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B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Obama Faulted in Terror Fight, New Poll Finds
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 Kenneth Chang
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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12) Deaths From Faulty Switch in G.M. Cars Edge Higher
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13) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
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
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-Ã -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
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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Bay
Area United Against War Newsletter
Table
of Contents:
A.
EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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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Protest at his fundraiser with SF’s “elite”,
let’s tell President Obama: No War!
Fri. Oct. 10, 4-7pm
‘W’ Hotel, 3rd & Howard St, SF
Join us to demand:
• Stop bombing Syria and Iraq!
• U.S. out of the Middle East!
• End U.S. aid to Israel!
• Money for jobs, housing, healthcare, education, not war and occupation!
President Barack Obama is coming to San Francisco to raise tens of millions of dollars for the Democratic Party’s “war chest” and upcoming elections, as the peoples of the Middle East suffer a new U.S. bombing war, this time expanding into Syria and deepening in Iraq. The Pentagon generals are demanding “boots on the ground” in Washington’s quest for total domination of the oil-rich region. Gaza is still under rubble and blockaded by Israel, due to both Democrats’ and Republicans’ military aid to Israel. We urge everyone to come and protest Obama’s visit, to say: Stop bombing the people of the Middle East, U.S. Out! Money for Jobs and Housing, Not War!
More info: 415-821-6545 or www.answersf.org
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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The ANSWER Coalition encourages its supporters to participate in this important action. The call to action below was reposted from the official website for the events.
We are in a movement moment.
Droves of people, many of them young and black, took to the streets of Ferguson to demand justice for Mike Brown. Millions stood in solidarity as protestors were met by a brutal and militarized response by local police departments.
Our country can no longer deny the epidemic of police violence facing Black and Brown communities. Mike Brown is now part of a long list of people like John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant and countless others who have been unjustly killed by police. Their lives mattered.
Join Hands Up United, Organization for Black Struggle, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment and our partners in Ferguson from October 10-13th for a weekend of resistance. We’re hosting a series of public events—marches, convenings and panels— to build momentum for a nationwide movement against police violence.
We will gather in Ferguson, but the world will hear our call for change.
Below is a tentative schedule of events. Click here for the latest updates.
Friday, October 10th
Justice Now March
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Buzz Westfall Justice Center (100 S Central Ave.) Clayton, Mo.
Saturday, October 11th
Justice for All: National March and Rally
10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Scott Trade Center (1401 Clark Ave.) St. Louis, MO
Sunday, October 12th
Hip Hop & Hope
TBA, St. Louis
Monday, October 13th
#MoralMonday Civil Disobedience
10:00 am - 12:00 pm
TBA, St. Louis, MO
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Yesterday, the ACLU and Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit against the Army demanding the necessary medical treatment for Manning’s previously diagnosed gender dysphoria.
By continuing to deny Manning treatment, the Army is directly violating Chelsea’s constitutional rights under the 8th amendment. Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case, notes “such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
Due to a full year of neglecting Manning’s medical care, the ACLU had previously announced a Sept 4th deadline for the Army to provide treatment. After continued failure to provide treatment, the ACLU filed a lawsuit yesterday and released the following statement:
ACLU Demands Government Provide Chelsea Manning Necessary Medical Care
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 23, 2014
CONTACT: Crystal Cooper, ACLU National, 212-549-2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON—Today, Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia against Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and other Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of the Army officials for their failure to provide necessary medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition with which she was originally diagnosed by Army doctors more than four years ago.
The complaint is accompanied by a motion for preliminary injunction demanding that Ms. Manning be provided hormone therapy, permission to follow female grooming standards, and access to treatment by a medical provider qualified to treat her condition. Ms. Manning is currently serving a thirty-five year prison sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, and though the military recognizes that she has gender dysphoria requiring treatment, critical care has been withheld without any medical basis.
“The government continues to deny Ms. Manning’s access to necessary medical treatment for gender dysphoria, without which she will continue to suffer severe psychological harms,” said Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case. “Such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
Ms. Manning is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, the ACLU of Kansas and civilian defense counsel David E. Coombs. Last month, Ms. Manning’s legal team sent a letter to the DOD and Army officials demanding that she receive treatment for gender dysphoria in accordance with medical standards of care, including hormone therapy and permission to follow female grooming standards. Her treatment needs have continued to be unmet and her distress has escalated.
“I am proud to be standing with the ACLU behind Chelsea on this very important issue.” said David E. Coombs, “It is my hope that through this action, Chelsea will receive the medical care that she needs without having to suffer any further anguish.”
Gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition that requires hormone therapy and changes to gender expression, like growing hair, to live consistently with one’s gender identity as part of accepted standards of care.
Without necessary treatment, gender dysphoria can cause severe psychological distress, anxiety, and suicidality. For this reason, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Psychological Association have issued policy statements that support providing treatment to prisoners diagnosed with the condition in accordance with established standards of care, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and many state corrections agencies are already doing.
A copy of the complaint is available at:
aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-complaint-declaratory-and-injunctive-relief
The motion for preliminary injunction is available at:
aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-plaintiffs-motion-preliminary-injunction
This press release is available at:
aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/aclu-demands-government-provide-chelsea-manning-necessary-medical-care
—Free Chelsea Manning, September 24, 2014
http://www.chelseamanning.org/press/aclu-files-lawsuit-against-army-demands-medical-care-for-manning
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In a bizarre and desperate move, prosecutors in the case of Palestinian American leader Rasmea Odeh filed a motion in Federal Court October 3, which characterized the efforts of an important leader of the Rasmea Odeh defense campaign, Hatem Abudayyeh, as “jury tampering” and “almost certainly criminal.” The prosecution then asks Judge Gershwin Drain for an “Anonymous Jury,” which means that the names of the jurors are kept secret from the defense attorneys, and that an array of security measures are put it place during the trial that make it seem like 67-year-old Rasmea Odeh is a dangerous person.
There is no evidence at all for the baseless accusations against the movement in support of Rasmea. The prosecutor’s motion is a clumsy attempt at intimidation and should be condemned by everyone who is concerned about civil liberties.
Here are the facts. Rasmea Odeh is a beloved leader of the Palestinian community in Chicago who is facing trumped up immigration charges. Imprisoned by the Israelis in the late 1960s, due to her work to free Palestine, Rasmea was tortured and sexually abused. She is well-known and respected across the world. The federal government is threatening her with jail and deportation. As a result, a powerful and effective movement organized protests around the country, demanding “Justice for Rasmea.”
Now the prosecutors are waging an attack on everyone involved in this movement to support and defend Rasmea.
They talk about “jury tampering.” Until there is a trial, there is no jury, so how could a jury possibly be tampered with? In any event, at no time have we ever tried to improperly influence a jury. Not once. What we are doing is organizing protests, having people sign petitions and holding educational events. We are encouraging people to attend Rasmea’s court appearances. We are shining a light on the unjust prosecution of Rasmea. We want the government to drop the charges.
In the prosecutor’s motion we are told, “Hatem Abudayyeh has orchestrated a concerted effort to influence the criminal proceedings against defendant, which has resulted, at each proceeding, in a large group outside the Courthouse protesting and parading, carrying signs demanding dismissal of charges and ‘Justice for Rasmea’ and displaying the Palestinian flag.” Imagine that. Palestinians, Arabs and progressive people responding to an injustice by holding a protest and engaging in activity that is protected by the First Amendment. In the world that the Detroit U.S. Attorney wants, speaking out as we have is, “almost certainly criminal.” On the contrary—it is criminal for the prosecutors to attempt to restrict our constitutional rights.
It is worth noting that there is a distinctly racist, anti-Arab undertone to the prosecutor’s motion, where spirited and dignified protests, with a majority of Palestinian American participants, are described as “hordes” and “mobs.” Again, the federal government is trying to sow fear among people in the U.S. by criminalizing and stereotyping Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. As one of Rasmea’s lawyers said when he was informed of the motion, it, “is only intended to play the ‘terrorism’ card and is unacceptable.”
The prosecutors also have a problem with people who want to petition the government for a redress of grievances, so they complain in their motion that those who want the charges against Rasmea dropped “have previously attempted to flood Department of Justice telephone lines in an attempt to influence these proceedings.”
We will continue to hold call-in days and we will organize even more people to participate in them.
We take the threats of the prosecution seriously. We urge all of our supporters to keep their eyes on Detroit and to be ready to respond to any attacks on leaders of the Rasmea defense campaign.
We see these threats as a sign that our campaign to defend Rasmea Odeh is working. We were successful in getting Zionist Judge Borman off the case. There are now thousands of people across the country engaged in organizing for Rasmea. We will not allow the government to intimidate us. This attack will bring more supporters and strengthen our work further. We will redouble our efforts to make sure the charges against Rasmea are dropped!
—Committee to Stop FBI Repression, October 6, 2014
http://www.stopfbi.net/2014/10/6/detroit-us-attorney-threatens-supporters-rasmea-odeh
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Please forward and post widely
- 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.
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) As Protests Persist, Ferguson Transfers Security to County
The St. Louis County Police Department on Friday took control of security surrounding protests in Ferguson, Mo., which have persisted since the death of Michael Brown, 18, at the hands of a police officer on Aug. 9.
Chief Thomas Jackson of the Ferguson Police Department asked the county to step in, citing a “lack of manpower and resources” at the disposal of the relatively small Ferguson police force, said Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the county police.
In a statement, the county force said it intended to “provide both our citizens and the media with the safest environment possible so that they may freely exercise their First Amendment right, while also protecting the rights and safety of all residents and businesses in the city of Ferguson.”The shift means that the responsibility for making arrests, booking and releasing prisoners and filing charges will now be handled by the county force, a significantly larger and more sophisticated police department that is the main law-enforcement agency for much of the county. Some municipalities in St. Louis County, like Ferguson, maintain their own, smaller forces, but depend on the county police for handling more serious criminal activity. The St. Louis County police are in charge of the investigation into Mr. Brown’s death.
Since the larger demonstrations after Mr. Brown’s death that drew a heavy police response and national media attention, protesters in recent weeks have gathered in modest numbers on a nightly basis in Ferguson, beating drums, shouting at police officers and marching in the streets with hands raised in the air. Nearby residents and business owners have grown impatient with their presence, with one shop owner asking protesters to stop using his parking lot as a staging ground.
The police have arrested protesters for offenses including violating noise ordinances. Some advocates have said the police have overreached. More than a dozen protesters were arrested on Thursday night, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to undertake a review of the events.
A county grand jury is meeting to decide whether Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Mr. Brown, committed a crime. He remains on paid administrative leave.
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2) Who Are ‘We the People’?
WHO is a person? How do you qualify for basic human rights? What is required for you to be able to speak or worship freely or to be free from torture?
Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has considered and reconsidered the criteria for membership in the club of rights, oscillating between a vision limiting rights to preferred groups and another granting rights to all who require protection. These competing visions have led to some strange results.
Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests as though they were individual political actors. Corporations can assert religious rights to gain legal exemptions from laws that would otherwise apply to them. Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay, however, have none of these rights.
As a corporate litigator who has also spent more than a decade defending Guantánamo detainees, I have been trying to figure out why corporations are worthy of court protection and Muslims held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States at a naval base in Cuba are not.
The direction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the past decade has been anything but consistent. As the court readies itself for another term, it may not be possible to speak of a Roberts court jurisprudence at all. Even within the conservative and liberal blocs there are a range of views on the limits of executive power, the relationship between the federal government and the states, the protection of politically expressive speech and the applicability of the Constitution abroad. But the bulk of the most controversial cases come down to 4-to-4 bloc voting, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s worldview defining the court’s path.
But we are not completely in the dark about who is likely to be granted legally enforceable rights and who is not. This term the court will consider whether Arkansas can force a Muslim prisoner to shave his beard, whether a Muslim woman who wears a head scarf can get a job at Abercrombie & Fitch, and whether Alabama can cram African-American voters into a few districts to dilute their political impact.
The Roberts court has already charted a course in which rights are extended to those who have real clout in American society and denied to those who are more marginal. In two critical cases, Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, the court decided by a 5-to-4 vote that corporations had broad rights of speech and of religion, which left corporate owners in a position to trumpet their political and religious views while diminishing or even silencing other voices.
In Citizens United, the court held that corporations had the right under the First Amendment to spend unlimited amounts on election advertising. The court evaded the issue of whether corporations were legal “persons” with rights, finding that the political process was always improved by more speech rather than less. Justice Kennedy, writing for the court, found that corporate spending contributed to the dissemination of information and ideas that “the First Amendment seeks to foster.” He rejected the argument that corporations should be limited “simply because such associations are not ‘natural persons.’ ”
But Congress limits speech all the time. Foreign nationals, for example, even those who live legally in the United States, are not permitted to make campaign contributions or expenditures. They may be “persons,” but for First Amendment purposes, they are not legitimate speakers. Unless, of course, they own shares in corporations.
The Supreme Court’s decision said nothing about the interests of the corporation or the identity of its stakeholders. Chinese or Russian shareholders could gain control of an American corporation and use shareholder funds to influence elections in the United States. According to the court, money is speech, and once it is corporate money, it is laundered of its foreign taint.
In Hobby Lobby, the court considered whether corporations had the right to deprive employees of contraceptive coverage required under the Affordable Care Act, based on the religious objections of their controlling shareholders. The court applied the Dictionary Act, an obscure statute from 1871 that says that a reference in a given statute to a “person” includes corporations “unless the context indicates otherwise.” Normal dictionaries do not define persons to include corporations. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion takes a “just folks” view of the matter: “A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends.”
This inability to make the distinction between individual corporate stakeholders and the legal fiction of the corporation is not only weird, it is bad corporate law. Whatever else corporations may be, they are not the sum of their people. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Chief Justice John Marshall’s two-centuries-old observation that a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law.”
The modern corporation is a brilliant invention of 19th-century capitalism that creates a separate entity — a legal “person” — that can enter into contracts, borrow money, sue and be sued without exposing its shareholders to personal liability. The shareholders are not the corporation; directors, executives and employees aren’t either. Shareholders, executives and employees do have religious rights — as individuals. Hobby Lobby does not expand anyone’s religious rights. What it does do is allow the religious beliefs of the owners of a company to trump the beliefs of its employees.
The Supreme Court did not declare Hobby Lobby a person with religious rights because it was confused about whether a corporation could pray or have a bar mitzvah. The court chose to allow business owners to retain the powerful protection of limited liability while awarding them the further benefit of an exemption from the financial obligations of the Affordable Care Act. The majority took one definition of a legal person and used it as a hook to impose its own views about the importance of religion and business in American public life. When she was asked recently which court decision during her tenure would be most significant 50 years from now, Justice Ginsburg noted the strangeness inherent in the court’s reasoning: “Well,” she said, “I think 50 years from now, people will not be able to understand Hobby Lobby.”
IN holding that corporations had religious rights, the Hobby Lobby decision sat in contrast to a case I brought under the same statute in 2004, in which the court found that Muslims at Guantánamo Bay were not persons and had no religious rights.
That case, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, alleged that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the chain of command had established a regime at Guantánamo that systematically humiliated and abused detainees when they tried to practice their religion. In an attempt to break these people, guards threw Qurans in the toilet bucket, blasted rock music to interrupt prayers and forced prisoners to pray with their genitals exposed.
To me, the case seemed open-and-shut. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (R.F.R.A.), which was passed in 1993, prohibits the government from “substantially” burdening “a person’s exercise of religion” unless it serves some important government interest that cannot be accomplished in any other way. My clients were “persons”; throwing Qurans in the toilet bucket certainly made it difficult for them to worship; and it served no governmental interest to humiliate people who were praying.
The Federal District Court in Washington, which first heard the case, agreed that “R.F.R.A. expressly protects the religious exercise of ‘persons,’ a broadly applicable term, commonly including aliens.” But the government appealed and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that, as aliens held outside the United States, these men were not “persons” after all. The Bush administration had put them offshore precisely to ensure this.Even the arch-conservative Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who once said that “in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery,” was uncomfortable, noting in concurrence, “It leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantánamo are not ‘persons.’ This is a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.”
The case went to the Supreme Court twice. The first time the court ordered the court of appeals to reconsider the case, which it duly did, reaching the same conclusion. The second time the Supreme Court declined to hear the case and the appeals court decision remains the law.
So while Muslims in United States custody do not have redress from the coarsest attacks on their religious dignity, corporations do have religious rights that the law protects. Why were my clients, undeniably actual people, abused when they worshiped, while state-chartered artificial entities were allowed an exemption from the law in deference to the religious beliefs of their shareholders?
One possibility is that detainees are excluded because they are aliens outside the United States. But the Supreme Court held in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush, again with a 5-to-4 vote, that detainees at Guantánamo did have the constitutional right to habeas corpus. To rule otherwise, Justice Kennedy wrote, would be to hold that the “political branches have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will” based on where the executive has chosen to bring prisoners. Under this reasoning, the Constitution should be a backpack that travels with governmental authority and protects those subject to American custody.
Justice Antonin Scalia was apoplectic. Warning of “disastrous consequences,” he wrote in dissent that “today, for the first time in our nation’s history, the court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war.” His dire prediction: “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
He need not have worried. As Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a mainstay of the conservative D.C. Circuit, wrote in a concurrence in 2011, Boumediene was a “charade,” a “defiant — if only theoretical — assertion of judicial supremacy.” The courts refused to extend habeas or any other rights to detainees at bases other than Guantánamo. No detainee has ever been released as a direct result of an American court order. As a practical matter, aliens in American custody outside the United States have no enforceable rights. President Obama has forbidden torture by executive order. Yet his predecessor allowed torture, and so could his successor. Whatever else may go into the knapsacks of military personnel, the Constitution is not on the packing list.
As the Roberts court begins its 10th term, there is a clear shift away from decades of jurisprudence in which the court envisioned its role as protector of the essential human dignity of those who lacked the political power to protect themselves. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. called the Constitution “a sublime oration on the dignity of man.” But historically the Supreme Court had ignored the dignity of a broad section of humanity: Native Americans, slaves, women, racial minorities, aliens, Japanese internees, gays and lesbians, and now Muslims at Guantánamo.
The current court is solicitous of those who pool their capital and obtain the protection of the corporate form. It is sympathetic toward the interests of mainstream elites, expanding religion, protecting commercial wealth and even protecting gay rights, an issue that crosses class lines. The dignity of prisoners, employees, or ethnic and racial minorities is far less likely to engage the moral imagination of this court.
Years ago, my constitutional law professor, Judge Robert H. Bork, taught us about the cases that challenged the government edict that ordered the rounding up of citizens of Japanese ancestry into remote internment camps during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld that order by a vote of 6 to 3, finding that “the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast.” Judge Bork was no progressive, but he told us that he was shocked that “we the people” could so easily succumb to racist, nativist hysteria. Surely it could never happen again.
It takes courage for the Supreme Court to stand up for the powerless and the despised. Sometimes it has risen to the challenge and sometimes it has not. With the Roberts court, what we see is a self-referential worldview, which leads the court to enhance the rights of insiders and deny protection to outsiders. On Monday, the justices will begin another term with the question of whether their commitment to the protection of human dignity will be universal or limited to “persons” just like them.
Eric L. Lewis is a partner at the law firm Lewis Baach and the chairman of Reprieve US.
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3) Reining In Egypt’s Military Aid
Egyptian leaders have come to see the annual $1.3 billion American military aid package as an entitlement they are due in perpetuity for having signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. The United States has done little to disabuse them of that notion. It’s time it does. Failing to make significant cuts to the program later this year, when the Obama administration will confront tough choices regarding Egypt’s future, would be indefensible. Since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took control in Egypt though a military coup in July 2013, the country has returned to its authoritarian moorings by jailing political opponents, silencing critics and vilifying peaceful Islamists.
Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, which became the leading political movement in the wake of Egypt’s 2011 popular uprising, are languishing in prison, unfairly branded as terrorists. That has left a large generation of Brotherhood supporters rudderless, raising the possibility that some will be drawn to militancy. Just when the United States is battling Sunni extremists in Iraq and Syria, seeking to isolate the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, Egypt’s crushing authoritarianism could well persuade a significant number of its citizens that violence is the only tool they have for fighting back.
Egypt today is in many ways more repressive than it was during the darkest periods of the reign of deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak. Mr. Sisi’s government has cracked down on demonstrations, tightened control of state media and prosecuted journalists. A new, vaguely worded law will soon stiffen penalties for individuals who receive foreign funding, making it a crime punishable by life in prison. The measure, ostensibly intended to fight terrorism, is similar to policies the state has used to suppress the work of pro-democracy organizations.
In Sinai, as its fight against militants has moved into populated areas, the Egyptian army has reportedly used American-made tanks to shell civilian areas. When Human Rights Watch tried to release a report in Egypt about last year’s brutal crackdown on a Cairo demonstration camp, during which more than 900 protesters were killed, the group’s representatives were barred from entering the country.
Mr. Sisi, who came to power in a rigged election, seems to think the rest of the world has not noticed. Addressing the General Assembly last week, he claimed, astonishingly, that he was building a new Egypt that “respects rights and freedoms” and “ensures the coexistence of all citizens without exclusion or discrimination.”
American officials have been measured in their criticism, calculating that they are better off with Egypt as an ally, however despotic. Historically, they have valued expedited passage through the Suez Canal for American Navy ships and unfettered access to the country’s airspace.In the coming months, however, the administration will have two opportunities to correct its course and signal that it can no longer condone brutality.
First, Washington must stop allowing Egypt to place military hardware orders under a preferential system called cash flow finance. Available only to Israel and Egypt, the mechanism works much like a credit card, permitting the countries to place orders under the assumption that Congress will eventually appropriate enough funds to cover them. It will take years to wean Egypt off cash flow finance, since orders can take years to process, but doing so now will help untangle contractual and legislative knots in the future.
Second, Secretary of State John Kerry has to certify to Congress that Egypt is on a path to democracy as a condition for delivering several items of military aid that are in the pipeline. Congress insisted on such certification when it appropriated Egypt’s military aid package last year. Failing to do so by the end of the year would halt the delivery of roughly $650 million worth of American tanks and fighter planes. The only reasonable answer from Mr. Kerry is no.
Egypt values American military hardware, and continued cooperation is in the interest of both countries. The onus is on Cairo to earn it.
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4) Jobs Report Highlights the Wage Growth Puzzle
By Justin Wolfers
The latest round of labor market data released Friday add to an emerging puzzle whose resolution will be central to the future of the recovery.
We learned that employment is growing at a healthy clip, with 248,000 jobs created this month, and an average of 220,000 jobs created each month over the past year. Moreover, unemployment has fallen both further and faster than most had anticipated. The latest reading suggests that unemployment is down to 5.9 percent, and has fallen about a full percentage point in each of the past three years. These are all symptoms of a healthy economic expansion.
Normally, this would lead to faster wage growth. When workers feel their jobs are secure, they’re better positioned to ask for a raise. Likewise, when there are fewer people unemployed, companies need to pay better wages in order to attract talented workers.
Yet average hourly wages in the private sector were roughly flat in September (they fell by a penny), and they’ve grown at a rate of only around 2 percent over the past year. Alternative indicators also suggest that wage growth remains subdued.
This puzzle isn’t entirely new, as the usual link between unemployment and the rate of wage growth has totally broken down over recent years.
The recent data have made a sharp departure from the usual textbook analysis in which a tighter labor market leads to faster wage growth, and subsequent cost pressures feed through to higher inflation. Even as the recession threw millions of people out of work, wage growth barely slowed despite the textbook prediction to the contrary. Then through the ensuing recovery, unemployment fell rapidly, but again, wage growth has barely moved.
By the usual analysis, the key variable is how much “slack” there is in the labor market. When unemployment gets too low — toward what economists call the “natural rate” (don’t be fooled, there’s nothing natural about it) — there’s no more slack, and inflationary pressures start to build. This is the key reason the Federal Reserve has historically been nervous about keeping its foot pressed on the accelerator when unemployment got this low.
The problem is that economists don’t actually know how much slack there is in the economy, because we don’t know what unemployment rate the economy can sustain without sparking inflationary pressures. The Fed’s current guess is that the natural rate is around 5¼ or 5½ percent, although really, this is just a guess based on historical patterns. But it’s a critically important guess, because while unemployment’s not yet that low, the current trajectory puts us there soon. Indeed, this is the key reason the Federal Reserve policy makers have been talking about raising interest rates.
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5) Aboard a Cargo Colossus
A helicopter appeared in the sky over the North Sea.
It was 7 a.m. on a Wednesday this summer, and the helicopter circled in a wide arc before hovering above a ship traveling south at about 15 knots. At more than 1,300 feet long, the ship, the Mary Maersk, was hard to miss. It is longer than the Eiffel Tower is high, and the Mary and its sister ships are the biggest container ships in the world.
Feet appeared first from the helicopter, then a pair of Levi’s, and gradually a man was lowered by rope onto the ship’s deck. His job was to pilot the ship down a narrow dredged channel in the Weser River, toward the port of Bremerhaven, Germany.
Later that morning, the Mary would undertake the largest-scale act of parallel parking ever — or at least since the last time it docked, the day before, in Gothenburg, Sweden.
As companies look for more efficient ways to move freight from factories in China to consumers in Europe, the Mary is among the newest giants, known as the Triple-E’s. Owned and operated by A. P. Moeller-Maersk of Denmark, the world’s largest container shipping company, the Triple-E’s went into service last year, muscling their way into the $210 billion container industry. They have also gained a following: Hobbyist spotters watch for the Triple-E’s and post pictures online, and Lego has created a mini version with 1,516 bricks.
Until the late 1990s, the largest container ships could carry about 5,000 steel shipping containers, each about 20 feet long. Today, such ships are little more than chum. The size of container ships has exploded, reflecting their role as the packhorses of globalization. Each year, the maritime shipping industry transports nearly $13 trillion of goods, roughly 70 percent of total freight, according to the World Trade Organization.
The Triple-E’s can carry more than 18,000 containers, piled 20 high, with 10 above deck and 10 below. But they can sail only between Europe and Asia, as their nearly 194-foot wide hull is too large to fit into American ports or to slip through the Panama Canal.
The Mary will stop at a dozen ports, going from Gdansk in Poland to Ningbo, Yantian and Shanghai in China. It carries seafood. It carries auto parts. It carries perfume, grated cheese and frozen pork. While computers and clothing are among China’s biggest exports, chemicals and timber are more likely to leave Europe.
The Mary — stacked so high with cargo that little is visible beyond two smokestacks and a glassed-in command center — is an apt symbol for an increasingly global marketplace. But it also represents the container shipping industry’s overreaching ambitions. Few carriers besides Maersk are profitable, too many new ships are being built, and demand for space on container ships is slowing as economies in Europe and Asia face headwinds.
Maersk, based in Copenhagen, ordered 20 Triple-E’s from Daewoo of South Korea in 2011, increasing its worldwide capacity more than 10 percent. The timing was unusual. A report from the Boston Consulting Group, which counts Maersk as a client, called 2011 a year that “executives in the container-shipping industry would probably like to forget,” in part because a wave of new vessels ordered in earlier years swelled capacity.
But demand for space has lagged since 2008, according to Drewry, a shipping consultancy that tracks the industry. The idle space at Maersk amounts to one Triple-E.
“It’s a simple logic, bigger is better,” said Ulrik Sanders, global head of the shipping practice at Boston Consulting, “if you can fill it.”
“There’s too much capacity in the market and that drives down prices,” he continued. “From an industry perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. But from an individual company perspective, it makes a lot of sense. It’s a very tricky thing.”
‘An Arms Race’
The captain wears Crocs. He is standing on the bridge, in black jeans and a white shirt with black stripes at the shoulders.
The captain, Franz Holmberg, is an easygoing Dane. There is a tattoo on his left arm of an eagle fighting a dragon; he says the image is “not as vivid” as it once was. A formidable camera rests among the bridge instruments — he likes to memorialize landscapes, such as the Suez Canal scene he uses as a screen saver.
Not much happens on the ship, he says, but then he sits back on a couch just off the bridge and offers a few stories of the sea. Like the time a sailor thought the Danish queen, whose picture hangs in the dining room, began speaking to him. Or the time two Ghanaian stowaways were discovered huddled in a sealed crate. They had packed food in bags, and brought bags to defecate in. But after more than a week at sea, “they ran out of bags,” the captain says.
He came from a farming family, but decided to try a life at sea and got hooked. After graduating from nautical school, he was a third officer on a ship that carried 3,800 containers, a fifth of Mary’s capacity.
“Every time a new series comes out, everyone says this is it; it can’t get any bigger,” the captain says, adding, “Then a few years after, they just add a little bit more.”
The industry wants ships that carry more containers, more slowly. Fuel prices are a major factor, so ships now commonly “slow steam” to save fuel, cruising at 16 or 18 knots instead of 22. A typical trip from Poland to China takes 34 days.
During a recent voyage to the Suez, the Mary’s crew sailed on a parallel course with a 10-year-old Maersk container ship that held half as much cargo, but the Mary used only 6 percent more fuel. “We’ve seen during the last 10, 15 years a dramatic increase in fuel costs,” said Jacob Pedersen, an analyst at Sydbank, a Danish bank. “That gives them reason to get rid of the old uneconomic ships.”
But fuel is only one part of the equation. “The supply of ships has far outstripped the growth rate” of container traffic, said Richard Meade, the editor of Lloyd’s List, a leading nautical newspaper, adding that the top shipping lines “have entered into an arms race in terms of size, led by Maersk” and its Swiss rival, the privately held Mediterranean Shipping Company. Newer ships, he said, “are more efficient, more economically viable and more environmentally friendly, but they are only going to deliver those results if they are full.”
When the world economy slackens, so does the shipping industry. At one end of Mary’s route, the growth engine of China has been losing steam, while at the other, Europe is again flirting with recession.
The shipping industry has also lacked significant consolidation, with shipping giants often seen as national assets. The top five container lines are either family- or state-controlled. Revenue at Maersk, publicly traded but family controlled, equals more than 14 percent of Denmark’s gross domestic product.
Shipyards, conditioned to build ever-larger vessels, are cutting prices to keep their order books filled. The Triple-E’s were built for $190 million a ship, which in 2011 was seen as a relative bargain. By comparison, in 2007 China Shipping Container Lines, another major shipping line, paid $1.36 billion for eight ships, or about $170 million a ship — but those had a capacity of about 13,300 containers, nearly 5,000 fewer per ship.
“In this down cycle, the new-built prices are low and money is cheap, so you would much rather go and buy the vessels than go and acquire a company” that has older ships, said Martin Dixon, director of research products at Drewry. “Many shipping lines are struggling to make money, so cost leadership is key to survival. Hence, you’re seeing a lot of investment in bigger ships.”
The bigger ships, though, have been sustained by a growth rate in containerization traffic that has been two and a half to three times global economic growth for decades — and that seems to be coming to an end.
“There are two types of companies that will survive this,” Mr. Sanders of Boston Consulting said. “Either you have the very large companies like Maersk” that “take advantage of scale and make money, or particular shipping lines that operate a niche where they dominate, like a feeder line out in Southeast Asia.
“The other guys,” he added, “are caught in the middle and will have a hard time to make a decent return.”
Both Officer and Medic
Jens Boysen is the Mary’s chief officer. Essentially, he is the captain’s right-hand man.
While the ships grow, the crews don’t, in another economy of scale. The Mary has a multinational crew of 20 to 30 — and with so few, they multitask.
Mr. Boysen, 35, is a blond, blue-eyed ethnic Dane who grew up in Germany. He doubles as medic, he explained during a tour of the ship’s small medical bay, which has a bed, a shower and drawers stuffed with pills and transfusion packs. He recounted an episode on the Mediterranean. “I had one motorman who, he was hammering on a shaft,” he began. “He used the wrong tool so some metal peeled off and actually was penetrating through the boiler suit, so there was a lot of blood coming out.”
He wasn’t sure whether metal had lodged inside the man, so he approached the situation like an engineer.
“We have a lot of magnets on board, so I just took a magnet to feel if there was something,” he said. “There was actually some metal, but we couldn’t get it removed, so we had to take him to the hospital later on.”
The crewman was fine — problem solved.
The cost of the crew and a range of other expenses related to running the vessel account for more than a quarter of the Maersk Line division’s cost base. Fuel represents more than a fifth. Cutting such costs helps Maersk steady its results.
In 2009, the company lost $1 billion. This year, Maersk is on track to make $4.5 billion in profit, according to Bloomberg.
Back in the medical bay, Mr. Boysen pulls out a metal box marked “dental” from a drawer and looked up.
“I can also pull some teeth if you want.”
China’s Huge Footprint
Earlier this year, the Nicaraguan government announced plans to build a new canal system, bankrolled by a Chinese billionaire, that would compete with Panama and be wide enough to accommodate the Triple-E. Such plans have been floated before and failed to materialize, but it is the kind of audacious project that only the Chinese might try.
No country more than China has spurred the containerization boom, a byproduct of moving the world’s factories thousands of miles from their biggest markets.
Maersk is deeply embedded in China, with more than 20,000 employees there. It operates container terminals at seven Chinese ports, has bought 118 Chinese-made ships worth $3.5 billion and owns two Chinese factories that build containers.
China is also exerting its influence on the industry. The country’s regulators recently blocked an attempt by Maersk and two European rivals to form a partnership, saying it would hinder competition. Maersk recently proposed a less ambitious alliance with a single rival, the Mediterranean Shipping Company. The proposed deals represent a concession that cargo volume is not rebounding as quickly, so shippers need to share costs and cargo space. Boats are typically full heading west to Europe and partly empty heading east to China. Cargo from Europe to Asia has grown about 30 percent in the last five years, in part because of rising demand from a growing Chinese middle class. But it has not nearly filled all the containers.
At the same time, some manufacturing is moving closer to local markets, a trend that contributes to slowing growth in container traffic. China, too, is trying to foster its own shipping lines. This year, China Shipping Container Lines ordered five ships that will each hold 19,000 containers, about 1,000 more than the Triple-E. They begin to arrive later this year.
But Jakob Stausholm, the chief strategy, finance and transformation officer at Maersk’s container shipping division, said that there was little room for ships to expand further.
“This is still an attractive industry, but it will grow at a much lower multiple of global G.D.P.,” he said. “I really think that right now, given the size of container lines, given the level of sea freight, there is no benefit going toward bigger vessels.”
How to Park a Whale
It was time to park the world’s largest container ship.
Several hours had passed since the first pilot arrived by helicopter, and a second, Karsten Burckner, 45, had come aboard from a tugboat gangplank. Soon he was smoking cigarettes on the far end of the ship’s bridge with the captain. He rolled them by hand, while the captain preferred his Marlboros.
Mr. Burckner’s job was to help turn large boats in front of the harbor at Bremerhaven and back them into their spot alongside the port where towering cranes would soon begin hoisting crates on and off the ships. Speedy, it is not.
Three tugboats nudged the Mary, while the ship’s twin engines fired in opposite directions. The ship began to rotate. It eased toward large rubber cushions on the dock. Beyond were steel shipping crates, stacked like dominoes and stretching out in a vast paved expanse in the port. They were scooped up by gangly red vehicles called “Straddle Carriers,” which are not much wider than a truck but tall enough to carry three or four crates.
The two men looked over the ship’s side and spoke on walkie-talkies to sailors on the ground. Minutes passed — 10, 20, 30. The Mary, crawling at 0.1 knots, began sidling up to a pier.
“Compared to the whole size and the weight of the ship, the steel plates in the side are actually pretty thin,” the captain explained. “If we get a speed higher than that, we’ll start buckling plates.”
He smiled. “And that does not go well with anybody, obviously.”
Mr. Burckner, too, was once a container ship captain — 11 years ago. But he had to give it up. “I was forced,” he said, pausing ominously and then smiling, “by my wife.” This is true of many pilots, who tend to be men who gave up the months at sea for home life.
His ship carried 2,500 containers. “That was a big container ship then,” Captain Holmberg explained.
“When I started, nobody was thinking that this size of vessel will be built,” Mr. Burckner said. “I don’t know where it will end,” he said, looking over its vast expanse. “Ask Maersk.”
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6) It Happened Again: How 14 People Made More Money Than the Entire Food Stamp Budget for 50,000,000 People
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7) Yes to Marijuana Ballot Measures
Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia Should Legalize Pot
The decision by California voters in 1996 to legalize medical marijuana produced a wave of similar initiatives around the country. Less than two decades later, over half the states allow at least limited medical use. Now it looks as though recreational use of the drug may follow the same path.
In 2012, Washington State and Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. This November, voters in Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia will decide whether to do the same — effectively disregarding the misguided federal ban on a drug that is far less dangerous than alcohol. Decades of arresting people for buying, selling and using marijuana have hurt more than helped society, and minority communities have been disproportionately affected by the harsh criminal penalties of prohibition.
Since Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia already allow medical marijuana, taking the next step makes good sense. There are some differences in their proposed initiatives, but they are all worthy of passage.
ALASKA Ballot Measure 2 would make the use and purchase of marijuana legal for those 21 and older, create a marijuana control board and tax the drug at $50 per ounce wholesale. It is already legal for Alaskans to possess small amounts of marijuana in their homes, and surveys indicate that 18 percent of Alaskans smoke marijuana. Ballot Measure 2 would mean that Alaskans could buy it from a store instead of resorting to the black market.
OREGON Measure 91 would also set a minimum age of 21. It would give the Oregon Liquor Control Commission the power to regulate marijuana as it does alcohol, and would direct it to review tax rates regularly. The tax — initially set at $35 per ounce for flowers and $10 per ounce for leaves — should allow for prices low enough to compete with street dealers. Since it is already extremely easy for adults in Oregon to obtain medical marijuana cards (almost 65,000 Oregonians have one), recreational legalization will not be a big change. As The Oregonian editorialized in August, the measure would “be worth supporting for reasons of honesty and convenience alone.”
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Initiative 71 would repeal all criminal and civil penalties for personal possession of marijuana and allow limited, private cultivation of the drug. People 21 and older could grow up to six plants at home and give away up to one ounce. Because the District of Columbia Home Rule Act does not allow a tax to be imposed by referendum, Initiative 71 would not set up a mechanism for regulating retail sales of the drug.Opponents of legalization warn that states are embarking on a risky experiment. But the sky over Colorado has not fallen, and prohibition has proved to be a complete failure. It’s time to bring the marijuana market out into the open and end the injustice of arrests and convictions that have devastated communities.
Careful regulation of the drug could very well make it safer to consume, and proper taxation could bring in new revenue for states. This year, from January through June, Colorado collected about $18.9 million.
Ideally, the federal government would repeal the ban on marijuana, so states could set their own policies without worrying about the possibility of a crackdown on citizens violating federal law. Even though a majority of Americans favor legalization, Congress shows no sign of budging. So it’s better for the states to take the lead than to wait for an epiphany on Capitol Hill that may never come.
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8) Hong Kong Wealth Gap on Display in Protests
HONG KONG — The normally gridlocked thoroughfare in front of the main Lamborghini dealership here is now quiet and carless. Guests at the $600-a-night Mandarin Oriental hotel had to enter through a lowered metal security gate on a few recent evenings, and several jewelers and luxury handbag shops are temporarily shuttered.
The unusual lull in high-end business seems a fitting contrast to the public protests that began Sept. 26, when hundreds of students first took to the streets, the crowds later swelling to tens of thousands of young people who fought off tear gas to call for greater democracy, in open defiance of the Chinese government.
China is grappling with a political problem in part because Hong Kong is dealing with an economic one. Underlying the current unrest in Hong Kong, an affluent city of 7.2 million that was a British colony for 155 years before it was returned to China in 1997, is a widening wealth gap.Growing closer to China has brought a bonanza to Hong Kong’s finance, trade, retail and real estate industries. Despite this, average wage growth in the city has stagnated for years, while the costs of housing and daily goods have surged.
Hong Kong’s silent minority of elite tend to fall in line behind the Beijing leadership on political or economic policies that touch the city. Now, it appears to be largely the squeezed middle class, and a younger generation discovering its political voice, driving the unprecedented demonstrations that have shut down major routes in some of Hong Kong’s busiest districts over the past week.
China’s leaders “have ignored the man on the street for so long because everyone told them Hong Kong people aren’t interested in politics, that it’s all about business, and they haven’t realized that society has clearly changed,” said Fraser J.T. Howie, a co-author of “Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”
“Even if protests just fizzle out, that’s not a victory for Beijing, and I don’t believe by any means it puts the democratic genie back in the bottle,” Mr. Howie said. “It’s going to be a maelstrom of governance for a long time to come.”
How Beijing chooses to respond to the sweeping protests is complicated by Hong Kong’s role as a major financial center for China. While the city’s economic output has diminished compared with China’s spectacular expansion over the years, it remains a particularly important gateway for foreign investors.Nearly two-thirds of mainland China’s foreign direct investment, which has been in decline this year, is channeled through Hong Kong. And Chinese companies raise a significant amount of funding on the city’s stock exchange.
The Chinese leadership and local officials in Hong Kong must walk a fine line as they seek to suppress calls for more democracy. Already, local police have been criticized for their liberal use of pepper spray and tear gas against peaceful demonstrators. Over the weekend, the situation turned violent as unidentified men assaulted protesters and tore down their encampments in several locations around the city, triggering dozens of arrests, including of individuals identified by the police as suspected members of triads, or organized crime groups.
By Sunday, fears had spread that the police would use force to remove demonstrators at the government’s headquarters. Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s chief executive, pledged on Saturday to “take all necessary actions” to reopen the government building by Monday morning.
Despite the tensions, Hong Kong so far has seen only limited economic fallout from the protests. Dozens of banks were forced last week to temporarily close a few branches, offices or A.T.M.s. The local stock index fell 2.6 percent for the week, which was shortened by a two-day holiday.
The temporary shuttering of some luxury shops was expected to hurt sales in Hong Kong during mainland China’s weeklong National Day holiday, which began Wednesday and traditionally has brought a huge influx of shoppers. Those closures may cost retailers as much as 2.2 billion Hong Kong dollars in lost sales, or around $280 million, for the month of October, according to Raymond Yeung, an analyst at the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group.
China temporarily suspended visas for group tours on Wednesday, a move that could have additional effects on hotel and restaurant receipts in the city. Such tours account for about 30 percent of all mainland visitors to Hong Kong.
The broader economic risk is that the situation on the streets deteriorates further and, in a worst-case situation, the authorities respond with the use of greater force or even call in the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army. Not only would that hurt the financial interests of Hong Kong’s influential tycoons and prompt a potential relocation of multinational companies away from the city, it would have far-reaching effects for China’s own economic development.
“Such a turn of events would do irreparable damage to Hong Kong’s special status as a regional financial center, which owes much to the city’s strong rule of law, its transparent legal system, and its reputation as a safe place for expatriates to live and do business,” Gareth Leather and Julian Evans-Pritchard, analysts at Capital Economics, wrote Friday in a research report.
Hong Kong has been a useful economic hub for distant rulers ever since the British established a trading colony here in 1842, a concession won from the Chinese after the First Opium War. But for Beijing, Hong Kong has proved far more financially vital than it ever was to London. Since Deng Xiaoping began opening China’s economy to the world more than three decades ago, the city has played a crucial role as a place for Chinese companies to raise funds, and as a model for the mainland’s economic and financial overhauls.
As China seeks to broaden the city’s use for trade finance and loans among overseas investors, Hong Kong operates the biggest offshore center for the use of the renminbi, the mainland’s currency. China is also moving forward with plans for a two-way trading link between the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock markets, which would give foreign funds and individual investors their first direct access to buying shares in hundreds of mainland companies.
“Hong Kong has been acting as a reference point for China — whatever they want to do, they come to Hong Kong to take a look first, and if it is good they pick it up,” said Li Kui-Wai, an associate professor of economics and finance at the City University of Hong Kong. “In a sense, they are trying to catch up with us.”
Being at the center of this give-and-take with China has proved immensely profitable for Hong Kong’s elite, who have voiced few objections to Beijing’s tightening grip on the city. The result has been that Hong Kong’s tycoons have increased their dominance over the sectors of the city’s domestic economy that produce the biggest and steadiest profits. That includes utilities, telecommunications, transportation, shipping, logistics, even supermarkets and convenience stores — but most of all, real estate.
Land prices are effectively set by the government, which controls the supply, and in recent years, prices have soared to levels that prohibit all but the wealthiest developers from bidding on prime plots. The city’s 10 richest men all have vast interests in Hong Kong real estate; they control a combined fortune of around $130 billion, according to data from Forbes.
That wealth is not getting spread around. Real wages in Hong Kong have risen less than 3 percent in the past decade. Over the same period, home prices have more than tripled. As a result, Hong Kong’s official Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has risen from 0.518 index point in 1996 to 0.537 point in 2011, the most recent data available — among the highest in the world for a developed economy.
“Hong Kong is supposedly an open window to the world for China,” said Heman Cheung, 24, one of hundreds of protesters who camped out in the middle of the street last week in Causeway Bay, one of the city’s busiest shopping districts. “Monopolies control everything, and I don’t see any ceiling on how high they can go.”
The sky may well be the limit, given the recent signals of the Chinese leadership. Last month, President Xi Jinping hosted a meeting in Beijing with dozens of Hong Kong’s elite to emphasize the government’s opposition to calls for political reform.
In an unusual public statement, a top Chinese academic who works closely with the central government said in a speech in August that democracy in the former colony must be limited in order to protect the interests of its capitalist class. “The business community is a reality,” said the academic, Wang Zhenmin, dean of the law school at Tsinghua University in Beijing, “even if it is a small group of people, a very small group of people.”
“They control the destiny of the economy in Hong Kong,” Mr. Wang said. “If we just ignore their interests, the Hong Kong capitalism will stop.”
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9) New York Is Cataloging, and Returning, Bloody Relics of 1971 Attica Assault
Forty-three
years later, it remains a grisly benchmark: Aside from the Indian
massacres of the late 19th century and an infamous 1921 race riot in
Tulsa, the State Police assault that quelled the four-day uprising at Attica prison
in upstate New York in 1971 was, investigators concluded, “the
bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”
When it ended, 10 correction officers and civilian employees and 33 prisoners were dead — all but one guard and three inmates killed in what a prosecutor branded a wanton “turkey shoot” by state troopers.
Prosecutions stemming from the uprising were resolved long ago; scores of inmates and one state trooper were charged. Civil suits by relatives of the dead and injured were settled (the state paid $12 million, including legal fees, to families of the inmates, and another $12 million to families of prison employees).
But even after more than four decades, the scars have never healed.
This year, state officials finally began cataloging the bloodstained uniforms of both guards and inmates, barrels of baseball bats, a homemade cannon, makeshift knives and other ephemera that had been stored in a Quonset hut to determine which were personal belongings that could be returned to the victims’ families, and which other artifacts to ultimately discard or to retain for research or eventual display in the New York State Museum.
In August, property belonging to 12 state employees was identified. Their families were invited privately to Attica on Sept. 13, before the solemn annual public memorial service held to mark the end of the siege.
Eleven of the families accepted the state’s invitation. All but one left with some memento — a bloody or bullet-ridden uniform, a wallet, keys, a thermos, a cap — that the state Department of Correctional Services could establish as having belonged either to an individual or to an unknown colleague. The twelfth family was still considering the state’s offer.
“It was a shock,” recalled Vickie Menz, who discovered a package of personal items belonging to her father, Arthur J. Smith, when she returned to the prison for the memorial. “There was a box of my father’s things, the clothing that he was wearing for the five days he was a hostage. The pants were caked with mud. They hadn’t been laundered.”
Mr. Smith, who had been a guard at Attica for more than two decades, was badly beaten on the first day of the uprising. Then, on the last day, he said he was pushed into a trench that had been dug by the inmates and filled with gasoline. “He did survive, but was beaten so badly on the first day of the riot that he had internal scarring,” Ms. Menz said. He died of cancer in 1995, at 68.
One common goal of state archivists, correction officials and relatives of the former guards and inmates is that what happened at Attica should not be forgotten. The objects collected from the prison yard and cellblocks after the uprising was quelled offer one tangible way of remembering.
“Those pieces of clothing, they’re not pristine, they’re dirty, bloodstained, ripped, have bullet holes in them — it’s not pretty stuff,” said Dee Quinn Miller, whose father, William Quinn, was the only guard killed by the inmates during the uprising (he was severely beaten and died two days later in a hospital). “For the families it’s meaningful, but incredibly difficult. All they want is information and a piece of something.”
The state also plans to return personal items to families of inmates.
“God knows what’s in that stuff,” said Elizabeth M. Fink, lawyer for the Attica Brothers Legal Defense, which represents former inmates and their families. “It’s a record of a big event in American history. It’s also their lives.”
Archivists turned over about 400 objects to the state’s correction department, mostly those identified as having belonged to guards or inmates. Another 1,700 are described as “general contraband,” including weapons fashioned from sports equipment, the typed first page of the prisoners’ original manifesto and the key to the prison’s front gate, which was found on a dead inmate.
“These are enormously significant objects embedded with a story,” said Mark Schaming, director of the New York State Museum in Albany. “They help tell the story of this terrible event.”
He hopes to eventually open the collection to researchers and possibly mount an exhibition.
Correction officials said that Acting Commissioner Anthony J. Annucci, who attended the annual memorial this year, was the highest ranking member of the department to have done so.
“Contrary to popular belief, time does not heal all wounds,” Mr. Annucci said. “There are certain wounds and certain scars that just run too deep to ever completely heal, regardless of how much time has elapsed although those events occurred many years ago.”
For the time being, Ms. Menz is keeping her father’s uniform in her living room in the wooden box prison officials presented to her last month, deciding whether to share it with her siblings or to donate it to a museum.
“I’ve gone back every year,” she said, of the memorial service. “Going and being part of the group, as hard as it was, brought comfort and I guess I feel that it’s my duty to my father to go.”
“After my father was released, state investigators came to the house and he gave them a statement,” she added. “He told his family, ‘I want you all to read this and we will discuss it and we will never discuss it again.’ And we never did,” she said. “It was so long ago, but I take it as my mission to keep educating people.”
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10) Bruised and Weary, Ferguson Struggles to Heal
FERGUSON,
Mo. — Almost two months after the death of Michael Brown, the empty
tear-gas canisters have been cleared from the streets. Protests, when
they flare up, are quieter. Traffic moves smoothly on West Florissant
Avenue, and most of the businesses along this main road that were closed
during August demonstrations have reopened.
But where once there was only one Ferguson — an anonymous suburb of St. Louis — now there is another: a small city whose name has become known for civil unrest, racial division and police harassment. Few of the deep grievances that divide the city have been resolved. Anger, despair and resentment have been driven to the surface, and many here are unsure when, or if, Ferguson will recover.“We’re hoping that two years from now, we can say that this was given to us for a reason and something good will have come out of it,” said Linda Hensiek, who runs a beauty shop in Ferguson, as she stopped in a frame store down the street owned by a friend, Robin Shively, who grew up in Ferguson.
“Right now,” Ms. Shively said, “it’s hell.”
A grand jury is meeting only a few miles away to consider the fate of the white Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, who fatally shot Mr. Brown on Aug. 9 in a dispute that began when Officer Wilson directed Mr. Brown to move from the street, where he was walking with a friend, the police said. Moments after the encounter began, the two scuffled, and Officer Wilson ended up shooting Mr. Brown at least six times.
Those who live and work in Ferguson, black and white, offer a portrait of a town that has been torn apart by the death of Mr. Brown, 18, who lived with his grandmother and was days away from starting classes at a trade college.
Some in Ferguson say that, while they are sympathetic to the protesters, they have had enough. Gunfire can often be heard after dark. Small demonstrations have persisted in various pockets of town, including South Florissant Road, which is lined with a wine bar, restaurants, the Police Headquarters and the public library. The police say that more unruly protesters have thrown incendiary devices and rocks, injuring officers and damaging businesses.
“What they’re doing is bringing down everything,” Chantea Arthur, a 35-year-old nurse’s aide who is African-American, said of the protesters. “I think the cop should get in trouble for what he did. But I’m getting tired of it all.”
Mr. Brown’s killing set off a cascade of demonstrations, sometimes violent, and police officers responded by shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. Officer Wilson has remained out of public view since the shooting and is on paid administrative leave.
Several witnesses to the shooting have said that Mr. Brown’s hands were raised in the air in the universal gesture of surrender when he was fatally shot. The police say that Mr. Brown struck Officer Wilson in a struggle for the officer’s gun.
Supporters of the protesters’ cause say that calm cannot be restored to Ferguson until Officer Wilson has been charged with murder. Many people, wearing T-shirts silk-screened with Mr. Brown’s face, still camp out across the street from the Police Headquarters, holding signs that read, “Stop Killing Us.”
Natalie Gray, sitting in a chair across the street from the Police Department last week, said she would not leave “till something happens.”
“I want justice,” she said.
“Ferguson is still a place of unrest until we get to a place of understanding,” said Ermon K. Trotter Jr., a clergy member, during a town-hall meeting at a Baptist church earlier last week. “A lot of people are saying they need it to be over. But brutality is an ongoing thing. And the African-American community has gotten tired.”
James Wiley, a barber at Exotic Trenz Salon in Ferguson, said he believed there was a racial divide in the city that could not be resolved anytime soon. Talk of the case dominated conversation at the salon, he said, and few African-Americans believed that Officer Wilson would be found guilty of any crime.
“Every day, people have their opinion. ‘Will he be charged? Won’t he be charged?’ ” he said. “It’s getting to the point where people believe he’ll be charged, but nobody believes he’ll be convicted.”
Some Ferguson residents — most of them white, but not all — insisted that Mr. Brown’s death had revealed racial tensions that they had not realized were there. Last week, Doug Hindle, who is white, paused from mowing his front lawn on a side street in Ferguson, where he has lived for 30 years. Mr. Hindle said that before Mr. Brown was killed, he thought that whites and African-Americans in Ferguson got along just fine. Both of his next-door neighbors are black, he said, and while they all don’t socialize, they always wave and say hello. For years, Mr. Hindle said, he has driven the older woman across the street, who is African-American, to church, the grocery store or wherever she needs to go.
“Everything was fine before,” Mr. Hindle said. “People are making this look like a bad place to live. We can hear them chanting at night. You can’t leave, you can’t open your windows at night. People are shooting their guns off. It’s never been like that. If they let Wilson go, all hell’s going to break loose. I really hope he goes to jail, just so people can get their justice. This has got to stop.”
Talk of the Brown shooting often shifts to more quotidian concerns, like a canceled street festival that was supposed to take place in Ferguson last month. More lost revenue, some business owners grumbled. Others worry about their property values and the descriptions of Ferguson — unflattering, to say the least — in the news media.
“I’ve had moments where I feel violated by the protesters,” Bernie Frazier, a speaker and career strategist who is African-American, said as she waited in line to attend a town-hall meeting. “To be honest, I feel violated by the media. I read a headline that said, ‘Ferguson under siege.’ I saw an article that described Ferguson as ‘impoverished.’ I’ve just stopped reading comments online. I’m done.”
Her friend Marie Ellison, who is white, shook her head in sympathy. “Sometimes you wake up and think, ‘What has happened in this town?’ ”
Even a simple pizza parlor on South Florissant has turned into tinderbox for racial tension. After protesters gathered outside Faraci Pizza on a recent evening, an owner, James Marshall, confronted them, saying they were blocking access to his business, his wife, Dawne, later told Riverfront Times. He then retreated inside and retrieved a gun, placing it in his pocket, according to his wife’s account. Protesters said he had threatened them with it, accusations that he denied.
Later, the police said that protesters had thrown incendiary devices in the parking lot. Last week, Mr. Marshall reluctantly prepared to open his doors for the dinner rush, loading boxes of frozen beef ravioli through the back door. “I don’t really want to talk to anyone,” he said, a grim expression set on his face. “I just want it to all go away.”
On Canfield Drive, where Mr. Brown was killed, residents have begun wearing cameras around their necks to record police activity — a reflection of their continued distrust of law enforcement in Ferguson.
Tammie Jackson, a Ferguson resident, said she used to love the local police. “I had a really good relationship with the Police Department,” she said. “But now I don’t trust them, none of them.”
The Brown family remains frozen in grief. Outside Mr. Brown’s grandmother’s home, a sign that was placed on the door soon after his death remained there last week. It reads: “Privacy please/During this time of mourning.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Lesley McSpadden, Mr. Brown’s mother, made one of her regular visits to the place where her son was killed. She drove an S.U.V., with a message scrawled on its rear window, “Justice for My Son,” and parked on Canfield Drive.
One of the two memorials at the site was mysteriously burned days ago, but neighbors quickly rebuilt it with foil balloons, a Winnie-the-Pooh doll, a plush Spider-Man and a wooden cross with the message “Love your neighbor.”
Wearing dark sunglasses and a white T-shirt with her son’s photo on the front, with her short-cropped hair dyed a brilliant red, her son’s favorite color, Ms. McSpadden stood at the memorial for 15 minutes, weeping, stooping to pick up fallen leaves.
She comes to the memorial all the time, she said, even though visits to the site of her son’s death deepen her pain. “I always want to straighten it up,” she said. “Keep it looking nice.”
Neighbors began trickling out of their homes, tentatively approaching Ms. McSpadden with handshakes, hugs and whispered words of sympathy. “I’ve been praying for you,” one woman said.
Gazing downward at the memorial, Ms. McSpadden pondered the question of how long it should stay in place.
“Forever,” she said.
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11) 43 Missing Students, a Mass Grave and a Suspect: Mexico’s Police
IGUALA, Mexico — They were farm boys who did well in school and took one of the few options available beyond the backbreaking work in the corn and bean fields of southern Mexico: enrolling in a local teachers college with a history of radicalism but the promise of a stable classroom job.
Leonel Castro, 19, the oldest of seven siblings, vowed to use his salary to help his impoverished family. Júlio César, 19, thought he could run a school one day and ensure the best for the next generation. Adán Abraham de la Cruz, 23, wanted to put his computer skills to good use in the classroom.
“He was just preparing himself to get ahead like any young person would do,” said Mr. de la Cruz’s father, Bernabé.Now, they are among 43 students reported missing after deadly clashes with the police on Sept. 26, when at least six student protesters and bystanders were killed in the restive, rural state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in the country and long afflicted by political, social and criminal upheaval.
The state prosecutor investigating why the police opened fire on students from their vehicles has found mass graves in Iguala — the small industrial city where the confrontations occurred — containing 28 badly burned and dismembered bodies.
The prosecutors had already arrested 22 police officers after the clashes, saying the officers secretly worked for, or were members of, a local gang. Now they are investigating whether the police apprehended the students after the confrontation and deliberately turned them over to the local gang. Two witnesses in custody told prosecutors that the gang then killed the protesters on the orders of a leader known as El Chucky.
“I saw police trucks go up and down the hill to up there, where the bodies are found,” said one man in the neighborhood near the site who declined to give his name out of fear. “Then came the news they found the grave and it may be the students. But you would be a fool around here to accuse the police and expect to live.”
Even in a country accustomed to mass killings, the case has generated alarm, both for the possible involvement of the police and for the fact that the students were not known to have criminal ties. Miguel MartÃnez, a representative for the families, said students at the school had fought back against extortion attempts by gangs last year, but it was not clear if that could have made them a target now.
The students, by many accounts, had been soliciting money in Iguala for an Oct. 2 demonstration rejecting cuts to their state-financed school, which opened in 1926 and has long played a role in local social justice movements. Such student demonstrations are part of a well-known militancy that goes back decades and has provoked violence in the past. It did again this time, as students got into a skirmish with the police when they tried to steal buses to take to and from the demonstration, human rights groups said.
The mayor and the police chief of Iguala are now on the run, having disappeared after being subpoenaed in the case, and the governor of the state confirmed that the local gang, known as Guerreros Unidos, had infiltrated the police force in Iguala, as well as other police departments in the state.
The specter of corrupted police has haunted Mexico for years. But these disappearances come at a time when President Enrique Peña Nieto is already confronting the prosecution of at least three soldiers charged with homicide in another recent case — the shooting death of 22 people captured in a warehouse in June.
“I feel deeply outraged and dismayed,” Mr. Peña Nieto told reporters Monday, referring to the violence here and dispatching the attorney general and other federal forces to the region. “I regret, in particular, the violence that occurred and especially that it was young students who were affected and whose rights were violated in the city of Iguala.”
Mr. Peña Nieto’s predecessor, Felipe Calderón, also faced wave after wave of police corruption scandals, with some entire local forces dismissed. But experts say that, even as violence soared, both administrations fell behind in putting in place measures to hold law enforcement authorities accountable.
Only this year did Mexico pass a law allowing members of the military to be tried in civilian courts for human rights abuses, and many feel that Mr. Peña Nieto has been more focused on shifting the dialogue to Mexico’s economy than on fighting corruption and improving security.
“A serious and sustained effort at reforming local police agencies has been a pending agenda for a long time in Mexico,” said Matthew C. Ingram, an assistant professor at the University at Albany who studies justice in Mexico. “As long as local, municipal police agencies remain weak, they will not have the capacity to generate public trust or resist corruption and capture.”Here at the small, 500-student mountaintop teachers college, Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, where cows and stray dogs roam freely and walls are adorned with slogans like “protest is a right, repression is a crime,” a hodgepodge of human rights and radical groups and representatives of the families have vowed paralyzing strikes across the country on Wednesday to keep the pressure on the authorities for answers.
Parents of the missing students doubt the effectiveness of state investigators. A team of forensic experts from Argentina with long experience in mass disappearance cases has arrived, and on Monday it began interviewing family members and collecting other data as part of an independent investigation, though it was unclear if the experts would have access to the bodies found.
States officials said it could take at least two weeks and possibly longer to identify the remains because of their poor condition.
And if the bodies are not those of the missing students, the question remains: Where did they come from?
Several parents said they still hoped their children would be found alive. Although the number of missing has fluctuated, the current list of 43 was developed after students and human rights representatives said they had called family members and friends and searched school grounds and other places, failing to account for 43 classmates.
“We have to keep looking and praying,” said Santa Cruz Castro, the father of Leonel.
He last spoke to his son when Leonel called him the day of the confrontation, saying, “Don’t worry, Dad, I am going to the march,” which Mr. Cruz took to mean the collection drive in Iguala. “And then I didn’t hear from him and saw the news about the shootings. We didn’t know what to do.”
In a sign of defiance and concern, placards and bumper stickers are popping up here and in other cities in Guerrero on buses, storefronts and buildings. Their slogan — #HastaEncontrarlos — means: “Until they are found.”
Paulina Villegas contributed reporting from Mexico City.
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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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Protest at his fundraiser with SF’s “elite”,
let’s tell President Obama: No War!
Fri. Oct. 10, 4-7pm
‘W’ Hotel, 3rd & Howard St, SF
Join us to demand:
• Stop bombing Syria and Iraq!
• U.S. out of the Middle East!
• End U.S. aid to Israel!
• Money for jobs, housing, healthcare, education, not war and occupation!
President Barack Obama is coming to San Francisco to raise tens of millions of dollars for the Democratic Party’s “war chest” and upcoming elections, as the peoples of the Middle East suffer a new U.S. bombing war, this time expanding into Syria and deepening in Iraq. The Pentagon generals are demanding “boots on the ground” in Washington’s quest for total domination of the oil-rich region. Gaza is still under rubble and blockaded by Israel, due to both Democrats’ and Republicans’ military aid to Israel. We urge everyone to come and protest Obama’s visit, to say: Stop bombing the people of the Middle East, U.S. Out! Money for Jobs and Housing, Not War!
More info: 415-821-6545 or www.answersf.org
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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National mobilization in Ferguson: Justice for Michael Brown!
October 10-13th
http://fergusonoctober.com/
September 25, 2014
We are in a movement moment.
Droves of people, many of them young and black, took to the streets of Ferguson to demand justice for Mike Brown. Millions stood in solidarity as protestors were met by a brutal and militarized response by local police departments.
Our country can no longer deny the epidemic of police violence facing Black and Brown communities. Mike Brown is now part of a long list of people like John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant and countless others who have been unjustly killed by police. Their lives mattered.
Join Hands Up United, Organization for Black Struggle, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment and our partners in Ferguson from October 10-13th for a weekend of resistance. We’re hosting a series of public events—marches, convenings and panels— to build momentum for a nationwide movement against police violence.
We will gather in Ferguson, but the world will hear our call for change.
Below is a tentative schedule of events. Click here for the latest updates.
Friday, October 10th
Justice Now March
3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Buzz Westfall Justice Center (100 S Central Ave.) Clayton, Mo.
Saturday, October 11th
Justice for All: National March and Rally
10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Scott Trade Center (1401 Clark Ave.) St. Louis, MO
Sunday, October 12th
Hip Hop & Hope
TBA, St. Louis
Monday, October 13th
#MoralMonday Civil Disobedience
10:00 am - 12:00 pm
TBA, St. Louis, MO
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Medical Care Needed for Chelsea Manning!
ACLU files lawsuit against Army demanding medical care for Manning
By the Chelsea Manning Support Network
Yesterday, the ACLU and Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit against the Army demanding the necessary medical treatment for Manning’s previously diagnosed gender dysphoria.
By continuing to deny Manning treatment, the Army is directly violating Chelsea’s constitutional rights under the 8th amendment. Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case, notes “such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
Due to a full year of neglecting Manning’s medical care, the ACLU had previously announced a Sept 4th deadline for the Army to provide treatment. After continued failure to provide treatment, the ACLU filed a lawsuit yesterday and released the following statement:
ACLU Demands Government Provide Chelsea Manning Necessary Medical Care
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 23, 2014
CONTACT: Crystal Cooper, ACLU National, 212-549-2666; media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON—Today, Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia against Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and other Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of the Army officials for their failure to provide necessary medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition with which she was originally diagnosed by Army doctors more than four years ago.
The complaint is accompanied by a motion for preliminary injunction demanding that Ms. Manning be provided hormone therapy, permission to follow female grooming standards, and access to treatment by a medical provider qualified to treat her condition. Ms. Manning is currently serving a thirty-five year prison sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, and though the military recognizes that she has gender dysphoria requiring treatment, critical care has been withheld without any medical basis.
“The government continues to deny Ms. Manning’s access to necessary medical treatment for gender dysphoria, without which she will continue to suffer severe psychological harms,” said Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case. “Such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
Ms. Manning is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, the ACLU of Kansas and civilian defense counsel David E. Coombs. Last month, Ms. Manning’s legal team sent a letter to the DOD and Army officials demanding that she receive treatment for gender dysphoria in accordance with medical standards of care, including hormone therapy and permission to follow female grooming standards. Her treatment needs have continued to be unmet and her distress has escalated.
“I am proud to be standing with the ACLU behind Chelsea on this very important issue.” said David E. Coombs, “It is my hope that through this action, Chelsea will receive the medical care that she needs without having to suffer any further anguish.”
Gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition that requires hormone therapy and changes to gender expression, like growing hair, to live consistently with one’s gender identity as part of accepted standards of care.
Without necessary treatment, gender dysphoria can cause severe psychological distress, anxiety, and suicidality. For this reason, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Psychological Association have issued policy statements that support providing treatment to prisoners diagnosed with the condition in accordance with established standards of care, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and many state corrections agencies are already doing.
A copy of the complaint is available at:
aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-complaint-declaratory-and-injunctive-relief
The motion for preliminary injunction is available at:
aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-plaintiffs-motion-preliminary-injunction
This press release is available at:
aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/aclu-demands-government-provide-chelsea-manning-necessary-medical-care
—Free Chelsea Manning, September 24, 2014
http://www.chelseamanning.org/press/aclu-files-lawsuit-against-army-demands-medical-care-for-manning
Write to Chelsea Manning:
Mail must be addressed exactly as follows:
CHELSEA E. MANNING 89289
1300 NORTH WAREHOUSE ROAD
FORT LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS 66027-2304
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Detroit U.S. Attorney Threatens Supporters of Rasmea Odeh
By Committee to Stop FBI RepressionIn a bizarre and desperate move, prosecutors in the case of Palestinian American leader Rasmea Odeh filed a motion in Federal Court October 3, which characterized the efforts of an important leader of the Rasmea Odeh defense campaign, Hatem Abudayyeh, as “jury tampering” and “almost certainly criminal.” The prosecution then asks Judge Gershwin Drain for an “Anonymous Jury,” which means that the names of the jurors are kept secret from the defense attorneys, and that an array of security measures are put it place during the trial that make it seem like 67-year-old Rasmea Odeh is a dangerous person.
There is no evidence at all for the baseless accusations against the movement in support of Rasmea. The prosecutor’s motion is a clumsy attempt at intimidation and should be condemned by everyone who is concerned about civil liberties.
Here are the facts. Rasmea Odeh is a beloved leader of the Palestinian community in Chicago who is facing trumped up immigration charges. Imprisoned by the Israelis in the late 1960s, due to her work to free Palestine, Rasmea was tortured and sexually abused. She is well-known and respected across the world. The federal government is threatening her with jail and deportation. As a result, a powerful and effective movement organized protests around the country, demanding “Justice for Rasmea.”
Now the prosecutors are waging an attack on everyone involved in this movement to support and defend Rasmea.
They talk about “jury tampering.” Until there is a trial, there is no jury, so how could a jury possibly be tampered with? In any event, at no time have we ever tried to improperly influence a jury. Not once. What we are doing is organizing protests, having people sign petitions and holding educational events. We are encouraging people to attend Rasmea’s court appearances. We are shining a light on the unjust prosecution of Rasmea. We want the government to drop the charges.
In the prosecutor’s motion we are told, “Hatem Abudayyeh has orchestrated a concerted effort to influence the criminal proceedings against defendant, which has resulted, at each proceeding, in a large group outside the Courthouse protesting and parading, carrying signs demanding dismissal of charges and ‘Justice for Rasmea’ and displaying the Palestinian flag.” Imagine that. Palestinians, Arabs and progressive people responding to an injustice by holding a protest and engaging in activity that is protected by the First Amendment. In the world that the Detroit U.S. Attorney wants, speaking out as we have is, “almost certainly criminal.” On the contrary—it is criminal for the prosecutors to attempt to restrict our constitutional rights.
It is worth noting that there is a distinctly racist, anti-Arab undertone to the prosecutor’s motion, where spirited and dignified protests, with a majority of Palestinian American participants, are described as “hordes” and “mobs.” Again, the federal government is trying to sow fear among people in the U.S. by criminalizing and stereotyping Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. As one of Rasmea’s lawyers said when he was informed of the motion, it, “is only intended to play the ‘terrorism’ card and is unacceptable.”
The prosecutors also have a problem with people who want to petition the government for a redress of grievances, so they complain in their motion that those who want the charges against Rasmea dropped “have previously attempted to flood Department of Justice telephone lines in an attempt to influence these proceedings.”
We will continue to hold call-in days and we will organize even more people to participate in them.
We take the threats of the prosecution seriously. We urge all of our supporters to keep their eyes on Detroit and to be ready to respond to any attacks on leaders of the Rasmea defense campaign.
We see these threats as a sign that our campaign to defend Rasmea Odeh is working. We were successful in getting Zionist Judge Borman off the case. There are now thousands of people across the country engaged in organizing for Rasmea. We will not allow the government to intimidate us. This attack will bring more supporters and strengthen our work further. We will redouble our efforts to make sure the charges against Rasmea are dropped!
—Committee to Stop FBI Repression, October 6, 2014
http://www.stopfbi.net/2014/10/6/detroit-us-attorney-threatens-supporters-rasmea-odeh
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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) As Protests Persist, Ferguson Transfers Security to County
2) Who Are ‘We the People’?
3) Reining In Egypt’s Military Aid
4) Jobs Report Highlights the Wage Growth Puzzle
By Justin Wolfers
5) Aboard a Cargo Colossus
6) It Happened Again: How 14 People Made More Money Than the Entire Food Stamp Budget for 50,000,000 People
By JULIE BOSMAN
2) Who Are ‘We the People’?
By ERIC L. LEWIS
By Justin Wolfers
By DANNY HAKIM
6) It Happened Again: How 14 People Made More Money Than the Entire Food Stamp Budget for 50,000,000 People
For the 2nd year in a row, America's 14 richest made more than all the money provided for those in ned of food.
By Paul Buchheit
October 5, 2014
http://www.alternet.org/economy/it-happened-again-how-14-people-made-more-money-entire-food-stamp-budget-50000000-people?akid=12330.229473.UBX098&rd=1&src=newsletter1022007&t=7&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
7) Yes to Marijuana Ballot Measures
Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia Should Legalize Pot
8) Hong Kong Wealth Gap on Display in Protests
9) New York Is Cataloging, and Returning, Bloody Relics of 1971 Attica Assault
10) Bruised and Weary, Ferguson Struggles to Heal
11) 43 Missing Students, a Mass Grave and a Suspect: Mexico’s Police
Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia Should Legalize Pot
By NEIL GOUGH
By SAM ROBERTS
10) Bruised and Weary, Ferguson Struggles to Heal
By JULIE BOSMAN
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1) As Protests Persist, Ferguson Transfers Security to County
By JULIE BOSMAN
The St. Louis County Police Department on Friday took control of security surrounding protests in Ferguson, Mo., which have persisted since the death of Michael Brown, 18, at the hands of a police officer on Aug. 9.
Chief Thomas Jackson of the Ferguson Police Department asked the county to step in, citing a “lack of manpower and resources” at the disposal of the relatively small Ferguson police force, said Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the county police.
In a statement, the county force said it intended to “provide both our citizens and the media with the safest environment possible so that they may freely exercise their First Amendment right, while also protecting the rights and safety of all residents and businesses in the city of Ferguson.”The shift means that the responsibility for making arrests, booking and releasing prisoners and filing charges will now be handled by the county force, a significantly larger and more sophisticated police department that is the main law-enforcement agency for much of the county. Some municipalities in St. Louis County, like Ferguson, maintain their own, smaller forces, but depend on the county police for handling more serious criminal activity. The St. Louis County police are in charge of the investigation into Mr. Brown’s death.
Since the larger demonstrations after Mr. Brown’s death that drew a heavy police response and national media attention, protesters in recent weeks have gathered in modest numbers on a nightly basis in Ferguson, beating drums, shouting at police officers and marching in the streets with hands raised in the air. Nearby residents and business owners have grown impatient with their presence, with one shop owner asking protesters to stop using his parking lot as a staging ground.
The police have arrested protesters for offenses including violating noise ordinances. Some advocates have said the police have overreached. More than a dozen protesters were arrested on Thursday night, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to undertake a review of the events.
A county grand jury is meeting to decide whether Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Mr. Brown, committed a crime. He remains on paid administrative leave.
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2) Who Are ‘We the People’?
By ERIC L. LEWIS
WHO is a person? How do you qualify for basic human rights? What is required for you to be able to speak or worship freely or to be free from torture?
Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has considered and reconsidered the criteria for membership in the club of rights, oscillating between a vision limiting rights to preferred groups and another granting rights to all who require protection. These competing visions have led to some strange results.
Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests as though they were individual political actors. Corporations can assert religious rights to gain legal exemptions from laws that would otherwise apply to them. Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay, however, have none of these rights.
As a corporate litigator who has also spent more than a decade defending Guantánamo detainees, I have been trying to figure out why corporations are worthy of court protection and Muslims held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States at a naval base in Cuba are not.
The direction of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the past decade has been anything but consistent. As the court readies itself for another term, it may not be possible to speak of a Roberts court jurisprudence at all. Even within the conservative and liberal blocs there are a range of views on the limits of executive power, the relationship between the federal government and the states, the protection of politically expressive speech and the applicability of the Constitution abroad. But the bulk of the most controversial cases come down to 4-to-4 bloc voting, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s worldview defining the court’s path.
But we are not completely in the dark about who is likely to be granted legally enforceable rights and who is not. This term the court will consider whether Arkansas can force a Muslim prisoner to shave his beard, whether a Muslim woman who wears a head scarf can get a job at Abercrombie & Fitch, and whether Alabama can cram African-American voters into a few districts to dilute their political impact.
The Roberts court has already charted a course in which rights are extended to those who have real clout in American society and denied to those who are more marginal. In two critical cases, Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, the court decided by a 5-to-4 vote that corporations had broad rights of speech and of religion, which left corporate owners in a position to trumpet their political and religious views while diminishing or even silencing other voices.
In Citizens United, the court held that corporations had the right under the First Amendment to spend unlimited amounts on election advertising. The court evaded the issue of whether corporations were legal “persons” with rights, finding that the political process was always improved by more speech rather than less. Justice Kennedy, writing for the court, found that corporate spending contributed to the dissemination of information and ideas that “the First Amendment seeks to foster.” He rejected the argument that corporations should be limited “simply because such associations are not ‘natural persons.’ ”
But Congress limits speech all the time. Foreign nationals, for example, even those who live legally in the United States, are not permitted to make campaign contributions or expenditures. They may be “persons,” but for First Amendment purposes, they are not legitimate speakers. Unless, of course, they own shares in corporations.
The Supreme Court’s decision said nothing about the interests of the corporation or the identity of its stakeholders. Chinese or Russian shareholders could gain control of an American corporation and use shareholder funds to influence elections in the United States. According to the court, money is speech, and once it is corporate money, it is laundered of its foreign taint.
In Hobby Lobby, the court considered whether corporations had the right to deprive employees of contraceptive coverage required under the Affordable Care Act, based on the religious objections of their controlling shareholders. The court applied the Dictionary Act, an obscure statute from 1871 that says that a reference in a given statute to a “person” includes corporations “unless the context indicates otherwise.” Normal dictionaries do not define persons to include corporations. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion takes a “just folks” view of the matter: “A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends.”
This inability to make the distinction between individual corporate stakeholders and the legal fiction of the corporation is not only weird, it is bad corporate law. Whatever else corporations may be, they are not the sum of their people. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited Chief Justice John Marshall’s two-centuries-old observation that a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law.”
The modern corporation is a brilliant invention of 19th-century capitalism that creates a separate entity — a legal “person” — that can enter into contracts, borrow money, sue and be sued without exposing its shareholders to personal liability. The shareholders are not the corporation; directors, executives and employees aren’t either. Shareholders, executives and employees do have religious rights — as individuals. Hobby Lobby does not expand anyone’s religious rights. What it does do is allow the religious beliefs of the owners of a company to trump the beliefs of its employees.
The Supreme Court did not declare Hobby Lobby a person with religious rights because it was confused about whether a corporation could pray or have a bar mitzvah. The court chose to allow business owners to retain the powerful protection of limited liability while awarding them the further benefit of an exemption from the financial obligations of the Affordable Care Act. The majority took one definition of a legal person and used it as a hook to impose its own views about the importance of religion and business in American public life. When she was asked recently which court decision during her tenure would be most significant 50 years from now, Justice Ginsburg noted the strangeness inherent in the court’s reasoning: “Well,” she said, “I think 50 years from now, people will not be able to understand Hobby Lobby.”
IN holding that corporations had religious rights, the Hobby Lobby decision sat in contrast to a case I brought under the same statute in 2004, in which the court found that Muslims at Guantánamo Bay were not persons and had no religious rights.
That case, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, alleged that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the chain of command had established a regime at Guantánamo that systematically humiliated and abused detainees when they tried to practice their religion. In an attempt to break these people, guards threw Qurans in the toilet bucket, blasted rock music to interrupt prayers and forced prisoners to pray with their genitals exposed.
To me, the case seemed open-and-shut. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (R.F.R.A.), which was passed in 1993, prohibits the government from “substantially” burdening “a person’s exercise of religion” unless it serves some important government interest that cannot be accomplished in any other way. My clients were “persons”; throwing Qurans in the toilet bucket certainly made it difficult for them to worship; and it served no governmental interest to humiliate people who were praying.
The Federal District Court in Washington, which first heard the case, agreed that “R.F.R.A. expressly protects the religious exercise of ‘persons,’ a broadly applicable term, commonly including aliens.” But the government appealed and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that, as aliens held outside the United States, these men were not “persons” after all. The Bush administration had put them offshore precisely to ensure this.Even the arch-conservative Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who once said that “in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery,” was uncomfortable, noting in concurrence, “It leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantánamo are not ‘persons.’ This is a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.”
The case went to the Supreme Court twice. The first time the court ordered the court of appeals to reconsider the case, which it duly did, reaching the same conclusion. The second time the Supreme Court declined to hear the case and the appeals court decision remains the law.
So while Muslims in United States custody do not have redress from the coarsest attacks on their religious dignity, corporations do have religious rights that the law protects. Why were my clients, undeniably actual people, abused when they worshiped, while state-chartered artificial entities were allowed an exemption from the law in deference to the religious beliefs of their shareholders?
One possibility is that detainees are excluded because they are aliens outside the United States. But the Supreme Court held in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush, again with a 5-to-4 vote, that detainees at Guantánamo did have the constitutional right to habeas corpus. To rule otherwise, Justice Kennedy wrote, would be to hold that the “political branches have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will” based on where the executive has chosen to bring prisoners. Under this reasoning, the Constitution should be a backpack that travels with governmental authority and protects those subject to American custody.
Justice Antonin Scalia was apoplectic. Warning of “disastrous consequences,” he wrote in dissent that “today, for the first time in our nation’s history, the court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war.” His dire prediction: “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
He need not have worried. As Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a mainstay of the conservative D.C. Circuit, wrote in a concurrence in 2011, Boumediene was a “charade,” a “defiant — if only theoretical — assertion of judicial supremacy.” The courts refused to extend habeas or any other rights to detainees at bases other than Guantánamo. No detainee has ever been released as a direct result of an American court order. As a practical matter, aliens in American custody outside the United States have no enforceable rights. President Obama has forbidden torture by executive order. Yet his predecessor allowed torture, and so could his successor. Whatever else may go into the knapsacks of military personnel, the Constitution is not on the packing list.
As the Roberts court begins its 10th term, there is a clear shift away from decades of jurisprudence in which the court envisioned its role as protector of the essential human dignity of those who lacked the political power to protect themselves. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. called the Constitution “a sublime oration on the dignity of man.” But historically the Supreme Court had ignored the dignity of a broad section of humanity: Native Americans, slaves, women, racial minorities, aliens, Japanese internees, gays and lesbians, and now Muslims at Guantánamo.
The current court is solicitous of those who pool their capital and obtain the protection of the corporate form. It is sympathetic toward the interests of mainstream elites, expanding religion, protecting commercial wealth and even protecting gay rights, an issue that crosses class lines. The dignity of prisoners, employees, or ethnic and racial minorities is far less likely to engage the moral imagination of this court.
Years ago, my constitutional law professor, Judge Robert H. Bork, taught us about the cases that challenged the government edict that ordered the rounding up of citizens of Japanese ancestry into remote internment camps during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld that order by a vote of 6 to 3, finding that “the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast.” Judge Bork was no progressive, but he told us that he was shocked that “we the people” could so easily succumb to racist, nativist hysteria. Surely it could never happen again.
It takes courage for the Supreme Court to stand up for the powerless and the despised. Sometimes it has risen to the challenge and sometimes it has not. With the Roberts court, what we see is a self-referential worldview, which leads the court to enhance the rights of insiders and deny protection to outsiders. On Monday, the justices will begin another term with the question of whether their commitment to the protection of human dignity will be universal or limited to “persons” just like them.
Eric L. Lewis is a partner at the law firm Lewis Baach and the chairman of Reprieve US.
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3) Reining In Egypt’s Military Aid
Egyptian leaders have come to see the annual $1.3 billion American military aid package as an entitlement they are due in perpetuity for having signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. The United States has done little to disabuse them of that notion. It’s time it does. Failing to make significant cuts to the program later this year, when the Obama administration will confront tough choices regarding Egypt’s future, would be indefensible. Since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took control in Egypt though a military coup in July 2013, the country has returned to its authoritarian moorings by jailing political opponents, silencing critics and vilifying peaceful Islamists.
Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, which became the leading political movement in the wake of Egypt’s 2011 popular uprising, are languishing in prison, unfairly branded as terrorists. That has left a large generation of Brotherhood supporters rudderless, raising the possibility that some will be drawn to militancy. Just when the United States is battling Sunni extremists in Iraq and Syria, seeking to isolate the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, Egypt’s crushing authoritarianism could well persuade a significant number of its citizens that violence is the only tool they have for fighting back.
Egypt today is in many ways more repressive than it was during the darkest periods of the reign of deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak. Mr. Sisi’s government has cracked down on demonstrations, tightened control of state media and prosecuted journalists. A new, vaguely worded law will soon stiffen penalties for individuals who receive foreign funding, making it a crime punishable by life in prison. The measure, ostensibly intended to fight terrorism, is similar to policies the state has used to suppress the work of pro-democracy organizations.
In Sinai, as its fight against militants has moved into populated areas, the Egyptian army has reportedly used American-made tanks to shell civilian areas. When Human Rights Watch tried to release a report in Egypt about last year’s brutal crackdown on a Cairo demonstration camp, during which more than 900 protesters were killed, the group’s representatives were barred from entering the country.
Mr. Sisi, who came to power in a rigged election, seems to think the rest of the world has not noticed. Addressing the General Assembly last week, he claimed, astonishingly, that he was building a new Egypt that “respects rights and freedoms” and “ensures the coexistence of all citizens without exclusion or discrimination.”
American officials have been measured in their criticism, calculating that they are better off with Egypt as an ally, however despotic. Historically, they have valued expedited passage through the Suez Canal for American Navy ships and unfettered access to the country’s airspace.In the coming months, however, the administration will have two opportunities to correct its course and signal that it can no longer condone brutality.
First, Washington must stop allowing Egypt to place military hardware orders under a preferential system called cash flow finance. Available only to Israel and Egypt, the mechanism works much like a credit card, permitting the countries to place orders under the assumption that Congress will eventually appropriate enough funds to cover them. It will take years to wean Egypt off cash flow finance, since orders can take years to process, but doing so now will help untangle contractual and legislative knots in the future.
Second, Secretary of State John Kerry has to certify to Congress that Egypt is on a path to democracy as a condition for delivering several items of military aid that are in the pipeline. Congress insisted on such certification when it appropriated Egypt’s military aid package last year. Failing to do so by the end of the year would halt the delivery of roughly $650 million worth of American tanks and fighter planes. The only reasonable answer from Mr. Kerry is no.
Egypt values American military hardware, and continued cooperation is in the interest of both countries. The onus is on Cairo to earn it.
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4) Jobs Report Highlights the Wage Growth Puzzle
By Justin Wolfers
The latest round of labor market data released Friday add to an emerging puzzle whose resolution will be central to the future of the recovery.
We learned that employment is growing at a healthy clip, with 248,000 jobs created this month, and an average of 220,000 jobs created each month over the past year. Moreover, unemployment has fallen both further and faster than most had anticipated. The latest reading suggests that unemployment is down to 5.9 percent, and has fallen about a full percentage point in each of the past three years. These are all symptoms of a healthy economic expansion.
Normally, this would lead to faster wage growth. When workers feel their jobs are secure, they’re better positioned to ask for a raise. Likewise, when there are fewer people unemployed, companies need to pay better wages in order to attract talented workers.
Yet average hourly wages in the private sector were roughly flat in September (they fell by a penny), and they’ve grown at a rate of only around 2 percent over the past year. Alternative indicators also suggest that wage growth remains subdued.
This puzzle isn’t entirely new, as the usual link between unemployment and the rate of wage growth has totally broken down over recent years.
The recent data have made a sharp departure from the usual textbook analysis in which a tighter labor market leads to faster wage growth, and subsequent cost pressures feed through to higher inflation. Even as the recession threw millions of people out of work, wage growth barely slowed despite the textbook prediction to the contrary. Then through the ensuing recovery, unemployment fell rapidly, but again, wage growth has barely moved.
By the usual analysis, the key variable is how much “slack” there is in the labor market. When unemployment gets too low — toward what economists call the “natural rate” (don’t be fooled, there’s nothing natural about it) — there’s no more slack, and inflationary pressures start to build. This is the key reason the Federal Reserve has historically been nervous about keeping its foot pressed on the accelerator when unemployment got this low.
The problem is that economists don’t actually know how much slack there is in the economy, because we don’t know what unemployment rate the economy can sustain without sparking inflationary pressures. The Fed’s current guess is that the natural rate is around 5¼ or 5½ percent, although really, this is just a guess based on historical patterns. But it’s a critically important guess, because while unemployment’s not yet that low, the current trajectory puts us there soon. Indeed, this is the key reason the Federal Reserve policy makers have been talking about raising interest rates.
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5) Aboard a Cargo Colossus
By DANNY HAKIM
A helicopter appeared in the sky over the North Sea.
It was 7 a.m. on a Wednesday this summer, and the helicopter circled in a wide arc before hovering above a ship traveling south at about 15 knots. At more than 1,300 feet long, the ship, the Mary Maersk, was hard to miss. It is longer than the Eiffel Tower is high, and the Mary and its sister ships are the biggest container ships in the world.
Feet appeared first from the helicopter, then a pair of Levi’s, and gradually a man was lowered by rope onto the ship’s deck. His job was to pilot the ship down a narrow dredged channel in the Weser River, toward the port of Bremerhaven, Germany.
Later that morning, the Mary would undertake the largest-scale act of parallel parking ever — or at least since the last time it docked, the day before, in Gothenburg, Sweden.
As companies look for more efficient ways to move freight from factories in China to consumers in Europe, the Mary is among the newest giants, known as the Triple-E’s. Owned and operated by A. P. Moeller-Maersk of Denmark, the world’s largest container shipping company, the Triple-E’s went into service last year, muscling their way into the $210 billion container industry. They have also gained a following: Hobbyist spotters watch for the Triple-E’s and post pictures online, and Lego has created a mini version with 1,516 bricks.
Until the late 1990s, the largest container ships could carry about 5,000 steel shipping containers, each about 20 feet long. Today, such ships are little more than chum. The size of container ships has exploded, reflecting their role as the packhorses of globalization. Each year, the maritime shipping industry transports nearly $13 trillion of goods, roughly 70 percent of total freight, according to the World Trade Organization.
The Triple-E’s can carry more than 18,000 containers, piled 20 high, with 10 above deck and 10 below. But they can sail only between Europe and Asia, as their nearly 194-foot wide hull is too large to fit into American ports or to slip through the Panama Canal.
The Mary will stop at a dozen ports, going from Gdansk in Poland to Ningbo, Yantian and Shanghai in China. It carries seafood. It carries auto parts. It carries perfume, grated cheese and frozen pork. While computers and clothing are among China’s biggest exports, chemicals and timber are more likely to leave Europe.
The Mary — stacked so high with cargo that little is visible beyond two smokestacks and a glassed-in command center — is an apt symbol for an increasingly global marketplace. But it also represents the container shipping industry’s overreaching ambitions. Few carriers besides Maersk are profitable, too many new ships are being built, and demand for space on container ships is slowing as economies in Europe and Asia face headwinds.
Maersk, based in Copenhagen, ordered 20 Triple-E’s from Daewoo of South Korea in 2011, increasing its worldwide capacity more than 10 percent. The timing was unusual. A report from the Boston Consulting Group, which counts Maersk as a client, called 2011 a year that “executives in the container-shipping industry would probably like to forget,” in part because a wave of new vessels ordered in earlier years swelled capacity.
But demand for space has lagged since 2008, according to Drewry, a shipping consultancy that tracks the industry. The idle space at Maersk amounts to one Triple-E.
“It’s a simple logic, bigger is better,” said Ulrik Sanders, global head of the shipping practice at Boston Consulting, “if you can fill it.”
“There’s too much capacity in the market and that drives down prices,” he continued. “From an industry perspective, it doesn’t make any sense. But from an individual company perspective, it makes a lot of sense. It’s a very tricky thing.”
‘An Arms Race’
The captain wears Crocs. He is standing on the bridge, in black jeans and a white shirt with black stripes at the shoulders.
The captain, Franz Holmberg, is an easygoing Dane. There is a tattoo on his left arm of an eagle fighting a dragon; he says the image is “not as vivid” as it once was. A formidable camera rests among the bridge instruments — he likes to memorialize landscapes, such as the Suez Canal scene he uses as a screen saver.
Not much happens on the ship, he says, but then he sits back on a couch just off the bridge and offers a few stories of the sea. Like the time a sailor thought the Danish queen, whose picture hangs in the dining room, began speaking to him. Or the time two Ghanaian stowaways were discovered huddled in a sealed crate. They had packed food in bags, and brought bags to defecate in. But after more than a week at sea, “they ran out of bags,” the captain says.
He came from a farming family, but decided to try a life at sea and got hooked. After graduating from nautical school, he was a third officer on a ship that carried 3,800 containers, a fifth of Mary’s capacity.
“Every time a new series comes out, everyone says this is it; it can’t get any bigger,” the captain says, adding, “Then a few years after, they just add a little bit more.”
The industry wants ships that carry more containers, more slowly. Fuel prices are a major factor, so ships now commonly “slow steam” to save fuel, cruising at 16 or 18 knots instead of 22. A typical trip from Poland to China takes 34 days.
During a recent voyage to the Suez, the Mary’s crew sailed on a parallel course with a 10-year-old Maersk container ship that held half as much cargo, but the Mary used only 6 percent more fuel. “We’ve seen during the last 10, 15 years a dramatic increase in fuel costs,” said Jacob Pedersen, an analyst at Sydbank, a Danish bank. “That gives them reason to get rid of the old uneconomic ships.”
But fuel is only one part of the equation. “The supply of ships has far outstripped the growth rate” of container traffic, said Richard Meade, the editor of Lloyd’s List, a leading nautical newspaper, adding that the top shipping lines “have entered into an arms race in terms of size, led by Maersk” and its Swiss rival, the privately held Mediterranean Shipping Company. Newer ships, he said, “are more efficient, more economically viable and more environmentally friendly, but they are only going to deliver those results if they are full.”
When the world economy slackens, so does the shipping industry. At one end of Mary’s route, the growth engine of China has been losing steam, while at the other, Europe is again flirting with recession.
The shipping industry has also lacked significant consolidation, with shipping giants often seen as national assets. The top five container lines are either family- or state-controlled. Revenue at Maersk, publicly traded but family controlled, equals more than 14 percent of Denmark’s gross domestic product.
Shipyards, conditioned to build ever-larger vessels, are cutting prices to keep their order books filled. The Triple-E’s were built for $190 million a ship, which in 2011 was seen as a relative bargain. By comparison, in 2007 China Shipping Container Lines, another major shipping line, paid $1.36 billion for eight ships, or about $170 million a ship — but those had a capacity of about 13,300 containers, nearly 5,000 fewer per ship.
“In this down cycle, the new-built prices are low and money is cheap, so you would much rather go and buy the vessels than go and acquire a company” that has older ships, said Martin Dixon, director of research products at Drewry. “Many shipping lines are struggling to make money, so cost leadership is key to survival. Hence, you’re seeing a lot of investment in bigger ships.”
The bigger ships, though, have been sustained by a growth rate in containerization traffic that has been two and a half to three times global economic growth for decades — and that seems to be coming to an end.
“There are two types of companies that will survive this,” Mr. Sanders of Boston Consulting said. “Either you have the very large companies like Maersk” that “take advantage of scale and make money, or particular shipping lines that operate a niche where they dominate, like a feeder line out in Southeast Asia.
“The other guys,” he added, “are caught in the middle and will have a hard time to make a decent return.”
Both Officer and Medic
Jens Boysen is the Mary’s chief officer. Essentially, he is the captain’s right-hand man.
While the ships grow, the crews don’t, in another economy of scale. The Mary has a multinational crew of 20 to 30 — and with so few, they multitask.
Mr. Boysen, 35, is a blond, blue-eyed ethnic Dane who grew up in Germany. He doubles as medic, he explained during a tour of the ship’s small medical bay, which has a bed, a shower and drawers stuffed with pills and transfusion packs. He recounted an episode on the Mediterranean. “I had one motorman who, he was hammering on a shaft,” he began. “He used the wrong tool so some metal peeled off and actually was penetrating through the boiler suit, so there was a lot of blood coming out.”
He wasn’t sure whether metal had lodged inside the man, so he approached the situation like an engineer.
“We have a lot of magnets on board, so I just took a magnet to feel if there was something,” he said. “There was actually some metal, but we couldn’t get it removed, so we had to take him to the hospital later on.”
The crewman was fine — problem solved.
The cost of the crew and a range of other expenses related to running the vessel account for more than a quarter of the Maersk Line division’s cost base. Fuel represents more than a fifth. Cutting such costs helps Maersk steady its results.
In 2009, the company lost $1 billion. This year, Maersk is on track to make $4.5 billion in profit, according to Bloomberg.
Back in the medical bay, Mr. Boysen pulls out a metal box marked “dental” from a drawer and looked up.
“I can also pull some teeth if you want.”
China’s Huge Footprint
Earlier this year, the Nicaraguan government announced plans to build a new canal system, bankrolled by a Chinese billionaire, that would compete with Panama and be wide enough to accommodate the Triple-E. Such plans have been floated before and failed to materialize, but it is the kind of audacious project that only the Chinese might try.
No country more than China has spurred the containerization boom, a byproduct of moving the world’s factories thousands of miles from their biggest markets.
Maersk is deeply embedded in China, with more than 20,000 employees there. It operates container terminals at seven Chinese ports, has bought 118 Chinese-made ships worth $3.5 billion and owns two Chinese factories that build containers.
China is also exerting its influence on the industry. The country’s regulators recently blocked an attempt by Maersk and two European rivals to form a partnership, saying it would hinder competition. Maersk recently proposed a less ambitious alliance with a single rival, the Mediterranean Shipping Company. The proposed deals represent a concession that cargo volume is not rebounding as quickly, so shippers need to share costs and cargo space. Boats are typically full heading west to Europe and partly empty heading east to China. Cargo from Europe to Asia has grown about 30 percent in the last five years, in part because of rising demand from a growing Chinese middle class. But it has not nearly filled all the containers.
At the same time, some manufacturing is moving closer to local markets, a trend that contributes to slowing growth in container traffic. China, too, is trying to foster its own shipping lines. This year, China Shipping Container Lines ordered five ships that will each hold 19,000 containers, about 1,000 more than the Triple-E. They begin to arrive later this year.
But Jakob Stausholm, the chief strategy, finance and transformation officer at Maersk’s container shipping division, said that there was little room for ships to expand further.
“This is still an attractive industry, but it will grow at a much lower multiple of global G.D.P.,” he said. “I really think that right now, given the size of container lines, given the level of sea freight, there is no benefit going toward bigger vessels.”
How to Park a Whale
It was time to park the world’s largest container ship.
Several hours had passed since the first pilot arrived by helicopter, and a second, Karsten Burckner, 45, had come aboard from a tugboat gangplank. Soon he was smoking cigarettes on the far end of the ship’s bridge with the captain. He rolled them by hand, while the captain preferred his Marlboros.
Mr. Burckner’s job was to help turn large boats in front of the harbor at Bremerhaven and back them into their spot alongside the port where towering cranes would soon begin hoisting crates on and off the ships. Speedy, it is not.
Three tugboats nudged the Mary, while the ship’s twin engines fired in opposite directions. The ship began to rotate. It eased toward large rubber cushions on the dock. Beyond were steel shipping crates, stacked like dominoes and stretching out in a vast paved expanse in the port. They were scooped up by gangly red vehicles called “Straddle Carriers,” which are not much wider than a truck but tall enough to carry three or four crates.
The two men looked over the ship’s side and spoke on walkie-talkies to sailors on the ground. Minutes passed — 10, 20, 30. The Mary, crawling at 0.1 knots, began sidling up to a pier.
“Compared to the whole size and the weight of the ship, the steel plates in the side are actually pretty thin,” the captain explained. “If we get a speed higher than that, we’ll start buckling plates.”
He smiled. “And that does not go well with anybody, obviously.”
Mr. Burckner, too, was once a container ship captain — 11 years ago. But he had to give it up. “I was forced,” he said, pausing ominously and then smiling, “by my wife.” This is true of many pilots, who tend to be men who gave up the months at sea for home life.
His ship carried 2,500 containers. “That was a big container ship then,” Captain Holmberg explained.
“When I started, nobody was thinking that this size of vessel will be built,” Mr. Burckner said. “I don’t know where it will end,” he said, looking over its vast expanse. “Ask Maersk.”
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6) It Happened Again: How 14 People Made More Money Than the Entire Food Stamp Budget for 50,000,000 People
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7) Yes to Marijuana Ballot Measures
Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia Should Legalize Pot
The decision by California voters in 1996 to legalize medical marijuana produced a wave of similar initiatives around the country. Less than two decades later, over half the states allow at least limited medical use. Now it looks as though recreational use of the drug may follow the same path.
In 2012, Washington State and Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. This November, voters in Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia will decide whether to do the same — effectively disregarding the misguided federal ban on a drug that is far less dangerous than alcohol. Decades of arresting people for buying, selling and using marijuana have hurt more than helped society, and minority communities have been disproportionately affected by the harsh criminal penalties of prohibition.
Since Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia already allow medical marijuana, taking the next step makes good sense. There are some differences in their proposed initiatives, but they are all worthy of passage.
ALASKA Ballot Measure 2 would make the use and purchase of marijuana legal for those 21 and older, create a marijuana control board and tax the drug at $50 per ounce wholesale. It is already legal for Alaskans to possess small amounts of marijuana in their homes, and surveys indicate that 18 percent of Alaskans smoke marijuana. Ballot Measure 2 would mean that Alaskans could buy it from a store instead of resorting to the black market.
OREGON Measure 91 would also set a minimum age of 21. It would give the Oregon Liquor Control Commission the power to regulate marijuana as it does alcohol, and would direct it to review tax rates regularly. The tax — initially set at $35 per ounce for flowers and $10 per ounce for leaves — should allow for prices low enough to compete with street dealers. Since it is already extremely easy for adults in Oregon to obtain medical marijuana cards (almost 65,000 Oregonians have one), recreational legalization will not be a big change. As The Oregonian editorialized in August, the measure would “be worth supporting for reasons of honesty and convenience alone.”
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Initiative 71 would repeal all criminal and civil penalties for personal possession of marijuana and allow limited, private cultivation of the drug. People 21 and older could grow up to six plants at home and give away up to one ounce. Because the District of Columbia Home Rule Act does not allow a tax to be imposed by referendum, Initiative 71 would not set up a mechanism for regulating retail sales of the drug.Opponents of legalization warn that states are embarking on a risky experiment. But the sky over Colorado has not fallen, and prohibition has proved to be a complete failure. It’s time to bring the marijuana market out into the open and end the injustice of arrests and convictions that have devastated communities.
Careful regulation of the drug could very well make it safer to consume, and proper taxation could bring in new revenue for states. This year, from January through June, Colorado collected about $18.9 million.
Ideally, the federal government would repeal the ban on marijuana, so states could set their own policies without worrying about the possibility of a crackdown on citizens violating federal law. Even though a majority of Americans favor legalization, Congress shows no sign of budging. So it’s better for the states to take the lead than to wait for an epiphany on Capitol Hill that may never come.
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8) Hong Kong Wealth Gap on Display in Protests
By NEIL GOUGH
HONG KONG — The normally gridlocked thoroughfare in front of the main Lamborghini dealership here is now quiet and carless. Guests at the $600-a-night Mandarin Oriental hotel had to enter through a lowered metal security gate on a few recent evenings, and several jewelers and luxury handbag shops are temporarily shuttered.
The unusual lull in high-end business seems a fitting contrast to the public protests that began Sept. 26, when hundreds of students first took to the streets, the crowds later swelling to tens of thousands of young people who fought off tear gas to call for greater democracy, in open defiance of the Chinese government.
China is grappling with a political problem in part because Hong Kong is dealing with an economic one. Underlying the current unrest in Hong Kong, an affluent city of 7.2 million that was a British colony for 155 years before it was returned to China in 1997, is a widening wealth gap.Growing closer to China has brought a bonanza to Hong Kong’s finance, trade, retail and real estate industries. Despite this, average wage growth in the city has stagnated for years, while the costs of housing and daily goods have surged.
Hong Kong’s silent minority of elite tend to fall in line behind the Beijing leadership on political or economic policies that touch the city. Now, it appears to be largely the squeezed middle class, and a younger generation discovering its political voice, driving the unprecedented demonstrations that have shut down major routes in some of Hong Kong’s busiest districts over the past week.
China’s leaders “have ignored the man on the street for so long because everyone told them Hong Kong people aren’t interested in politics, that it’s all about business, and they haven’t realized that society has clearly changed,” said Fraser J.T. Howie, a co-author of “Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise.”
“Even if protests just fizzle out, that’s not a victory for Beijing, and I don’t believe by any means it puts the democratic genie back in the bottle,” Mr. Howie said. “It’s going to be a maelstrom of governance for a long time to come.”
How Beijing chooses to respond to the sweeping protests is complicated by Hong Kong’s role as a major financial center for China. While the city’s economic output has diminished compared with China’s spectacular expansion over the years, it remains a particularly important gateway for foreign investors.Nearly two-thirds of mainland China’s foreign direct investment, which has been in decline this year, is channeled through Hong Kong. And Chinese companies raise a significant amount of funding on the city’s stock exchange.
The Chinese leadership and local officials in Hong Kong must walk a fine line as they seek to suppress calls for more democracy. Already, local police have been criticized for their liberal use of pepper spray and tear gas against peaceful demonstrators. Over the weekend, the situation turned violent as unidentified men assaulted protesters and tore down their encampments in several locations around the city, triggering dozens of arrests, including of individuals identified by the police as suspected members of triads, or organized crime groups.
By Sunday, fears had spread that the police would use force to remove demonstrators at the government’s headquarters. Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s chief executive, pledged on Saturday to “take all necessary actions” to reopen the government building by Monday morning.
Despite the tensions, Hong Kong so far has seen only limited economic fallout from the protests. Dozens of banks were forced last week to temporarily close a few branches, offices or A.T.M.s. The local stock index fell 2.6 percent for the week, which was shortened by a two-day holiday.
The temporary shuttering of some luxury shops was expected to hurt sales in Hong Kong during mainland China’s weeklong National Day holiday, which began Wednesday and traditionally has brought a huge influx of shoppers. Those closures may cost retailers as much as 2.2 billion Hong Kong dollars in lost sales, or around $280 million, for the month of October, according to Raymond Yeung, an analyst at the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group.
China temporarily suspended visas for group tours on Wednesday, a move that could have additional effects on hotel and restaurant receipts in the city. Such tours account for about 30 percent of all mainland visitors to Hong Kong.
The broader economic risk is that the situation on the streets deteriorates further and, in a worst-case situation, the authorities respond with the use of greater force or even call in the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army. Not only would that hurt the financial interests of Hong Kong’s influential tycoons and prompt a potential relocation of multinational companies away from the city, it would have far-reaching effects for China’s own economic development.
“Such a turn of events would do irreparable damage to Hong Kong’s special status as a regional financial center, which owes much to the city’s strong rule of law, its transparent legal system, and its reputation as a safe place for expatriates to live and do business,” Gareth Leather and Julian Evans-Pritchard, analysts at Capital Economics, wrote Friday in a research report.
Hong Kong has been a useful economic hub for distant rulers ever since the British established a trading colony here in 1842, a concession won from the Chinese after the First Opium War. But for Beijing, Hong Kong has proved far more financially vital than it ever was to London. Since Deng Xiaoping began opening China’s economy to the world more than three decades ago, the city has played a crucial role as a place for Chinese companies to raise funds, and as a model for the mainland’s economic and financial overhauls.
As China seeks to broaden the city’s use for trade finance and loans among overseas investors, Hong Kong operates the biggest offshore center for the use of the renminbi, the mainland’s currency. China is also moving forward with plans for a two-way trading link between the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock markets, which would give foreign funds and individual investors their first direct access to buying shares in hundreds of mainland companies.
“Hong Kong has been acting as a reference point for China — whatever they want to do, they come to Hong Kong to take a look first, and if it is good they pick it up,” said Li Kui-Wai, an associate professor of economics and finance at the City University of Hong Kong. “In a sense, they are trying to catch up with us.”
Being at the center of this give-and-take with China has proved immensely profitable for Hong Kong’s elite, who have voiced few objections to Beijing’s tightening grip on the city. The result has been that Hong Kong’s tycoons have increased their dominance over the sectors of the city’s domestic economy that produce the biggest and steadiest profits. That includes utilities, telecommunications, transportation, shipping, logistics, even supermarkets and convenience stores — but most of all, real estate.
Land prices are effectively set by the government, which controls the supply, and in recent years, prices have soared to levels that prohibit all but the wealthiest developers from bidding on prime plots. The city’s 10 richest men all have vast interests in Hong Kong real estate; they control a combined fortune of around $130 billion, according to data from Forbes.
That wealth is not getting spread around. Real wages in Hong Kong have risen less than 3 percent in the past decade. Over the same period, home prices have more than tripled. As a result, Hong Kong’s official Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has risen from 0.518 index point in 1996 to 0.537 point in 2011, the most recent data available — among the highest in the world for a developed economy.
“Hong Kong is supposedly an open window to the world for China,” said Heman Cheung, 24, one of hundreds of protesters who camped out in the middle of the street last week in Causeway Bay, one of the city’s busiest shopping districts. “Monopolies control everything, and I don’t see any ceiling on how high they can go.”
The sky may well be the limit, given the recent signals of the Chinese leadership. Last month, President Xi Jinping hosted a meeting in Beijing with dozens of Hong Kong’s elite to emphasize the government’s opposition to calls for political reform.
In an unusual public statement, a top Chinese academic who works closely with the central government said in a speech in August that democracy in the former colony must be limited in order to protect the interests of its capitalist class. “The business community is a reality,” said the academic, Wang Zhenmin, dean of the law school at Tsinghua University in Beijing, “even if it is a small group of people, a very small group of people.”
“They control the destiny of the economy in Hong Kong,” Mr. Wang said. “If we just ignore their interests, the Hong Kong capitalism will stop.”
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9) New York Is Cataloging, and Returning, Bloody Relics of 1971 Attica Assault
By SAM ROBERTS
When it ended, 10 correction officers and civilian employees and 33 prisoners were dead — all but one guard and three inmates killed in what a prosecutor branded a wanton “turkey shoot” by state troopers.
Prosecutions stemming from the uprising were resolved long ago; scores of inmates and one state trooper were charged. Civil suits by relatives of the dead and injured were settled (the state paid $12 million, including legal fees, to families of the inmates, and another $12 million to families of prison employees).
But even after more than four decades, the scars have never healed.
This year, state officials finally began cataloging the bloodstained uniforms of both guards and inmates, barrels of baseball bats, a homemade cannon, makeshift knives and other ephemera that had been stored in a Quonset hut to determine which were personal belongings that could be returned to the victims’ families, and which other artifacts to ultimately discard or to retain for research or eventual display in the New York State Museum.
In August, property belonging to 12 state employees was identified. Their families were invited privately to Attica on Sept. 13, before the solemn annual public memorial service held to mark the end of the siege.
Eleven of the families accepted the state’s invitation. All but one left with some memento — a bloody or bullet-ridden uniform, a wallet, keys, a thermos, a cap — that the state Department of Correctional Services could establish as having belonged either to an individual or to an unknown colleague. The twelfth family was still considering the state’s offer.
“It was a shock,” recalled Vickie Menz, who discovered a package of personal items belonging to her father, Arthur J. Smith, when she returned to the prison for the memorial. “There was a box of my father’s things, the clothing that he was wearing for the five days he was a hostage. The pants were caked with mud. They hadn’t been laundered.”
Mr. Smith, who had been a guard at Attica for more than two decades, was badly beaten on the first day of the uprising. Then, on the last day, he said he was pushed into a trench that had been dug by the inmates and filled with gasoline. “He did survive, but was beaten so badly on the first day of the riot that he had internal scarring,” Ms. Menz said. He died of cancer in 1995, at 68.
One common goal of state archivists, correction officials and relatives of the former guards and inmates is that what happened at Attica should not be forgotten. The objects collected from the prison yard and cellblocks after the uprising was quelled offer one tangible way of remembering.
“Those pieces of clothing, they’re not pristine, they’re dirty, bloodstained, ripped, have bullet holes in them — it’s not pretty stuff,” said Dee Quinn Miller, whose father, William Quinn, was the only guard killed by the inmates during the uprising (he was severely beaten and died two days later in a hospital). “For the families it’s meaningful, but incredibly difficult. All they want is information and a piece of something.”
The state also plans to return personal items to families of inmates.
“God knows what’s in that stuff,” said Elizabeth M. Fink, lawyer for the Attica Brothers Legal Defense, which represents former inmates and their families. “It’s a record of a big event in American history. It’s also their lives.”
Archivists turned over about 400 objects to the state’s correction department, mostly those identified as having belonged to guards or inmates. Another 1,700 are described as “general contraband,” including weapons fashioned from sports equipment, the typed first page of the prisoners’ original manifesto and the key to the prison’s front gate, which was found on a dead inmate.
“These are enormously significant objects embedded with a story,” said Mark Schaming, director of the New York State Museum in Albany. “They help tell the story of this terrible event.”
He hopes to eventually open the collection to researchers and possibly mount an exhibition.
Correction officials said that Acting Commissioner Anthony J. Annucci, who attended the annual memorial this year, was the highest ranking member of the department to have done so.
“Contrary to popular belief, time does not heal all wounds,” Mr. Annucci said. “There are certain wounds and certain scars that just run too deep to ever completely heal, regardless of how much time has elapsed although those events occurred many years ago.”
For the time being, Ms. Menz is keeping her father’s uniform in her living room in the wooden box prison officials presented to her last month, deciding whether to share it with her siblings or to donate it to a museum.
“I’ve gone back every year,” she said, of the memorial service. “Going and being part of the group, as hard as it was, brought comfort and I guess I feel that it’s my duty to my father to go.”
“After my father was released, state investigators came to the house and he gave them a statement,” she added. “He told his family, ‘I want you all to read this and we will discuss it and we will never discuss it again.’ And we never did,” she said. “It was so long ago, but I take it as my mission to keep educating people.”
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10) Bruised and Weary, Ferguson Struggles to Heal
By JULIE BOSMAN
But where once there was only one Ferguson — an anonymous suburb of St. Louis — now there is another: a small city whose name has become known for civil unrest, racial division and police harassment. Few of the deep grievances that divide the city have been resolved. Anger, despair and resentment have been driven to the surface, and many here are unsure when, or if, Ferguson will recover.“We’re hoping that two years from now, we can say that this was given to us for a reason and something good will have come out of it,” said Linda Hensiek, who runs a beauty shop in Ferguson, as she stopped in a frame store down the street owned by a friend, Robin Shively, who grew up in Ferguson.
“Right now,” Ms. Shively said, “it’s hell.”
A grand jury is meeting only a few miles away to consider the fate of the white Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, who fatally shot Mr. Brown on Aug. 9 in a dispute that began when Officer Wilson directed Mr. Brown to move from the street, where he was walking with a friend, the police said. Moments after the encounter began, the two scuffled, and Officer Wilson ended up shooting Mr. Brown at least six times.
Those who live and work in Ferguson, black and white, offer a portrait of a town that has been torn apart by the death of Mr. Brown, 18, who lived with his grandmother and was days away from starting classes at a trade college.
Some in Ferguson say that, while they are sympathetic to the protesters, they have had enough. Gunfire can often be heard after dark. Small demonstrations have persisted in various pockets of town, including South Florissant Road, which is lined with a wine bar, restaurants, the Police Headquarters and the public library. The police say that more unruly protesters have thrown incendiary devices and rocks, injuring officers and damaging businesses.
“What they’re doing is bringing down everything,” Chantea Arthur, a 35-year-old nurse’s aide who is African-American, said of the protesters. “I think the cop should get in trouble for what he did. But I’m getting tired of it all.”
Mr. Brown’s killing set off a cascade of demonstrations, sometimes violent, and police officers responded by shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. Officer Wilson has remained out of public view since the shooting and is on paid administrative leave.
Several witnesses to the shooting have said that Mr. Brown’s hands were raised in the air in the universal gesture of surrender when he was fatally shot. The police say that Mr. Brown struck Officer Wilson in a struggle for the officer’s gun.
Supporters of the protesters’ cause say that calm cannot be restored to Ferguson until Officer Wilson has been charged with murder. Many people, wearing T-shirts silk-screened with Mr. Brown’s face, still camp out across the street from the Police Headquarters, holding signs that read, “Stop Killing Us.”
Natalie Gray, sitting in a chair across the street from the Police Department last week, said she would not leave “till something happens.”
“I want justice,” she said.
“Ferguson is still a place of unrest until we get to a place of understanding,” said Ermon K. Trotter Jr., a clergy member, during a town-hall meeting at a Baptist church earlier last week. “A lot of people are saying they need it to be over. But brutality is an ongoing thing. And the African-American community has gotten tired.”
James Wiley, a barber at Exotic Trenz Salon in Ferguson, said he believed there was a racial divide in the city that could not be resolved anytime soon. Talk of the case dominated conversation at the salon, he said, and few African-Americans believed that Officer Wilson would be found guilty of any crime.
“Every day, people have their opinion. ‘Will he be charged? Won’t he be charged?’ ” he said. “It’s getting to the point where people believe he’ll be charged, but nobody believes he’ll be convicted.”
Some Ferguson residents — most of them white, but not all — insisted that Mr. Brown’s death had revealed racial tensions that they had not realized were there. Last week, Doug Hindle, who is white, paused from mowing his front lawn on a side street in Ferguson, where he has lived for 30 years. Mr. Hindle said that before Mr. Brown was killed, he thought that whites and African-Americans in Ferguson got along just fine. Both of his next-door neighbors are black, he said, and while they all don’t socialize, they always wave and say hello. For years, Mr. Hindle said, he has driven the older woman across the street, who is African-American, to church, the grocery store or wherever she needs to go.
“Everything was fine before,” Mr. Hindle said. “People are making this look like a bad place to live. We can hear them chanting at night. You can’t leave, you can’t open your windows at night. People are shooting their guns off. It’s never been like that. If they let Wilson go, all hell’s going to break loose. I really hope he goes to jail, just so people can get their justice. This has got to stop.”
Talk of the Brown shooting often shifts to more quotidian concerns, like a canceled street festival that was supposed to take place in Ferguson last month. More lost revenue, some business owners grumbled. Others worry about their property values and the descriptions of Ferguson — unflattering, to say the least — in the news media.
“I’ve had moments where I feel violated by the protesters,” Bernie Frazier, a speaker and career strategist who is African-American, said as she waited in line to attend a town-hall meeting. “To be honest, I feel violated by the media. I read a headline that said, ‘Ferguson under siege.’ I saw an article that described Ferguson as ‘impoverished.’ I’ve just stopped reading comments online. I’m done.”
Her friend Marie Ellison, who is white, shook her head in sympathy. “Sometimes you wake up and think, ‘What has happened in this town?’ ”
Even a simple pizza parlor on South Florissant has turned into tinderbox for racial tension. After protesters gathered outside Faraci Pizza on a recent evening, an owner, James Marshall, confronted them, saying they were blocking access to his business, his wife, Dawne, later told Riverfront Times. He then retreated inside and retrieved a gun, placing it in his pocket, according to his wife’s account. Protesters said he had threatened them with it, accusations that he denied.
Later, the police said that protesters had thrown incendiary devices in the parking lot. Last week, Mr. Marshall reluctantly prepared to open his doors for the dinner rush, loading boxes of frozen beef ravioli through the back door. “I don’t really want to talk to anyone,” he said, a grim expression set on his face. “I just want it to all go away.”
On Canfield Drive, where Mr. Brown was killed, residents have begun wearing cameras around their necks to record police activity — a reflection of their continued distrust of law enforcement in Ferguson.
Tammie Jackson, a Ferguson resident, said she used to love the local police. “I had a really good relationship with the Police Department,” she said. “But now I don’t trust them, none of them.”
The Brown family remains frozen in grief. Outside Mr. Brown’s grandmother’s home, a sign that was placed on the door soon after his death remained there last week. It reads: “Privacy please/During this time of mourning.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Lesley McSpadden, Mr. Brown’s mother, made one of her regular visits to the place where her son was killed. She drove an S.U.V., with a message scrawled on its rear window, “Justice for My Son,” and parked on Canfield Drive.
One of the two memorials at the site was mysteriously burned days ago, but neighbors quickly rebuilt it with foil balloons, a Winnie-the-Pooh doll, a plush Spider-Man and a wooden cross with the message “Love your neighbor.”
Wearing dark sunglasses and a white T-shirt with her son’s photo on the front, with her short-cropped hair dyed a brilliant red, her son’s favorite color, Ms. McSpadden stood at the memorial for 15 minutes, weeping, stooping to pick up fallen leaves.
She comes to the memorial all the time, she said, even though visits to the site of her son’s death deepen her pain. “I always want to straighten it up,” she said. “Keep it looking nice.”
Neighbors began trickling out of their homes, tentatively approaching Ms. McSpadden with handshakes, hugs and whispered words of sympathy. “I’ve been praying for you,” one woman said.
Gazing downward at the memorial, Ms. McSpadden pondered the question of how long it should stay in place.
“Forever,” she said.
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11) 43 Missing Students, a Mass Grave and a Suspect: Mexico’s Police
IGUALA, Mexico — They were farm boys who did well in school and took one of the few options available beyond the backbreaking work in the corn and bean fields of southern Mexico: enrolling in a local teachers college with a history of radicalism but the promise of a stable classroom job.
Leonel Castro, 19, the oldest of seven siblings, vowed to use his salary to help his impoverished family. Júlio César, 19, thought he could run a school one day and ensure the best for the next generation. Adán Abraham de la Cruz, 23, wanted to put his computer skills to good use in the classroom.
“He was just preparing himself to get ahead like any young person would do,” said Mr. de la Cruz’s father, Bernabé.Now, they are among 43 students reported missing after deadly clashes with the police on Sept. 26, when at least six student protesters and bystanders were killed in the restive, rural state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in the country and long afflicted by political, social and criminal upheaval.
The state prosecutor investigating why the police opened fire on students from their vehicles has found mass graves in Iguala — the small industrial city where the confrontations occurred — containing 28 badly burned and dismembered bodies.
The prosecutors had already arrested 22 police officers after the clashes, saying the officers secretly worked for, or were members of, a local gang. Now they are investigating whether the police apprehended the students after the confrontation and deliberately turned them over to the local gang. Two witnesses in custody told prosecutors that the gang then killed the protesters on the orders of a leader known as El Chucky.
“I saw police trucks go up and down the hill to up there, where the bodies are found,” said one man in the neighborhood near the site who declined to give his name out of fear. “Then came the news they found the grave and it may be the students. But you would be a fool around here to accuse the police and expect to live.”
Even in a country accustomed to mass killings, the case has generated alarm, both for the possible involvement of the police and for the fact that the students were not known to have criminal ties. Miguel MartÃnez, a representative for the families, said students at the school had fought back against extortion attempts by gangs last year, but it was not clear if that could have made them a target now.
The students, by many accounts, had been soliciting money in Iguala for an Oct. 2 demonstration rejecting cuts to their state-financed school, which opened in 1926 and has long played a role in local social justice movements. Such student demonstrations are part of a well-known militancy that goes back decades and has provoked violence in the past. It did again this time, as students got into a skirmish with the police when they tried to steal buses to take to and from the demonstration, human rights groups said.
The mayor and the police chief of Iguala are now on the run, having disappeared after being subpoenaed in the case, and the governor of the state confirmed that the local gang, known as Guerreros Unidos, had infiltrated the police force in Iguala, as well as other police departments in the state.
The specter of corrupted police has haunted Mexico for years. But these disappearances come at a time when President Enrique Peña Nieto is already confronting the prosecution of at least three soldiers charged with homicide in another recent case — the shooting death of 22 people captured in a warehouse in June.
“I feel deeply outraged and dismayed,” Mr. Peña Nieto told reporters Monday, referring to the violence here and dispatching the attorney general and other federal forces to the region. “I regret, in particular, the violence that occurred and especially that it was young students who were affected and whose rights were violated in the city of Iguala.”
Mr. Peña Nieto’s predecessor, Felipe Calderón, also faced wave after wave of police corruption scandals, with some entire local forces dismissed. But experts say that, even as violence soared, both administrations fell behind in putting in place measures to hold law enforcement authorities accountable.
Only this year did Mexico pass a law allowing members of the military to be tried in civilian courts for human rights abuses, and many feel that Mr. Peña Nieto has been more focused on shifting the dialogue to Mexico’s economy than on fighting corruption and improving security.
“A serious and sustained effort at reforming local police agencies has been a pending agenda for a long time in Mexico,” said Matthew C. Ingram, an assistant professor at the University at Albany who studies justice in Mexico. “As long as local, municipal police agencies remain weak, they will not have the capacity to generate public trust or resist corruption and capture.”Here at the small, 500-student mountaintop teachers college, Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, where cows and stray dogs roam freely and walls are adorned with slogans like “protest is a right, repression is a crime,” a hodgepodge of human rights and radical groups and representatives of the families have vowed paralyzing strikes across the country on Wednesday to keep the pressure on the authorities for answers.
Parents of the missing students doubt the effectiveness of state investigators. A team of forensic experts from Argentina with long experience in mass disappearance cases has arrived, and on Monday it began interviewing family members and collecting other data as part of an independent investigation, though it was unclear if the experts would have access to the bodies found.
States officials said it could take at least two weeks and possibly longer to identify the remains because of their poor condition.
And if the bodies are not those of the missing students, the question remains: Where did they come from?
Several parents said they still hoped their children would be found alive. Although the number of missing has fluctuated, the current list of 43 was developed after students and human rights representatives said they had called family members and friends and searched school grounds and other places, failing to account for 43 classmates.
“We have to keep looking and praying,” said Santa Cruz Castro, the father of Leonel.
He last spoke to his son when Leonel called him the day of the confrontation, saying, “Don’t worry, Dad, I am going to the march,” which Mr. Cruz took to mean the collection drive in Iguala. “And then I didn’t hear from him and saw the news about the shootings. We didn’t know what to do.”
In a sign of defiance and concern, placards and bumper stickers are popping up here and in other cities in Guerrero on buses, storefronts and buildings. Their slogan — #HastaEncontrarlos — means: “Until they are found.”
Paulina Villegas contributed reporting from Mexico City.
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C.
SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING
CAMPAIGNS
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Free the Whistle-Blowers
An Appeal from Daniel Ellsberg
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.
Free the Whistle-Blowers
An Appeal from Daniel Ellsberg
July 21, 2014 by Daniel Ellsberg
NSA 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.
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.
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
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
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!
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!
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/
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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]
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Prison vs School: The Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
NYC
RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Kids
being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate
locations" in
Terror
Drills
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Private
prisons,
a
recession resistant investment opportunity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
The
Invisible American Workforce
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
The
Battle of Oakland
by
brandon jourdan plus
http://vimeo.com/36256273
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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/
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
To
unsubscribe go to: bauaw2003-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
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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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Obama Faulted in Terror Fight, New Poll Finds
2) Artificial Sweeteners May Disrupt Body’s Blood Sugar Controls
By Kenneth Chang
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and DALIA SUSSMAN
By Kenneth Chang
3) Busy Days Precede a March Focusing on Climate Change
4) We Can Save the Caribbean’s Coral Reefs
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]
6) Climate Change March Begins in New York City
7) U.S. and Allies Strike ISIS Targets in Syria
8) The New York Jail Scandal Continues
9) Israeli Forces Kill 2 Suspects in Murder of Jewish Teenagers
10) Talk in Synagogue of Israel and Gaza Goes From Debate to Wrath to Rage
11) Washington: Marijuana-Use Tickets Are Nullified
12) Deaths From Faulty Switch in G.M. Cars Edge Higher
13) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
14) A California Dream: Not Having to Settle for Just One Bedroom
15) Cleared After Nearly 23 Years in Prison, but Not Free
4) We Can Save the Caribbean’s Coral Reefs
By JEREMY JACKSON and AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON
[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]
6) Climate Change March Begins in New York City
7) U.S. and Allies Strike ISIS Targets in Syria
By JODI RUDOREN
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
By HILARY STOUT
13) In Colorado, a Student Counterprotest to an Anti-Protest Curriculum
By JACK HEALY
By JIM DWYER
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Obama Faulted in Terror Fight, New Poll Finds
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and DALIA SUSSMAN
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 Kenneth Chang
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
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
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
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
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
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 JODI RUDOREN
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
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 JACK HEALY
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
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-Ã -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 JIM DWYER
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
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.
Free the Whistle-Blowers
An Appeal from Daniel Ellsberg
July 21, 2014 by Daniel Ellsberg
NSA 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.
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.
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
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
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!
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!
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
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Exceptional
art from the streets of Oakland:
Oakland
Street Dancing
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
NYC
RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1000
year of war through the world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Kids
being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate
locations" in
Terror
Drills
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Private
prisons,
a
recession resistant investment opportunity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
The
Invisible American Workforce
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
The
Battle of Oakland
by
brandon jourdan plus
http://vimeo.com/36256273
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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/
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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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unsubscribe go to: bauaw2003-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
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