5/20/2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2015

Police Mass Murder Fact
As of May 1, 2015, 387 people have been killed by police since January 1, 2015 (that's a total of 120 days.) That's 3.225 people per day, on average.

http://killedbypolice.net/

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Amn3.pngMayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families


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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS


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Police Terror from Marikana, South Africa to the US

Presentation By Dinga Sikwebu, Education Director of NUMSA, the National Union Of Metal Workers South Africa


Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7:00 PM

ILWU Local 10
Henry Schmidt Room
400 North Point St. @ Mason
San Francisco
Transportation: Street car F, MUNI bus 47, 8, 88

When ILWU Local 10 stopped work on May 1, 2015 to protest police terror from Ferguson to Baltimore to the Bay Area, it received a statement of solidarity from the National Union Of Metal Workers of South Africa. NUMSA is the largest and most militant union in South Africa representing 350,000 workers including not only metal workers but also dockworkers and airline workers.

Continuing privatization and deregulation has caused increased impoverishment in the black townships and rural areas. The 2012 massacre of striking mineworkers in Marikana by police of the ANC government was the catalyst for NUMSA to call for a United Front to begin the process of uniting the working class and oppressed and the formation of an independent workers party. NUMSA has also fought the recent bloody attacks against migrant workers in South Africa that has led to many deaths.

Dinga Sikwebu is the NUMSA Director of Education and has been involved in the formation of this United Front. He will be visiting ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco and speaking about his union’s experience and the lessons of their struggles. This is important not only for South African workers but US working people who also face police terror and similar attacks on their wages, jobs and workers rights.

Sponsored by ILWU Local 10
Endorsed by Transport Workers Solidarity Committee www.transportworkers.org
For information: (510) 384-9561


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A Saudi-led coalition began waging a war on Yemen on March 25th with the pretext of attempting to restore deposed President Hadi. Armed with weapons, logistical support and intelligence from the United States, the coalition has devastated a country at the heart of Arab history, resistance and power.

Over 1,200 people have been killed, thousands injured, over 300,000 people displaced, entire neighborhoods turned into rubble, and a blockade has created catastrophic humanitarian disaster. The Bay Area is home to one of the largest Yemeni communities in the US. While their families are struggling to survive this devastation, they are calling on all to support their struggle for self determination against foreign intervention and imperialist wars. Join us in the following protest and actions in the coming days.

#HandsOffYemen

Protest the War on Yemen
Support Yemeni Self Determination

#HandsOffYemen

Join us for a discussion on the Saudi-led war and the ways for us to support Yemeni self determination.

Speakers:
As'ad Abukhalil
Ashwak Hauter
Adel Folly

#HandsOffYemen
Sunday, May 24th
2pm
518 Valencia St.
San Francisco

Event will be bilingual in English and Arabic. Interpretation will be provided.

Copyright © 2015 Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you have expressed interest in AROC news and events.

Our mailing address is:
Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC)
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110



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Mumia Needs Medical Care

New Campaign Update!

The ‘Mumia Abu-Jamal Needs Medical Care NOW!’ team just posted:

1 new Announcement:

Dateline May 17th 2015:

We have not seen or spoken to Mumia Abu-Jamal for a week.  He is being held incommunicado in a hospital without access to visits of any kind or the phone.


This is deeply troubling.


On Tuesday May 12th in the evening Mumia was taken from the prison  to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, PA.  

The Legal & Medical Team  working 24/7.
Bret Grote, Esq, and co counsel Bob Boyle are preparing an emergency court action in Federal Court.  Bret Grote, notes

"The DOC demonstrating its contempt for human rights and proper health care by holding Mumia Abu-Jamal incommunicado from his family and lawyers. Instead of recognizing the value of family support and legal consultation in protecting and improving his health, the DOC is treating Mumia like a piece of property that it can withhold access to and information about arbitrarily and with impunity.  Demand that Mumia be permitted visits and phone calls "

A delegation from Collectif Français 'Libérons Mumia'  from Paris, France went to the hospital & the prison. The prison guards denied their visit.  On Saturday Mark Lewis Taylor, of Princeton Theological Seminary  was turned away.

 Keeping Our Eyes on Munia
 In the past two weeks, Mumia’s doctor has identified seriously inadequacies in the medical care provided by the infirmary.  Mumia’s doctor stressed that a cat scan was needed. The prison said it was fine. There were serious medical issues raised by the troubling cat scan results.  Then Mumia was given a topical cream that was on the warning label counter indicated to the very specific and rare potential cancer that is a possible cause of his extreme skin ailment.  Clearly, a biopsy was called for.  Upon hearing that on Monday a biopsy would be conducted, Mumia’s doctor immediately specified that it should be taken from his trunk area.  When Mumia told the Physician’s assistant who conducted the biopsy at the infirmary this, he could not change the standing order which was to take the biopsy from his arm. 

The concern is that what might be driving the extreme skin condition is subcutaneous T cell lymphoma – a treatable cancer.  Mumia was told that the physicians at SCI Mahanoy in March were prevented from ordering additional tests by officials of the Wexford Corporation that has the health care contract. 

Clearly Mumia needs an immediate diagnosis, and then a competent treatment plan. Please join us in keeping Mumia alive, and then seeing him free.

Noelle Hanrahan, P.I. Director Prison Radio

https://www.indiegogo.com/individuals/585261

Take Action Now!
Demand that the Department of Corrections permit Mumia to have an examination by his doctor! Click here to call and fax the Prison and State officials and state our demands.

http://www.prisonradio.org/sites/default/files/letters/pdf/Eyes%20on%20Mumia_1.pdf

Mumia needs his own physician specialists!  Please donate now to help make this possible.  Please got to the web site below and give as generously as you can.

Donate at:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mumia-abu-jamal-needs-medical-care-now

and…
Sign the petition
to help save—and free—Mumia.
Go to:

https://www.change.org/p/john-e-wetzel-pa-secretary-of-corrections-tom-wolf-pa-governor-stop-the-medical-execution-of-mumia-abu-jamal-by-neglect-and-malpractice-3

Also,
We need to keep up the pressure
with phone calls:

Let SCI Mahanoy Superintendent John Kerestes and Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel know we insist that Mumia have medical specialists of his own choosing, and that they have daily access rights to examine and treat him. Also let them know that Mumia’s family needs regular and frequent visitation rights.

SCI Mahanoy
Superintendent John Kerestes
(570) 773-2158

SCI Mahanoy
Chief Health Care Administrator Steinhardt
(570) 773-2158

Christopher Oppman
Director, PA Department of Corrections Health Care Services
(717) 728-5309

John Wetzel
Secretary, PA Department of Corrections
(717) 728-4109

NO EXECUTION BY MEDICAL NEGLECT!
SAVE MUMIA'S LIFE!

Mumia is Innocent! Free Mumia Now!

This message by:
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
20 April 2015

Call now to demand freedom and medical care for Mumia:

Often when we call in, prison and state officials have taken their lines off the hook. Know that every action matters, even when they don't pick up. If they don't answer, please leave a voicemail:

John Wetzel, PA Secretary of Corrections: 717-728-4109

Governor Tom Wolf: 717-787-2500

SCI Mahanoy: 570-787-2500

For a full list of addresses and faxes, visit prisonradio.org
Support Prison Radio

$35 to become a member.

$50 to become a member and receive a beautiful tote bag. Or call us to special order a yoga mat bag.

$100 to become a member and receive the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary."

$300 to become a member and bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1,000 (or $88 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Thank you!


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Prison Radio has recorded Mumia and other political prisoners for over 25 years, and we are pulling out all the stops to keep these voices on the air. 

Please donate today to amplify prisoners' voices far and wide beyond the bars:

     Support Prison Radio: prisonradio.org/donate
     Defeat SB 508: bit.ly/defendfreespeech


Copyright © Prison Radio

www,prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Our mailing address is:

Prison Radio PO Box 411074, SF CA 94141

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=247585f092e945ff55b9a1bb2&id=e113d0b6d0&e=0107d76ccd

Donate Now

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222


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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

Lorenzo Speaks Concerning Prosecution's Brief:

JANUARY 1, 2015—The prosecutor has run away from (almost) every issue raised in my PCRA by begging the Court to dismiss everything as “untimely”. When they don’t do this, they suggest that me and my lawyers were “defamatory” towards either my former prosecutor Christopher Abruzzo or Detective Kevin Duffin, in our claims they withheld, misused or hid evidence of my Innocence, in order to secure an unjust conviction in this case. If I charged, a year ago, that about a dozen AGs (attorneys general) were involved in circulating porno via their office computers, people would’ve laughed at me, and seen me as crazy.

But, guess what? During 2014, we learned that this was the truth. How can it be defamatory to speak the truth? Notice the OAG (Office of Attorney General), never said the obvious: That AG Abruzzo didn’t inform the Defense about the relationship between his Motive Witness and his head detective (Victoria Doubs and Det. Duffin); that Det. Duffin doesn’t deny Doubs was his god-sister, and that she lived in his family home, or that he assisted her whenever she got into trouble.

Why not? Because it is true. How can you defame someone who defames himself? Mr. Christopher Abruzzo, Esq., when a member of the higher ranks of the OAG, sent and/or received copious amounts of porno to other attorneys general and beyond. What does this say about his sense of judgment? He thought enough about his behavior to resign from his post in the Governor’s Cabinet. If he thought that his behavior was okay, he’d still be sitting in the Governor’s cabinet, right? The OAG cannot honestly oppose anything we’ve argued, but they try by seeking to get the Court to do their dirty work, how? By denying an Evidentiary Hearing to prove every point we’ve claimed.

The prosecution is trying desperately to avoid dealing with the substance of my claims in Com. v. Lorenzo Johnson. So, they slander my Legal Team and blame them for defaming the good AG’s and Cops involved with this case. They try to do what is undeniable, to deny that they hid evidence from the Defense for years. They blamed me for daring to protest the hidden evidence of their malfeasance and other acts to sabotage the defense. They claim that they had an “Open File” policy with my trial counsel. But “Open File” is more than letting an attorney read something in their office. If it’s a search for the truth it must include what is turned over to the attorney, for how do we really know what was shown to her?

They say it is inconceivable that an attorney would read a file, beginning on page nine (9), and not ask for the preceding eight (8) pages. Yet, it is conceivable if trial counsel was ineffective for not demanding the record of the first eight pages. Pages that identify the State’s only witness as a “SUSPECT” in the murder for which her client was charged! How could such an attorney fail to recognize the relevance of such an issue, barring their sheer Ineffectiveness and frankly, Incompetence.

By seeking to avoid an evidentiary hearing, the prosecution seeks to avoid evidence of their wrongdoing being made plain, for all to see. If they believe I’m wrong, why not prove it? They can’t. So they shout I filed my appeal untimely, as if there can ever justly be a rule that precludes an innocent from proving his innocence! Not to mention the fact that the prosecution has failed to even mention the positive finger prints that ay my trial they said none existed. Don’t try to hide it with a lame argument about time. When isn’t there a time for truth? The prosecution should be ashamed of itself for taking this road. It is unworthy of an office that claims to seek justice.

After the trial verdict The Patriot-News (March 18, 1997) reported, “Deputy Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo admitted there were some serious concerns about the strength of the evidence against Johnson and praised the jury for doing a thorough job.” I guess he forgot to mention all of the evidence he left out to show Innocence.

Now, more than ever, Lorenzo Johnson needs your support.

Publicize his case; bring it to your friends, clubs, religious

and social organizations.

SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/sign-the-petition.html

CONTRIBUTE TO LORENZO'S CAMPAIGN FOR FREEDOM!

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/how-can-i-help.html

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


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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/
   

On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge’s approval, repeatedly told the jury “you don’t need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney.” And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE ‘ALTERED’ PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney’s appeal.

Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney.  Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search “Pinkney”).

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist." 

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an “Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers’ Association of America]” demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

Contributions for Rev. Pinkney’s defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.



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COURAGE TO RESIST

 http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action- write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

 November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.

It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.

Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

101 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-0101

The Judge Advocate General

2200 Army Pentagon

Washington, DC 20310-2200

Army Clemency and Parole Board

251 18th St, Suite 385

Arlington, VA 22202-3532

Directorate of Inmate Administration

Attn: Boards Branch

U.S. Disciplinary Barracks

1301 N. Warehouse Road

Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304

Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:

The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.”  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!


Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org


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B. ARTICLES IN FULL


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1) 18 Years’ Probation for Arizona Woman Who Left Sons in Car
By




2) Racist Police Emails Put Florida Cases in Doubt
By




3) Florida: Man’s Taser Death Is Ruled a Homicide
By REUTERS




4) Don’t Be So Sure the Economy Will Return to Normal
By TYLER COWEN 





5) Class-Action Lawsuit, Blaming Police Quotas, Takes On Criminal Summonses
By




6) Justice Department Reviewing Inmate Abuse by Attica Guards
By TOM ROBBINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/nyregion/justice-department-reviewing-abuse-of-inmates-at-attica.html?ref=nyregion




7) Open-Ended Strike to Bring German Trains to a Halt Again This Week
By REUTERS





8) Missouri: No Charge for St. Louis Officer in Killing
By




9) Rise in Suicide by Black Children Surprises Researchers
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/health/suicide-rate-for-black-children-surged-in-2-decades-study-says.html?_r=0




10) Los Angeles Lifts Its Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
By and NOAM SCHEIBER




11) U.S. Military Space Plane Begins a Fourth (Mostly) Secret Mission
By




12) Two Rikers Inmates Accuse Guard of Repeated Rapes
By




13) Five Banks to Pay Billions and Plead Guilty in Currency and Interest Rate Cases [BUT NO JAIL TIME!]
By and



































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1) 18 Years’ Probation for Arizona Woman Who Left Sons in Car
By

PHOENIX — A woman who left her two young sons alone for an hour in a hot car while she was at a job interview was sentenced Friday to 18 years of supervised probation.

The mother, Shanesha Taylor, now 36, earned sympathy when events first unfolded in 2014, her tear-streaked booking photo moving strangers to send tens of thousands of dollars in donations to her family. But the sympathy turned to notoriety after she spent much of the money on nonessential items for her children and herself.

Commissioner Jeffrey Rueter of Maricopa County Superior Court followed prosecutors’ recommendation in sentencing Ms. Taylor, turning away her lawyers’ request for 10 years of supervision.

Jerry Cobb, a spokesman for the county attorney’s office, said Ms. Taylor, who has two other children, must also attend parenting classes.Ms. Taylor was working odd jobs and moving between relatives’ homes and cheap motels when she landed a job interview at an insurance agency in neighboring Scottsdale in March 2014. When she walked out of the interview, police officers arrested her, charging her with two counts of felony child abuse.

Her boys — one was 2 and the other 6 months — had been left strapped to their car seats, the car windows cracked open. Ms. Taylor told the authorities that she could not afford child care, nor could she find anyone to watch her sons for free.

The authorities say temperatures were in the 70s that day in the Arizona sun.

A judge initially agreed to dismiss the charges if Ms. Taylor put some of the donations she had received in a trust fund under her children’s names, a term of the deferred-prosecution agreement reached between prosecutors and her lawyer at the time, Benjamin P. Taylor II, who was working pro bono. The courts reinstated the charges when she failed to comply.

Court filings revealed that Ms. Taylor spent a significant share of the donations on clothes, entertainment, cellphones and a cable television package for her home. She pleaded guilty to the felony abuse charges in March.

The length of Ms. Taylor’s probation was tailored to guarantee that all of her children would be adults when it is concluded, Mr. Cobb said. Her youngest child is still a baby.


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2) Racist Police Emails Put Florida Cases in Doubt
By

KEY WEST, Fla. — The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office is combing through more than 150 criminal cases of black suspects arrested by Miami Beach police officers who wrote or received racist emails, the latest in a series of high-profile episodes around the nation that have raised troubling questions about the relations between the police and the communities they serve.

Two ranking officers at the Miami Beach Police Department sent about 230 emails that contained racist and sexist jokes and pornography from 2010-12, Chief Dan Oates announced Thursday. A former police captain, who had been demoted to lieutenant, was fired, and a major retired before the investigation was made public.

Fourteen other officers received the emails, the police department said.The episode, which follows the release of racist or homophobic emails in Ferguson, Mo.; San Francisco; and Fort Lauderdale, adds another level of discord to the often-strained relations between the police and minority groups. Officers in Edison, N.J.; Seattle; Baton Rouge, La.; and Casselberry, Fla., have also been fired or disciplined over racist text and email messages, a wave that some experts believe indicates a culture in which officers are comfortable expressing racist views.

The episodes also raise questions about whether an officer’s flippant attitude about race manifests itself on the streets.

“This behavior serves to belittle the people that we serve,” Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the Miami-Dade County state attorney, said at a news conference Thursday. “They belittle women, and they belittle minorities.”

A review of about a million emails showed that from 2010-12, the supervisors had forwarded racist memes and jokes mocking blacks, women, President Obama and Mexicans. One photo of a baby in a bassinet, purporting to put to rest questions about Mr. Obama’s place of birth, showed a baby in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. One meme showed a “Black Monopoly” board game on which each square had a police officer directing the player to “go to jail.”

The state attorney’s office found that the officers involved were listed as witnesses in 540 cases, including 97 that are pending. The majority of the defendants were white or Hispanic.

In the 162 cases in which the defendant was listed as black, the state attorney’s office is conducting a review to determine whether the case relied solely on the testimony of an officer whose conduct is being called into question. The emails raise the possibility that prosecutors will have to reopen closed cases in which the officers played an important role, said the state attorney’s spokesman, Ed Griffith. “If there are indications of some kind of bias, if there is a pattern, then clearly we have to remedy that,” Mr. Griffith said.

Eugene G. Gibbons, a lawyer who represents the fired lieutenant, Alex Carulo, said his client’s dismissal was unfair, because the initial internal affairs investigation had been presented to a previous police chief two years ago. That chief, Raymond Martinez, had issued a written reprimand to the major, Angel Vasquez, and the emails stopped. Mr. Carulo was demoted last year when Mr. Oates took over, and this week he was fired.

Mr. Gibbons questioned the decision to release the emails just before Urban Beach Week, an annual hip-hop festival in Miami Beach over Memorial Day weekend, which has been marred by clashes between the police and partygoers. In 2011, eight Miami Beach police officers fired at a reckless driver, killing him and wounding several bystanders.

“It’s a powder keg for these people, and they self-created it,” Mr. Gibbons said.

Robert Jenkins, president of the Miami Beach Fraternal Order of Police, agreed. “The people who are coming on Memorial Day are not police-friendly,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Sometimes we feel there’s an attitude of ‘them and us,’ and this is going to add to the tensions.”

Mr. Gibbons stressed that dozens of people, including assistant chiefs and majors, had received or forwarded the offensive emails, which he said indicated widespread but harmless activity.

“That was the culture back then,” Mr. Vasquez, the retired major, told the local CBS channel last year. “It was just guys emailing each other. There was a good ol’ boy mentality back then.”

Delores Jones-Brown, director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that any criminal cases the officers touched were in jeopardy, because defense lawyers could impeach the credibility of any officer involved.

“You would want prosecutors to take the lead,” she said. “You’d have to look at the statute to see if the officers violated any harassment and hate crime statutes. If they did, they can be charged.”

The Broward County, Fla., state attorney’s office was forced to drop 11 felony cases, 23 misdemeanors and one juvenile case after four Fort Lauderdale police officers were caught sending racists texts, including some that used racial epithets to refer to suspects they chased. An officer also made a video trailer featuring actual police dogs and Ku Klux Klan imagery.

All of the defendants in the dropped cases were black, said Ron Ishoy, a spokesman for the Broward County state attorney. In all of those instances, at least one of the four officers involved was the principal officer in the arrest, he said.

“This is a serious matter,” Mr. Ishoy said in an email. “Beyond the cases we’ve dropped, we continue to review other cases in which these former policemen were the principal officers involved in the arrest. We will drop charges against the defendants where it is appropriate.”

Howard Finkelstein, the Broward public defender, said the state attorney and police investigations did not go far enough. “Look at the numbers. How is it possible that in a city that is 31 percent black, 96 percent of the people stopped walking or biking are black? How is that even possible, statistically?”

His office is reviewing 45 of the officers’ cases.

“I can assure you that if people think the beating of black young men is funny, then they are willing to beat young black men, period, end of story,” Mr. Finkelstein said.

“It is not possible for an officer to use hate-filled language and humor, but only on his private time.”

Marsha Ellison, president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said the city had reprimanded only low-ranking officers and had not, for example, disciplined the K-9 officers who allowed their dogs to be used in the video.

“The city wants us to believe that a 22-year-old kid on the force for three years was the mastermind of all of this,” she said.

The three Fort Lauderdale officers who were fired are appealing their dismissals; one resigned. One of the fired men, Christopher Sousa, 25, said he had sent an apology to the N.A.A.C.P.

“I made a mistake, a huge one, and I am so sorry for it,” Mr. Sousa said. “I understand that some people will never forgive me.”

On Friday, the San Francisco district attorney’s office, which is reviewing some 3,000 cases in which one of 14 officers who sent or received offensive texts was listed as the primary officer, said it had so far dismissed eight criminal cases.


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3) Florida: Man’s Taser Death Is Ruled a Homicide
By REUTERS



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4) Don’t Be So Sure the Economy Will Return to Normal
By TYLER COWEN 

It is hard to avoid the feeling that our current economic problems are more than just a cyclical downturn. We know that the economy has gone through some bad times. But what exactly are we experiencing?

One relatively optimistic view is that observed deficiencies — like slow growth in real wages and the overall economy, persistently low interest rates and low levels of labor participation — are merely temporary. In this view, these problems will dwindle after manageable problems like high levels of public or household debt have been reduced.

Another commonly heard view is that we made the mistake of letting the last recession linger too long, allowing some of its features to became entrenched. That analysis suggests that if we correct past policy errors, whatever they may have been, an underlying normality will re-emerge.There are some nuggets of truth in both of these arguments, but there is a much more disturbing possibility that could turn out to be more accurate: namely, that the recession was a learning experience that we haven’t fully absorbed. From this perspective, the radical and sudden changes of the financial crisis were early indicators of deep fragility and dysfunctionality.

Slowly but surely, we may be responding to these difficult revelations by scaling back our ambitions for the economy — reinforcing negative trends that were already underway. In this troubling view, we have finally begun to discover some unpleasant truths. Borrowing a phrase from the University of Toronto economist Richard Florida, it’s possible that we are experiencing a “Great Reset.”

Let’s consider an analogy to see how this might work in practice.

Well before the recent recession, many colleges and universities realized that they could not afford so many full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members, and they began to increase their reliance on lower-paid adjuncts. Few institutions fired large numbers of full-timers suddenly, because that could have left them understaffed if trends reversed. Longstanding protections of tenure were also a constraint. Instead, many administrators added modestly to the number of adjunct faculty members, sometimes over decades, relying on retirement and attrition to manage the shift in a relatively smooth manner.

That evolution reflects a more general principle: Institutional rigidities don’t permit adjustments to occur all at once, but by studying continuing changes we may be able to peer around a corner and see where a sector is headed.

Such processes are scary because we may be watching the slow unfolding of a hand that, in its fundamentals, has already been dealt.

There are signs that a comparable story may apply to the American economy more broadly.

In manufacturing, for example, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Caterpillar and Navistar (formerly International Harvester) all pay many of their new workers much less. In some of these two-tier structures, the new wage may be as little as half the old one. In addition to this rapid change, the companies also seem to be reducing the ranks of highly paid workers through slow attrition.

Here is another change that might be a broader sign of a pending reset: A heavy burden of adjustment in the overall labor market is being borne by the young. Wages for the typical graduate of a four-year college have dropped more than 7 percent since 2000, and the labor force participation rate of the young has been falling. One consequence is that young people are living at home longer and receiving more aid from their parents. They also seem to be less interested in buying their own homes.

All of these factors could indicate that our economy is evolving into one that will offer far less favorable long-run wage prospects. Much research has shown that the effects of a recession can be pernicious for decades: Earning a lower wage in earlier years is predictive of lower wages through the rest of one’s career. While we are seeing economic problems for the relatively young, they will eventually become dominant earners in the economy and the major force behind broader statistics.

In short, are these economic problems transitory, or are we glimpsing the beginnings of a grimmer future?If a reset is underway, we might have to accept that public policy cannot reverse it easily. Once unsustainable economic structures begin to fail, it takes a significant improvement to make them viable again. Yet because of the difficulty of making major changes under our current political alignment, most new government policies today are no more than changes at the margin. Perhaps the most basic problem is that it is difficult to be sure when a reset is underway, and it is harder yet to raise public alarm about changes that seem to be gradual and slow.

Most of all, it is not always wise to fight a reset.

Early in the previous decade, Germany realized its economic model wasn’t working, and it accepted lower real wages for many workers.

Even though growth in living standards has been slow, the German economy has been flexible and has appeared to be on a sustainable track. Maybe that was the best Germany could do.

France, in contrast, has attempted to preserve high real wages and benefits for prime-age workers, in part by buying older workers out of employment and delaying starts for the young. But the country has a higher rate of unemployment and, arguably, may face greater and more sudden adjustments in years to come. French polls indicate high pessimism about future economic prospects.

The debate over the economy these days isn’t just about income inequality and what should or should not be done about it. Perhaps the most crucial issue is whether economies will return to normal conditions of steady growth, or whether we are witnessing a fundamental transformation, unveiled in bits and pieces. Nominations for the nature of that transformation include a “robot economy,” a new political economy where elites have too much power or, perhaps, a new global economy where the United States no longer holds such a dominant position, to the detriment of American firms and workers.

No one knows whether or how much of a reset may be underway. Yet I can’t help but wonder which features of current data might prove harbingers of larger, more permanent changes to come.

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Follow him on Twitter at @tylercowen.


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5) Class-Action Lawsuit, Blaming Police Quotas, Takes On Criminal Summonses
By

In March 2010, at age 19, Sharif L. Stinson was issued two criminal summonses in the Bronx: One ticket charged him with trespassing, and the other with disorderly conduct. Court records show that both were later thrown out by a judge for the same reason: “legally insufficient.”

Mr. Stinson thus joined an unusual but hardly exclusive club in New York City: people who were stopped by the police and given a summons for a criminal offense, only to have it dismissed.

Indeed, records show, about one-fifth — or 850,000 — of the 3.8 million criminal summonses issued by the police between 2007 and 2014 were thrown out on grounds of legal insufficiency, which a federal judge has found was “tantamount to a decision that probable cause was presumptively lacking.”Summonses have long been heralded as a valuable law enforcement tool, not only for combating minor offenses like drinking in public or disorderly conduct, but also because an officer may demand identification and discover someone with an outstanding warrant for a more serious crime.

The Police Department’s use of summonses has received renewed attention in the debate over police tactics, with the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, calling for lower-level offenders to be issued summonses rather than be arrested and charged with a crime. Under the law, the police must have probable cause to issue a summons, the same legal requirement for making an arrest.

But a class-action lawsuit, with Mr. Stinson, now 24, as the lead plaintiff, alleges that the city’s officers, under the pressure of a Police Department quota system, have engaged in an illegal pattern and practice of issuing summonses “in the absence of probable cause for offenses never committed.” The lawsuit seeks damages and a change in the way summonses are issued.

In 2012, Judge Robert W. Sweet of Federal District Court in Manhattan, in granting class-action status to the suit, said it would cover all individuals who had been issued summonses that judges later dismissed for facial insufficiency, meaning they were legally insufficient on their face.

City lawyers, during the administrations of Mayors Michael R. Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, have vigorously contested the lawsuit, denying in court papers that the police have quotas and arguing that the dismissals for legal insufficiency were not merit-based rulings on whether probable cause existed in particular cases. The city has also argued that such dismissals may be the result of mere “poor drafting by the issuing officer.”

“When a piece of information is not included on a written summons,” a Law Department spokesman, Nicholas Paolucci, said in a statement, “that does not mean that there was not probable cause to believe that an offense occurred. It simply means all of the legally required facts were not recorded on the face of the summons.”

But Judge Sweet rejected that position when the city argued it in court last year. “The overwhelming majority of summonses dismissed at the facial sufficiency review stage were dismissed for want of probable cause,” the judge found.

Summonses are reviewed in two stages. Court personnel initially screen them for defects, like a missing signature or an improper return date, which would invalidate them. The review for facial sufficiency is then conducted by judges, or in some cases retired judges sitting as judicial hearing officers.

Judge Sweet has ruled that individuals whose summonses were dismissed in the second review, for facial sufficiency, were “presumptive members of the class,” although he said that the city could challenge an individual plaintiff to prove that a summons had been dismissed for other reasons.

Gerald M. Cohen, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the class action, said that the potential pool of class-action plaintiffs was now in the hundreds of thousands and was “constantly growing.” Another plaintiff’s lawyer, Elinor C. Sutton, added, “Clearly, the sheer numbers show that there is a citywide, systemic problem in the policies that are being used to police.”

Mr. Stinson, the lead plaintiff, received the two summonses that were later dismissed as legally insufficient in early 2010. Joshua P. Fitch, another of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said the summonses were legally insufficient on their face.

The ticket for trespassing accused Mr. Stinson of entering and remaining in a building “without permission or authority” of its owner. But Mr. Stinson had his aunt’s permission to be in the building, Mr. Fitch said. Mr. Stinson, in a brief phone interview, said, “I go over there every week to visit her, to see how she’s doing.”

The disorderly conduct summons alleged that Mr. Stinson had used “obscene language and gestures, causing public alarm.” But it did not specify what Mr. Stinson’s behavior and obscene language had been, Mr. Fitch said. “Using foul language is not a crime,” he said. “Anyone in New York knows that.”

After Judge Sweet ruled in 2012 that the suit could proceed as a class action, city lawyers sought reconsideration of the order, arguing that a finding of facial insufficiency was “not a merits-based determination of whether an officer had probable cause to issue a summons.” But Judge Sweet declined to change his position.

In 2014, the Law Department again asked the judge to reverse his ruling, and submitted a statement from Justin Barry, the chief clerk of the city’s criminal courts, who said such dismissals might be the result of summonses that were poorly drafted.

“Facial sufficiency review may well be a test of the officer’s narrative talents, rather than a reflection of the underlying facts,” Mr. Barry wrote.

But Judge Sweet ruled that “the failure to provide requisite facts establishing the elements of a crime necessarily means that no reasonable cause existed to summons a person for any offense.”

The judge has said that he will schedule the class-action suit for trial early next year.


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6) Justice Department Reviewing Inmate Abuse by Attica Guards
By TOM ROBBINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/nyregion/justice-department-reviewing-abuse-of-inmates-at-attica.html?ref=nyregion

The United States Justice Department is now reviewing inmate abuse at Attica Correctional Facility, the upstate New York prison that employed three officers who pleaded guilty in March to state charges stemming from the beating of a 29-year-old inmate, according to the local district attorney and lawyers for the officers.

The federal inquiry was revealed in court filings by the former officers, who were allowed to avoid jail time in exchange for pleading guilty and agreeing to resign from their jobs at the prison. The three men, and a fourth guard who was not prosecuted, still face a multimillion-dollar civil suit filed by George Williams, the former inmate whose injuries from the Aug. 11, 2011, beating included a broken shoulder, cracked ribs and two broken legs, one of which required doctors treating him to insert a plate and six pins.In a motion filed in Federal District Court in Buffalo, where the civil case is pending, a lawyer for Sean Warner, a former sergeant, asked a judge to delay depositions because of what the lawyer said was a Justice Department investigation into a “possible violation of inmate civil rights at Attica State Correctional Facility.” The lawyer, Cheryl Meyers Buth, said she had been told that “the criminal investigation arises from the same facts that are in dispute in this case,” and that the investigation was not “limited to the alleged assault on plaintiff George Williams.”

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, where Loretta E. Lynch, the former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was sworn in last month as attorney general vowing increased vigilance on civil rights, declined to comment. “The department can neither confirm nor deny whether there is an investigation into the Attica prison,” the spokeswoman, Dena Iverson, said.

The state’s Department of Correctional Services and Supervision also declined to comment but issued a statement saying that “it always fully cooperates with any legal investigation.”

Donald G. O’Geen, the district attorney of Wyoming County, home of the 2,240-inmate prison, and who obtained the guilty pleas, said that federal investigators had visited his office recently to obtain records of the case. “I said, ‘Make yourselves at home.’ I wish they had come in at the beginning.”

Mr. O’Geen said that the inquiry did not appear limited solely to the Williams episode. “I think they’re looking at broader matters as well,” he said.

Any federal criminal civil rights investigation would face a high hurdle, said William Yeomans, a former acting assistant attorney general for civil rights who now teaches at American University Law School. “They face the difficult burden of establishing that the prison guards intentionally acted with more force than was reasonably necessary under the circumstances,” he said. In recent years, according to Mr. Yeomans, the Justice Department has prosecuted as many prison guards as police officers under federal civil rights statutes.

Mr. Williams’s lawyer, Edward Sivin, declined to comment, but in court papers he asked for the civil case to proceed despite any new criminal investigation. In a ruling issued Tuesday, Jeremiah J. McCarthy, a federal magistrate judge, denied the officers’ request for a stay and set a hearing date to schedule depositions in the case, stating that they could re-present their motion “in the event criminal charges are instituted against them.”

Norman Effman, a lawyer who has represented both inmates and officers at Attica since 1969, and who represents one of the four defendants in the civil suit, said he believed that a federal investigation would be the first for the prison, which became notorious after a bloody 1971 inmate rebellion that claimed 43 lives. After a four-day standoff, the prison was retaken by state troopers and corrections officers whose bullets killed 10 employees held hostage along with 29 inmates. Four others, including a guard, were killed during the riot.

“I do not know of any prior inquiry by federal law enforcement at the prison,” Mr. Effman said.

The March 2 guilty pleas by the three officers came on the eve of their trial on gang assault charges; each could have been sentenced to as much as 25 years in prison. It was the first time that New York State prison guards had faced criminal indictments for a nonsexual assault on an inmate.

After Mr. Williams was told he would be given a urine test, it is believed that he was taken by officers from his cell to a darkened room, where he was punched to the floor, struck with batons and kicked more than 50 times according to witnesses.

The plea deal in March came one day after an article in The New York Times about the beating and other abuses at Attica. The deal was widely criticized as too lenient, given the extent of Mr. Williams’s injuries. Mr. O’Geen defended his decision. “I, too, wish we could have done more,” he said. “But getting a plea was a monumental step.”


This article was reported in collaboration with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.


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7) Open-Ended Strike to Bring German Trains to a Halt Again This Week
By REUTERS

BERLIN — German train drivers announced on Monday their ninth strike in an ongoing dispute with rail operator Deutsche Bahn, which will bring freight trains to a standstill from Tuesday and passenger trains on Wednesday - with no date given for the strike to end.

The GDL union said it will announce the end of the strike with 48 hours' notice, raising the prospect of even longer disruption than a seven-day strike earlier this month, which was already the longest in the history of Deutsche Bahn [DBN.UL].

"Strikes hurt everyone and cost time and money," said Ulrich Weber, Deutsche Bahn's personnel chief, adding that the union had rejected all offers before talks broke down this weekend.

The dispute over pay, working conditions and the power of the union itself has caused major disruption in a country where about 5.5 million people travel by train every day and one-fifth of freight - 620,000 tonnes a day - is hauled by rail.

Economists estimate that the last strike could have clipped 0.1 percentage points off German economic growth in the second quarter of the year, costing Europe's biggest economy up to 750 million euros in lost activity.

The latest freight-train strike will begin on Tuesday at 3 p.m. (1300 GMT) and the passenger-train strike early on Wednesday at 2 a.m. (0000 GMT), GDL leader Claus Weselsky told reporters.

"You can assume this strike will be somewhat longer than the last one," said Weselsky. As well as a 5 percent pay rise and a shorter working week, he wants the GDL - which represents about 20,000 German train drivers - to be able to negotiate on behalf of other workers in the company, such as train stewards.

This has prompted a rare intervention in a labour dispute from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who urged the conflicting parties to avoid creating "a serious burden" for people and companies.

In a country largely unaccustomed to disruptive union action until a spate of train and airline strikes last year, the German government is scrambling to reverse changes in the law that now permit smaller unions like the GDL to bring entire businesses - and industries that rely on them - to a standstill.

One union source said the strike action would likely impact the upcoming May 23-25 holiday weekend in Germany.

(Reporting by Stephen Brown; Editing by Dominic Evans)


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8) Missouri: No Charge for St. Louis Officer in Killing
By

Prosecutors in St. Louis will not charge the police officer who fatally shot VonDerrit D. Myers Jr. in October, a shooting that renewed tensions with law enforcement weeks after Michael Brown was killed by an officer in nearby Ferguson. In a report released Monday, Jennifer M. Joyce, the circuit attorney for St. Louis, found that Mr. Myers “produced a gun” during the encounter with the officer, Jason Flanery, who was working an off-duty security detail for a private company. Police had said Mr. Myers, 18, who was black, shot a stolen handgun before Officer Flanery, who is white, returned fire. Prosecutors said in their report that witnesses had seen gunfire coming from both directions and from two guns and that a semiautomatic pistol had been recovered next to Mr. Myers’s body. Mr. Myers’s family disputed the police account and insisted that he had been unarmed. Protesters marched for several nights after the shooting, and some drew parallels between Mr. Myers’s death and that of Mr. Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old shot by a white Ferguson officer in August. In a statement, Ms. Joyce expressed condolences to the Myers family and called his death “a tragic situation for our entire community.”


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9) Rise in Suicide by Black Children Surprises Researchers
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/health/suicide-rate-for-black-children-surged-in-2-decades-study-says.html?_r=0

The suicide rate among black children has nearly doubled since the early 1990s, while the rate for white children has declined, a new study has found, an unusual pattern that seemed to suggest something troubling was happening among some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

Suicide among children ages 5 to 11, the age range the study measured, is rare, and researchers had to blend several years of data to get reliable results. The findings, which measured the period from 1993 to 2012, were so surprising that researchers waited for an additional year of data to check them. The trend did not change.

Suicide rates are almost always lower among blacks than among whites of any age. But the study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics on Monday, found that the rate had risen so steeply among black children — to 2.54 from 1.36 per one million children — that it was substantially above the rate among white children by the end of the period. The rate for white children fell to 0.77 per million from 1.14.

It was the first time a national study found a higher suicide rate for blacks than for whites of any age group, researchers noted.

“I was shocked, I’ll be honest with you,” said Jeffrey Bridge, an epidemiologist at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘Did we do the analysis correctly?’ I thought we had made a mistake.”

The researchers used national data based on death certificates that listed suicide as the underlying cause. In the study, they offered a few possible explanations for the difference, including that black children are more likely to be exposed to violence and traumatic stress, and that black children are more likely to experience an early onset of puberty, which can increase the risk of depression and impulsive aggression. But it was not clear whether those characteristics had changed much over the period of the study and would account for the sharp rise.

Sean Joe, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, who has studied suicide among black youth and did not take part in the new research, pointed out that suicide had long been one of the few negative health outcomes that have affected blacks less than whites.

A departure from that trend happened from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, when rising suicide rates among black teenagers narrowed the gap with white teenagers. One hypothesis was that the rate was driven up by easier access to guns; another was that there had been a cultural shift, in which young blacks were not as religiously observant as older blacks. In that thinking, religious faith had conferred a protective quality that had made older blacks less vulnerable to suicide.

“What it means to grow up young and black has changed,” Professor Joe said. “Something happened that put black teens at risk.”

He added, “I find the rates for children even more troubling, because they are the most vulnerable.”

The finding seemed to buck other trends by race. Among adolescents of both races, for example, the rate declined over the same period, falling for blacks more than for whites, according to figures Dr. Bridge provided. The rate for black boys rose sharply. The rate for black girls also rose, but the change was not statistically significant, he said.

The way the children were dying seemed to provide some clues. Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, who read the study, pointed out that gun deaths among white boys had gone down by about half while staying about the same for black boys, signaling that gun safety education may not be reaching black communities as effectively as white ones.

Suicides by hanging, on the other hand, roughly tripled among black boys, while remaining virtually unchanged for whites.

“He uncovered something very significant in the data,” she said, referring to Dr. Bridge. “Viewed over all, that age group looked like it was flat.”

She said the traditionally lower rates for blacks had often been attributed to strong social networks and family support, religious faith and other cultural factors. “That makes me wonder whether there is something in those protective factors that may have shifted in the wrong direction over those two decades,” she said.

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10) Los Angeles Lifts Its Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
By and NOAM SCHEIBER

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.

The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wages by ballot initiative.

The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, almost 50 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise over five years.

“The effects here will be the biggest by far,” said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was commissioned by city leaders to conduct several studies on the potential effects of a minimum-wage increase. “The proposal will bring wages up in a way we haven’t seen since the 1960s. There’s a sense spreading that this is the new norm, especially in areas that have high costs of housing.”

The groups pressing for higher minimum wages said that the Los Angeles vote could set off a wave of increases across Southern California, and that higher pay scales would improve the way of life for the region’s vast low-wage work force.

Supporters of higher wages say they hope the move will reverberate nationally. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced this month that he was convening a state board to consider a wage increase in the local fast-food industry, which could be enacted without a vote in the State Legislature. Immediately after the Los Angeles vote, pressure began to build on Mr. Cuomo to reject an increase that falls short of $15 an hour.

“The L.A. increase nudges it forward,” said Dan Cantor, the national director of the Working Families Party, which was founded in New York and has helped pass progressive economic measures in several states. “It puts an exclamation point on the need for $15 to be where the wage board ends up.”

The current minimum wage in New York State is $8.75, versus a federal minimum wage of $7.25, and will rise to $9 at the end of 2015. A little more than one-third of workers citywide and statewide now make below $15 an hour.

Los Angeles County is also considering a measure that would lift the wages of thousands of workers in unincorporated parts of the county.

Much of the debate here has centered on potential regional repercussions. Many of the low-wage workers who form the backbone of Southern California’s economy live in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Proponents of the wage increase say they expect that several nearby cities, including Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Pasadena, will also approve higher wages.

But opponents of higher minimum wages, including small-business owners and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, say the increase approved Tuesday could turn Los Angeles into a “wage island,” pushing businesses to nearby places where they can pay employees less.

“They are asking businesses to foot the bill on a social experiment that they would never do on their own employees,” said Stuart Waldman, the president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, a trade group that represents companies and other organizations in Southern California. “A lot of businesses aren’t going to make it,” he added. “It’s great that this is an increase for some employees, but the sad truth is that a lot of employees are going to lose their jobs.”

The 67 percent increase from the current state minimum will be phased in over five years, first to $10.50 in July 2016, then to $12 in 2017, $13.25 in 2018 and $14.25 in 2019. Businesses with fewer than 25 employees will have an extra year to carry out the plan. Starting in 2022, annual increases will be based on the Consumer Price Index average of the last 20 years. The City Council’s vote will instruct the city attorney to draft the language of the law, which will then come back to the Council for final approval.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, had proposed a slightly different increase last fall and later negotiated the details with the Democratic-controlled Council. Mr. Garcetti said Tuesday that he would sign the legislation and that he hoped other elected officials, including Mr. Cuomo, would follow Los Angeles’s path.

“We’re leading the country; we’re not going to wait for Washington to lift Americans out of poverty,” Mr. Garcetti said in an interview. “We have too many adults struggling to be living off a poverty wage. This will re-establish some of the equilibrium we’ve had in the past.”

New York City does not have a separate minimum wage, but Mayor Bill de Blasio has spoken out in favor of higher wages statewide. “Los Angeles is another example of a city that’s doing the right thing, lifting people up by providing a wage on which they can live,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement “We need Albany to catch up with the times and raise the wage.”Any economist will tell you that a 70% hike in the minimum wage "just because" is a terrible idea. If this were to happen on the Federal...
The push for a $15-an-hour minimum wage is not confined to populous coastal states. In Kansas City, Mo., activists recently collected enough signatures to put forward an August ballot initiative on whether to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2020. The City Council is deliberating this week over how to respond and could pass its own measure in advance of the initiative.

As the Los Angeles City Council considered raising the minimum wage over the last several months, the question was not if, but how much. The lone councilman who voted against the bill — a Republican — did not speak during Tuesday’s meeting.

Still, for all their enthusiasm, some Council members acknowledged that it would be difficult to predict what would happen once the increase was fully in effect.

“I would prefer that the cost of this was really burdened by those at the highest income levels,” said Gil Cedillo, a councilman who represents some of the poorest sections of the city and worries that some small businesses will shut down. “Instead, it’s going to be coming from people who are just a rung or two up the ladder here. It’s a risk that rhetoric can’t resolve.”

Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say there is not enough historical data to predict the effect of a $15 minimum wage, an unprecedented increase. A wage increase to $12 an hour over the next few years would achieve about the same purchasing power as the minimum wage in the late 1960s, the most recent peak.

Many restaurant owners here aggressively fought the increase, saying they would be forced to cut as much as half of their staff. Unlike other states, California state law prohibits tipped employees from receiving lower than the minimum wage. The Council promised to study the potential effect of allowing restaurants to add a service charge to bills to meet the increased costs.

And while labor leaders and the coalition of dozens of community groups celebrated in the rotunda of City Hall after the vote, they acknowledged there was a long way to go.

“This says to Los Angeles workers that they are respected, and that’s an important psychological effect,” said Laphonza Butler, the president of Service Employees International Union-United Long Term Care Workers here and a leader of the coalition. “To know that they have a pathway to $15, to getting themselves off of welfare and out of poverty, that’s huge. This should change the debate of the value of low-wage work.”

Jennifer Medina reported from Los Angeles, and Noam Scheiber from Washington.


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11) U.S. Military Space Plane Begins a Fourth (Mostly) Secret Mission
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A secretive United States Air Force space plane is on a fourth trip into orbit.

As with the previous flights, the Air Force revealed few details about what the unmanned X-37B spacecraft, which resembles a smaller version of NASA’s retired space shuttles, will be doing.

“The test mission furthers the development of the concept of operations for reusable space vehicles, and fine-tunes technical parameters for an affordable, reusable space vehicle,” said Capt. Christopher M. Hoyler, a spokesman for the Air Force.

Boeing has built two X-37B spacecraft for the Air Force. The first launched in April 2010, setting off speculation over the vessel’s purposes. Some suggested that the craft had something to do with space weapons, which the Pentagon denied. It landed in December that year. The second orbiter was sent up from March 2011 to June 2012. The first craft made a second flight, launching in December 2012 and returning 674 days later, in October 2014.The Air Force was not saying which of the two was packed inside an Atlas 5 rocket on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

“We are excited about our fourth X-37B mission,” Randy Walden, the director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement released last month. “With the demonstrated success of the first three missions, we’re able to shift our focus from initial checkouts of the vehicle to testing of experimental payloads.”

The rocket lifted off Wednesday morning.

One of the experiments the Air Force has talked about is an improved version of an electric thruster. Unlike conventional thrusters employing chemical reactions, electric thrusters are more efficient, accelerating charged ions through electric fields.

Electric thrusters are common on commercial satellites, but the Air Force needs more powerful propulsion. Aerojet Rocketdyne has built thrusters for three military satellites that run at 5 kilowatts, or about four times the power of those on commercial satellites. The thruster on the X-37B is a modified version, intended to improve performance, although it still generates less than a tenth of a pound of thrust. “But it does it very, very efficiently from a fuel standpoint,” said Fred C. Wilson, director of business development at Aerojet Rocketdyne. “It’s a higher-power, higher-performance device.”

NASA, which collaborated on the development of the thruster, hopes that similar technology can be used to propel cargo ships to Mars, part of an eventual mission to send astronauts there. Last month, the space agency selected Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop and test a 100-kilowatt electric thruster.

NASA is also taking advantage of this X-37B flight to test how almost 100 materials react to the harsh conditions of space, like the barrage of radiation and swings of temperature the craft will experience while passing between the day and night sides of the Earth for at least 200 days.

“It’s just sitting there and letting the environment hit it,” said Miria Finckenor, a materials engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. She is the principal investigator for the experiment, which is housed in the space plane’s cargo bay.

The materials to be tested include thermal coatings to keep spacecraft components within a certain range of temperatures, clear materials under consideration for lighter windows on NASA’s Orion crew capsule and ink to make sure that markings on parts do not fade away.

NASA previously tested more than 4,000 samples outside the International Space Station, but it is difficult to carve out time during spacewalks to set up and retrieve the experiments. “This opportunity presented itself, and we just needed to take advantage of it,” Ms. Finckenor said.

The information gleaned from such experiments helps engineers choose materials for spacecraft components like antennas.

In addition to the space plane, the Atlas 5 rocket gave 10 tiny satellites known as CubeSats a ride to space. The CubeSats will be deployed to test technologies like new propulsion and communication systems.

One of the CubeSats is LightSail, developed by the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration. On launching, it is about the size of a loaf of bread, but after a month of testing, it is to deploy four 13-foot booms and unfurl four triangular pieces of Mylar to act as a sail, propelled by sunlight. For this test flight, the orbit will be too low for the force of photons to overcome atmospheric drag, and the satellite is expected to fall out of the sky within a few days.

A second LightSail, scheduled to lift off next year on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, is to be sent high enough to demonstrate controlled solar sailing in orbit. The second LightSail is already built, but the society is raising additional money through a Kickstarter campaign for education and promotion.


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12) Two Rikers Inmates Accuse Guard of Repeated Rapes
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Two women who said they had repeatedly been raped by the same correction officer at Rikers Island sued him and New York City on Tuesday, accusing the city of indifference to a “pervasive culture” of rape and sexual abuse of female inmates in the city jail.

Even after one of the plaintiffs reported sexual misconduct by the officer, first to a mental health clinician, then to a jail physician and then to city investigators, the city, rather than promptly investigate the allegations, continued to employ the guard, the lawsuit says.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, claims that rapes and sexual abuse are “endemic” in the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s jail, and seeks class-action status on behalf of all such victims.

The suit also accuses seven other unnamed correction officers of raping or sexually abusing female inmates or subjecting them to unwanted sexual touching. It says that at least one inmate was impregnated by the guards, and that six of the guards still work in the women’s jail, and the seventh is serving a prison sentence for a drug crime.

“These officers’ conduct was open and notorious,” the lawsuit says. “On at least one occasion, women in custody overheard a correction officer raping a woman in her cell. Another correction officer routinely raped women in the officers’ station.”

The suit comes as the Correction Department and city lawyers are negotiating with the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, and private lawyers in an effort to settle a class-action suit that alleged widespread civil rights violations across Rikers, including the use of excessive force by guards against inmates.

Mr. Bharara’s office issued a report in August that described a “deep-seated culture of violence” against youthful inmates, carried out by officers who operated with little fear of punishment. Although the federal investigation concerned adolescent inmates and did not focus on alleged sexual assault, the report noted a “concern that D.O.C. may be underreporting sexual assault allegations.”

Jack Ryan, a correction spokesman, declined to comment on the women’s lawsuit, saying the agency did not discuss pending litigation. Speaking generally, he said, “D.O.C. has a zero-tolerance policy with regard to sexual abuse and assault, and there is no place at D.O.C. for the mistreatment of any inmate.”

A Law Department spokesman said the suit would be reviewed “once we are served.” The officer named as a defendant in the lawsuit is currently on “modified duty,” a status in which officers do not interact with inmates, another correction official said.

Efforts to reach that officer, Benny Santiago, by phone were unsuccessful.

Norman Seabrook, the president of the union that represents correction officers, said by phone that any allegation made against a correction officer “of such an act as this is unforgivable, if it is true.”

But he added of Mr. Santiago, “Until all the facts are in, we will support our correction officer and do what’s necessary to ensure his rights are protected, just like the inmates’ rights.” The lawsuit, filed by the Legal Aid Society and the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, seeks unspecified damages for due process violations, and asks that the city be ordered to formulate a comprehensive plan to remedy the pattern of sexual abuse.

The two plaintiffs are identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2. Earlier Tuesday, their lawyers asked for permission from Judge Alison J. Nathan to proceed anonymously “to protect themselves from further retaliation.”

Judge Nathan signed an order finding that the plaintiffs had demonstrated “a compelling interest in proceeding anonymously at this stage of the litigation,” although she said the defendants could seek to have the order modified.

The case has been assigned to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.

During the years Jane Doe 1 has been at Rikers, she was raped as often as four times a week by Mr. Santiago, the lawsuit alleges. He would also park his car outside her home, observe her family and later report his observations to her, it says. He “implicitly threatened Jane Doe 1’s family in order to coerce Jane Doe 1 into obeying him,” the suit says.

Jane Doe 2, who is no longer at Rikers, was also repeatedly raped there, and when she reported the abuse to a mental health clinician and later a doctor, they each said there was nothing they could do, the suit says.

She eventually related the allegations to city investigators, but two years later, she has still not received a written determination of her complaint from the Department of Investigation, the lawsuit says.

The Investigation Department said in a statement that it had not been told by “plaintiffs’ counsel who the Jane Does are, and so it is not possible to comment on any investigation that may or may not have been undertaken.”

The agency added that generally, over the past two years, it had “conducted investigations of sex-related allegations involving staff members at D.O.C., some that have resulted in substantiated findings and referrals to the appropriate authorities.”


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13) Five Banks to Pay Billions and Plead Guilty in Currency and Interest Rate Cases [BUT NO JAIL TIME!]
By and

Adding another entry to Wall Street’s growing rap sheet, five big banks have agreed to pay more than $5 billion and plead guilty to multiple crimes related to manipulating foreign currencies and interest rates, federal and state authorities announced on Wednesday.

The Justice Department forced four of the banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland — to plead guilty to antitrust violations in the foreign exchange market as part of a scheme that padded the banks’ profits and enriched the traders who carried out the plot. The traders were supposed to be competitors, but much like companies that rigged the price of vitamins and automotive parts, they colluded to manipulate the largest and yet least regulated market in the financial world, where some $5 trillion changes hands every day, prosecutors said.The banks also misled their clients about the price of currencies, the federal and state authorities said, imposing “hard mark-ups,” which one Barclays employee described as the “worst price I can put on this where the customers decision to trade with me or give me future business doesn’t change.” Or, to put their mission in the starkest of terms, the employee said: “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”

As part of the criminal deal with the Justice Department, a fifth bank, UBS, will plead guilty to manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, a benchmark rate that underpins the cost of trillions of dollars in credit cards and other loans. Federal prosecutors had previously agreed not to prosecute the Swiss bank over the Libor scheme. But in a rare stand against corporate recidivism, the Justice Department voided that non-prosecution agreement after UBS was accused of taking part in the effort to manipulate currency prices.

The guilty pleas, which the banks are expected to enter in federal court later on Wednesday, represent a first in a financial industry that has been dogged by numerous scandals and investigations since the 2008 financial crisis. Until now, banks have either had their biggest banking units or small subsidiaries plead guilty.

That result represents a victory for a Justice Department, which has faced criticism for going too soft on big banks, whose size and significance to the global economy had rendered them — in the minds of some regulators and politicians — too big to jail.

For the banks, though, life as a felon is likely to carry more symbolic shame than practical problems. Although they could be technically barred by American regulators from managing mutual funds or corporate pension plans or perform certain other securities activities, the banks have obtained waivers from the Securities and Exchange Commission that will allow them to conduct business as usual. In fact, the cases were not announced until after the S.E.C. had time to act.In addition to the criminal cases with the Justice Department, the banks each struck settlements with Mr. Lawsky as well as federal regulators. Barclays settled with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Financial Conduct Authority of London and Mr. Lawsky, paying a total sum of $2.4 billion.

UBS agreed to pay more than $500 million, some that was earmarked for the Libor crimes and the rest for currency manipulation. The bank, which was the first to cooperate in the currency case, was not criminally charged in that matter.

These sums come in addition to the $4.25 billion that some of these same banks agreed pay in November to resolve foreign exchange investigations by a slew of regulators. And yet the penalties may still continue.

Mr. Lawsky has said that he is examining whether Barclays and other banks used electronic foreign exchange trading platforms to cheat their clients. The settlement announced on Wednesday did not release the bank from any future penalties.

In a statement, Mr. Lawsky called the first batch of misconduct “a brazen ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ scheme to rip off their clients.”

Aitan Goelman, the head of enforcement at the C.F.T.C., released his own statement saying that “when banks like Barclays try to tip the scales in their favor by attempting to manipulate a benchmark on which their customers and the markets rely, we will be relentless in investigating and taking action to restore and protect market integrity.”




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