4/11/2018

bauaw2003 BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 2018

 



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Cindy Sheehan and the Women's March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

By Whitney Webb

WASHINGTON—In the last few years, arguably the most visible and well-publicized march on the U.S. capital has been the "Women's March," a movement aimed at advocating for legislation and policies promoting women's rights as well as a protest against the misogynistic actions and statements of high-profile U.S. politicians. The second Women's March, which took place this past year, attracted over a million protesters nationwide, with 500,000 estimated to have participated in Los Angeles alone.

However, absent from this women's movement has been a public antiwar voice, as its stated goal of "ending violence" does not include violence produced by the state. The absence of this voice seemed both odd and troubling to legendary peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose iconic protest against the invasion and occupation of Iraq made her a household name for many.

Sheehan was taken aback by how some prominent organizers of this year's Women's March were unwilling to express antiwar positions and argued for excluding the issue of peace entirely from the event and movement as a whole. In an interview with MintPress, Sheehan recounted how a prominent leader of the march had told her, "I appreciate that war is your issue Cindy, but the Women's March will never address the war issue as long as women aren't free."

War is indeed Sheehan's issue and she has been fighting against the U.S.' penchant for war for nearly 13 years. After her son Casey was killed in action while serving in Iraq in 2004, Sheehan drew international media attention for her extended protest in front of the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas, which later served as the launching point for many protests against U.S. military action in Iraq.

Sheehan rejected the notion that women could be "free" without addressing war and empire. She countered the dismissive comment of the march organizer by stating that divorcing peace activism from women's issues "ignored the voices of the women of the world who are being bombed and oppressed by U.S. military occupation."

Indeed, women are directly impacted by war—whether through displacement, the destruction of their homes, kidnapping, or torture. Women also suffer uniquely and differently from men in war as armed conflicts often result in an increase in sexual violence against women.

For example, of the estimated half-a-million civilians killed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of them were women and children. In the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the number of female casualties has been rising on average over 20 percent every year since 2015. In 2014 alone when Israel attacked Gaza in "Operation Protective Edge," Israeli forces, which receives $10 million in U.S. military aid every day, killed over two thousand Palestinians—half of them were women and children. Many of the casualties were pregnant women, who had been deliberately targeted.

Given the Women's March's apparent rejection of peace activism in its official platform, Sheehan was inspired to organize another Women's March that would address what many women's rights advocates, including Sheehan, believe to be an issue central to promoting women's rights.

Dubbed the "Women's March on the Pentagon," the event is scheduled to take place on October 21—the same date as an iconic antiwar march of the Vietnam era—with a mission aimed at countering the "bipartisan war machine." Though men, women and children are encouraged to attend, the march seeks to highlight women's issues as they relate to the disastrous consequences of war.

The effort of women in confronting the "war machine" will be highlighted at the event, as Sheehan remarked that "women have always tried to confront the war-makers," as the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the men and women in the military, as well as those innocent civilians killed in the U.S.' foreign wars. As a result, the push for change needs to come from women, according to Sheehan, because "we [women] are the only ones that can affect [the situation] in a positive way." All that's missing is an organized, antiwar women's movement.

Sheehan noted the march will seek to highlight the direct relationship between peace activism and women's rights, since "no woman is free until all women are free" and such "freedom also includes the freedom from U.S. imperial plunder, murder and aggression" that is part of the daily lives of women living both within and beyond the United States. Raising awareness of how the military-industrial complex negatively affects women everywhere is key, says Sheehan, as "unless there is a sense of international solidarity and a broader base for feminism, then there aren't going to be any solutions to any problems, [certainly not] if we don't stop giving trillions of dollars to the Pentagon."

Sheehan also urged that, even though U.S. military adventurism has long been an issue and the subject of protests, a march to confront the military-industrial complex is more important now than ever: "I'm not alarmist by nature but I feel like the threat of nuclear annihilation is much closer than it has been for a long time," adding that, despite the assertion of some in the current administration and U.S. military, "there is no such thing as 'limited' nuclear war." This makes "the need to get out in massive numbers" and march against this more imperative than ever.

Sheehan also noted that Trump's presidency has helped to make the Pentagon's influence on U.S. politics more obvious by bringing it to the forefront: "Even though militarism had been under wraps [under previous presidents], Trump has made very obvious the fact that he has given control of foreign policy to the 'generals.'"

Indeed, as MintPress has reported on several occasions, the Pentagon—beginning in March of last year—has been given the freedom to "engage the enemy" at will, without the oversight of the executive branch or Congress. As a result, the deaths of innocent civilians abroad as a consequence of U.S. military action has spiked. While opposing Trump is not the focus of the march, Sheehan opined that Trump's war-powers giveaway to the Pentagon, as well as his unpopularity, have helped to spark widespread interest in the event.

Different wings of the same warbird

Sheehan has rejected accusations that the march is partisan, as it is, by nature, focused on confronting the bipartisan nature of the military-industrial complex. She told MintPress that she has recently come under pressure owing to the march's proximity to the 2018 midterm elections—as some have ironically accused the march's bipartisan focus as "trying to harm the chances of the Democrats" in the ensuing electoral contest.

In response, Sheehan stated that: 

"Democrats and Republicans are different wings of the same warbird. We are protesting militarism and imperialism. The march is nonpartisan in nature because both parties are equally complicit. We have to end wars for the planet and for the future. I could really care less who wins in November."

She also noted that even when the Democrats were in power under Obama, nothing was done to change the government's militarism nor to address the host of issues that events like the Women's March have claimed to champion.

"We just got finished with eight years of a Democratic regime," Sheehan told MintPress. "For two of those years, they had complete control of Congress and the presidency and a [filibuster-proof] majority in the Senate and they did nothing" productive except to help "expand the war machine." She also emphasized that this march is in no way a "get out the vote" march for any political party.

Even though planning began less than a month ago, support has been pouring in for the march since it was first announced on Sheehan's website, Cindy Sheehan Soapbox. Encouraged by the amount of interest already received, Sheehan is busy working with activists to organize the events and will be taking her first organizing trip to the east coast in April of this year. 

In addition, those who are unable to travel to Washington are encouraged to participate in any number of solidarity protests that will be planned to take place around the world or to plan and attend rallies in front of U.S. embassies, military installations, and the corporate headquarters of war profiteers.

Early endorsers of the event include journalists Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh and Margaret Kimberley; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly; FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley; and U.S. politicians like former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Activist groups that have pledged their support include CodePink, United National Antiwar Coalition, Answer Coalition, Women's EcoPeace and World Beyond War.

Though October is eight months away, Sheehan has high hopes for the march. More than anything else, though, she hopes that the event will give birth to a "real revolutionary women's movement that recognizes the emancipation and liberation of all peoples—and that means [freeing] all people from war and empire, which is the biggest crime against humanity and against this planet." By building "a movement and not just a protest," the event's impact will not only be long-lasting, but grow into a force that could meaningfully challenge the U.S. military-industrial complex that threatens us all. God knows the world needs it.

For those eager to help the march, you can help spread the word through social media by joining the march's Facebook page or following the march's Twitter account, as well as by word of mouth. In addition, supporting independent media outlets—such as MintPress, which will be reporting on the march—can help keep you and others informed as October approaches.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, the Anti-Media, and 21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.

MPN News, February 20, 2018

https://www.mintpressnews.com/cindy-sheehan-and-the-womens-march-on-the-pentagon-a-movement-not-just-a-protest/237835/


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It is so beautiful to see young people in this country rising up to demand an end to gun violence. But what is Donald Trump's response? Instead of banning assault weapons, he wants to give guns to teachers and militarize our schools. But one of the reasons for mass school shootings is precisely because our schools are already militarized. Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was trained by U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program while he was in high school.

Yesterday, Divest from the War Machine coalition member, Pat Elder, was featured on Democracy Now discussing his recent article about the JROTC in our schools. The JROTC teaches children how to shoot weapons. It is often taught by retired soldiers who have no background in teaching. They are allowed to teach classes that are given at least equal weight as classes taught by certified and trained teachers. We are pulling our children away from classes that expand their minds and putting them in classes that teach them how to be killing machines. The JROTC program costs our schools money. It sends equipment. But, the instructors and facilities must be constructed and paid for by the school.

The JROTC puts our children's futures at risk. Children who participate in JROTC shooting programs are exposed to lead bullets from guns. They are at an increased risk when the shooting ranges are inside. The JROTC program is designed to "put a jump start on your military career." Children are funneled into JROTC to make them compliant and to feed the military with young bodies which are prepared to be assimilated into the war machine. Instead of funneling children into the military, we should be channeling them into jobs that support peace and sustainable development. 

Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry to take the war machine out of our schools! The JROTC program must end immediately. The money should be directed back into classrooms that educate our children.

The Divest from the War Machine campaign is working to remove our money from the hands of companies that make a killing on killing. We must take on the systems that keep fueling war, death, and destruction around the globe. AND, we must take on the systems that are creating an endless cycle of children who are being indoctrinated at vulnerable ages to become the next killing machine.  Don't forget to post this message on Facebook and Twitter.

Onward in divestment,

Ann, Ariel, Brienne, Jodie, Kelly, Kirsten, Mark, Medea, Nancy, Natasha, Paki, Sarah, Sophia and Tighe

P.S. Do you want to do more? Start a campaign to get the JROTC out of your school district or state. Email divest@codepink.org and we'll get you started!


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Mumia Is Innocent... And He Needs Your Help


On April 30 Mumia Abu-Jamal and his attorneys will be in court to demand that his DA and police files be turned over to the court as ordered by Judge Tucker. These documents show that former Philadelphia DA Castille and later PA Judge Castille moved both times against Mumia, first as DA for his conviction and later as judge against his appeal. 


The US Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for a prosecutor who gets a prisoner convicted to later sit as a judge to determine the appeal of that conviction. 


We need to mobilize. We've done it before and twice saved him from state execution. Now we've got to demand his freedom! 


Demonstrations are being organized around the world— from France, Germany and the UK to South Africa and Japan calling on the DA and police to stop their stonewalling and release Mumia's files. 


In Oakland, a rally and march is being planned for April 28th.


The Free Mumia Coalition wants YOU to

Come to the Organizing Meeting!


Come to the Bay Area organizing meeting for the April 28 rally:


We meet Thursday April 12 @ 7PM at Omni Commons; 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland, near the MacArthur stop on BART. 


For more detailed information on Mumia's fight check out this article by Rachel Wolkenstein, Mumia's legal advisor: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/28/new-legal-action-is-a-path-to-mumia-abu-jamals-freedom-but-a-re-ignited-international-mobilization-is-critical-for-victory/


For more info on the meeting & the rally...

Call Jack: 510.501.7080, Tova: 510.600.5800, or Gerald: 510.417.1252

Rally and March to Free Mumia

Saturday, April 28, 2018, 12:00 Noon

Oscar Grant Plaza, Oakland, CA


Other Regional and International Actions to Free Mumia

Detroit, Michigan: National Conference to Defeat Austerity, Saturday, March 24. 10:00 A.M.—5:00 P.M.  St. Matthew's—St. Joseph's Church, 8850 Woodward Ave., Detroit, MI 48202. For more information: www.moratorium-mi.org

Houston, Texas: Banner Drop for Mumia, Monday, March 26, 5:30 P.M.—6:30 P.M.  Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement will do a banner drop over Houston's busiest freeway for Mumia, on Dunlavy Bridge, over Highway 59.

New York City: Break Down Walls and Prison Plantation: Mumia, Migrants and Movements for Liberation, Friday, March 23. 6:00 P.M. Community Supper 7:30 PM, Holyrood Episcopal Church, 715 179th Street, New York, NY 10033

Jericho Amnesty Movement 20th Anniversary, Saturday, March 24. Holyrood Episcopal Church, 715 W. 179th St, New York, NY, Dinner from 5:00 P.M.—6:00 P.M. Downstairs Program from 6:30 P.M.—9:00 P.M. in Sanctuary.

Sunday, March 25: March and Rally, Gather 12:00 P.M., U.S. Mission (799 UN Plaza: 1st Ave. and 45th St.), March 1:00 P.M., to Times Square for 2:00 P.M. Rally, Buses to Philadelphia: Leaving NYC March 27, 5:30 A.M. from 147 West 24 St. For information email info@freemumia.com or call 212-330-8029.

Vallejo, CA, Saturday, March 24: 1:00 P.M.—4:00 P.M., Vallejo JFK Library, 505 Santa Clara Street, Vallejo, CA 94590, Contact Info: New Jim Crow Movement (Vallejo), 707-652-8367, withjusticepeace@gmail.com

Toronto, Canada, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!, Saturday, March 24, 1:00 P.M., Across the street from the U.S. Consulate
360 University Avenue, march24freemumia@gmail.com 

Johannesburg, South Africa, Sunday, March 25, Freedom Park RDD, Poetry. Hip Hop. Kwaito. Drama. Local Organizer: Pastor Rev, Contact Info: +27 649 240514

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Support Herman Bell



Last week the New York State Board of Parole granted Herman Bell release. Since the Board's decision, there has been significant backlash from the Police Benevolent Association, other unions, Mayor De Blasio and Governor Cuomo. They are demanding that Herman be held indefinitely, the Parole Commissioners who voted for his release be fired, and that people convicted of killing police be left to die in prison.

We want the Governor, policymakers, and public to know that we strongly support the Parole Board's lawful, just and merciful decision. We also want to show support for the recent changes to the Board, including the appointment of new Commissioners and the direction of the new parole regulations, which base release decisions more on who a person is today and their accomplishments while in prison than on the nature of their crime.

Herman has a community of friends, family and loved ones eagerly awaiting his return. At 70 years old and after 45 years inside, it is time for Herman to come home.

Here are four things you can do RIGHT NOW to support Herman Bell:

1- CALL New York State Governor Cuomo's Office NOW
518-474-8390

2-EMAIL New York State Governor Cuomo's Office
https://www.governor.ny.gov/content/governor-contact-form

3- TWEET at Governor Cuomo: use the following sample tweet:

"@NYGovCuomo: stand by the Parole Board's lawful & just decision to release Herman Bell. At 70 years old and after more than 40 years of incarceration, his release is overdue. #BringHermanHome."

4- Participate in a CBS poll and vote YES on the Parole Board's decision
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/…/herman-bell-parole-police-ou…/
The poll ends on March 21st. Please do this ASAP!

Script for phone calls and emails:
"Governor Cuomo, my name is __________and I am a resident of . I support the Parole Board's decision to release Herman Bell and urge you and the Board to stand by the decision. I also support the recent appointment of new Parole Board Commissioners, and the direction of the new parole regulations, which base release decisions more on who a person is today than on the nature of their crime committed years ago. Returning Herman to his friends and family will help the heal the many harms caused by crime and decades of incarceration. The Board's decision was just, merciful and lawful, and it will benefit our communities and New York State as a whole."

Thank you for your support and contributions.

With gratitude,
Supporters of Herman Bell and Parole Justice New York

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After almost 14 years of tireless work, we are changing our name to About Face: Veterans Against the War! This has been a long time coming, and we want to celebrate this member-led decision to grow our identity and our work with you.



Member vote at Convention in favor of changing the name

Why change our name? It's a different world since our founding in 2004 by 8 veterans returning from the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration's decision to start two wars significantly altered the political landscape in the US, and even more so in the Middle East and Central Asia. For all of us, that decision changed our lives. Our membership has grown to reflect the diversity of experiences of service members and vets serving in the so-called "Global War on Terror," whether it be deploying to Afghanistan, special operations in Africa, or drone operations on US soil. We will continue to be a home for post-9/11 veterans, and we've seen more members join us since the name-change process began.


Over the past 15 years, our political understanding has also grown and changed. As a community, we have learned how militarism is not only the root cause of conflicts overseas, but how its technology, tactics, and values have landed directly on communities of color, indigenous people, and poor people here at home.

So why this name? About Face is a drill command all of us were taught in the military. It signifies an abrupt 180 degree turn. A turn away. That drill movement represents the transformation that has led us to where we find ourselves today: working to dismantle the militarism we took part in and building solidarity with people who bear the weight of militarism in its many forms.

We are keeping Veterans Against the War as our tag line because it describes our members, our continued cause, and because we are proud to be a part of the anti-war veteran legacy. Our name has changed and our work has deepened, but our vision -- building a world free of militarism -- is stronger than ever. 



As we make this shift, we deeply appreciate your commitment to us over the years and your ongoing support as we build this new phase together. We know that dismantling militarism is long haul work, and we are dedicated to being a part of it with you for as long as it takes.

Until we celebrate the last veteran,

Matt Howard
Co-Director
About Face: Veterans Against the War
(formerly IVAW)





P.O. Box 3565, New York, NY 10008. All Right Reserved. | Unsubscribe

To ensure delivery of About Face emails please add webmaster@ivaw.org to your address book.

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Tell the Feds: End Draft Registration

Courage to Resist Podcast: The Future of Draft Registration in the United States

We had draft registration resister Edward Hasbrouck on the Courage to Resistpodcast this week to explain what's going on. Edward talks about his own history of going to prison for refusing to register for the draft in 1983, the background on this new federal commission, and he addresses liberal arguments in favor of involuntary service. Edward explains: 

When you say, "I'm not willing to be drafted", you're saying, "I'm going to make my own choices about which wars we should be fighting", and when you say, "You should submit to the draft", you're saying, "You should let the politicians decide for you."

What's happening right now is that a National Commission … has been appointed to study the question of whether draft registration should be continued, whether it should be expanded to make women, as well as men register for the draft, whether a draft itself should be started, whether there should be some other kind of Compulsory National Service enacted.

The Pentagon would say, and it's true, they don't want a draft. It's not plan A, but it's always been plan B, and it's always been the assumption that if we can't get enough volunteers, if we get in over our head, if we pick a larger fight than we can pursue, we always have that option in our back pocket that, "If not enough people volunteer, we're just going to go go to the draft, go to the benches, and dragoon enough people to fight these wars."

[This] is the first real meaningful opportunity for a national debate about the draft in decades.


COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!

484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559

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Major George Tillery

A Case of Gross Prosecutorial Misconduct and Police Corruption

Sexual Favors and Hotel Rooms Provided by Police to Prosecution Fact Witness for Fabricated Testimony During Trial

By Nancy Lockhart, M.J.

August 24, 2016


Corruption in The State of Pennsylvania is being exposed with a multitude of public officials indicted by the US Attorney's office in 2015 and 2016.  A lengthy list of extortion, theft, and corruption in public service includes a former Solicitor, Treasurer and Veteran Police Officer  U.S. Department of Justice Corruption Prosecutions.  On Monday August 15, 2016 Pennsylvania State Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane was found guilty of all nine counts in a perjury and obstruction case related to a grand jury leak.  Pennsylvania's Attorney General Convicted On All Counts - New York Times

Although this is a small sampling of decades long corruption throughout the state of Pennsylvania, Major George Tillery has languished in prison over 31 years because of prosecutorial misconduct and police corruption. Tillery was tried and convicted in 1985 in a trial where prosecutors and police created a textbook criminal story for bogus convictions. William Franklin was charged as a co-conspirator in the shootings, he was tried and convicted in December of 1980, because he refused to lie on Tillery.  Franklin is 69 years old according to the PADOC website and has been in prison 36 years. 


Major Tillery Is Not Represented by an Attorney and Needs Your Assistance to Retain One. Donate to Major Tillery's Legal Defense FundMajor Tillery, PA DOC# AM9786, will turn 66-years-old on September 9, 2016 and has spent over three decades in prison for crimes he did not commit. Twenty of those 31 plus years were spent in solitary confinement. Tillery has endured many very serious medical issues and medical neglect.  Currently, he is plagued with serious illnesses that include hepatitis C, stubborn skin rashes, dangerous intestinal disorders and a degenerative hip. His orthopedic shoes were taken by prison administrators and never returned.


Tillery, was convicted of homicide, assault, weapons and conspiracy charges in 1985, for the poolroom shootings which left one man dead and another wounded. William Franklin was the pool room operator at the time. The shooting occurred on October 22, 1976.  

Falsified testimony was the only evidence presented during trial. No other evidence linked Tillery to the 1976 shootings, except for the testimony of two jailhouse informants. Both men swore that they had received no promises, agreements, or deals in exchange for their testimony. Barbra Christie, the trial prosecutor, insisted to the Court and Jury that these witnesses were not given any plea agreements or sentencing promises. That was untrue.


Newly discovered evidence is the sole basis for Tillery's latest Pro Se filing. According to the  Post Conviction Relief Petition Filed June 15, 2016, evidence proves that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania committed fraud on the Court and Jury which undermined the fundamentals of due process. The newly discovered evidence in sworn declarations is from two prosecution fact witnesses. Those two witnesses provided the entirety of trial evidence against Major Tillery. The declarations explain false testimonies manufactured by the prosecution with the assistance of police detectives/investigators. On August 19, 2016 Judge Leon Tucker filed a Notice of Intent to Dismiss Major's PCRA petition.  Notice to Dismiss


Emanuel Claitt Has Come Forth to Declare His Testimony as Manufactured and Fabricated by Police and Prosecutors. Claitt states that his testimony during trial was fabricated and coerced by Assistant District Attorney Barbara Christie, Detectives John Cimino and James McNeshy.  Claitt swore that he was promised a very favorable plea agreement and treatment in his pending criminal cases.  Claitt was granted sexual favors in exchange for his false testimony. Claitt states that he was allowed to have sex with four different women in the homicide interview rooms and in hotel rooms in exchange for his cooperation. 


Prosecution fact witness Emanuel Claitt states in his  Declaration of Emanuel Claitt, and Emanuel Claitt Supplemental Declaration that testimony against Major Tillery was fabricated, coerced and coached by Assistant District Attorney's Leonard Ross, Barbara Christie, and Roger King with the assistance of Detectives Larry Gerrad, Ernest Gilbert, and Lt. Bill Shelton.  Claitt was threatened with false murder charges as well as, given promises and agreements of favorable plea deals and sentencing. In exchange for his false testimony, many of Claitt's cases were not prosecuted. He received probation. Additionally, he was sentenced to a mere 18 months for fire bombing and was protected after his arrest between the time of Franklin's and Tillery's trials.  


Trial Lawyer Operated Under Actual Conflict of Interest. Tillery discovered that his trial lawyer, Joseph Santaguida, also represented the victim. In other words, the victim in this case was represented by trial lawyer Santaguida and Santaguida also represented Major Tillery.  The Commonwealth has concealed newly discovered evidence as well as, evidence which would have been favorable to Major Tillery in the criminal trial. That evidence would have exonerated him. In light of the new Declarations which prove manufactured testimony by prosecutors and police, Major Tillery needs legal representation. He is not currently represented by an attorney. 

Donate: Major Tillery's Legal Defense FundClick Here & Donate


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Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier


Art by Leonard Peltier


I am overwhelmed that today, February 6, is the start of my 43rd year in prison. I have had such high hopes over the years that I might be getting out and returning to my family in North Dakota. And yet here I am in 2018 still struggling for my FREEDOM at 73.

I don't want to sound ungrateful to all my supporters who have stood by me through all these years. I dearly love and respect you and thank you for the love and respect you have given me.

But the truth is I am tired, and often my ailments cause me pain with little relief for days at a time. I just had heart surgery and I have other medical issues that need to be addressed: my aortic aneurysm that could burst at any time, my prostate, and arthritis in my hip and knees.

I do not think I have another ten years, and what I do have I would like to spend with my family. Nothing would bring me more happiness than being able to hug my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I did not come to prison to become a political prisoner. I've been part of Native resistance since I was nine years of age. My sister, cousin and I were kidnapped and taken to boarding school. This incident and how it affected my cousin Pauline, had an enormous effect on me.

This same feeling haunts me as I reflect upon my past 42 years of false imprisonment. This false imprisonment has the same feeling as when I heard the false affidavit the FBI manufactured about Myrtle Poor Bear being at Oglala on the day of the fire-fight—a fabricated document used to extradite me illegally from Canada in 1976.

I know you know that the FBI files are full of information that proves my innocence. Yet many of those files are still withheld from my legal team. During my appeal before the 8th Circuit, former Prosecuting Attorney Lynn Crooks said to Judge Heaney: "Your honor, we do not know who killed those agents. Further, we don't know what participation, if any, Mr. Peltier had in it."

That statement exonerates me, and I should have been released. But here I sit, 43 years later still struggling for my freedom. I have pleaded my innocence for so long now, in so many courts of law, in so many public statements issued through the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, that I will not argue it here. But I will say again, I DID NOT KILL THOSE AGENTS!

Right now, I need my supporters here in the U.S. and throughout the world helping me. We need donations large or small to help pay my legal team to do the research that will get me back into court or get me moved closer to home or a compassionate release based on my poor health and age. Please help me to go home, help me win my freedom!

There is a new petition my Canadian brothers and sisters are circulating internationally that will be attached to my letter. Please sign it and download it so you can take it to your work, school or place of worship. Get as many signatures as you can, a MILLION would be great!

I have been a warrior since age nine. At 73, I remain a warrior. I have been here too long. The beginning of my 43rd year plus over 20 years of good time credit, that makes 60-plus years behind bars.

I need your help. I need your help today! A day in prison for me is a lifetime for those outside because I am isolated from the world.

I remain strong only because of your support, prayers, activism and your donations that keep my legal hope alive.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

Doksha,

Leonard Peltier

If you would like a paper petition, please email contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info.

—San Francisco Bay View, February 6, 2018

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132 

USP Coleman I 

P.O. Box 1033 

Coleman, FL 33521


Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603


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Artwork by Kevin Cooper




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301 Days in Jail,
as of today.

Reality's trial
is now postponed 

until October 15th.


That's 500 Days in Jail,
Without Bail!


   


Whistleblower Reality Winner's trial has (again) been postponed.
Her new trial date is October 15, 2018, based on the new official proceedings schedule (fifth version). She will have spent 500 days jailed without bail by then. Today is day #301.
And her trial may likely be pushed back even further into the Spring of 2019.

We urge you to remain informed and engaged with our campaign until she is free! 





One supporter's excellent report

on the details of Winner's imprisonment

~Check out these highlights & then go read the full article here~

"*Guilty Until Proven Innocent*

Winner is also not allowed to change from her orange jumpsuit for her court dates, even though she is "innocent until proven guilty."  Not only that, but during any court proceedings, only her wrists are unshackled, her ankles stay.  And a US Marshal sits in front of her, face to face, during the proceedings.  Winner is not allowed to turn around and look into the courtroom at all . . .

Upon checking the inmate registry, it starts to become clear how hush hush the government wants this case against Winner to be.  Whether pre-whistleblowing, or in her orange jumpsuit, photos of Winner have surfaced on the web.  That's why it was so interesting that there's no photo of her next to her name on the inmate registry . . .

For the past hundred years, the Espionage Act has been debated and amended, and used to charge whistleblowers that are seeking to help the country they love, not harm it.  Sometimes we have to learn when past amendments no longer do anything to justify the treatment of an American truth teller as a political prisoner. The act is outdated and amending it needs to be seriously looked at, or else we need to develop laws that protect our whistleblowers.

The Espionage Act is widely agreed by many experts to be unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the First Amendment of Free Speech.  Even though a Supreme Court had ruled that the Espionage Act does not infringe upon the 1st Amendment back in 1919, it's constitutionality has been back and forth in court ever sense.


Because of being charged under the Espionage Act, Winner's defense's hands are tied.  No one is allowed to mention the classified document, even though the public already knows that the information in it is true, that Russia hacked into our election support companies." 

 Want to take action in support of Reality?


Step up to defend our whistleblower of conscience ► DONATE NOW



FRIENDS OF REALITY WINNER ~ PATRIOT & ALLEGED WHISTLEBLOWER
c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610 ~ 510-488-3559

Standwithreality.org

@standbyreality (Twitter)

 Friends of Reality Winner (Facebook)




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SOLIDARITY with SERVERS — PLEASE CIRCULATE!

From Clifford Conner


Dear friends and relatives


Every day the scoundrels who have latched onto Trump to push through their rightwing soak-the-poor agenda inflict a new indignity on the human race.  Today they are conspiring to steal the tips we give servers in restaurants.  The New York Times editorial appended below explains what they're trying to get away with now.


People like you and me cannot compete with the Koch brothers' donors network when it comes to money power.  But at least we can try to avoid putting our pittance directly into their hands.  Here is a modest proposal:  Whenever you are in a restaurant where servers depend on tips for their livelihoods, let's try to make sure they get what we give them.


Instead of doing the easy thing and adding the tip into your credit card payment, GIVE CASH TIPS and HAND THEM DIRECTLY TO YOUR SERVER. If you want to add a creative flourish such as including a preprinted note that explains why you are doing this, by all means do so.  You could reproduce the editorial below for their edification.


If you want to do this, be sure to check your wallet before entering a restaurant to make sure you have cash in appropriate denominations.


This is a small act of solidarity with some of the most exploited members of the workforce in America.  Perhaps its symbolic value could outweigh its material impact.  But to paraphrase the familiar song: What the world needs now is solidarity, sweet solidarity.


If this idea should catch on, be prepared for news stories about restaurant owners demanding that servers empty their pockets before leaving the premises at the end of their shifts.  The fight never ends!


Yours in struggle and solidarity,


Cliff


Most Americans assume that when they leave a tip for waiters and bartenders, those workers pocket the money. That could become wishful thinking under a Trump administration proposal that would give restaurants and other businesses complete control over the tips earned by their employees.

The Department of Labor recently proposed allowing employers to pool tips and use them as they see fit as long as all of their workers are paid at least the minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour nationally and higher in some states and cities. Officials argue that this will free restaurants to use some of the tip money to reward lowly dishwashers, line cooks and other workers who toil in the less glamorous quarters and presumably make less than servers who get tips. Using tips to compensate all employees sounds like a worthy cause, but a simple reading of the government's proposal makes clear that business owners would have no obligation to use the money in this way. They would be free to pocket some or all of that cash, spend it to spiff up the dining room or use it to underwrite $2 margaritas at happy hour. And that's what makes this proposal so disturbing.

The 3.2 million Americans who work as waiters, waitresses and bartenders include some of the lowest-compensated working people in the country. The median hourly wage for waiters and waitresses was $9.61 an hour last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, there is a sordid history of restaurant owners who steal tips, and of settlements in which they have agreed to repay workers millions of dollars.

Not to worry, says the Labor Department, which argues, oddly and unconvincingly, that workers will be better off no matter how owners spend the money. Enlarging dining rooms, reducing menu prices or offering paid time off should be seen as "potential benefits to employees and the economy over all." The department also assures us that owners will funnel tip money to employees because workers would quit otherwise.

t is hard to know how much time President Trump's appointees have spent with single mothers raising two children on a salary from a workaday restaurant in suburban America, seeing how hard it is to make ends meet without tips. What we do know is that the administration has produced no empirical cost-benefit analysis to support its proposal, which is customary when the government seeks to make an important change to federal regulations.

The Trump administration appears to be rushing this rule through — it has offered the public just 30 days to comment on it — in part to pre-empt the Supreme Court from ruling on a 2011 Obama-era tipping rule. The department's new proposal would do away with the 2011 rule. The restaurant industry has filed several legal challenges to that regulation, which prohibits businesses from pooling tips and sharing them with dishwashers and other back-of-the-house workers. Different federal circuit appeals courts have issued contradictory rulings on those cases, so the industry has asked the Supreme Court to resolve those differences; the top court has not decided whether to take that case.

Mr. Trump, of course, owns restaurants as part of his hospitality empire and stands to benefit from this rule change, as do many of his friends and campaign donors. But what the restaurant business might not fully appreciate is that their stealth attempt to gain control over tips could alienate and antagonize customers. Diners who are no longer certain that their tips will end up in the hands of the server they intended to reward might leave no tip whatsoever. Others might seek to covertly slip cash to their server. More high-minded restaurateurs would be tempted to follow the lead of the New York restaurateur Danny Meyer and get rid of tipping by raising prices and bumping up salaries.



By changing the fundamental underpinnings of tipping, the government might well end up destroying this practice. But in doing so it would hurt many working-class Americans, including people who believed that Mr. Trump would fight for them.

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Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations! 

Charity for the Wealthy!

GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

By Jake Johnson, December 18, 2017




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Puerto Rico Still Without Power


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Addicted to War:


And this does not include "…spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet…"



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Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:



Love this guy!



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B) ARTICLES IN FULL

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1) Ethan Couch, 'Affluenza Teen' Who Killed 4 While Driving Drunk, Is Freed

 APRIL 2, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/ethan-couch-affluenza-jail.html?rref=

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package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Ethan Couch after being released from jail in Fort Worth on Monday. He served a 720-day sentence after killing four people while driving drunk. CreditNick Oxford/Reuters


Ethan Couch, whose trial for killing four people while driving drunk sparked widespread conversations about the privilege of being raised wealthy, was released from a Texas jail on Monday after nearly two years.

Mr. Couch, 20, became known as the "affluenza teen" after a psychologist suggested during his trial that growing up with money might have left him with psychological afflictions, too rich to tell right from wrong. He attracted further attention when he and his mother, Tonya Couch, fled to Mexico in an effort to evade possible jail time.


He served his 720-day sentence in a jail in Tarrant County, and was freed about a week before his 21st birthday.

Ms. Couch, 50, had been freed on bond while awaiting trial on a felony charge of hindering apprehension. But she was arrested last week after the authorities said she failed a drug test, violating the conditions of her bond, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Mr. Couch was 16 in June 2013 when he and a group of friends stole beer from a store and had a party at his parents' house before going for a drive. He struck and killed four people on the side of a road near Burleson, Tex., a Fort Worth suburb, and a passenger in his car was paralyzed and suffered brain damage.

He had a blood alcohol level of 0.24, three times the legal limit in Texas, hours after the crash.

He pleaded guilty in 2013 to four counts of manslaughter and a juvenile court judge sentenced him to 10 years of probation, defying prosecutors who sought a 20-year prison sentence. The victims' families were outraged, and critics felt he got special treatment because of his wealth.

In December 2015, a six-second video that appeared to show Mr. Couch at a party where alcohol was served — a possible parole violation — was posted on Twitter. Two weeks later, he and his mother went missing.

They were arrested about two weeks later, about 1,200 miles away in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they had changed their appearances and ditched their identifications. Mr. Couch was brought back to Texas and placed in juvenile detention, while his case was moved to adult court.

In April 2016, Dee Anderson, Tarrant County's sheriff, said Mr. Couch had created "zero issues" since beginning his jail stint that January.

"I do believe Ethan Couch is not the same person he was when he came to jail," he said. "The time he's spent, it's a rude awakening for anyone."

Under the terms of his probation, Mr. Couch will not be permitted to drive or drink alcohol, and cannot leave the Fort Worth area without approval from probation or court officials. He must look for a job and perform community service.

In a statement, Mothers Against Drunk Driving said it was "small consolation" that Mr. Couch would remain on probation.

"Two years in jail for four people killed is a grave injustice to the victims and their families who have been dealt life sentences because of one person's devastating decision to drink and drive," the organization said. "The 720 days Ethan Couch served for his crimes shows that drunk driving homicides still aren't treated as the violent crimes that they are."

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2)  When Migrants Are Treated Like Slaves

By Jacqueline Stevens

Dr. Stevens runs the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern University.

April 4, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/opinion/migrants-detention-forced-labor.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region


We're familiar with grim stories about black-shirted federal agents barging into apartment complexes, convenience stores and school pickup sites to round up and deport immigrants. We've heard far less about the forced labor — some call it slavery — inside detention facilities. But new legal challenges to these practices are succeeding and may stymie the government's deportation agenda by taking profits out of the detention business.

Yes, detention is a business. In 2010, private prisons and their lenders and investors lobbied Congress to pass a law ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement to maintain contracts for no fewer than 34,000 beds per night. This means that when detention counts are low, people who would otherwise be released because they pose no danger or flight risk and are likely to win their cases in immigration court remain locked up, at a cost to the government of about $125 a day.

The people detained at these facilities do almost all of the work that keeps them running, outside of guard duty. That includes cooking, serving and cleaning up food, janitorial services, laundry, haircutting, painting, floor buffing and even vehicle maintenance. Most jobs pay $1 a day; some work they are required to do pays nothing.

Workers in immigration custody have suffered injuries and even died. In 2007, Cesar Gonzalez was killed in a facility in Los Angeles County when his jackhammer hit an electrical cable, sending 10,000 volts of direct current through his body. He was on a crew digging holes for posts to extend the camp's perimeter.


Crucially, California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health ruled that regardless of his status as a detainee, Mr. Gonzalez was also an employee, and his employer was found to have violated state laws on occupational safety and health.

Two of the country's biggest detention companies — GEO and CoreCivic, known as CCA — are now under attack by five lawsuits. They allege that the obligatory work and eight-hour shifts for no or little pay are unlawful. They also accuse the companies of violating state minimum wage laws, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and laws prohibiting unjust enrichment.

The plaintiffs have a strong case. Forced labor is constitutional so long as it is a condition of punishment, a carve-out in the slavery prohibitions of the 13th Amendment. But in 1896, the Supreme Court held that "the order of deportation is not a punishment for crime." Thus, while private prisons may require work to "punish" or "correct" criminal inmates, judges in three cases have ruled that immigration detention facilities may not. It's as legal for GEO to force its facilities' residents to work as it would be to make seniors in government-funded nursing homes scrub their neighbors' showers.

GEO's own defense provides insights into just how much its profits depend on labor coerced from the people it locks up. In 2017, after Federal District Judge John Kane certified a class-action lawsuit on behalf of GEO residents in Aurora, Colo., the company filed an appeal claiming the suit "poses a potentially catastrophic risk to GEO's ability to honor its contracts with the federal government."

Court records suggest that GEO may be paying just 1.25 percent to 6 percent of minimum wage, and as little as half of 1 percent of what federal contractors are supposed to pay under the Service Contract Act. If the plaintiffs win, that's tens of millions of dollars GEO would be obligated to pay in back wages to up to 62,000 people, not to mention additional payments going forward. And that's just at one facility.


GEO's appeal tanked. During oral arguments last summer, the company's lawyer defended the work program by explaining that those held in Aurora "make a decision each time whether they're going to consent to work or not." A judge interjected, "Or eat, or be put in isolation, right? I mean, slaves had a choice, right?" The 10th Circuit panel in February unanimously ruled that the case could proceed.

On top of that, last year GEO was sued for labor violations in its Tacoma, Wash., facility. In October, United States District Judge Robert Bryan, a Reagan appointee (!), denied GEO's motions to dismiss these cases and for the first time allowed claims under the state minimum wage laws to proceed, as well as those for forced labor and unjust enrichment.

On March 7, 18 Republican members of the House, 12 of whom have private prisons in or adjacent to their districts, sent a letter to the leaders of the departments of Labor, Justice and Homeland Security complaining about the lawsuits. They warned that if the agencies don't intervene to protect the companies, "immigration enforcement efforts will be thwarted."

Those who cheer this outcome should feel encouraged. The measures the representatives asked for — including a statement by the government that those who work while locked up are "not employees" and that federal minimum wage laws do not apply to them — won't stop the litigation. Agency pronouncements cannot overturn statutes. As long as judges follow the laws, more of the true costs of deportation will be put into the ledgers.

If the price of human suffering does not deter the barbarism of rounding people up based on the happenstance of birth, then maybe pinched taxpayer wallets will.

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3) Police Fatally Shoot a Brooklyn Man After Falsely Believing He Had a Gun

 APRIL 4, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/nyregion/police-shooting-brooklyn-crown-heights.html?rref=

collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=

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Saheed Vassell


New York City police officers shot and killed a black man who was known to be mentally ill on a Brooklyn street corner on Wednesday afternoon after he pointed what the officers believed was a gun at them, the authorities said. The object, however, turned out to be a metal pipe with a knob on it.

The shooting drew a tense, charged crowd of dozens to the streets of Crown Heights. The Police Department had encountered the man before and classified him as emotionally disturbed, and the shooting raised questions about what the officers at the scene knew about him.

Five officers — three of them in street clothes, two in uniform — were responding to three 911 calls about a man threatening people with a silver gun near the corner of Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue in Crown Heights, Terence A. Monahan, the chief of department, said at a news conference. A law enforcement official who listened to one of the calls said a woman was frantically reporting that a man was pointing a gun at people.

The police found a man who matched descriptions from the 911 callers, Chief Monahan said.

"The suspect then took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers," Chief Monahan said.

Chief Monahan said four of the officers — the three in street clothes and one uniformed officer — fired 10 bullets in all. The man, identified by his father as Saheed Vassell, 34, was pronounced dead after being taken to Kings County Medical Center.

In an interview at his home late Wednesday night, Mr. Vassell's father, Eric Vassell, said his son had bipolar disorder and had been admitted to the hospital multiple times in recent years, sometimes after encounters with the police. The younger Mr. Vassell, who was born in Jamaica and came to the United States when he was 6, lived with his family in a Crown Heights apartment and had worked as a welder. He also had a 15-year-old son.

Mr. Vassell's father said he had never seen his son act as if he had a gun.

He would "just walk around the neighborhood and help people," the father said.

Area residents said Mr. Vassell was a familiar figure on the corner and a caring father who begged for money in a nearby subway station and did odd jobs for shopkeepers. He loved to dance and was widely known to be mentally ill. People said he had a penchant for picking things up off the street — cigarette lighters, empty bottles and other curbside flotsam — and playing with them like toys.

The Police Department said the man was in "a two-handed shooting stance" and brandishing an object at responding officers when they shot him.

CreditNew York Police Department


John Fuller, 59, said that he had known Mr. Vassell for years and that local police officers had, too. He echoed a common refrain: The officers should have known him well enough to not simply shoot him to death. "Every cop in this neighborhood knows him," Mr. Fuller said.

The police said he had been arrested before and said officers had classified him as an emotionally disturbed person in previous encounters.

The police released blurry still images from surveillance videos — though not the videos themselves — showing a man with an outstretched arm and something in his hand. The police said the images showed him pointing an object that appeared to investigators to be a gun at people on the street and then pointing it in the officers' direction after they arrived. They also released a picture of what the man turned out to have been holding: a slim, curved silver pipe with a cylindrical knob at the end of it.

Witnesses said the police officers appeared to fire almost immediately after they got to the corner around 4:45 p.m. Some of the witnesses said they did not hear the officers say anything to the man before firing, while another witness said she heard the officers and the man exchange some words.

The police did not answer questions about whether the officers had said anything before firing.

Dozens were still gathered at the scene late Wednesday and tempers flared hours after the shooting. "Murder!" some bystanders shouted at dozens of police officers behind yellow tape. Other crowd members wept at how this had happened on the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Others spoke of wanting to riot. When darkness fell, a group of about 10 protesters arrived carrying Black Lives Matter signs.

The killing held echoes of the shooting less than three weeks ago in Sacramento in which the police shot and killed a black man who they believed was pointing a gun at them, but who, it turned out, was actually holding a cellphone.

On Wednesday in Brooklyn, Jaccpot Hinds, 40, was walking south on Utica Avenue near Montgomery Street when he saw an unmarked police car pass him and pull across two lanes of traffic near where a man was standing on a street corner. Mr. Hinds said a plainclothes officer got out of the passenger seat of the car and fired at the man several times. The officer appeared to shoot him in the neck, chest and right arm, Mr. Hinds said, and then walked over to the man and prodded his chest with the service weapon.

Mr. Hinds said that officer, joined by two other plainclothes officers who had been in the car with him, tried to resuscitate the man.

Chief Monahan said the officers who fired had not been wearing body cameras. He said that the plainclothes officers were part of an anti-crime unit and that the uniformed officers belonged to the Strategic Response Group, which is assigned to major events and hot spots of crime. The names and races of the police officers were not released.

An employee at a beauty salon on the corner, Angie, 52, said she heard the police fire and then saw the man drop. She said the police then fired several more shots before they ran over to the man and handcuffed him.

"We hear the first shot, the guy went down and then they started firing again," said Angie, who declined to give her last name.

Angie described Mr. Vassell as a quiet man who often sat outside near a barbershop and sometimes worked odd jobs at her beauty salon for a few dollars.

"He would just walk and bob his head," she said. "If we ask him to do our chores, he'd come and do it."

Rocky Brown, 45, who knew him for years, said he was a friendly man who was mentally ill.

"He's harmless," Mr. Brown said. "A very willing guy, a very nice guy, a good guy."

Betty Weaver, 71, said Mr. Vassell would often greet her when she was on her way to church.

Another woman, Nicole Williams, said she had given him $2 earlier on Wednesday afternoon. His last words to her, she said, were "Thank you, God."








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4)  Stephon Clark and the Golden State's Shameful Secret

By Amy Alexander, April 5, 2018

Ms. Alexander is a journalist, author and former California resident.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/sunday/stephon-clark-california-police-racism.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

Ben Crump, attorney for the family of Stephon Clark, at a news conference where the findings of an independent autopsy of Mr. Clark were announced.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images


Stephon Clark, 22, was unarmed when the Sacramento police came upon him in his grandmother's backyard, shot him eight times — mostly in the back — and killed him. The two officers were responding to a report of car break-ins. The tragedy became California's latest addition to the long list of high-profile law enforcement shootings of unarmed black people, but to me, a native of the state, Mr. Clark's death on March 18 was also a reminder of one of California's best-kept and most shameful secrets: In a manner that belies its liberal reputation, day-to-day life for generations of black residents there has long been shaped by discrimination and inequality.

Blacks account for only about 6.5 percent of California's nearly 40 million residents, yet they are among the most heavily policed populations in the state.


In 2016, police in California shot at or used force against black people at triple the rate of their portion of the population, according to a 2017 reporton use of force by the state Department of Justice.


Blacks in California are more likely than any other state population demographic to be subjected to traffic stops, according to a 2017 study by Stanford's Open Policing Project.


The way Mr. Clark died is part of a historic pattern of black Californians experiencing uniquely harsh and sometimes lethal outcomes in the realm of criminal justice and public safety. Mr. Clark's death was the second such instance of the local police shooting and killing a black man in Sacramento in the past couple of years; statewide, there have been similar high-profile episodes, notably the caught-on-cellphone-camera shooting death of Mario Woods by San Francisco Police Department officers in December 2015.

These encounters had a precursor in the beating of Rodney King that was caught on tape in greater Los Angeles 27 years ago, three years before I left the state. In April 1992, following the acquittal of the white police officers who were charged with beating Mr. King after he'd led them on a high-speed chase, thousands of citizens took to the streets of Los Angeles in protests that morphed into a weeklong riot.

I covered that upheaval as a journalist, and in the aftermath Los Angeles residents, city officials and representatives from business engaged in soul-searching about the undercurrent of disaffection among black residents that had fueled the civic unrest. Residents in South Central, Compton and other predominantly black and Latino Los Angeles neighborhoods spoke at town hall meetings and forums, saying they'd continually experienced not only police abuse, but also unfair hiring practices in the city's retail centers and film industry, as well as job losses from closures in manufacturing.

Now, nearly three decades later, the state still enjoys a liberal reputation that is partly deserved, but it is also often at odds with the material status of black residents — not only when it comes to headline-grabbing tragedy and injustice, but also in all facets of life. Equal access to California's economic drivers has long been elusive for black residents.

Currently 10 percent of Sacramento County's 1.5 million residents are African-Americans, and the median household income for blacks there is$44,188, versus $70,076 for whites, according to the county government's 2018 summary census data. Homeownership among Sacramento's black population declined from 43 percent in 2006 to 27 percent in 2015, with blacks experiencing larger losses during the subprime mortgage-related economic downturn of 2008 and seeing a longer recovery period than whites, The Sacramento Bee found.


While the divides in median income and homeownership mirror similar disparities in other American cities, particularly as they apply to black males, the gaps between blacks and whites in Sacramento County exist in stark contrast to California's image as a liberal nirvana in which ethnic populations have equal access to the ladder of upward economic mobility. Employment numbers are another key metric of a population's overall health, and black Californians consistently lag behind whites and, increasingly, behind Hispanics, as well: In the third quarter of 2017, black unemployment in California was 7.9 percent, outpacing the rate for Hispanics (5.6 percent), whites (4.4 percent) and Asian residents (3.9 percent), according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Notwithstanding policing and economic discrimination, California emits a golden halo in the progressive American imagination, one that obscures the material conditions of blacks in the state. I think it is fair to ask if this partly allows elected officials to avoid grappling directly with blacks' disparate treatment. Case in point: Following Mr. Clark's death, Darrell Steinberg, Sacramento's mayor and a former Democratic member of the State Assembly, said he believes that implicit bias on the part of the two officers who shot and killed Mr. Clark may have been a factor.

But the problems that lead to an unarmed black man being gunned down and the many other issues facing black people in my home state run much deeper than one officer's subconscious attitudes toward race. And there is a long overdue need for deep, sustained measures, such as changes to training protocols for law enforcement agencies (now under discussion in Sacramento) and increased funding for culturally competent social services programs that specifically address the health and welfare of black residents. In reflecting on life for California's black residents in the days after Mr. Clark's brutal death, I've thought about police violence but also about how the past decade has seen the stalling of economic mobility for black residents in Sacramento and in my home region, the San Francisco Bay Area, and job creation increasingly centers on advanced technology industries that have overlooked black applicants.

Activists have demanded accountability for Mr. Clark's death. We need that, and much more: We need policies that ensure a person's racial identity doesn't determine their ability to survive a police encounter, secure a mortgage or enjoy a decent quality of life according to other key indicators. We need a state that not only signals its commitment to egalitarian principles, but also does the hard, uncomfortable work of erasing the impact of longstanding racism from systems that affect all residents.


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5) Palestinian Protesters Face Off With Israeli Soldiers on Gaza Border

 APRIL 6, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/world/middleeast/gaza-palestinian-protest-israel.html?rref=

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Palestinian protesters flocked to the Israel-Gaza border on Friday. The protests are aimed at Israel's blockade, which began after Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. CreditMohammed Salem/Reuters


NAHAL OZ, Israel — Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli soldiers faced off along the Gaza border on Friday in a cat-and-mouse battle waged mainly with burning tires and water cannons, with hand-held mirrors and tear gas. But sporadic rifle fire from the Israeli side made clear that the protests could elicit the sort of response that killed 20 people a week ago.


By midafternoon, the Gaza Health Ministry said one Palestinian had been killed by Israeli fire in Khan Yunis and 40 others wounded, five of them critically; the Red Crescent put the number of wounded at 81, three critically.

In Shejaiya, one of five main gathering points for the protesters, at least three people were seen on stretchers. One, a lightly wounded man holding a slingshot, made an obscene gesture toward the Israeli side, prompting cheers and laughter; another held up two fingers in a victory sign.

The protests, significantly smaller than last week's, are aimed at Israel's blockade of Gaza, which began after Hamas seized control in 2007. Billed as a six-week "March of Return," they are to culminate on May 15 with Nakba Day, which commemorates the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel's 1948 war for independence.

The protests have already amply succeeded in one crucial aim of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza: changing the international conversation about the coastal territory from one focused on Hamas's troubles to one centered on the image of Gaza — its economy in collapse, its people suffering — as a prison, with Israel as its jailer.

From early Friday, protesters flocked to the barrier fence on the Gaza side, chanting, waving flags, flying kites — and setting fire to piles of tires that had been carted to the fence.

Hamas, which has been effectively running the protests, said the smoke screen was a defensive measure to protect unarmed Palestinians from being shot, as many were on March 30, the first day of the demonstrations.

But Israeli officials insisted the smoke screens were meant to provide cover for militants trying to make it across the barrier fence and to attack soldiers and Israeli civilians living in farming communities along the border.

Either way, the smoke screens appeared effective: From the Israeli side, along the fortified barrier fence near the Nahal Oz kibbutz, hundreds of protesters in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City could only occasionally be glimpsed through vast clouds of acrid black smoke that enshrouded a detachment of soldiers ensconced behind earthen berms.

The Israelis first tried dispersing the smoke with an industrial-size fan trucked in on trailers. When that did not work, they began trying to douse the fires with water cannons, setting off cheers among the protesters when that too, did little quickly.

Bilal Abu Zaher, 26, who came to the protest on crutches, said he had been disabled ever since his house was damaged by an Israeli airstrike in the 2008 Israel-Gaza war. On Thursday, he said, Israeli soldiers shot at his wheelchair, damaging it. On Friday, he was back at the fence.

"I believe I'm going to cross the fence, even if they shoot me or cut me in half," he said. "I have nothing to eat or drink at home. I'm here for dignity. My goal is to return to the land."

Israeli military officials, for their part, insisted that their soldiers were being extremely judicious in their use of live fire, and said that they had learned and were applying lessons from the protests last week.

But they said they would use live ammunition if necessary to stop Palestinians from penetrating or damaging the border barrier, which is actually at least two fences — one a crude barrier of barbed wire; the other, some yards behind, a more complicated structure with a range of electronic sensors built into it.

The Israelis also put forward a retired British army colonel, Richard Kemp, who defended their tactics, saying in an interview that Israel's use of snipers was in keeping with both British and American tactics.

"The British Army had many situations where demonstrations were used as cover for terrorism. I'd think our response would be virtually the same," he said. "Ultimately, they just can't afford to allow them to break through."

Despite the occasional crack of gunfire and whistle of bullets, which sent demonstrators running for cover, there was an eerily festive, almost carnival-like atmosphere on the periphery, with vendors selling food, drinks and flags. Israeli drones and surveillance balloons flew overhead, as did the occasional kite in the Palestinian national colors of red, black, white and green.

On the Israeli side, too, military police loosely guarded the roads leading to the border, but many civilians sought vantage points with binoculars and cameras, straining to see the action from kibbutz watchtowers or outcroppings of farmland.

Yet up close, the danger was real.

Israeli news outlets reported that Palestinians had built an ancient war machine — a trebuchet, or slingshot-like catapult — to hurl heavy stones or burning tires at Israeli soldiers. And Israeli officials shooed journalists away from the fence at one point, saying there had been gunfire from the Gaza side.

Again and again throughout the day came the sound of gunshots, the wail of sirens, the cheers in Arabic: "We are heading to Jerusalem with millions of martyrs."








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6) America's Federally Financed Ghettos

By The Editorial Board, April 7, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/americas-federally-financed-ghettos.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region



Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, showed utter contempt for his agency's core mission last month when he proposed deleting the phrase "free from discrimination" from the HUD mission statement. Yet Mr. Carson is not the first housing secretary to betray the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968 — which turns 50 years old this week — by failing to enforce policies designed to prevent states and cities from using federal dollars to perpetuate segregation.

By its actions and failure to act, HUD has prolonged segregation in housing since the 1960s under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The courts have repeatedly chastised the agency for allowing cities to confine families to federally financed ghettos that offer little or no access to jobs, transportation or viable schools. The lawsuits, filed by individuals and fair housing groups, have forced the agency to adopt rules and policies that have been crucial in advancing the goals of the Fair Housing Act.

Mr. Carson was named in such a lawsuit filed last month by the nonprofit Texas Low Income Housing Information Service. The suit accuses HUD of illegally funneling federal money to the city of Houston, despite a 2017 finding by HUD itself that the city was flouting federal civil rights laws by allowing racially motivated opposition to stop affordable housing projects in white neighborhoods. In a detail reminiscent of the Jim Crow South, the plaintiffs argue that Houston discriminates even at the level of flood relief, maintaining "entirely different (and markedly inferior) drainage systems in predominantly minority neighborhoods, exposing the residents of those neighborhoods to increased risk from storms."

The next round of lawsuits against Mr. Carson's HUD will almost certainly challenge his recent decision to suspend until 2020 rules introduced under the Obama administration that require communities to analyze housing segregation and submit plans to address it as a condition for receiving billions of dollars in federal aid.

FEDERALLY SPONSORED SEGREGATION

Critics of the Fair Housing Act have glibly attempted to dismiss attempts to end segregation as "social engineering" — as if rigid racial segregation in housing were a natural phenomenon. In fact, the residential segregation that is pervasive in the United States today was partly created by explicit federal policies that date back at least to World War I. It is now widely acknowledged that the federal insistence on segregated housing introduced Jim Crow separation in areas of the country outside the South where it had previously been unknown. It stands to reason that dismantling a system created by a set of government policies will require an equally explicit set of federal policies.

The scholar Richard Rothstein exposed the roots of this shameful process in his recent book "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America." He reported that the government's first effort to build housing for defense workers near military installations and factories during World War I was founded on the premise that African-American families would be excluded "even from projects in northern and western industrial centers where they worked in significant numbers."

The same toxic pattern prevailed under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, when the government created the first public housing projects for nondefense workers, building separate projects for black people, segregating buildings by race or excluding African-Americans entirely. Particularly telling is the fact that racially integrated communities were razed to make way for Jim Crow housing.

The federal insistence on rigid racial separation found its most pernicious expression in the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to promote homeownership by insuring mortgages. As the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton document in "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass," the government typically denied mortgages to African-Americans, shutting out even affluent black people from the suburban homeownership boom that remade the residential landscape during the middle decades of the 20th century.

Government at all levels embraced racial covenants that forbade even well-to-do African-Americans from purchasing homes outside of black communities. Cut off from homeownership — the principal avenue of wealth creation — African-Americans lost the opportunity to build the intergenerational wealth that white suburban families took for granted. The vast wealth gap that exists today between whites and African-Americans has its roots in this era.

The argument for what became the Fair Housing Act emerged forcefully in the 1968 Kerner Commission report, which blamed segregation in large measure for the riots that ravaged the country in the 60s and called for national fair housing legislation. The housing law might well have died in committee had the country not erupted in fresh violence after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. It was signed into law a week later.

The housing act put the federal government on record as supporting open housing and prohibiting the pervasive discrimination that had locked most African-Americans out of decent accommodations and homeownership. But the version that passed in 1968 had been declawed — stripped of enforcement provisions that would have given HUD strong authority to root out discrimination. Nearly a quarter-century would pass before Congress strengthened the law. So during that time, African-Americans were left subject to the harsh discrimination the original act was supposed to preclude.

This progressive sounding law — which requires entities that receive federal money to "affirmatively further" fair housing goals — was consistently undermined by officials of both parties who had little appetite for confronting entrenched segregation.

That realization came home with particular force to George Romney, Richard Nixon's HUD secretary, who initially took the law at its word and tried to enforce it by turning down grant applications from communities that continued to segregate themselves racially.

When white communities complained directly to the Oval Office, Nixon shut down Romney's effort and eventually forced him out of government. Subsequent administrations shied away from enforcing the law in ways great and small — but the Reagan administration sold it out in an egregious fashion that angered even Republicans in Congress. The administration conspired with the real estate industry to undermine HUD's already limited powers, brought cases that attacked integration programs and showed scant vigor in enforcing civil rights laws.

THE NEXT FAIR HOUSING FIGHT

The Fair Housing Act received new life three years ago when the Supreme Court endorsed the doctrine known as disparate impact, ruling that housing discrimination did not have to be intentional to be illegal. The court reminded the country that the statute does indeed bar governments from spending federal money in a way that perpetuates segregation.

Soon after, the Obama administration issued a long-awaited rule that required state and local governments to affirmatively further fair housing goals by making efforts to address the cumulative results of the discrimination that historically shut African-Americans out of many communities.

The common-sense rule rightly breaks with the laissez-faire approach of the past, making it clear that compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws means abandoning the strategy of dumping affordable housing in ghettos — and giving poor residents access to areas that offer greater opportunity. To that end, communities that receive HUD money are being asked to consider data on segregation and concentrations of poverty when making affordable housing decisions.

The fact that Congress has not overturned the rule reflects a growing awareness on both sides of the aisle that ghettoizing poor people is counterproductive — and that the country has an interest in giving low-income families access to areas that further opportunity. Later this month, for example, the House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on a draft bill that would increase mobility for families receiving federal housing vouchers, improving their job and educational opportunities.

The hearing is no doubt related to a widely cited Harvard study showing that young children whose families had been given housing vouchers to move to better neighborhoods were more likely to attend college and had higher incomes as adults than children whose families had not been given the vouchers. The data show that changing the circumstances in which poor families live can be crucial to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

This brings us back to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was intended to break down the walls around the country's ghettos so that at least some people could forge successful lives elsewhere. If the country keeps betraying this landmark law, it will continue to squander a powerful tool for reducing lethal concentrations of poverty and for opening the door to upward mobility for the poor.

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7) 'Big Brother' in India Requires Fingerprint Scans for Food, Phones and Finances

 APRIL 7, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/technology/india-id-aadhaar.html?rref=

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\India has collected biometric data on most of its 1.3 billion residents, to be used in a nationwide identity system called Aadhaar, meaning "foundation." 

CreditThe New York Times\\



NEW DELHI — Seeking to build an identification system of unprecedented scope, India is scanning the fingerprints, eyes and faces of its 1.3 billion residents and connecting the data to everything from welfare benefits to mobile phones.

Civil libertarians are horrified, viewing the program, called Aadhaar, as Orwell's Big Brother brought to life. To the government, it's more like "big brother," a term of endearment used by many Indians to address a stranger when asking for help.

For other countries, the technology could provide a model for how to track their residents. And for India's top court, the ID system presents unique legal issues that will define what the constitutional right to privacy means in the digital age.

To Adita Jha, Aadhaar was simply a hassle. The 30-year-old environmental consultant in Delhi waited in line three times to sit in front of a computer that photographed her face, captured her fingerprints and snapped images of her irises. Three times, the data failed to upload. The fourth attempt finally worked, and she has now been added to the 1.1 billion Indians already included in the program.

Ms. Jha had little choice but to keep at it. The government has made registration mandatory for hundreds of public services and many private ones, from taking school exams to opening bank accounts.

"You almost feel like life is going to stop without an Aadhaar," Ms. Jha said.

Technology has given governments around the world new tools to monitor their citizens. In China, the government is rolling out ways to use facial recognition and big data to track people, aiming to inject itself further into everyday life. Many countries, including Britain, deploy closed-circuit cameras to monitor their populations.

But India's program is in a league of its own, both in the mass collection of biometric data and in the attempt to link it to everything — traffic tickets, bank accounts, pensions, even meals for undernourished schoolchildren.

"No one has approached that scale and that ambition," said Jacqueline Bhabha, a professor and research director of Harvard's FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, who has studied biometric ID systems around the world. "It has been hailed, and justifiably so, as an extraordinary triumph to get everyone registered."

Critics fear that the government will gain unprecedented insight into the lives of all Indians.

In response, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other champions of the program say that Aadhaar is India's ticket to the future, a universal, easy-to-use ID that will reduce this country's endemic corruption and help bring even the most illiterate into the digital age.

"It's the equivalent of building interstate highways," said Nandan Nilekani, the technology billionaire who was tapped by the government in 2009 to build the Aadhaar system. "If the government invested in building a digital public utility and that is made available as a platform, then you actually can create major innovations around that."

The potential uses — from surveillance to managing government benefit programs — have drawn interest elsewhere. Sri Lanka is planning a similar system, and Britain, Russia and the Philippines are studying it, according to the Indian government.

Aadhaar, which means "foundation" in English, was initially intended as a difficult-to-forge ID to reduce fraud and improve the delivery of government welfare programs.

But Mr. Modi, who has promoted a "digital India" vision since his party took power in 2014, has vastly expanded its ambitions.

The poor must scan their fingerprints at the ration shop to get their government allocations of rice. Retirees must do the same to get their pensions. Middle-school students cannot enter the water department's annual painting contest until they submit their identification.

In some cities, newborns cannot leave the hospital until their parents sign them up. Even leprosy patients, whose illness damages their fingers and eyes, have been told they must pass fingerprint or iris scans to get their benefits.

The Modi government has also ordered Indians to link their IDs to their cellphone and bank accounts. States have added their own twists, like using the data to map where people live. Some employers use the ID for background checks on job applicants.

"Aadhaar has added great strength to India's development," Mr. Modi said in a January speech to military cadets. Officials estimate that taxpayers have saved at least $9.4 billion from Aadhaar by weeding out "ghosts" and other improper beneficiaries of government services.

Opponents have filed at least 30 cases against the program in India's Supreme Court. They argue that Aadhaar violates India's Constitution — and, in particular, a unanimous court decision last year that declared for the first time that Indians had a fundamental right to privacy.

Rahul Narayan, one of the lawyers challenging the system, said the government was essentially building one giant database on its citizens. "There has been a sort of mission creep to it all along," he said.

The court has been holding extensive hearings and is expected to make a ruling in the spring.

The government argues that the universal ID is vital in a country where hundreds of millions of people do not have widely accepted identification documents.

"The people themselves are the biggest beneficiaries," said Ajay B. Pandey, the Minnesota-trained engineer who leads the Unique Identification Authority of India, the government agency that oversees the system. "This identity cannot be refused."

Businesses are also using the technology to streamline transactions.

Banks once sent employees to the homes of account applicants to verify their addresses. Now, accounts can be opened online and finished with a fingerprint scan at a branch or other authorized outlet. Reliance Jio, a telecom provider, relies on an Aadhaar fingerprint scan to conduct the government-mandated ID check for purchases of cellphone SIM cards. That allows clerks to activate service immediately instead of forcing buyers to wait a day or two.

But the Aadhar system has also raised practical and legal issues.

Although the system's core fingerprint, iris and face database appears to have remained secure, at least 210 government websites have leaked other personal data — such as name, birth date, address, parents' names, bank account number and Aadhaar number — for millions of Indians. Some of that data is still available with a simple Google search.

As Aadhaar has become mandatory for government benefits, parts of rural India have struggled with the internet connections necessary to make Aadhaar work. After a lifetime of manual labor, many Indians also have no readable prints, making authentication difficult. One recent study found that 20 percent of the households in Jharkand state had failed to get their food rations under Aadhaar-based verification — five times the failure rate of ration cards.

"This is the population that is being passed off as ghosts and bogus by the government," said Reetika Khera, an associate professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, who co-wrote the study.

Seeing these problems, some local governments have scaled back the use of Aadhaar for public benefits. In February, the government for the Delhi region announced that it would stop using Aadhaar to deliver food benefits.

Dr. Pandey said that some problems were inevitable but that his agency was trying to fix them. The government is patching security holes and recently added face recognition as an alternative to fingerprint or iris scans to make it easier to verify identities.

Fears that the Indian government could use Aadhaar to turn the country into a surveillance state, he said, are overblown. "There is no central authority that has all the information," he said.

Before Aadhaar, he said, hundreds of millions of Indians could not easily prove who they were.

"If you are not able to prove your identity, you are disenfranchised," he said. "You have no existence."



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8) The Disappearing Doctor: HowMega-Mergers Are Changingthe Business of Medical Care,  APRIL 7, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/health-care-mergers-doctors.html?rref=

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By opening clinics to compete with urgent care centers, Dr. Carl Olden's practice in Yakima, Wash., was able to retain its patients and move some walk-ins into the fold. CreditDavid Ryder for The New York Times


Is the doctor in?

In this new medical age of urgent care centers and retail clinics, that's not a simple question. Nor does it have a simple answer, as primary care doctors become increasingly scarce.

"You call the doctor's office to book an appointment," said Matt Feit, a 45-year-old screenwriter in Los Angeles who visited an urgent care center eight times last year. "They're only open Monday through Friday from these hours to those hours, and, generally, they're not the hours I'm free or I have to take time off from my job.

"I can go just about anytime to urgent care," he continued, "and my co-pay is exactly the same as if I went to my primary doctor."


That's one reason big players like CVS Health, the drugstore chain, and most recently Walmart, the giant retailer, are eyeing deals with Aetna and Humana, respectively, to use their stores to deliver medical care.

People are flocking to retail clinics and urgent care centers in strip malls or shopping centers, where simple health needs can usually be tended to by health professionals like nurse practitioners or physician assistants much more cheaply than in a doctor's office. Some 12,000 are already scattered across the country, according to Merchant Medicine, a consulting firm.

On the other side, office visits to primary care doctors declined 18 percent from 2012 to 2016, even as visits to specialists increased, insurance data analyzed by the Health Care Cost Institute shows.

There's little doubt that the front line of medicine — the traditional family or primary care doctor — has been under siege for years. Long hours and low pay have transformed pediatric or family practices into unattractive options for many aspiring physicians.

And the relationship between patients and doctors has radically changed. Apart from true emergency situations, patients' expectations now reflect the larger 24/7 insta-culture of wanting everything now. When Dr. Carl Olden began watching patients turn to urgent care centers opening around him in Yakima, Wash., he and his partners decided to fight back.

They set up similar clinics three years ago, including one right across the street from their main office in a shopping center.

The practice not only was able to retain its patients, but then could access electronic health records for those off-site visits, avoiding a bad drug interaction or other problems, said Dr. Olden, who has been a doctor for 34 years.

"And we've had some folks come into the clinics who don't have their own primary care physicians," he said. "So we've been able to move them into our practice."

Merger Maneuvers

The new deals involving major corporations loom over doctors' livelihoods, intensifying pressure on small practices and pushing them closer to extinction.

The latest involves Walmart and Humana, a large insurer with a sizable business offering private Medicare plans. While their talks are in the early stages, one potential partnership being discussed would center on using the retailer's stores and expanding its existing 19 clinics for one-stop medical care. Walmart stores already offer pharmacy services and attract older people.

In addition, the proposed $69 billion merger between CVS Health, which operates 1,100 MinuteClinics, and Aetna, the giant insurer, would expand the customer bases of both. The deal is viewed as a direct response to moves by a rival insurer, UnitedHealth Group, which employs more than 30,000 physicians and operates one of the country's largest urgent-care groups, MedExpress, as well as a big chain of free-standing surgery centers.

While both CVS and UnitedHealth have large pharmacy benefits businesses that would reap considerable rewards from the stream of prescriptions generated by the doctors at these facilities, the companies are also intent on managing what type of care patients get and where they go for it. And the wealth of data mined from consolidation would provide the companies with a map for steering people one way or another.

On top of these corporate partnerships, Amazon, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway decided to join forces to develop some sort of health care strategy for their employees, expressing frustration with the current state of medical care. Their announcement, and Amazon's recent forays into these fields, are rattling everyone from major hospital networks to pharmacists.

Doctors, too, are watching the evolution warily.

"With all of these deals, there is so much we don't know," said Dr. Michael Munger, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "Are Aetna patients going to be mandated to go to a CVS MinuteClinic?"

Constant Changes in Care

Dr. Susan Kressly, a pediatrician in Warrington, Pa., has watched patients leave. Parents who once brought their children to her to treat an ear infection or check for strep, services whose profits helped offset some of the treatments she offered, are now visiting the retail clinics or urgent care centers.

What is worse, some patients haven't been getting the right care. "Some of the patients with coughs were being treated with codeine-based medicines, which is not appropriate at all for this age group," Dr. Kressly said.

Even doctors unfazed by patients going elsewhere at night or on weekends are nervous about the entry of the corporate behemoths.

"I can't advertise on NBC," said Dr. Shawn Purifoy, who practices family medicine in Malvern, Ark. "CVS can."

Nurse practitioners allow Dr. Purifoy to offer more same-day appointments; he and two other practices in town take turns covering emergency phone calls at night.

And doctors keep facing new waves of competition. In California, Apple recently decided to open up its own clinics to treat employees. Other companies are offering their workers the option of seeking medical care via their cellphones. Investors are also pouring money into businesses aiming to create new ways of providing primary care by relying more heavily on technology.

An Absence of Proof

Dr. Mark J. Werner, a consultant for the Chartis Group, which advises medical practices, emphasized that convenience of care didn't equal quality or, for that matter, less expensive care.

"None of the research has shown any of these approaches to delivering care has meaningfully addressed cost," Dr. Werner said.

Critics of retail clinics argue that patients are given short shrift by health professionals unfamiliar with their history, and may be given unnecessary prescriptions. But researchers say neither has been proved in studies.

"The quality of care that you see at a retail clinic is equal or superior to what we see in a doctor's office or emergency department," said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School, who has researched the retail clinics. "And while there is a worry that they will prescribe antibiotics to everybody, we see equal rates occurring between the clinics and doctor's offices."

Still, while the retail clinics over all charge less, particularly compared with emergency rooms, they may increase overall health care spending. Consumers who not long ago would have taken a cough drop or gargled with saltwater to soothe a sore throat now pop into their nearby retail clinic for a strep test.

Frustration with the nation's health care system has fueled a lot of the recent partnerships. Giant companies are already signaling a desire to tackle complex care for people with a chronic health condition like diabetes or asthma.

"We're evolving the retail clinic concept," said Dr. Troyen A. Brennan, the chief medical officer for CVS. The company hopes its proposed merger with Aetna will allow it to transform its current clinics, where a nurse practitioner might offer a flu shot, into a place where patients can have their conditions monitored. "It requires new and different work by the nurse practitioners," he said.

Dr. Brennan said CVS was not looking to replace patients' primary care doctors. "We're not trying to buy up an entire layer of primary care," he said.

But people will have the option of using the retail clinic to make sure their hypertension or diabetes is well controlled, with tests and counseling provided as well as medications. The goal is to reduce the cost of care for what would otherwise be very expensive conditions, Dr. Brennan said.

If the company's merger with Aetna goes through, CVS will initially expand in locations where Aetna has a significant number of customers who could readily go to CVS, Dr. Brennan said.

People are flocking to retail clinics and urgent care centers in strip malls or shopping centers, where simple health needs can usually be tended to by health professionals like nurse practitioners or physician assistants much more cheaply than in a doctor's office. Some 12,000 are already scattered across the country, according to Merchant Medicine, a consulting firm.

On the other side, office visits to primary care doctors declined 18 percent from 2012 to 2016, even as visits to specialists increased, insurance data analyzed by the Health Care Cost Institute shows.

There's little doubt that the front line of medicine — the traditional family or primary care doctor — has been under siege for years. Long hours and low pay have transformed pediatric or family practices into unattractive options for many aspiring physicians.


And the relationship between patients and doctors has radically changed. Apart from true emergency situations, patients' expectations now reflect the larger 24/7 insta-culture of wanting everything now. When Dr. Carl Olden began watching patients turn to urgent care centers opening around him in Yakima, Wash., he and his partners decided to fight back.

They set up similar clinics three years ago, including one right across the street from their main office in a shopping center.

The practice not only was able to retain its patients, but then could access electronic health records for those off-site visits, avoiding a bad drug interaction or other problems, said Dr. Olden, who has been a doctor for 34 years.

"And we've had some folks come into the clinics who don't have their own primary care physicians," he said. "So we've been able to move them into our practice."

Merger Maneuvers

The new deals involving major corporations loom over doctors' livelihoods, intensifying pressure on small practices and pushing them closer to extinction.

The latest involves Walmart and Humana, a large insurer with a sizable business offering private Medicare plans. While their talks are in the early stages, one potential partnership being discussed would center on using the retailer's stores and expanding its existing 19 clinics for one-stop medical care. Walmart stores already offer pharmacy services and attract older people.

In addition, the proposed $69 billion merger between CVS Health, which operates 1,100 MinuteClinics, and Aetna, the giant insurer, would expand the customer bases of both. The deal is viewed as a direct response to moves by a rival insurer, UnitedHealth Group, which employs more than 30,000 physicians and operates one of the country's largest urgent-care groups, MedExpress, as well as a big chain of free-standing surgery centers.

While both CVS and UnitedHealth have large pharmacy benefits businesses that would reap considerable rewards from the stream of prescriptions generated by the doctors at these facilities, the companies are also intent on managing what type of care patients get and where they go for it. And the wealth of data mined from consolidation would provide the companies with a map for steering people one way or another.

On top of these corporate partnerships, Amazon, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway decided to join forces to develop some sort of health care strategy for their employees, expressing frustration with the current state of medical care. Their announcement, and Amazon's recent forays into these fields, are rattling everyone from major hospital networks to pharmacists.

Doctors, too, are watching the evolution warily.

"With all of these deals, there is so much we don't know," said Dr. Michael Munger, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "Are Aetna patients going to be mandated to go to a CVS MinuteClinic?"

Constant Changes in Care

Dr. Susan Kressly, a pediatrician in Warrington, Pa., has watched patients leave. Parents who once brought their children to her to treat an ear infection or check for strep, services whose profits helped offset some of the treatments she offered, are now visiting the retail clinics or urgent care centers.

What is worse, some patients haven't been getting the right care. "Some of the patients with coughs were being treated with codeine-based medicines, which is not appropriate at all for this age group," Dr. Kressly said.

Even doctors unfazed by patients going elsewhere at night or on weekends are nervous about the entry of the corporate behemoths.


"I can't advertise on NBC," said Dr. Shawn Purifoy, who practices family medicine in Malvern, Ark. "CVS can."

Nurse practitioners allow Dr. Purifoy to offer more same-day appointments; he and two other practices in town take turns covering emergency phone calls at night.

And doctors keep facing new waves of competition. In California, Apple recently decided to open up its own clinics to treat employees. Other companies are offering their workers the option of seeking medical care via their cellphones. Investors are also pouring money into businesses aiming to create new ways of providing primary care by relying more heavily on technology.

An Absence of Proof

Dr. Mark J. Werner, a consultant for the Chartis Group, which advises medical practices, emphasized that convenience of care didn't equal quality or, for that matter, less expensive care.

"None of the research has shown any of these approaches to delivering care has meaningfully addressed cost," Dr. Werner said.

Critics of retail clinics argue that patients are given short shrift by health professionals unfamiliar with their history, and may be given unnecessary prescriptions. But researchers say neither has been proved in studies.

"The quality of care that you see at a retail clinic is equal or superior to what we see in a doctor's office or emergency department," said Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School, who has researched the retail clinics. "And while there is a worry that they will prescribe antibiotics to everybody, we see equal rates occurring between the clinics and doctor's offices."

Still, while the retail clinics over all charge less, particularly compared with emergency rooms, they may increase overall health care spending. Consumers who not long ago would have taken a cough drop or gargled with saltwater to soothe a sore throat now pop into their nearby retail clinic for a strep test.

Frustration with the nation's health care system has fueled a lot of the recent partnerships. Giant companies are already signaling a desire to tackle complex care for people with a chronic health condition like diabetes or asthma.

"We're evolving the retail clinic concept," said Dr. Troyen A. Brennan, the chief medical officer for CVS. The company hopes its proposed merger with Aetna will allow it to transform its current clinics, where a nurse practitioner might offer a flu shot, into a place where patients can have their conditions monitored. "It requires new and different work by the nurse practitioners," he said.

Dr. Brennan said CVS was not looking to replace patients' primary care doctors. "We're not trying to buy up an entire layer of primary care," he said.

But people will have the option of using the retail clinic to make sure their hypertension or diabetes is well controlled, with tests and counseling provided as well as medications. The goal is to reduce the cost of care for what would otherwise be very expensive conditions, Dr. Brennan said.

If the company's merger with Aetna goes through, CVS will initially expand in locations where Aetna has a significant number of customers who could readily go to CVS, Dr. Brennan said.


UnitedHealth has also been aggressively making inroads, adding a large medical practice in December and roughly doubling the number of areas where its OptumCare doctors will be to 75 markets in the United States. It is also experimenting with putting its MedExpress urgent care clinics into Walgreens stores.

Big hospital groups are also eroding primary care practices: They employed 43 percent of the nation's primary care doctors in 2016, up from 23 percent in 2010. They are also aggressively opening up their own urgent care centers, in part to try to ensure a steady flow of patients to their facilities.

HCA Healthcare, the for-profit hospital chain, doubled its number of urgent care centers last year to about 100, according to Merchant Medicine. GoHealth Urgent Care has teamed up with major health systems like Northwell Health in New York and Dignity Health in San Francisco, to open up about 80 centers.

"There is huge consolidation in the market right now," said Dr. Jeffrey Le Benger, the chief executive of Summit Medical Group, a large independent physician group in New Jersey. "Everyone is fighting for the primary care patient." He, too, has opened up urgent care centers, which he describes as a "loss leader," unprofitable but critical to managing patients.

Eva Palmer, 22, of Washington, D.C., sought out One Medical, a venture-backed practice that is one of the nation's largest independent groups, when she couldn't get in to see a primary care doctor, even when she became ill. After paying the annual fee of about $200, she was able to make an appointment to get treatment for strep throat and pneumonia.

"In 15 minutes, I was able to get the prescriptions I needed — it was awesome," Ms. Palmer said.

Patients also have the option of getting a virtual consultation at any time.

By using sophisticated computer systems, One Medical, which employs 400 doctors and health staff members in eight major cities, allows its physicians to spend a half-hour with every patient.

Dr. Navya Mysore joined One Medical after working for a large New York health system, where "there was a lot of bureaucracy," she said. She now has more freedom to practice medicine the way she wants and focus more on preventive health, she said.

By being so readily available, One Medical can reduce visits to an emergency room or an urgent care center, said Dr. Jeff Dobro, the company's chief medical officer.

As primary care doctors become an "increasingly endangered species, it is very hard to practice like this," he said.

Long-Term Lifelines

But more traditional doctors like Dr. Purifoy stress the importance of continuity of care. "It takes a long time to gain the trust of the patient," he said. He is working with Aledade, another company focused on reinventing primary care, to make his practice more competitive.

One longtime patient, Billy Ray Smith, 70, learned that he needed cardiac bypass surgery even though he had no symptoms. He credits Dr. Purifoy with urging him to get a stress test.

"If he hadn't insisted," Mr. Smith said, "it would have been all over for me." Dr. Purifoy's nurse routinely checks on him, and if he needs an appointment, he can usually see the doctor that day or the next.

"I trust him 100 percent on what he says and what he does," Mr. Smith said.

Those relationships take time and follow-up. "It's not something I can do in a minute," Dr. Purifoy said. "You're never going to get that at a MedExpress."


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9)  Michigan Will No Longer Provide Free Bottled Water to Flint

APRIL 8, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/us/flint-water-bottles.html?rref=

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Michigan will stop providing free bottled water to the city of Flint, Gov. Rick Snyder said on Friday.

City officials criticized the decision, in part because Flint is still recovering from a crisis that left residents with dangerous levels of lead in their tap water beginning in 2014.

But Michigan officials said lead levels in the water there have not exceeded federal limits for about two years, so the state was closing the four remaining distribution centers where residents have been picking up cases of free water since January 2016.

"We have worked diligently to restore the water quality and the scientific data now proves the water system is stable and the need for bottled water has ended," Mr. Snyder, a Republican, said in a statement on Friday.

Flint's mayor, Karen Weaver, said she was informed of the decision only moments before it was made public.

"We did not cause the man-made water disaster, therefore adequate resources should continue being provided until the problem is fixed and all the lead and galvanized pipes have been replaced," she said in a statement.

Lines of cars formed outside distribution points on Friday as residents rushed to load up on the last of the free bottles.

Joyce Wilson, 62, who lives in Flint, said she did not trust the water that flows to her taps — not for drinking, bathing or even watering her garden, where she grows food. She has been visiting the free water distribution centers for two years and bringing cases to her older or ailing relatives, friends and neighbors.

"This weekend the lines are so long, it's unreal," she said. "It's like all of a sudden, panic has set in."

Although state officials said Flint's water supply met federal standards, the water can still pick up lead when it flows through the thousands of lead or galvanized steel lines that remain in the city.

Flint is working with contractors to replace all of the affected lines by 2020. Just over 6,200 have been replaced so far, said Steve Branch, the acting city administrator. An estimated 12,000 could remain.

The governor's statement said Flint residents could still obtain free water filters.

Michigan taxpayers have "provided more than $350 million to Flint, in addition to the $100 million from the federal government," the statement said. "The funding is helping with water quality improvements, pipe replacement, health care, nutritional food distribution, educational resources, job training and creation, and more."

Flint has struggled with its water crisis since 2014, when state-appointed officials began using the Flint River, rather than the more expensive Detroit water system, as a source for tap water that was not properly treated before it reached residents' homes.

One study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2016 found that the percentage of Flint children with elevated levels of lead in their blood doubled after the switch, which has also been linked to 12 fatal cases of Legionnaires' disease.

The city switched back to the Detroit water system in 2015, and the crisis resulted in felony charges against emergency managers who had been appointed by Mr. Snyder to help run the city.

Flint was put under emergency management in 2011 because it was struggling financially, but Michigan's treasurer, Nick Khouri, said this past week that he would sign a resolution to release the city from state oversight.

City officials remain concerned about access to safe water now that the distribution of free bottles has ended.

"There are still questions that remain," Dr. Pamela Pugh, Flint's chief public health adviser, said in a statement. "We have not received clear steps as to how the remaining lead in Flint schools will be remediated or how ongoing monitoring will continue for our most vulnerable populations."

Ms. Wilson said that after years of watching people suffer in her hometown, she was disappointed with officials at both the state and local levels.

"I just have no trust in anything they say, because they make these claims and then shortly thereafter, it turns out that they weren't telling the truth," she said.

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10)  Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S.

APRIL 8, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/business/credit-card-signatures.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

The signature was once the way merchants tracked their customers' promises to pay up — and verified their identities. But technology has made them largely obsolete. CreditErica Berenstein


For nearly a decade, Doug Taylor, a sales manager who travels often for work, has signed credit card receipts with a doodle of a dog wagging its tail.

No cashier has ever rejected his "signature" as invalid.

"It gets a laugh, most of the time," said Mr. Taylor, 44, who lives in Mobile, Ala. "Or they just glance at it and don't really notice."

Credit card networks are finally ready to concede what has been obvious to shoppers and merchants for years: Signatures are not a useful way to prove someone's identity. Later this month, four of the largest networks — American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa — will stop requiring them to complete card transactions.

The signature, a centuries-old way of verifying identity, is rapidly going extinct. Personal checks are anachronisms. Pen-and-ink letters are scarce. When credit card signatures disappear, handwritten authentications will be relegated to a few special circumstances: sealing a giant transaction like a house purchase, or getting a celebrity to autograph a piece of memorabilia — and even that is being supplanted by the cellphone selfie.


Card signatures won't vanish overnight. The change is optional, leaving retailers to decide whether they want to stop collecting signatures.

Target plans to eliminate them this month. Walmart considers signatures "worthless" and has already stopped recording them on most transactions, according to Randy Hargrove, a company spokesman. It will soon get rid of them completely.

Mastercard said it has been wanting to make the change for years, but held off until cards embedded with computer chips became common.

Card companies, which cover the costs of fraudulent credit card spending, started adding the microchips more than a decade ago to reduce fraud-related losses. The chips create unique codes for each transaction, making the cards much harder to copy. The chips have long been popular in Europe and Asia but only took off in the United States three years ago, when the card networks began punishing merchantsthat still relied on the old card-swipe technology. At that point, signatures became largely irrelevant in resolving fraud claims.

"The signature has really outrun its useful life," said Linda Kirkpatrick, Mastercard's head of business development in the United States.

It took nearly a century for technology to overtake the hand-scrawled name. The charge card dates back to the 1920s, when stores started issuing embossed metal plates with paper signature strips that allowed customers to add purchases to their ledger and settle the bill later.

Thirty years later, banks and merchant networks introduced cards that worked at a variety of retailers. By the late 1950s, a shopper could leave home without any cash and buy groceries, gas and dinner, secured only by a signature.

Investigators scrutinized signed credit slips to determine whether cardholders were present when transactions were made. Signatures were required on all purchases; merchants that failed to collect them generally had to absorb the losses if transactions were disputed. Retailers could also be held liable if they failed to notice that the signature on a receipt did not match the one on the back of the customer's card.

Then online shopping took off, forcing card issuers to come up with new ways to detect and adjudicate fraud. As their forensic systems improved, signatures became a relic.

Card networks began inching toward getting rid of signatures years ago. Most stopped requiring signatures on transactions below a certain threshold, typically $25 or $50, as far back as 2010.

But old habits die hard, and the jumble of rules about which transactions required signatures and which did not — every issuer has its own policies — discouraged many merchants, especially smaller ones, from scrapping signatures altogether.

This time, though, the card networks are sending a consistent message: Signatures are obsolete.

"I think they're done," said Mark Horwedel, the chief executive of the Merchant Advisory Group, a trade group that represents large American retailers.

Mr. Horwedel said he expected that three-quarters of his group's members will have stopped asking customers to sign their names on credit card receipts by the end of the year. Speeding up checkout lines is a powerful incentive, he said.

Smaller retailers will probably lag behind. ShopKeep and Square, two popular small business payment systems, said they do not plan to immediately update their systems to allow retailers to skip signatures on all transactions. (Both currently allow merchants to disable them on transactions below $25.)

"We'll play it a little bit by ear," said Michael DeSimone, ShopKeep's chief executive. "Right now, I don't think there's a high level of awareness about this. Let's get the changes in place and see how they work operationally, and then we'll adapt."

The new rules will vary at each card network. American Express is dropping its signature requirement globally, on all of its cards. Mastercard is ending the requirement only in the United States and Canada. Discover's change applies in those countries plus Mexico and the Caribbean. Visa is making signatures optional in all of North America, but only for retailers with payment systems that read chip cards.

Some merchants are hesitant to mess with a process that customers have built into their muscle memory. Mikiah Westbrooks, the owner of Brix, a wine bar in Detroit, said she worried that skipping signatures will affect her workers' tips.

She has also occasionally found signatures useful when fighting fraud claims. A customer who challenged a bill last summer backed off when she produced a signed receipt.

"They were lying, and I had proof," Ms. Westbrooks said.

But others are ready to cast them aside. At Snowy Owl Coffee Roastersin Brewster, Mass., pausing for signatures noticeably slows things down at rush hour, said Shayna Ferullo, the shop's owner.

"Any extra second is valuable," she said. "And everyone knows the signature is a joke. No one really signs any more; it's all scribbles and squiggles. Some people do smiley faces."

Mark Malkoff, a New York comedian, and his friend Greg Benson posted a YouTube video that vividly illustrated just how widely ignored card signatures are. They went on a spree through a dozen Los Angeles stores, signing obviously fake names on all of their receipts: Justin Bieber, Jessica Alba, Vin Diesel, Oprah. On one bill, they went with "Mr. Fake Name."

None were rejected.

"Fifteen years, a decade ago, they would look at your signature, they would ask for I.D. if it seemed off," Mr. Malkoff said. "Now, no one cares. It's the most useless, pointless thing."


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11)  Don't Let the Police Wreck Stop-and-Frisk Reforms

By Jenn Rolnick BorchettaDarius Charney and Angel Harris, April 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/opinion/police-stop-and-frisk-reforms.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region


Critics of the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy observing deliberations by the City Council in 2013, the year a federal judge ruled that the practice was unconstitutionalCreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images


We won the stop-and-frisk case in 2013, when a federal court ruled the New York City Police Department's use of the practice was unconstitutional.

But as the lawyers in the case, our work isn't done. Ultimate victory depends on whether we reform the police practices that drove unlawful stops and arrests.

In the court-ordered reform process, improvements to police discipline and supervision are on the chopping block. Without these changes, we fear unlawful stops will explode again.

This isn't theoretical. Though the number of stops has declined, department audits reveal that officers fail to record them up to 73 percent of the time. Among the stops that do get recorded, racial disparities persist at rates similar to when stop-and-frisk was at its peak. Over 80 percent of people stopped are black or Latino. And controlling for crime rates, the police patrol much more aggressively in black and Latino neighborhoods compared to white ones.


The police department has received 1,536 complaints of racial profiling since it began tracking in 2015. But it hasn't substantiated a single profiling allegation in the more than 700 investigations it has closed. None of those hundreds of profiling complaints had merit? And the department continues to impose slap-on-the-wrist discipline for misconduct — a practice that we proved significantly contributed to discriminatory stops.

In our case, the department agreed to participate in a two-part process for reforming stop-and-frisk, as well as trespass stops, which often led to baseless arrests of people of color living in public housing. One set of changes is being developed based on negotiations among the parties' lawyers and a monitor appointed by the court. Additional reforms are supposed to be developed based on community input. It's not surprising to us that the lawyer-designed reforms have not solved the problems, because we always expected the real solutions to come from the community-input process.

The problem is the police department suggested that it might oppose reforms that black and Latino New Yorkers are asking for. As much as the department wants to be seen as listening to community members, it doesn't actually want to be responsive to their needs.

That's a shame because "the communities most affected by the N.Y.P.D.'s use of stop-and-frisk have a distinct perspective that is highly relevant to crafting effective reforms," as Judge Shira A. Scheindlin wrote in her opinion overhauling the department's use of stop-and-frisk.

"No amount of legal or policing expertise can replace a community's understanding of the likely practical consequences of reforms in terms of both liberty and safety," she wrote. Without community input, "the reforms are unlikely to be successful."


Imagine a black man who lived in the Bronx around 2011, the height of the stop-and-frisk era. New York police officers threw him up against walls; they turned his pockets inside out. Some days they accused him of trespassing in his own apartment building. Every time, the police let him go without a summons and without arresting him — because he was doing nothing wrong. He was only walking to the corner store or home. Now he's a father. And while the police department says that stops have dropped, his son is also getting stopped, tossed and humiliated,even if less often.

But the words of lawyers or federal court appointees cannot serve as a substitute for that black father's voice and experiences. He knows better than we do what lasting change looks like.

Thousands of people like this man — people who were repeatedly stopped, or whose children or friends were repeatedly stopped — gave their input into the design of reforms through 64 focus groups and 24 community forums across the city. At the very least, the New York Police Department must adopt these three reforms to fix the problems that took it to court in the first place.

First, the department must establish progressive and serious penalties for unconstitutional behavior by officers. One unlawful stop might lead to retraining, for example, while two could mean a loss of vacation days. The police commissioner could diverge from the guidelines whenever he deemed it appropriate. But establishing minimum discipline standards that set strict penalties would encourage lawful behavior while communicating that the department is committed to addressing misconduct.

Second, the police must use department-issued smartphones to instantly collect information about investigative activities, and to briefly explain these activities in their notes. We heard many community members describe stops that we know police officers did not report. This reform would ensure that more encounters do get reported, which would give the department a better view of whether officers understand the limits on their authority.

Third, the department must create a citywide community oversight board consisting of those who have been most invested in advancing stop-and-frisk reforms. The board would monitor the department's fulfillment of changes and provide assistance. For example, it would help to identify penalties to use in the discipline standards. Such sustained and structured community oversight promises more complete and abiding reform. And it's not unprecedented: Just last month, Chicago agreed to a similar measure.

The New York Police Department says it wants to improve community relations and build trust. But it's easier to go on a listening tour than to give the community power over policies. And it's easier to talk about accountability than to earn trust through action. We can't let the department choose the easy way out.

On April 30, a court appointee is to issue a report on the community-input process. Without discipline standards, improved documentation of police activity and a community oversight board, we believe the routine violation of the rights of people of color during police encounters in New York City will go on. And if these reforms do not happen through the community-input process, then they will not happen.


Ms. Borchetta, a lawyer at the Bronx Defenders, and Mr. Charney, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, are counsel to the plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York. Ms. Harris, a lawyer at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is counsel to the plaintiffs in Davis v. City of New York.


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12) Trump Signs Order to Require Recipients of Federal Aid Programs to Work

APRIL 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/trump-work-requirements-assistance-programs.html?rref=

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President Trump quietly signed a long-anticipated executive order on Tuesday intended to force low-income recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to join the work force or face the loss of their benefits.

The order, in the works since last year, has an ambitious title — "Reducing Poverty in America" — and is directed at "any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes," according to the order's text.

But its programmatic goals are considerably more modest, officials said. Many of the initiatives outlined have already been set into motion by the affected agencies, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services, which has begun issuing waivers to Republican governors who want to impose stricter work requirements on Medicaid recipients as a way to reduce costs.

And advocates for poor people questioned whether the order could achieve even modest goals, saying most able-bodied adults who receive noncash federal aid either already work or face significant impediments to doing so.

The order gave all cabinet departments 90 days to produce plans that impose work requirements on able-bodied aid recipients and block ineligible immigrants from receiving aid, while drafting "a list of recommended regulatory and policy changes" to push recipients off the rolls and into jobs.

"President Trump has directed his administration to study policies that are failing Americans," said Andrew Bremberg, the president's domestic policy chief, who briefed reporters on the order's contents in a telephone call late Tuesday. Journalists were not provided with copies of the document beforehand.

The aim, Trump aides said on the call, is to prod federal and state officials to take a tougher stance with aid recipients — millions of whom currently receive exemptions from existing work requirements because they are in training programs, provide care for relatives or volunteer their labor.

The Agriculture Department is already pressuring states to impose work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the program formerly known as food stamps. Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services granted a waiver to Arkansas so it could require Medicaid recipients to get jobs, participate in job training or engage in job searches at least 80 hours a month.

Advocates say most able-bodied adults who do not already have jobs face obstacles including mental problems, criminal records that deter employers from hiring them and complicated family situations.

A 2017 study of Michigan's Medicaid program by the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation found that three-quarters of those enrolled in the program were already working or physically unable to do so. Another 12 percent were people likely to be exempt, including the elderly and students.

"It's a little bit of a solution in search of a problem," said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow with the nonpartisan Urban Institute, who has studied food assistance programs and other government entitlements. "The administration is reflecting a larger narrative that many low-income individuals avoid work — but there's just not a lot of data to support that position. Many of these people have significant barriers to working full time."

But the greater significance of the order might be semantic — and political.

The order — signed in private on a frenzied news day dominated by congressional testimony from Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, a potential military response in Syria and the president's rage at the raid on Monday on his personal lawyer's office — tries to redefine "welfare" to fit the catchall term Mr. Trump used in campaign speeches.

The word "welfare" — politically loaded and often pejorative, especially among the president's conservative supporters — has historically been used to describe cash assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

The Trump administration wants to change the lexicon. On Tuesday, Mr. Bremberg sought to stretch the term to encompass food aid and Medicaid — programs even many conservative lawmakers view as a necessary safety net for families and individuals on the economic margins through no fault of their own.

"Our country suffers from nearly record high welfare enrollments," Mr. Bremberg said. But Temporary Assistance for Needy Families payments to poor people are approaching record lows.

Mr. Trump, several aides said, is unconcerned — or perhaps even unaware — of the distinction between cash assistance and other safety-net programs.

He calls all of them "welfare," they said.

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13)  Trump Promises Strike on Syria and Warns Russia Against Backing Assad

APRIL 11, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/world/middleeast/trump-syria-attack.html?rref=

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WASHINGTON — President Trump put Syria and Russia on notice Wednesday morning in a Twitter post, promising that missiles fired at Syria "will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'" and telling the Kremlin that it should not partner with a "Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" After the threat, the president said in a separate tweet that relations between the United States and Russia are worse than ever.


The president appeared to be reacting to reports on Tuesday that the Russian ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, warned the United States and its allies that any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down, according to a Reuters report.

Mr. Trump's early morning comments were remarkable in that he is, in a way, telegraphing the United States' response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, which is something he had previously criticized other leaders for doing. Mr. Trump has said publicly that sharing military plans could give enemies information they could use to their advantage. Bracing for a strike, there were already indications that Syria was moving key aircraft to a Russian base in the Mediterranean Sea, taking pains to protect important weapons systems.

But the president's subsequent tweet struck a different tone. After he warned Russia what it would be up against in Syria, Mr. Trump lamented that relations between the two countries were worse than during the Cold War, a decades-long geopolitical and ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union when both were armed for, and prepared for, nuclear war.

Russia has blamed the suspected chemical attacks on the Syrian opposition forces. On Wednesday, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said that if the American missiles were so smart then they should hit "terrorists" and not government targets. She also suggested in a posting on Facebook that the missile attack might destroy evidence of the use of chemical weapons.

Mr. Trump has been critical of Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, for supporting the Syrian regime, led by Bashar al-Assad, believed to be behind the suspected chemical weapons attack on April 7 that has left dozens dead.

The attack on Saturday in the Damascus suburb of Douma has not been confirmed to be the result of a chemical weapon.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Wednesday that the United States is still assessing the intelligence on the suspected chemical attack, but that military planning was proceeding.

"We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined," he said.

The World Health Organization said on Wednesday that there were reports of about 500 people in the Damascus suburb of Douma who have symptoms similar to people exposed to toxic chemicals. It said about 70 people had died while taking shelter in basements and 43 of them had signs of being exposed to "highly toxic chemicals."

The United Nations Security Council, on Tuesday, considered but did not approve rival resolutions from the United States and Russia regarding how to determine who is responsible for the attack.

Mr. Trump's comments about poor relations with Russia echoed what the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said recently in response to the wave of diplomatic expulsions of Russians from the United States and other countries, according to a Reuters report. The expulsions were a coordinated response to the poisoning in Britain of a former Russian spy and his daughter. Since then, analysts have said the Balkans could become a battleground for a new Cold War.

The tough talk on Russia, when it comes to Syria, is a strikingly different tone for Mr. Trump, who has long pushed for improved relations with the Kremlin. Recently, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin for his re-election and even invited him to the White House.

Later on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump clarified his assessment of the poor relations with Russia in another tweet, blaming the decline in Washington-Moscow ties on the ongoing investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.

Russia has been a dominant theme during Mr. Trump's entire presidency, particularly with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia's election interference.

The president repeated his frustrations about the ongoing inquiry, which he said was led by Democrats or others who worked for former President Barack Obama.

Earlier this week, the F.B.I. raided the offices and hotel room of Mr. Trump's personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, enraging the president, who called it an "attack on our country in a true sense." Mr. Trump, however, has not used similarly strong language about Russia's election activities which started as early as 2014.

When it comes Syria, however, Mr. has blamed Mr. Putin for supporting the Syrian regime. Mr. Trump called the suspected chemical attack a "barbaric act" and suggested Mr. Putin bears some responsibility. "He may, and if he does, it's going to be very tough, very tough," Mr. Trump said on Monday. "Everybody's going to pay a price. He will, everybody will."

Mr. Trump canceled a planned trip to Latin America later this week in order to oversee an American response to Syria, the White House said. And the president met with his military commanders on Monday to discuss options.

But publicly discussing American military plans is in contrast to how he has said he would conduct himself as commander in chief.

During tensions with North Korea in April of 2017, he said in an interview on "Fox & Friends" that he would not say whether he would order a strike if the rogue nation continued conducting missile tests.

"I don't want to telegraph what I am doing or what I am thinking," Mr. Trump said. "I am not like other administrations, where they say, 'We are going to do this in four weeks.' It doesn't work that way. We'll see what happens."

That was the kind of message that Mr. Trump repeatedly delivered as a presidential candidate, mocking former President Barack Obama for giving adversaries too much information by setting timelines for withdrawal from combat zones.

And, indeed, while he has not set a public withdrawal deadline for American forces in Syria the way Mr. Obama did for other combat zones, just last week Mr. Trump set a private one that quickly became public when he told military commanders that ideally he wanted to pull troops out of Syria within a few months.

After Mr. Trump's series of tweets Wednesday morning, Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said, "We don't participate in Twitter diplomacy. We advocate serious approaches." Mr. Peskov's comments were reported by the Interfax news agency.

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14)  Police Release First Footage of Officers Shooting Man in Brooklyn

APRIL 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/nyregion/nypd-video-saheed-vassell-shooting.html?rref=

collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=

rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront


Police officers at the scene of the April 4 shooting near the intersection of Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. CreditJohn Taggart for The New York Times



The New York Police Department on Tuesday released the first video of the shooting last week in which officers in Brooklyn shot and killed a mentally ill man who was holding part of a welding torch as if it were a gun and, the police said, pointing it at people on the street and then at arriving officers.

In the video, filmed from a security camera about half a block away, the officers and the man, Saheed Vassell, appear as small figures in the distance. Before the shooting, in the late afternoon on April 4 in the Crown Heights neighborhood, people gather at a bus stop, watching buses pass and peering down the street for another.

Then plainclothes officers in an unmarked sedan come into the picture. They drive down Utica Avenue, turn across traffic at Montgomery Street and crack their doors open. A marked police vehicle follows behind them.

About eight seconds later, before the officers get more than a couple steps from their car, the video shows them with their arms outstretched as if they are firing and people on the street flinch and then scatter. The officers are on one side of Montgomery Street, and Mr. Vassell is outside a market on the other side of the street. Mr. Vassell is seen dropping to the sidewalk.

The footage is at too great a distance to reveal much about the shooting. The police last week released a snippet of video from a different security camera showing Mr. Vassell raising the welding torch as if it were a gun in the moment before the shooting and, the police said, pointing it in officers' direction. Several 911 callers had told dispatchers he might have had a gun, but they were not sure.

Witnesses have said the officers said nothing before firing. The police last week said the officers repeatedly shouted, "Drop it."

The police said the video released on Tuesday was the only footage investigators recovered of the shooting itself. The police declined to release it last week because, police officials said then, the department and the state attorney general's office were still investigating the shooting.

And Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested on Tuesday that the video had been withheld because the attorney general's office had prevented its release during the early stages of its investigation.

But Phil Walzak, the department's deputy commissioner for public information, said on Tuesday that the attorney general's office had never objected to the video being released. He said officials decided to show it publicly, as they have in other cases in which shootings were captured on body-worn cameras.

Amy Spitalnick, press secretary for the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, said in a statement: "Our office played no role in the N.Y.P.D.'s decision to release partial footage concerning the Vassell case last week, and we have not objected to the N.Y.P.D.'s release of video footage of the officers."

The Police Department does not have a clear public policy for when it will release footage in shootings involving officers, and it has previously said the release of footage in shootings captured on officers' body-worn cameras was up to the commissioner, James P. O'Neill.

"The N.Y.P.D. is committed to transparency, as demonstrated with prior releases of body-worn camera footage of officer-involved-shootings when it is available," Mr. Walzak said. "The N.Y.P.D. is also committed to ensuring that the attorney general can conduct a thorough and complete review. The attorney general's office has thus far not objected to the release of video in the Vassell case."


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