting for what’s right.”

This is Lorenzo Johnson’s second fight for his innocence and freedom. In January 2012, after 16 years of court battles to prove his innocence, a federal appeals court held his sentence was based on insufficient evidence – a judicial acquittal. Lorenzo was freed from prison. But after a petition filed by the PA Attorney General the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Lorenzo Johnson’s conviction and he was re-incarcerated to continue serving a life sentence without parole for a murder he did not commit.

This innocent man drove himself back to prison in June 2012—after less than five months of freedom—leaving his new wife and family, construction job and advocacy on behalf of others wrongfully convicted. The reason Lorenzo Johnson voluntarily returned to prison? Because he is innocent and fighting for full vindication.

In the words of Lorenzo Johnson, “A second is too long to be in prison when you are Innocent, so eighteen years … is Intolerable.”

Add your voices and demand again: Dismiss the charges against Lorenzo Johnson. Free Lorenzo NOW!

 SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

CONTRIBUTE TO HELP TAZZA AND THE OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS VISIT LORENZO AND STAY IN CONTACT!


Write: Lorenzo Johnson
            DF 1036
            SCI Mahanoy
            301 Morea Rd.
            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC


 www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org

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U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.

Stripped of  “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more determined as his PA state court appeal continues.

Increased public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

—Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq.
   October 25, 2013

For more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.
Hear Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”
Go to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and how to help.
 
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 SAVE CCSF!


Two campaigns that need funds – Please donate!
Posted on August 25, 2013

Cartoon by Anthonty Mata for CCSF Guardsman

DOE CAMPAIGN
We are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other side who have much more money and resources than we do.
So please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!

LEGAL CAMPAIGN
Save CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office, Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.
The total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.

PLEASE HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!
Checks can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent to:
Save CCSF Coalition
2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
Or you may donate online:  http://www.gofundme.com/4841ns

http://www.saveccsf.org/
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16 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"

American Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement.

In California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more than a decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's "The Prince."

Gabriel Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the last 16 years:

“Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a living tomb …’ I have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995…I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.”

That’s why over 30,000 prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the state has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their basic conditions.

California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and refuses to negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.

Solitary is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture rapporteur called for an international ban on the practice except in rare occasions. Here’s why:

The majority of the 80,000 people held in solitary in this country are severely mentally ill or because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for violent prisoners)
Even for people with stable mental health, solitary causes severe psychological reactions, often leading people to attempt suicide
It jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time reintegrating into society.

And to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation – their lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are being punished. But the media continues to write about the hunger strike and we can help keep the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing this petition.

Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.

Our criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly. The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals – but little by little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.

Thank you,
Anthony for the ACLU Action team
P.S. The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their basic conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary confinement. They are:

-End group punishment – prisoners say that officials often punish groups to address individual rule violations

-Abolish the debriefing policy, which is often demanded in return for better food or release from solitary

-End long-term solitary confinement

-Provide adequate and nutritious food

-Expand or provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates

Sources
“Solitary - and anger - in California's prisons.” Los Angeles Times July 13, 2013
“Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers' Stories: Gabriel Reyes.” TruthOut July 9, 2013
“Solitary confinement should be banned in most cases, UN expert says.” UN News October 18, 2011
"Stop Solitary - Two Pager" ACLU.org
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What you Didn't know about NYPD's Stop and Frisk program !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rfJHx0Gj6ys#at=990

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Egypt: The Next President -- a little Egyptian boy speaks his remarkable mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I

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Wealth Inequality in America

[This is a must see to believe video...bw]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

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Read the transcription of hero Bradley Manning's 35-page statement explaining why he leaked "state secrets" to WikiLeaks.

March 1, 2013

Alternet

The statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bradley-mannings-surprising-statement-court-details-why-he-made-his-historic?akid=10129.229473.UZvQfK&rd=1&src=newsletter802922&t=7

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You Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters

Posted 1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Occupy Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists – please click here to support the NLG.

We strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number (888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy. This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement Encounters

What Rights Do I Have?

Whether or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your political activities.

Standing Up For Free Speech

The government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a "subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.

What if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?

What if an agent or police officer comes to the door?

Do not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions. Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future. Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.

Do I have to answer questions?

You have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you reside.

Do I have to give my name?

As above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name could in some circumstances be a crime.

Do I need a lawyer?

You have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.

If I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have something to hide?

Anything you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights and refusing to answer questions.

Can agents search my home or office?

You do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of your workspace without your permission.

What if agents have a search warrant?

If you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes, including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first. (Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant is present.)

Do I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?

No. If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.

What if I speak to government agents anyway?

Even if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.

What if the police stop me on the street?

Ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not consent to a search of your bags or other property.

What if police or agents stop me in my car?

Keep your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance. You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one has to answer any questions.

What if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?

Write down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as possible.

What if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer their questions?

A grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.

What if I receive a grand jury subpoena?

Grand jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping ("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense attorney immediately.

The government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and disruption, discouraging continued activism.

Federal grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries, testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony, should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in your testimony.

Frequently prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.

In front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.

What if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?

If you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare instances you may face criminal contempt charges.

What If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the purposes of this pamphlet.

? Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.

? Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney. If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be barred from returning.

Based on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.

Do I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or signing any DHS papers?

Yes. You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you a list of free or low cost legal service providers.

Should I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?

If you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be. Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.

Am I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?

If you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider refusing to talk to the agent at all.

If I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?

Yes. In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief for you.

Can I call my consulate if I am arrested?

Yes. Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the right to refuse help from your consulate.

What happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing is over?

You could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.

What should I do if I want to contact DHS?

Always talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of your options to you.

What Are My Rights at Airports?

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches, detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion, sex or ethnicity.

If I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop and search me?

Yes. Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.

Can my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?

Yes. Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.

If I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get off the plane?

The pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.

What If I Am Under 18?

Do I have to answer questions?

No. Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.

What if I am detained?

If you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no cost.

Do I have the right to express political views at school?

Public school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.

Can my backpack or locker be searched?

School officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.

Disclaimer

This booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.

NLG National Hotline for Activists Contacted by the FBI

888-NLG-ECOL

(888-654-3265)

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Free Mumia NOW!

Prisonradio.org

Write to Mumia:

Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335

SCI Mahanoy

301 Morea Road

Frackville, PA 17932

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Wolkenstein

August 21, 2011 (917) 689-4009

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ILLEGALLY SENTENCED TO

LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE!

FREE MUMIA NOW!

www.FreeMumia.com

http://blacktalkradionetwork.com/profiles/blogs/mumia-is-formally-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-w-out-hearing-he-s



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"A Child's View from Gaza: Palestinian Children's Art and the Fight Against

Censorship" book

https://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=25

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WITNESS GAZA

http://www.witnessgaza.com/

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The Battle Is Still On To

FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610

www.laboractionmumia.org

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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!

Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper

Chronicle Editorial

Monday, December 13, 2010

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL

Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's

death row!

http://www.savekevincooper.org/

http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255

URGENT ACTION APPEAL

- From Amnesty International USA

17 December 2010

Click here to take action online:

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&\

b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084

To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to

http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success

For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):

http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf

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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work

The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's

work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown

on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l

Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected

over the past nine years.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl

Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial

support to carry out its work.

To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to

http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html

and follow the simple instructions.

Thank you for your generosity!

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D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:

[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:

http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]

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Prison vs School: The Tour 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI


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Checkpoint - Jasiri X 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6Y6LSjulU

Published on Jan 28, 2014
"Checkpoint" is based on the oppression and discrimination Jasiri X witnessed firsthand during his recent trip to Palestine and Israel "Checkpoint" is produced by Agent of Change, and directed by Haute Muslim. Download "Checkpoint" at https://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/ch....

Follow Jasiri X at https://twitter.com/jasiri_x

 LYRICS
Journal of the hard times tales from the dark side
Evidence of the settlements on my hard drive
Man I swear my heart died at the end of that car ride
When I saw that checkpoint welcome to apartheid
Soldiers wear military green at the checkpoint
Automatic guns that's machine at the checkpoint
Tavors not m16s at the checkpoint
Fingers on the trigger you'll get leaned at the checkpoint
Little children grown adults or teens at the checkpoint
All ya papers better be clean at the checkpoint
You gotta but your finger on the screen at the checkpoint
And pray that red light turns green at the check point

 If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

 Separation walls that's surrounding the checkpoint
On top is barbwire like a crown on the checkpoint
Better have ya permits if your found at the checkpoint
Gunmen on the tower aiming down at the checkpoint
The idea is to keep you in fear of the checkpoint
You enter through the cage in the rear of the checkpoint
It feels like prison on a tier at the check point
I'd rather be anywhere but here at this checkpoint
Nelson Mandela wasn't blind to the check point
He stood for free Palestine not a check point
Support BDS don't give a dime to the checkpoint
This is international crime at the checkpoint
Arabs get treated like dogs at the checkpoint
Cause discrimination is the law at the checkpoint
Criminalized without a cause at the checkpoint
I'm just telling you what I saw at the checkpoint
Soldiers got bad attitudes at the checkpoint
Condescending and real rude at the checkpoint
Don't look em in they eyes when they move at the checkpoint
They might strip a man or woman nude at the checkpoint
Soldiers might blow you out of ya shoes at the checkpoint
Gas you up and then light the fuse at the checkpoint
Everyday you stand to be accused at the checkpoint
Each time your life you could lose at the checkpoint

 If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

 At the airport in Tel Aviv is a checkpoint
They pulled over our taxi at the checkpoint
Passport visa ID at the checkpoint
Soldiers going all through my things at the checkpoint
Said I was high risk security at the checkpoint
Because of the oppression I see at the checkpoint
Occupation in the 3rd degree at the checkpoint
All a nigga wanna do is leave fuck a checkpoint

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Exceptional art from the streets of Oakland:

Oakland Street Dancing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRRnAhmB58

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqH9s5mwTEY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atyTZ8prhCg

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NYC RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded

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On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded

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Fukushima Never Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU

"Fukushima, Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the Japanese government.

This is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.

The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then

when the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.

It also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks

the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.

Production Of Labor Video Project

P.O. Box 720027

San Francisco, CA 94172

www.laborvideo.org

lvpsf@laborvideo.org

For information on obtaining the video go to:

www.fukushimaneveragain.com

(415)282-1908


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1000 year of war through the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share

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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded

Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder

To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures

Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter

(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)

The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in

mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report

confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.

"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common

amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations

that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced

"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious

that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising

alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have

weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the

questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however

is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which

means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my

hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."

A Film By SBS

Distributed By Journeyman Pictures

April 2012

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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-sooti\

ng-of-trayvon-martin.html?hp

SPD Security Cams.wmv

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WWDNbQUgm4&feature=player_embedded

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Kids being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate locations" in

Terror Drills

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ

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Private prisons,

a recession resistant investment opportunity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg

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Attack Dogs used on a High School Walkout in MD, Four Students Charged With

"Thought Crimes"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wafMaML17w

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Common forms of misconduct by Law Enforcement Officials and Prosecutors

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSpM4K276w&feature=related

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Organizing and Instigating: OCCUPY - Ronnie Goodman

http://arthazelwood.com/instigator/occupy/occupy-birth-video.html

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Rep News 12: Yes We Kony

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8

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The New Black by The Mavrix - Official Music Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rLfja8488

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Japan One Year Later

http://www.onlineschools.org/japan-one-year-later/

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The CIA's Heart Attack Gun

http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/assassination-studies/the-cias-heart-attack-g\

un-.html

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The Invisible American Workforce

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison

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Labor Beat: NATO vs The 1st Amendment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQxnb4so3U

For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org.


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The Battle of Oakland

by brandon jourdan plus

http://vimeo.com/36256273

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Officers Pulled Off Street After Tape of Beating Surfaces

By ANDY NEWMAN

February 1, 2012, 10:56 am

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/officers-pulled-off-street-after-ta\

pe-of-beating-surfaces/?ref=nyregion

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This is excellent! Michelle Alexander pulls no punches!

Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow, speaks about the political

strategy

behind the War on Drugs and its connection to the mass incarceration of Black

and Brown people in the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75cbEdNo2U&feature=player_embedded

If you think Bill Clinton was "the first black President" you need to watch this

video and see how much damage his administration caused for the black community

as a result of his get tough attitude on crime that appealed to white swing

voters.

This speech took place at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on January 12,

2012.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

FREE BRADLEY MANNING

http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/national-call-in-for-bradley

I received the following reply from the White House November 18, 2011 regarding

the Bradley Manning petition I signed:

"Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning

"Thank you for signing the petition 'Free PFC Bradley Manning, the accused

WikiLeaks whistleblower.' We appreciate your participation in the We the People

platform on WhiteHouse.gov.

The We the People Terms of Participation explain that 'the White House may

decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or

similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or

agencies, federal courts, or state and local government.' The military justice

system is charged with enforcing the Uniform Code of

Military Justice. Accordingly, the White House declines to comment on the

specific case raised in this petition...

That's funny! I guess Obama didn't get this memo. Here's what Obama said about

Bradley:

BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!

"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be

charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the

President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with

a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!

Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-

Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at

fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political

action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be

Release Bradley Manning

Almost Gone (The Ballad Of Bradley Manning)

Written by Graham Nash and James Raymond (son of David Crosby)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYG7yJpBbQ&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*


School police increasingly arresting American students?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-efNBvjUU&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

FYI:

Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"

The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are

plotted visually and audibly on a world map.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&feature=share&mid=5408

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

We Are the 99 Percent

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to

choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are

suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay

and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1

percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

Brought to you by the people who occupy wall street. Why will YOU occupy?

OccupyWallSt.org

Occupytogether.org

wearethe99percentuk.tumblr.com

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

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We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools

YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAOJsBxAxY

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

In honor of the 75th Anniversary of the 44-Day Flint Michigan sit-down strike at

GM that began December 30, 1936:

According to Michael Moore, (Although he has done some good things, this clip

isn't one of them) in this clip from his film, "Capitalism a Love Story," it was

Roosevelt who saved the day!):

"After a bloody battle one evening, the Governor of Michigan, with the support

of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, sent in the National

Guard. But the guns and the soldiers weren't used on the workers; they were

pointed at the police and the hired goons warning them to leave these workers

alone. For Mr. Roosevelt believed that the men inside had a right to a redress

of their grievances." -Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'

- Flint Sit-Down Strike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8x1_q9wg58

But those cannons were not aimed at the goons and cops! They were aimed straight

at the factory filled with strikers! Watch what REALLY happened and how the

strike was really won!

'With babies & banners' -- 75 years since the 44-day Flint sit-down strike

http://links.org.au/node/2681

--Inspiring

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

HALLELUJAH CORPORATIONS (revised edition).mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTS ON YOUTUBE SO FAR!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C-qIgbP9o&feature=share&mid=552

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

ILWU Local 10 Longshore Workers Speak-Out At Oakland Port Shutdown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JUpBpZYwms

Uploaded by laborvideo on Dec 13, 2011

ILWU Local 10 longshore workers speak out during a blockade of the Port of

Oakland called for by Occupy Oakland. Anthony Levieges and Clarence Thomas rank

and file members of the union. The action took place on December 12, 2011 and

the interview took place at Pier 30 on the Oakland docks.

For more information on the ILWU Local 21 Longview EGT struggle go to

http://www.facebook.com/groups/256313837734192/

For further info on the action and the press conferernce go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3fE-Vhrw8&feature=youtu.be

Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

UC Davis Police Violence Adds Fuel to Fire

By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News

19 November 11

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8485-uc-davis-police-violence-add\

s-fuel-to-fire

UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4&feature=player_embedded

Police PEPPER SPRAY UC Davis STUDENT PROTESTERS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I&feature=player_embedded

Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmJmmnMkuEM&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CZ0t9ez_EGI#!

Occupy Seattle - 84 Year Old Woman Dorli Rainey Pepper Sprayed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTIyE_JlJzw&feature=related

*---------*

THE BEST VIDEO ON "OCCUPY THE WORLD"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S880UldxB1o

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Shot by police with rubber bullet at Occupy Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

Copwatch@Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Infiltrators and Provocateurs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0

*---------*

Occupy Oakland 11-2 Strike: Police Tear Gas, Black Bloc, War in the Streets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tu_D8SFYck&feature=player_embedded

*----*

Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest

were actually undercover Quebec police officers:

POLICE STATE Criminal Cops EXPOSED As Agent Provocateurs @ SPP Protest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoiisMMCFT0&feature=player_embedded

*----*

Quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=player_embedded

G20: Epic Undercover Police Fail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ7aU-n1L8&feature=player_embedded

*----*

WHAT HAPPENED IN OAKLAND TUESDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 25:

Occupy Oakland Protest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlPs-REyl-0&feature=player_embedded

Cops make mass arrests at occupy Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27kD2_7PwU&feature=player_embedded

Raw Video: Protesters Clash With Oakland Police

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpO-lJr2BQY&feature=player_embedded

Occupy Oakland - Flashbangs USED on protesters OPD LIES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqNOPZLw03Q&feature=player_embedded

KTVU TV Video of Police violence

http://www.ktvu.com/video/29587714/index.html

Marine Vet wounded, tear gas & flash-bang grenades thrown in downtown

Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMUgPTCgwcQ&feature=player_embedded

Tear Gas billowing through 14th & Broadway in Downtown Oakland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4Y0pwJtWE&feature=player_embedded

Arrests at Occupy Atlanta -- This is what a police state looks like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStWz6jbeZA&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

Labor Beat: Hey You Billionaire, Pay Your Fair Share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8isD33f-I

*---------*

Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA48gmfGB6U&feature=youtu.be

Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjKZpOk7TyM&feature=related

*---------*

#Occupy Wall Street In Washington Square: Mohammed Ezzeldin, former occupier of

Egypt's Tahrir Square Speaks at Washington Square!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziodsFWEb5Y&feature=player_embedded

*---------*

#OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street

By adele pham

http://vimeo.com/30146870

*---------*

Live arrest at brooklyn bridge #occupywallstreet by We are Change

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULSI-31Pto&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

FREE THE CUBAN FIVE!

http://www.thecuban5.org/wordpress/index.php

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmS4kHC_OlY&feature=player_embedded

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

One World One Revolution -- MUST SEE VIDEO -- Powerful and beautiful...bw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded

"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Japan: angry Fukushima citizens confront government (video)

Posted by Xeni Jardin on Monday, Jul 25th at 11:36am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded


*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand

Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.

"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."

"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse

Sharkey, Vice

President, Chicago Teachers Union

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded

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