11/12/2019

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019

 


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CA Coalition for Women Prisoners and
Freedom Archives Present...

A Living Chance

Exhibit & Panel Discussion
Thursday, November 14th | 4:30-6:30pm
Eric Quezada Center | 518 Valencia Street

Please join CCWP for the opening reception of A Living Chance Project, exhibited as part of the National Women's Studies Association's annual conference. We will host a panel discussion of formerly incarcerated survivors of Life Without Parole (LWOP), who now help lead the statewide campaign to #DropLWOP.

Panelists:
*All panelists are members of CCWP, formerly sentenced to LWOP, and are now outside organizers with the Drop LWOP campaign.

• Kelly Savage
• Dejohnette
• Susan Bustamante
• Tammy Garvin
• Brandi Taliano

*Moderated by Adrienne Skye Roberts, A Living Chance organizer

The exhibit can also be viewed on Friday, November 15th and Sunday, November 17th from 11:30am-1:30pm.

A Living Chance uses audio storytelling, portraits and postcards to share the stories of people serving Life Without Parole (LWOP) sentences in California women's prisons. The project was created collaboratively by members of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) inside and outside of prison to break through carceral boundaries and challenge extreme sentencing. Through A Living Chance, more than 70 people have shared their stories about the racialized and gendered violence that led to their conviction, their day-to-day survival, and the resiliency necessary to fight against these death sentences.


Spread the word on Facebook!
Life Without Parole (or LWOP) is a sentence under California law in which a person is sent to prison for the rest of their life with no possibility of demonstrating their change and growth to seek parole. Described as "the death sentence in slow motion," LWOP effectively banishes people from the world outside prisons and demonizes them as less than human. 
Learn more about the campaign to #DropLWOP!





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Save The Date: Black Lives Matter at School Week, February 3-7, 2020.




Mark your calendar! The Black Lives Matter at School national week of action will be held from February 3-7th, 2020–and educators from coast to coast are organizing to make this the biggest coordinated uprising for racial justice in the schools yet. 
Black Lives Matter At School is a national coalition educators, parents and students organizing for racial justice in education.  We encourage community organizations and unions to join our annual week of action during the first week of February each year. To learn more about how to participate in the week of action, please check out the BLM@School starter kit
If you or your organization would like to support or endorse the week of action, please email us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.  
During the 2018-2019 school year, BLM@School held its second national week of action in some 30 different citiesaround the country. During the nationally organized week of action, thousands of educators around the U.S. wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school and taught lessons about the guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist social movements. 
In addition to centering Blackness in the classroom, BLM at School has these four demands:
1) End "zero tolerance" discipline, and implement restorative justice
3) Mandate Black history and Ethnic Studies in K-12 curriculum
The lessons that educators teach during the week of action corresponded to the guiding principles of Black Lives Matter:
Monday: Restorative Justice, Empathy and Loving Engagement
Tuesday: Diversity and Globalism
Wednesday: Trans-Affirming, Queer Affirming and Collective Value
Thursday: Intergenerational, Black Families and Black Villages
Friday: Black Women and Unapologetically Black
With your help, this year's BLM at School week of action can continue to grow and provide healing for Black students.  Learn more about how to participate by visiting our website, www.BlackLivesMatterAtSchool.com. Let us know what you are planning for BLM at School week this school year or ask us how to get involved with the action by emailing us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.

Related

https://blacklivesmatteratschool.com/2019/10/15/save-the-date-black-lives-matter-at-school-week-feb-3-7-2020/








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Stop Kevin Cooper's Abuse by San Quentin Prison Guards!

https://www.change.org/p/san-quentin-warden-ronald-davis-stop-kevin-cooper-s-abuse-by-san-quentin-prison-guards-2ace89a7-a13e-44ab-b70c-c18acbbfeb59?recruiter=747387046&recruited_by_id=3ea6ecd0-69ba-11e7-b7ef-51d8e2da53ef&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard&use_react=false

On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young.

The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned:

"This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here . . . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken . . . I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!"

A bucket was eventually brought over and:

"I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush."

Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C., that is f_cked up!"

A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A. Young. Kevin has never met Officer A. Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse.

Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration.

No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young. Please:

1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.

2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated.

3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037

4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at:

Main Street
San Quentin, CA 94964
5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.ca.gov



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Here is a message from Kevin Cooper recorded for Prison Radio in 2015 to save the life of Rodney Reed. Please feel free to circulate it on radio, social media and email as it is very timely now. Rodney Reed is scheduled for execution by the state of Texas on Nov. 20, 2019.


Sign the petition! Rodney Reed is Innocent!

Please sign a petition on Action Network telling Bastrop County DA Bryan Goertz to: (1) Cancel the November 20 execution date; (2) Test ALL the evidence; (3) Ensure a new, fair trial free of racial bias and false forensics. Rodney Reed should have an opportunity to fully prove his innocence in a courtroom.




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Sign Global Petition to Dismiss Charges Against Anti-Nuclear Plowshares Activists Facing 25 Years

US ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR

This is an urgent request that you join with distinguished global supporters including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, other Nobel laureates and many others by signing our global petition to dismiss all charges against the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP7). They face 25 years in prison for exposing illegal and immoral nuclear weapons that threaten all life on Earth. The seven nonviolently and symbolically disarmed the Trident nuclear submarine base at Kings Bay, GA on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (View KBP7 reading their statement here.)

This petition is also a plea for us all to be involved in rebuilding the anti-nuclear weapons movement that helped disarm the world's nuclear arsenals from 90,000 down to 15,000 weapons in the 1980s. We must abolish them all. The KBP7 trial is expected to begin this fall in Georgia. Time is short. Please sign the petition and visit kingsbayplowshares7.org. Help KBP7 by forwarding their petition to your friends, to lists, and post it on social media.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 have offered us their prophetic witness. Now it's up to us!

In peace and solidarity,

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Support Committee
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-global-petition-to-dismiss-charges-against-anti-nuclear-plowshares-activists-facing-25-years?source=direct_link&




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Vote Socialist 2020!
Gloria La Riva and Leonard Peltier announce presidential run

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Support the return of Leonard Peltier's Medicine Bundle

November 1, 2019

Dear Friends and supporters,
We need your help in getting Leonard Peltier's- (89637-132) Medicine Bundle returned to him. His Medicine Bundle includes: Pipe bowel, Pipe stem, Eagle feathers, sage and cedar. Leonard is at USP Coleman1, in Coleman FL. which has been locked down since mid-July. This lockdown has led to many "shakedowns" that is where the guards go in to a cell and check it for weapons. Leonard said in a legal letter,  that on"10/22/2019 the shakedown crew came to his cell and destroyed itThey came in and tore apart everything and threw out everything they couldjust because they couldThe most painfuland what caused me the most anger was when they took my religious itemsmyPipe (Chunapain myMedicine Bundleuse in my prayers.

Leonard's lawyer was immediately on top of the situation and asked us to hold off until he could reach Leonard's counselor and get the Bundlereturned.  I heard from the attorney last night and he said the prison has not returned Leonard his Medicine Bundle nor give them any reason for itbeing taken. 

Leonard Peltier as a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewaa federally recognized American Indian Nation is afforded all the legalprotections and rights pursuant to the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act codified at Title 42 United States Code 1996 et.seq.

I am asking if today you would send e-mails to Coleman I SR. Attorney J.C. DiNicola jcdinicola@bop.gov, public relations officer-COA/Publicinformation@bop.gov and to thenBOP-Southwest Regional office SERO/ExecAssistant@bop.gov requesting the return of Leonard Peltier 89637-132, Medicine Bundle

This lockdown has been extremely hard on Leonard and his Medicine Bundle is his way to help him maintain his relationship to his Creator!

Miigwech
Paulette Dauteuil ILPDC National Office
Sheridan Murphy- President of the ILPDC Board
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Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/


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Courage to Resist
Reality Winner, a whistleblower who helped expose foreign hacking of US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election, has been behind bars since June 2017. Supporters are preparing to file a petition of clemency in hopes of an early release. Reality's five year prison sentence is by far the longest ever given for leaking information to the media about a matter of public interest. Stand with Reality shirts, stickers, and more available. Please take a moment to sign the letter


Vietnam War combat veteran Daniel Shea on his time in Vietnam and the impact that Agent Orange and post traumatic stress had on him and his family since. Listen now
This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured. If you believe this history is important, please ...




COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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New Evidence of Innocence Spurs two Court Filings for Mumia Abu Jamal

Press Release

mobilization4mumia.com

September 9, 2019 Philadelphia—The struggle to free unfairly convicted Mumia Abu-Jamal took a significant step forward on September 3, 2019, when his attorneys submitted two documents to Pennsylvania Superior Court.
Judith L Ritter, Widener University-Delaware Law School, and Samuel Spital, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. released this statement: 
"This week, Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a brief in Pennsylvania Superior Court to support his claim that his 1982 trial was fundamentally unfair in violation of the Constitution. For example, he argues that the prosecution failed to disclose evidence as required and discriminated against African Americans when selecting the jury. And, his lawyer did not adequately challenge the State's witnesses. 
"Mr. Abu-Jamal also filed a motion containing new evidence of constitutional violations such as promises by the prosecutor to pay or give leniency to two witnesses. There is also new evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection."
Abu-Jamal has always said he is innocent and the new documents go a long way in supporting his case, undermining police and prosecution claims of how Philadelphia police officer Danny Faulkner was killed.
The filings are in response to the December 27, 2018 decision by Court of Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker reinstating Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petitions for the defendant. Tucker ruled Justice Ronald Castille unconstitutionally participated in deciding the appeals in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court after denying Mr. Abu-Jamal's motions asking for his recusal, creating an appearance of judicial bias.
The "Brief For Appellant" in support of his struggle to gain his freedom after 37 years in Pennsylvania prisons re-opens the PCRA petitions as ordered by Tucker.
The "Appellant's motion for remand to the court of common pleas to consider newly discovered evidence" ask the Superior Court that the case be sent back to the Court of Common Pleas "so that he may present newly discovered evidence."
Among the arguments resubmitted in the "Brief For Appellant:"
Ineffective Assistance of Counsel:Failure to make right argument because counsel did not know the law.
Brady Violation—District Attorney Withheld Evidence:Namely that Prosecutor said that he would look into reinstating the driver's license of key witness, Robert Chobert;
Rights Violation of fifth, sixth, and 14th Amendments:District Attorney manipulated key witness to falsely identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter.
Ineffective Assistance of Counsel:Failure to retain ballistics expert when the trial counsel knew Officer Faulkner was killed by a .44 caliber bullet even though it was known Abu-Jamal's firearm was not a .44 weapon.
Batson:Discrimination in jury selection that kept Black jurors from being sworn in.
Juror Misconduct:Several jurors violated court rules by conducting premature discussions, creating potential for prejudgment of evidence.
Basym Hassan, Philadelphia political activist, said: "The district attorney clearly violated Mumia's constitutional rights by withholding clear evidence that should have been exposed from the beginning. Throughout the entire process of Mumia's approaching the scene up until today's current developments, the law has not been applied as it was created—to get to the truth of a matter. Hopefully, Mumia will get a re-trial and the truth will finally get told. We await his release from hell."
Cindy Miller, Food Not Bombs, Solidarity and Mobilization for Mumia reminds us: "Does everybody remember on December 28, when current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and his staff happened to find six boxes of evidence that had not beforehand been shown? That evidence is partly the reason for this new motion."
The "Appellant's motion for remand to the court of common pleas to consider newly discovered evidence" Miller refers to, includes the suppression of evidence of improper prosecutorial interactions with the state's main two witnesses that were instrumental in ensuring Abu-Jamal's conviction. The motion charges that "Abu-Jamal's capital trial was fundamentally unfair and tainted by serious constitutional violations. Mr. Abu-Jamal respectfully requests that this Court remand the case to the Court of Common Pleas so that Mr. Abu-Jamal may litigate the claims arising from this new evidence."
Pam Africa: "Here's another example of why Mumia shoulda been home—an example of police and prosecutorial misconduct. That evidence has been there for years. It shoulda been in trial records but it was hidden. What else is hidden besides the few things that we have right here."
MOVE 9 member, Eddie Africa said: "If they deal with this issue honestly, they'll have to release him because they know what they did was wrong."
Mumia, 65-years-old, remains in SCI Mahanoy in poor health, suffering from severe itching and cirrhosis of the liver. He recently had cataract surgery in his left eye and is awaiting surgery in his right eye. He also has glaucoma. 
Janine Africa, from the MOVE 9, said: "I just got released from prison after 41 years in May. I want to say, everyone work hard to bring Mumia home so he can be taken care of and get proper medical care, and he don't deserve to be in jail from the beginning."
Mike Africa Jr. added: "The pressure of the people, and of the power of the people is squeezing the evidence of Mumia's innocence out. We shall win."


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Board Game

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/race-for-solidarity

Solidarity against racism has existed from the 1600's and continues until today
An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who always fought back. Appreciate the anti-racist solidarity of working people, who built and are still building, the great progressive movements of history. There are over 200 questions, with answers and references.
Spread the word!!
By Dr. Nayvin Gordon


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Action Alert for Shaka Shakur

Urgent Action Alert: Stop Prison Officials from Blocking Shaka Shakur’s Access to Educational and Vocational Services

Shaka Shakur is a politically active, incarcerated, New Afrikan who was transferred on December 18th, 2018, from the Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) to the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) as part of campaign to neutralize his activism by prison officials. This transfer was done in violation of his due process rights as a prisoner. He is currently incarcerated at the Sussex 1 State Prison in Waverly, Virginia. His VA DOC # is 135647.  Since being held there, his right to access educational and vocational programs has been violated. Below is a summary of these violations in Shaka’s own words:

“1) i was moved out of the state of Indiana against my will in violation of Indiana Code and due process. i was never afforded any form of hearing where i was informed as to why i was being shipped out of state nor allowed to present evidence challenging the decision to move me.

2) Upon my arrival to the prison system in Virginia, i was never given any form of orientation. I've never been informed as to what my rights are, nor informed as to how i can go about challenging any decision made by the state of Va. I've only been informed that the state of Va has custody of my body and that all decisions pertaining to my classification, security level and placement was being determined and controlled by the state of Indiana and its Department of Corrections (IDOC).

3) There is supposed to be an IDOC liaison that oversees my placement in Va and communicates with an official in the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) named Ms. Collins. She has refused to respond to any and all efforts to contact her by myself or any outside sources. Any questions i’ve had pertaining to video visits, security level, placement, and classification have gone unanswered except for being told that it is up to Indiana.

4) Per Indiana Code i am supposed to be afforded the same rights and privileges as if i was still in Indiana. That includes jobs, programming, religious services etc.s To deny me such is a const violation and discrimination. In fact, it denies me equal protection under the law. I am not being allowed to find a job outside of the housing unit. i’m being told that i’m not going to be allowed to drop my security level even though my points will drop as low as 10 points in Va and less than 15 in indiana. Both of which would qualify me for a level 3 security level placement.

5) The counselor Ponce falsified my classification review/progress report by lying and saying that i had assaulted a staff member within the last 12 months. This was in order to justify my continued placement at a level 4/5 prison. When this was brought to her attention, she pretended that she had corrected it and instead further falsified the report and then blamed it on Indiana. i have copies of these documents and my lawyer have the originals [see images posted in event below].”

Furthermore:

6) The doctors at Sussex 1 have not been provided with Shaka’s medical records past 2014. Shaka experiences nerve and other issues due to a degenerative disc on which he has been operated. Without these records he cannot be provided with the necessary care for his chronic condition.

7)There is no appeals process available to Shaka or any other out-of-state inmate. Indiana code establishes the sender state [Indiana] as having unchallenged authority in cases of interstate transfer. Having access only to internal grievance procedures in Virginia, Shaka is unable to appeal decisions made in Indiana

You can read about Shaka’s long history of activism and rebellious activity in Indiana prisons here and here.

What You Can Do to Support Shaka:

On Monday, 11/11, call  the Indiana DOC Executive Director of Classification Jack Hendrix at (317) 232-2247. Leave a message with whoever you are able to speak to, or a voicemail. You can also email Jack Hendrix at jdhendrix@idoc.in.gov.

Please tell them to drop Shaka’s  security level dropped to a level 3 for which he qualifies so that he can access vocational and educational programs, or to authorize Shaka’s lateral transfer to a facility where he can be allowed to participate in vocational and educational programs.

As Shaka stated:

“How am i supposed to work my way back to Indiana if i’m not being allowed to participate in anything positive or constructive?”

To make a donation to Shaka Shakur’s legal defense fund and for more info on his case, go to https://www.gofundme.com/f/shaka-shakur-legal-defense-fund

For more information, contact Seth Donnelly at sethdonnelly2000@yahoo.com.


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50 years in prison: 
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!

FREE Chip Fitzgerald 
Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend
former Black Panther 
              
Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago. A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him.

NOW is the time for Chip to come home!

In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman. During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty. Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years. But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. 

Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings:
·        for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more;
·        for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old;
·        for anyone with disabilities 

Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria.

But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.

Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home.

The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage.

We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately.

What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP:


1)   Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald
Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering.

2)   Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing

3)   Write to Chip: 
 Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527,
CSP-LAC
P.O. Box 4490
B-4-150
Lancaster, CA 93539

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Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/

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Political Prisoners and Assange: Carole Seligman At S.F. Assange Rally
As part of an international action to free Julian Assange, a rally was held on June 12, 2019 at the US Federal Building in San Francisco and Carole Seligman was one of the speakers. She also speaks about imperialist wars and  the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Fumiaki Hoshino.
For more info:
Production of Labor Video Project
www.laborvideo.org 

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One Democratic State of Palestine
https://odspal.net


Why One Democratic State of Palestine

The colonial entity and its imperial patrons have brought the people of Palestine to a historic juncture.  We, the residents of historic Palestine, must dismantle the terms of our collective extermination so as to set up relations which reject racial segregation and mutual negation.  We must dismantle the closed structure and replace it with an open, non-imperial and humane system.  This can only be achieved by establishing One Democratic State of Palestine for its indigenous people, the refugees who were forced out of the country and its current citizens.  This is the key to a 'fair and permanent resolution of conflict' in the region, and to a 'just solution' for the Palestinian cause.  Failing this, war and mutual destruction will continue.

Call for a Palestine Liberation Movement

Call initiated by the One State Assembly, February 9, 2019
We are calling for signatures on the statement to create national and global public opinion specially among Palestinians, Arabs and international supporters about the genuine, just and long lasting solution to the seven decades of the ethnic cleansing war and catastrophe of 1948. The One Democratic State  of Palestine (ODSP) initiative stands in opposition and objection to the dead solution of the two states, the Oslo Accords and exposing the latest racist Nation-State Law that was issued by the apartheid state of Israel which emphasizes the real nature of this manufactured colonial state.
This is a crucial time in the history of our struggle, which needs all activists, individuals and organizations, to consolidate and coordinate their efforts in an organized manner to make an impact, make a difference towards the only solution that guarantees the right of return and deals with our people as one united nation on one united homeland: the One Democratic State of Palestine.
Signatories include: Richard Falk, Alison Weir, Ann Wright, Cindy Sheehan, Tariq Ali, Paul Larudee, Kevin Zeese, Joe Lombardo, Tim Anderson, Amal Wahdan, Judith Bello, Ken Stone, Issa Chaer,  Ali Mallah, Alicia Jrapko …..
Endorsers: Free Palestine Movement, Palestine Solidarity Forum (India), Syria Solidarity Movement, International Committee for Peace Justice and Dignity, Hands Off Syria Coalition, Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, United Front Against Facism and War (Canada), Communist Reconstruction (Canada), Palestine Solidarity Association/University of Western Cape (South Africa), India Palestine Solidarity Forum, Venezuela Solidarity Network, Free Palestine Movement, Akashma News, Media Review Network,  Solidarity Net, Kenya, Human Rights in the Middle East, Cleveland Peace Action, Interfaith Council For Peace In The Middle East Northeast Ohio, Pax Christi Hilton Head, Portsmouth South Downs Palestine Solidarity Campaign
https://odspal.net/call-for-a-palestine-liberation-movement/



Call for A Palestine Liberation Movement and One Democratic State of Palestine

We say YES to the just national struggle for our rights, which unifies the living energies of our people. We are inspired by our glorious history, our great leaders and their decisive battles, our martyrs, our prisoners, our restless youth and those in refugee camps, waiting on the realization of their inalienable right of return. We say NO to begging at the doors of the occupiers in pursuit of crumbs. This has led Palestinians and will lead them to more division and bloody infighting
Palestine was colonized for strategic, imperial reasons: it is at the junction of three continents, with key transport links and easy access for the hegemonic powers on their way to the oil wealth of the Arab nations. But the colonists could not evacuate the Palestinian people, who have lived here for more than 6,000 years.
After a century of dealing with the European colonial states and American imperialism, our Arab nation has been betrayed, and is still being betrayed, by the terror of these countries.
The illusion that Zionists want peace must be confronted. When will we wake up? We cannot speak of a national state for the Palestinians if we do not liberate ourselves from our petty differences while under siege and occupation. We have to recognize reality: that we continue in a period of national liberation, not in a period of state building.
For this reason we believe in the need to withdraw completely from farcical negotiations with the colonial entity. These only cover up and legalize the occupation. They suggest fair solutions which don't exist, deepening Palestinian conflicts and leading to bloody infighting.
The national liberation stage must precede the construction of the national state. Recognizing this provides a compass to guide us in our national priorities and relations with others. This means no more agreements with the occupiers. They will not commit to agreements, and experience shows they are part of a great deception, falsely called a 'peace process'.
This 'Peace Process' became a façade for the colonial entity to proceed with a so-called 'political solution'. Really, they needed Palestinian participation to pave the way for the oppressive Arab regimes to end the boycott and 'normalize' relationships with the entity.
As Arab markets were closed to the Zionist entity by a blockade, it was necessary to find ways to open them through 'normalization'. But Palestinian resistance had generated popular sympathy in the Arab and Islamic world, and formed a major obstacle to this 'normalization'. Zionist leader Shimon Perez admitted: "The main goal of the Oslo conventions was not Palestinians, but rather normalization with the Arab world and opening its markets."
Yet national liberation requires confronting, not submitting to, foreign hegemony. We say that the leadership of our national movement has ignored this, and has instead engaged in binding relations with the occupying entity and its patrons.
The history of the colonial entity in Palestine is nothing more than a history of the destruction of the Palestinian people and their civilization. Two thirds of our people have been displaced and more than 90% of our land has been stolen. Our land, water and houses are stolen and demolished every day, while apartheid walls are built and the racist nation-state law is being enforced by Israeli legislators. There is also a permanent aggression against the peoples of the region, to subjugate them through Salafist terrorism and economic siege.
The USA supports the Zionist entity with money, weapons, missiles and aircraft, while protecting it from punishment at the UN, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, abolishing its financial support for the United Nations Refugees and Work Agency (UNRWA) and halting its financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. How can the USA or its regional puppets ever be 'honest brokers' for the people of Palestine?
The invaders falsely used divine religion in attempts to destroy the indigenous people and their cultures. They said this was an 'empty land', available for another people with no land, but with the 'divine promise' of a religious homeland. Yet hiding settler colonization behind the banner of Judaism wrongly places responsibility on religion for the crimes of the colonizers.
We have no problem with 'Jewish' people in Palestine. That problem emerged in capitalist Europe, not in our countries. We are not the ones to create a solution to Europe's 'Jewish problem'. Rather, we have to deal with colonization and foreign hegemony in our region.
The colonial entity and its imperial patrons have brought the people of Palestine to a historic juncture. We, the residents of historic Palestine, must dismantle the terms of our collective extermination so as to set up relations which reject racial segregation and mutual negation. We must dismantle the closed structure and replace it with an open, non-imperial and humane system. This can only be achieved by establishing One Democratic State of Palestine for its indigenous people, the refugees who we were forced out of the country and its current citizens. This is the key to a 'fair and permanent solution of conflict' in the region, and to a 'just solution' for the Palestinian cause. Failing this, war and mutual destruction will continue.
Yet the old Palestinian leadership has presided over regression. They make agreements for the benefit of the colonial entity and its patrons. They abandon 1948 Palestine and the refugees. They collaborate with our enemies while delivering no tangible benefit for our people.
For these reasons we say that this leadership has become a real obstacle to any future development or advancement for our people. This leadership has lost its qualifications to lead national action. It looks to its own benefit and is too weak to learn the lessons of the anti-colonial movements of the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. It does not see the advances elsewhere in challenging US hegemony. It does not even see the resistance in the Arab and Muslim World, when they manage to foil US and Zionist projects.
Our movement must be an organic part of the Arab Liberation Movement, putting an end to foreign hegemony, achieving national unity and liberating Palestine from the current apartheid system. Yet this great humanitarian goal directly clashes with the interests of the dominant triad - the forces of global hegemony, settler apartheid and the comprador Arab regimes.
We warn all against chasing the myth of 'two contiguous states' in Palestine. This is a major deception, to portray ethnic enclaves within Palestine as an expression of the right to popular self-determination. The goal must be to replace apartheid with equal citizenship and this can only be achieved by establishing One Democratic State in historic Palestine for all, including its indigenous people, the refugees who we were forced out of the country and its current citizens, including those who were drawn into the country as settlers through the Zionist project.
Palestinian parties negotiating for unity and reform should focus on restoring liberation to the core of the Palestinian National Charter. The Arab homeland will never be liberated and unified by subordination to the USA! It will only be liberated by confronting and ending colonial and imperial dominance.
We say YES to national unity in the framework of our Palestinian Liberation Movement, freed from deceptive agreements which only serve the hegemonic powers and comprador regimes.
LONG LIVE PALESTINE, liberated from racial colonization and built on the foundations of equality for all its citizens, rejecting segregation and discrimination by religion, culture or ethnicity; friends with its regional neighbours and with all progressive forces of the world!
**Your Signature**

HTTPS://ODSPAL.NET/CALL-FOR-A-PALESTINE-LIBERATION-MOVEMENT/

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Support Chuck Africa for Parole

Michael Africa Jr. started this petition to Pennsylvania Governor


Charles Sims Africa #AM 4975 has been in prison since age 18. He is now 59 years old and a recovering cancer patient. He has been eligible for parole since 2008 but continually denied because of  his political views.
Charles has 8 codefendants. Two has died in prison, four has been released from prison onto parole. Chuck's sister Debbie Sims Africa is one of the four codefendants released onto parole.
Since coming home from prison, Debbie is thriving. Our community of support has supported Debbie to excel and we are committed to do the same for Chuck so that he can excel as well. 
http://chng.it/Yprs8pXBBp

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On Abortion: From Facebook

Best explanation I've heard so far..., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied..., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question. However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973). Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent. It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional. This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save., , That's the law., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong. That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees. But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy., , She may choose to carry the baby to term. She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between. But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side. Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means.", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y
Sent from my iPhone

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The Campaign To Bring Mumia Home


 

As many of you know, Jalil has been to the parole board twelve times since 2002, when he first become parole eligible.

Jalil has been denied each time for a variety of reasons, all of which are tantamount to the nature of the crime—something that will never change.

Pursuant to NYS Constitutional Article IV, Section 4, Jalil has filed an Application to Commute the Sentence to Time Served with NYS Governor Andrew M. Cuomo. Governor Cuomo has the authority to grant the Application and order Jalil's immediate release from NYS DOCCS custody.

Since the Application's submission it has been revealed that the NYS Board of Parole had a "secret deal" with the NYC Police Benevolent Association (PBA), permitting them to submit opposition letters directly to the Board of Parole from their website. These opposition letters negatively influenced the decision-making process, ensuring Jalil would not receive a fair and impartial parole hearing. During Jalil's 2014 parole hearing, he was told that "current and former members of law enforcement" were parole commissioners, many of whom decided to deny his release.

On December 4th & 5th, 2016, The New York Times published an extensive exposé entitled "The Scourge of Racial Bias in New York States Prisons" that informed: "The racism can be felt from the moment a black inmate enters New York's upstate prisons." This implacable racism has been institutionalized in the entire parole system, permitting subjective biases of parole commissioners to influence parole decisions.

Since the submission of the Application to Commute the Sentence to Time Served, Governor Cuomo has received many letters and communications urging him to grant Jalil's Application. However, due to the revelation of political collusion between the Board of Parole and the PBA, and the PBA/media backlash and scrutiny of the Parole Board's release of Jalil's co-defendant, it has become necessary to launch this initiative in support of Jalil's Application.

Jalil exceeds all requirements for release. His release on parole has been supported by activists, academics and community leaders from across the country and around the world, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the family of one of the victims. The political nature of his conviction has prevented parole commissioners from giving fair and impartial consideration to his release, despite the overwhelming community support.


ACCOMPLISHMENTS

During his 48+ years of his imprisonment, Jalil has accomplished the following: Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology, Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology, Certificate of Architectural Drafting, Certificate of Computer Literacy.

He has established many programs, such as the first Men's Group for therapeutic training in the NY State prison system, an African/Black Studies program, a computer literacy class, a Sociology class and a poetry class. He has received two commendations for preventing prison riots. He has raised money for the children's fund, was office manager of the computer lab and a teacher's aide for GED classes.

Jalil is also the recipient of several certificates for rehabilitation programming, and is a published author, poet, educator and blogger.

As a human rights advocate, he had the first U.S. prisoners national petition heard and recorded by a Special Committee at the United Nations on U.S. prisons and the existence of U.S. political prisoners. He has litigated several civil rights complaints on behalf of prisoners. In 2000, Essence magazine featured an article on father-daughter relationships. The article, entitled "Daddy Says," quoted Jalil stressing the importance of maintaining these relations even during incarceration.

We request that people do the following for Jalil throughout the months of November and December:

We are requesting that Friends and Supporters call, tweet, email and write NYS Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's office and appeal to him to grant Jalil's Application to Commute the Sentence to Time Served.

We also request that this initiative be widely posted on social media platforms, encouraging freedom loving people around the world to join in this initiative.

Since this will be ongoing throughout the months of November and December, we propose that people tweet and/or email Governor Cuomo every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and call and write the Governor every Tuesday and Thursday.

Communications to Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's office must refer to Jalil as: ANTHONY JALIL BOTTOM, 77A4283, Sullivan Correctional Facility, P.O. Box 116, Fallsburg, New York 12733-0115.

Write the Governor:

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of the State of New York
Executive Chamber
State Capital Building
Albany, New York 12224

Call the Governor: 1-518-474-8390

Tweet the Governor: @NYGovCuomo

Email the Governor: https://www.governor.ny.gov/content/governor-contact-form

For more information concerning Jalil's case, check his website: www.freejalil.com and https://thejerichomovement.com/

Click here to download a pamphlet to distribute to your family, friends, neighbors, faith group, etc.


UPCOMING EVENTS



 

"There is no time for despair, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal."

-Toni Morrison
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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa
Take action now to support Jalil A. Muntaqim's release


Jalil A. Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing. Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release.

48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release.

http://freedomarchives.org/Support.Jalil/Campaign.html
Write:
The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of the State of New York
Executive Chamber State Capital Building
Albany, New York 12224

Michelle Alexander – Author, The New Jim Crow; Ed Asner - Actor and Activist; Charles Barron - New York Assemblyman, 60th District; Inez Barron - Counci member, 42nd District, New York City Council; Rosa Clemente - Scholar Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate; Patrisse Cullors – Co-Founder Black Lives Matter, Author, Activist; Elena Cohen - President, National Lawyers Guild; "Davey D" Cook - KPFA Hard Knock Radio; Angela Davis - Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Native American historian, writer and feminist; Mike Farrell - Actor and activist; Danny Glover – Actor and activist; Linda Gordon - New York University; Marc Lamont Hill - Temple University; Jamal Joseph - Columbia University; Robin D.G. Kelley - University of California, Los Angeles; Tom Morello - Rage Against the Machine; Imani Perry - Princeton University; Barbara Ransby - University of Illinois, Chicago; Boots Riley - Musician, Filmmaker; Walter Riley - Civil rights attorney; Dylan Rodriguez - University of California, Riverside, President American Studies Association; Maggie Siff, Actor; Heather Ann Thompson - University of Michigan; Cornel West - Harvard University; Institutional affiliations listed for identification purposes only.

Call: 1-518-474-8390

Email Gov. Cuomo with this form

Tweet at @NYGovCuomo
Any advocacy or communications to Gov. Cuomo must refer to Jalil as:
ANTHONY JALIL BOTTOM, 77A4283,
Sullivan Correctional Facility,
P.O. Box 116,
Fallsburg, New York 12733-0116


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Funds for Kevin Cooper

https://www.gofundme.com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108

For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California. 

Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here . 

In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered  limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison. 

The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls.

Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!




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Don't extradite Assange!

To the government of the UK
Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state. Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority. We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. 
Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning. The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West. 
The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible. They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him. Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger. The world is still watching.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.html
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/
https://internal.diem25.org/en/petitions/1

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Words of Wisdom

Louis Robinson Jr., 77
Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.

"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill. All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No. We aren't going for this. Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did. It happened. It doesn't feel good."

[On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.]
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant.html

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Get Malik Out of Ad-Seg


Keith "Malik" Washington is an incarcerated activist who has spoken out on conditions of confinement in Texas prison and beyond:  from issues of toxic water and extreme heat, to physical and sexual abuse of imprisoned people, to religious discrimination and more.  Malik has also been a tireless leader in the movement to #EndPrisonSlavery which gained visibility during nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018.  View his work at comrademalik.com or write him at:

Keith H. Washington
TDC# 1487958
McConnell Unit
3001 S. Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78102
Friends, it's time to get Malik out of solitary confinement.

Malik has experienced intense, targeted harassment ever since he dared to start speaking against brutal conditions faced by incarcerated people in Texas and nationwide--but over the past few months, prison officials have stepped up their retaliation even more.

In Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at McConnell Unit, Malik has experienced frequent humiliating strip searches, medical neglect, mail tampering and censorship, confinement 23 hours a day to a cell that often reached 100+ degrees in the summer, and other daily abuses too numerous to name.  It could not be more clear that they are trying to make an example of him because he is a committed freedom fighter.  So we have to step up.


Who to contact:
TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier
Phone: (936)295-6371

Senior Warden Philip Sinfuentes (McConnell Unit)
Phone: (361) 362-2300

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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.

Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.

In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.

Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years

Major Tillery Needs Your Help:


Major Tillery and family

HOW YOU CAN HELP
    Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.
    Go to JPay.com;
    code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

    Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:
    The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.
    Call: 215-686-8000 or

    Write to:
    Security Processing Center
    Major Tillery AM 9786
    268 Bricker Road
    Bellefonte, PA 16823
    For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org
    Call/Write:
    Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com
    Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com




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    ILPDC NEWSLETTER BANNER
      

    On Monday March 4th, 2019 Leonard Peltier was advised that his request for a transfer had been unceremoniously denied by the United States Bureau of Prisons.

    The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee appreciates and thanks the large number of his supporters who took the time to write, call, email, or fax the BOP in support of Leonard's request for a transfer.
    Those of us who have been supporting Leonard's freedom for a number of years are disappointed but resolute to continue pushing for his freedom and until that day, to continue to push for his transfer to be closer to his relatives and the Indigenous Nations who support him.
    44 years is too damn long for an innocent man to be locked up. How can his co-defendants be innocent on the grounds of self-defense but Leonard remains in prison? The time is now for all of us to dig deep and do what we can and what we must to secure freedom for Leonard Peltier before it's too late.
    We need the support of all of you now, more than ever. The ILPDC plans to appeal this denial of his transfer to be closer to his family. We plan to demand he receive appropriate medical care, and to continue to uncover and utilize every legal mechanism to secure his release. To do these things we need money to support the legal work.
    Land of the Brave postcard-page-0

    Please call the ILPDC National office or email us for a copy of the postcard you can send to the White House. We need your help to ask President Trump for Leonard's freedom.
      


    Free Leonard Peltier!



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    Articles:


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    1) Ugly From the Outset: A Day of Violence and Anger in Hong Kong
    By Mike Ives, Elaine Yu and Edward Wong, November 11, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/world/hong-kong-protests.html

    A still image captured from a live video shot by Chan Cheuk-hin, a reporter for a local production house, shows the scene just before a police officer shot a protester on Monday.Credit...Cupid Producer, via Reuters

     

    HONG KONG — On a Hong Kong street corner, a young protester found himself staring at the end of an angry police officer's handgun. He was shot.
    Across town on an overpass, a middle-aged man argued with rowdy protesters, accusing them of lacking patriotism for the Chinese motherland. He was set on fire.
    By nightfall, both were in the hospital, fighting for their lives.

    The actions on Monday were the violent expressions of a city on edge and seething with resentment. The protesters are furious with a police force they see as acting with impunity, while their detractors are angry with the increasingly destructive demonstrations.

    Months of antigovernment protests have thrown the Chinese territory into its worst political crisis in decades, with no end in sight. The movement, which started as a fight over an extradition bill, has morphed into a broader call for democracy and police accountability in the former British colony. But neither side seems to agree on what the future should look like under Chinese rule — and neither seems willing to compromise.

    Carrie Lam, the city's embattled chief executive, denounced the unrest on Monday, saying the escalating violence would not force the government to give in to the protesters' demands. She called those who had set the man on fire "enemies of the people."
    Tensions had been building for days, following the death of a student last week who fell from a parking garage amid demonstrations. The protesters see him as a martyr, and have depicted his death as another sign of excessive police violence.
    In response, they called for the city to join in a strike on Monday, disrupting transit en masse and messing up the morning commute. Events across the city, including classes at most of its universities, were canceled.
    Monday's unrest was ugly from the outset. The police officer drew a handgun on the protester as commuters, snarled by roadblocks set up by demonstrators, looked on in disbelief. Several shots rang out, and the 21-year-old man crumpled to the ground in the middle of an eerily deserted intersection.

    As blood pooled on the asphalt, a crowd of angry pedestrians surrounded riot police officers who had arrived as reinforcements. "Murderer!" some of them cried, while an officer doused the crowd with pepper spray.
    Anger over the shooting quickly unspooled across several districts in the city of more than seven million people, drawing suit-clad office workers in the central business district and residents in working-class neighborhoods.
    The scale of the transit disruptions on Monday was not as large as a citywide strike that protesters staged on a weekday in early August. Yet the clashes between protesters and the police were intense by any measure; the shooting was only the third time the police have shot a protester since the demonstrations began in June.
    Notably, some clashes occurred on the fringes of leafy university campuses that have in recent months generally been off limits to such violence. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails and glass bottles at police lines, while officers responded by firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

    Thousands of black-clad protesters also turned up for a flash mob-style demonstration in Hong Kong's central business district around lunchtime, creating a starkly surreal aura in an area filled with luxury malls. Some front-liners used orange traffic cones, bricks and wooden poles to set up barricades on main roads.

    On the side of a Giorgio Armani store, a screen with a video ad that showed sleek models parading down a runway was defaced with graffiti: "They shoot, they murder, they are well-paid." And protesters, some of them office workers in full face masks, yelled insults at police officers along the same lines.
    "Shooting everywhere, you think you're so cool?" one asked an officer at one point, adding an expletive. "Have you killed someone yet today? Have you met your killing quota?"
    Marcus Lee, a 26-year-old lawyer in a charcoal gray suit with a blue face mask, stood outside with a group of protesters who were shouting at the police.

    "The gun wasn't necessary, let alone firing shots," he said, referring to the morning's shooting. "You can see how people are reacting to this. They are angry. It's just very ridiculous."
    Scattershot violence erupted throughout the city for much of the day.
    Video footage showed a police officer on a motorcycle in the Kwai Fong district of northern Hong Kong swerving into a crowd of protesters, clipping at least one of them. The police later said the officer had been suspended from front-line duties.
    Across town in Ma On Shan, a district near the border with the Chinese mainland, a video showed a man who appeared to be a government supporter being doused with flammable liquid and set on fire after arguing with a group of protesters.

    "Go back to the Greater Bay Area!" the protesters shouted at him, using Beijing's term for the region of southern China that includes Hong Kong and neighboring cities.

    As many Hong Kong residents prepared for their evening commute, the smell of tear gas lingered outside their office buildings. In an internal memo, the bank HSBC said that while it was still operating normally, its employees should "leave the office early and under safe conditions."
    The Hospital Authority said that both the protester who had been shot and the man who had been set on fire were in critical condition.
    On Monday afternoon, the police urged protesters to stop threatening public safety. The authorities said that the officer who fired the three live rounds in the Sai Wan Ho area had acted in self-defense against protesters who had been trying to steal his revolver.
    "We certainly believe our officer did not have bad intention to hurt anyone," John Tse, a top police official, told reporters.
    Mrs. Lam, the city's leader, called Monday's mayhem "destructive" and said it could "take Hong Kong to the road of ruin."

    "The behaviors of these rioters have already far exceeded this so-called fight for demands," Mrs. Lam said, describing those who were responsible for the man's burning.
    Mrs. Lam also made it clear that the government would not be pressured into making concessions to the protesters, describing such expectations as "wishful thinking."
    "I am making this statement clear and loud here," she said. "That will not happen."

    Katherine Li, Ezra Cheung and Paul Mozur contributed reporting.


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    2) Big Business Is Overcharging You $5,000 a Year
    Consolidation is great for corporations — and bad for almost everyone else.
    By David Leonhardt, November 10, 2019
    "In the United States, the process is more political, and companies spend vastly more money on campaign donations and lobbying. Lobbyists — and, by extension, regulators — justify mergers with dubious theories about money-saving efficiencies. Somehow, though, the efficiencies usually end up raising profits rather than lowering prices."
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    Thomas Philippon outside Washington Square Park in New York on Friday.Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times

    When Thomas Philippon moved to Boston from his native France 20 years ago, he was a graduate student on a budget, and he was happy to discover how cheap American telephone use was. In those days of dial-up internet connections, going online involved long local phone calls that could cost more than $10 apiece in France. In the United States, they were virtually free.
    Philippon eventually got a Ph.D. in economics at M.I.T. and decided to stay here. He's now a professor at New York University. And over the years, he has noticed something surprising about his adopted country: Internet usage is no longer a good deal.
    Today, his parents pay about 90 euros (or $100) a month in the Paris suburbs for a combination of broadband access, cable television and two mobile phones. A similar package in the United States usually costs more than twice as much.

    Figuring out why has become a core part of Philippon's academic research, and he offers his answer in a fascinating new book, "The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets." In one industry after another, he writes, a few companies have grown so large that they have the power to keep prices high and wages low. It's great for those corporations — and bad for almost everyone else.

    Many Americans have a choice between only two internet providers. The airline industry is dominated by four large carriers. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are growing ever larger. One or two hospital systems control many local markets. Home Depot and Lowe's have displaced local hardware stores. Regional pharmacy chains like Eckerd and Happy Harry's have been swallowed by national giants.
    Other researchers have also documented rising corporateconcentration. Philippon's biggest contribution is to explain that it isn't some natural result of globalization and technological innovation. If it were, the trends would be similar around the world. But they're not. Big companies have become only slightly larger in Europe this century — rather than much larger, as in the United States.

    What explains the difference? Politics.
    The European economy certainly has its problems, but antitrust policy isn't one of them. The European Union has kept competition alive by blocking mergers and insisting that established companies make room for new entrants. In telecommunications, smaller companies often have the right to use infrastructure built by the giants. That's why Philippon's parents can choose among five internet providers, including a low-cost company that brought down prices for everyone.

    In air travel, European discount carriers like easyJet have received better access to the gate slots they need to operate. The largest four European airlines control only about 40 percent of the market. In the United States, that share is 80 percent, and, as you'd expect, airfares are higher. Even Southwest Airlines has begun to behave less like a low-fare carrier.
    The irony is that Europe is implementing market-based ideas — like telecommunications deregulation and low-cost airlines — that Americans helped pioneer. "E.U. consumers are better off than American consumers today," Philippon writes, "because the E.U. has adopted the U.S. playbook, which the U.S. itself has abandoned."

    The European Union has created an impressively independent competition agency that's willing to block mergers, like General Electric-Honeywell and Siemens-Alstom. In the United States, the process is more political, and companies spend vastly more money on campaign donations and lobbying. Lobbyists — and, by extension, regulators — justify mergers with dubious theories about money-saving efficiencies. Somehow, though, the efficiencies usually end up raising profits rather than lowering prices.

    Whirlpool's 2006 purchase of Maytag is a good example. The Justice Department rationalized the deal partly by predicting that foreign appliance makers would keep the combined company from raising prices. But Whirlpool later successfully lobbied for tariffs to keep out foreign rivals. Washers, dryers and dishwashers have all become more expensive.
    The consolidation of corporate America has become severe enough to have macroeconomic effects. Profits have surged, and wages have stagnated. Investment in new factories and products has also stagnated, because many companies don't need to innovate to keep profits high. Philippon estimates that the new era of oligopoly costs the typical American household more than $5,000 a year.

    It's a problem that should inspire bipartisan action. Some solutions feel conservative: reducing licensing requirements and other bureaucratic rules that hamper start-ups. Others feel progressive: blocking mergers, splitting up monopolies and forcing big business to share infrastructure.
    There are signs that the politics of antitrust are shifting. Several Republicans, like Senator Josh Hawley, now talk about the issue, and many Democrats — not just Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but also Amy Klobuchar — do too.
    But we have a long way to go. Too often, both parties are still confusing the interests of big business with the national interest. And American families are paying the price.


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    3) Australia Confronts 'Catastrophic' Fire Conditions
    An emergency was declared for all of New South Wales as risk warnings reached their highest possible level.
    By Damien Cave, November 11, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/world/australia/fires-sydney-new-south-wales.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

    Bushfires in New South Wales, Australia, on Saturday.Credit...Tom Bannigan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    SYDNEY, Australia — Australia is bracing for cataclysmic wildfires on Tuesday, as officials warned that strong winds, high temperatures and parched forests had created some of the worst fire conditions the country has ever seen. 
    After powerful blazes caused three deaths over the weekend, the authorities said people and homes were now at risk from Sydney's outer suburbs up the southeastern coast to Byron Bay, 500 miles away. An emergency was declared on Monday for all of New South Wales as risk warnings reached their highest possible level.
    "If a fire starts and takes hold during 'catastrophic' fire danger conditions, lives and homes will be at risk," said Shane Fitzsimmons, the Rural Fire Service commissioner, adding, "We are talking about something we haven't experienced before in Sydney."
    The fires also became a political issue on Monday as the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, said that only leftist "lunatics" were linking the blazes to climate change.

    Across the region, the day began with preparations for the increased fire risk. 
    • In Sydney's suburbs near the Blue Mountains, where a devastating fire destroyed hundreds of homes and left two people dead in 2013, residents reported packing their cars with clothes, water and essentials in case they needed to flee. Farther north, where fires continued to rage, evacuation centers have been filling up with residents fleeing to safety. 
    • The Country Fire Authority in the state of Victoria reported sending more than 300 members to New South Wales after the state requested help. More than 1,000 firefighters have been fighting blazes across the state since the weekend. Most are volunteers. 
    • Conditions were expected to ease somewhat on Wednesday in New South Wales, with temperatures cooling and winds slowing, but the fire threat was expected to remain for several days. 

    An omen for the current fire season came in September, when a historic lodge in a rain forest burned nearly to the ground.
    The areas where fires were raging as of Tuesday morning, north of Sydney near Port Macquarie and the Queensland border, have been suffering from a lengthy drought.
    But scientists note that moisture levels of live trees and shrubs around Sydney are also at record lows — even lower than the levels during the Black Christmas fires of 2001, which destroyed more than 500 buildings on the edge of Sydney and burned for three weeks.
    Given the drier-than-normal conditions, there is fuel both on the ground, with dry leaves, and in the branches of trees that are dying or dead. And if something ignites, high winds threaten to carry the flames far and wide.

    On Tuesday, the federal Bureau of Meteorology reported, winds could reach up to 70 kilometers per hour, or 43 miles per hour, with gusts in excess of 90 km/h (56 m.p.h). Gusts could be even higher in the mountains.

    "It's not just out in the bush, because many people in cities are right on that edge," said Lesley Hughes, a biology professor at Macquarie University who works with the Climate Council of Australia. "Everybody loves to live in the bush and around the bush — it's becoming an increasingly dangerous place."

    Despite several months of mass protests drawing attention to the Australian public's concerns about climate change, the country's deputy prime minister on Monday dismissed questions about its role in the fires. 
    In an interview with ABC Radio National, the official, Michael McCormack, said it "galls" him when people raise climate change in relation to bush fires. He said global warming was a concern of "raving inner-city lunatics."
    Scientists and firefighters immediately responded. Many pointed out the clear connections between climate change and the extended and more intense fire seasons in Australia, California and other places around the world. 
    "Fires are burning in places and at intensities never before experienced," Greg Mullins, a former fire and rescue commissioner in New South Wales, wrote in an op-ed article for The Sydney Morning Herald, citing rain forests in northern New South Wales, tropical areas of Queensland and the "formerly wet old-growth forests" of Tasmania. 
    He also said that thunderstorms caused by fires — known as "pyro-convective" events — were rare in the past but were now happening regularly.

    Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University, said it was clear that "there's a human fingerprint on the temperature increases since 1950 — all the weather patterns are occurring in a planet that is warming and warming because of human activity."
    By dismissing the role of climate change, she said, the government was choosing immediate disaster response over long-term needs. 
    "We're really missing the opportunity to prepare for future life in Australia," Ms. Gergis said. 
    "It's going to be a lot warmer, and we're going to see a lot of prevalence of extreme fire conditions," she added. "The further we kick the can down the road and avoid these conversations, we're really missing the opportunity to get the Australian public ready for what is upon us."
    Jamie Tarabay, Isabella Kwai and Sasha Gattermayr contributed reporting.


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    4) Is It a Crime to Encourage Unauthorized Immigration? The Supreme Court Will Decide
    An appeals court struck down a broad 1986 law under the First Amendment, saying it covers conversations between family members and legal advice.
    By Adam Liptak, November 11, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/us/politics/supreme-court-immigration-speech.html

    The case is one of several significant immigration matters on the Supreme Court's docketAnna Moneymaker/The New York Times

    WASHINGTON — A 1986 federal law makes it a crime to "encourage" unauthorized immigrants to come to or stay in the United States. 
    "The statute potentially criminalizes the simple words — spoken to a son, a wife, a parent, a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, a student, a client — 'I encourage you to stay here,'" Judge A. Wallace Tashimawrote last year for a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, in striking down the law.

    The law applies to a grandmother urging a grandchild to overstay a visa or a lawyer advising a client to stay in the country while fighting deportation, Judge Tashima wrote. It may cover public officials helping immigrants in sanctuary cities and perhaps even speeches at immigration rallies, he wrote.
    Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the law can be squared with the First Amendment. The case, United States v. Sineneng-Smith, No. 19-67, is one of several significant immigration matters on the court's docket. On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments on whether the Trump administration can rescind protections for so-called Dreamers. Later in the term, it will consider whether immigrants can go to court to challenge orders calling for their expedited removal.
    The First Amendment case concerns Evelyn Sineneng-Smith, who ran an immigration consulting firm in San Jose, Calif. Her clients, mostly from the Philippines, worked without authorization in the home health care industry. Ms. Sineneng-Smith offered to help them get green cards under a Labor Department certification program that she said would give them permanent resident status and allow them to work legally.
    But the program had expired. Ms. Sineneng-Smith nonetheless charged her clients $6,800 to file applications she knew to be futile. She was convicted of mail fraud, a conviction that the Ninth Circuit affirmed and that Ms. Sineneng-Smith is not challenging in the Supreme Court. The question for the justices is whether her separate conviction under the 1986 law for encouraging her clients to stay in the United States was proper.
    In the Ninth Circuit, Ms. Sineneng-Smith argued that she had a First Amendment right to file the applications, which was not a particularly strong argument. "Speech integral to criminal conduct," the Supreme Court has said, is not protected by the First Amendment.
    When the case reached the Ninth Circuit, it did something unusual. It asked for briefing on a different First Amendment question. The court wanted to know whether the law was overbroad, chilling the free speech of people other than Ms. Sineneng-Smith.
    After getting additional briefs and hearing another round of arguments, the appeals court ruled that the law was unconstitutional.

    In urging the Supreme Court to hear its appeal, the Trump administration said the Ninth Circuit had gone too far. The Supreme Court has said that striking down laws because they are too broad is "strong medicine" to be used only when the laws are unconstitutional in a substantial number of real-world settings rather than in "fanciful hypotheticals."
    In his Ninth Circuit opinion, Judge Tashima said that his examples of possible prosecutions "are not some parade of fanciful horribles." 
    "Instead," he wrote, "they represent real and constitutionally protected conversations and advice that happen daily."
    Whatever the literal language of the 1986 law, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote for the government in its petition seeking review, criminal laws are "ordinarily understood not to prohibit abstract advocacy of illegality."
    "Just as a teenager does not aid, abet or solicit marijuana possession merely by saying to a friend, 'I encourage you to try smoking pot,'" Mr. Francisco wrote, a grandmother does not violate the 1986 law "merely by saying to her grandson whose visa has expired, 'I encourage you to stay.'"
    Mr. Francisco asked the justices to decide only whether speech made for financial gain could be made criminal. The 1986 law does discuss financial gain, but in a separate provision allowing longer sentences when money is involved.
    Prosecutions under the law tend to be limited to cases concerning classically criminal conduct by unsympathetic defendants. But not always. In 2012, for instance, a Massachusetts woman, Lorraine Henderson, was convicted of hiring an unauthorized immigrant to clean her home and offering general and not always reliable advice about immigration law.

    In that case, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, of the Federal District Court in Boston, wrote that the "plain and unadorned language" of the law "can be read to cast a wide net over those who interact with illegal aliens by offering employment." 
    Judge Woodlock did not consider First Amendment issues in his decision, but he granted Ms. Henderson's motion for a new trial based on his misgivings about the sweep of the law. Prosecutors dropped the case.
    In Ms. Sineneng-Smith's case, the government argued that it did not pursue prosecutions based on ordinary interactions with unauthorized immigrants.
    That was small comfort, Judge Tashima wrote. "Just because the government has not (yet) sought many prosecutions based on speech," he wrote, "it does not follow that the government cannot or will not use an overbroad law to obtain such convictions."
    In the Supreme Court, Ms. Sineneng-Smith's lawyers said they should be allowed to challenge the law in order to protect the constitutional rights of other people.
    "The very reason that overbroad laws are subject to facial attack," they wrote, "is to remedy the chilling effect resulting from keeping such laws on the books."


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    5) Hong Kong’s Universities, the Last Refuge of Protesters, Become Battlegrounds
    Police have begun raiding the edges of campuses to make arrests, leading student activists to engage with them in pitched battles that resemble medieval sieges.
    "...the students discuss the wealth inequality that has led to visions of a bleak future among many of their generation..."
    By Edward Wong and Ezra Cheung, November 13. 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-students.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

    Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

    HONG KONG — During hourslong standoffs with students this week, the Hong Kong police broke an unspoken rule to keep off campuses.
    Confronted by lines of riot police, black-clad students at the city’s largest universities erected makeshift barricades and threw bricks.The police responded by firing nonlethal projectiles for the first time on campuses.
    In six months of antigovernment protests, universities around Hong Kong had served as sanctuaries for the students at the core of the movement, homes where they could strategize and classrooms where they could debate politics.

    This week, they became medieval citadels under siege.
    The most dramatic clash unfolded late Tuesday night at a bridge leading to the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For hours, police officers fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas and rubber bullets and students hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks, and practiced firing bows with flaming arrows. More than 100 injured students were brought to a makeshift first-aid clinic in a gym.

    By targeting campuses, the police have breached the last refuge of the protesters, a move that brings the violence to the heart of the universities and invokes the pivotal and fraught role of student activism in the global history of democracy movements. 
    “One thing that people have realized is that the protests, the movement, the conflict, is unavoidable,” Gabriel Fung, a 19-year-old second-year student at the University of Hong Kong, said. “It’s going to reach you wherever you are at some point.”
    It is at these universities where young leaders and other students have been organizing revolts against the Chinese Communist Party and spreading the pro-democracy ideas that undergird the protests. And here too, that the students discuss the wealth inequality that has led to visions of a bleak future among many of their generation.

    In Hong Kong, university administrators and professors now find themselves in a difficult position, trying to preach tolerance and walk a tightrope of furious demands from students, the police and government officials. Two schools on Wednesday ended their semesters weeks early.
    “Not a single place in Hong Kong is exempt from the rule of law, and that includes universities,” John Lee, the secretary for security, said Wednesday at a news conference. “Universities are not supposed to be the breeding ground of violence.”

    The showdown has been brewing for years, going back to the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. And the roots of the protests in many ways harken back to social movements elsewhere.
    On mainland China, students have led campaigns calling for sweeping political change, notably in 1919 and 1989. In the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, violence broke out on campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests, most horrifically at Kent State University in 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students, killing four and injuring nine.
    Student activists in Hong Kong have lived by an exhausting weekly rhythm since the movement began in early June: protest on weekends, show up on Mondays for class, study for exams and apply for internships or jobs in between it all. Many argue with parents who disagree with their politics or tactics. Hundreds have been arrested in recent months and quickly released by the police, as required by law.
    It was the death of a university student this month that set off the current round of protests and violence. Chow Tsz-lok, a student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, sustained a fatal injury after falling from a parking garage near a police action on Nov. 4. Thousands attended candlelit memorial rallies last weekend and his photograph is on posters and makeshift shrines all over campuses, since he is now a martyr for other students.

    Roiled by the latest unrest, universities canceled classes from Monday to Thursday. That meant protesters were able to hit the streets at dawn on weekdays after sleeping a few hours. On campus, activists have sprayed fresh graffiti, including phrases cursing administrators.
    The fraught situation led police officers on Wednesday to organize an evacuation of dozens of mainland Chinese students across the border to Shenzhen, where hotels offered them free rooms. 
    One graduate student at Hong Kong University said he and others from the mainland still felt safer on campuses than on the streets. He said many students do not openly express pro-Beijing opinions and sometimes avoid speaking loudly in Mandarin, the dominant language back home. (He spoke on the condition of anonymitybecause of the tensions.) 
    Some university departments have delayed recruitment drives of mainland and foreign students to come up with new strategies; a drop-off in enrollment by mainland graduate students, who often pay full tuition, would lead to budget problems. 
    Hong Kong’s public universities, which have more than 86,000 undergraduate and nearly 11,000 graduate students, each have distinct characters. That means the students have occupied different roles in the movement, and the protests have played out in different ways on each campus.

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with 20,000 students, is considered the most radical campus. Most of its students are Cantonese-speaking locals, some of whom live nearby with their parents in dense apartment blocks. And the campus is located high in the hills of Sha Tin, isolated from the city center, which is an hour’s ride away by subway.
    On Monday, the police arrested five students on the campus’s edge, administrators said. The next morning, the police, still at the border, confronted front line students, and clashes took place over 20 hours. Rocky S. Tuan, the president, who has been known for trying to engage with students during the movement, showed up during a lull in the evening to urge the students to be calm.
    “You all should know that I really want to help you. I will do everything within my capability,” he said. “It is the university’s responsibility to maintain peace on campus, not the police.”
    But as Mr. Tuan began walking away, the police fired tear gas. Mr. Tuan himself was enveloped in the gas. Students set fires to keep the police from advancing, and scores formed human chains to pass along bricks, umbrellas and bottled water to the front lines. Students sitting on one patch of road made gasoline bombs as if on an assembly line.
    “It was a savage move and a type of police violence when they tried to encroach on the university,” said Timothy Chow, 23, an engineering student who graduated in June. “This is why we have to protect our Chinese University of Hong Kong.”
    “When I saw our compatriots and Chinese University staff being hurt by the police, I felt particularly furious and wanted to come back to defend our university,” he added.
    Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

    At the University of Hong Kong this week, front-line students also set up barricades and, against the advice of professors, threw paving bricks off balconies, even though it is considered the most establishment of the territory’s schools. 
    Founded in 1911, it is the territory’s oldest university. Many of its students are foreigners or Hong Kong residents who attended international schools. English is the main language, and the university aims to open a mainland China campus. Among its alumni are many police commanders and Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief executive who is reviled by protesters.
    On Monday, the students were on edge in part because the police had taken a student from a dormitory early that morning.
    Two liberal law professors, Fu Hualing and Johannes Chan, urged a group of front-line protesters in masks not to resort to violence and to understand that the struggle for democracy was a lifetime commitment, according to video footage. But one masked woman shouted they had no choice, and asked: “How many people are we going to sacrifice?”
    “We are better, we are different,” Mr. Fu said.
    “But we shall not forgive,” a young man shouted, “we shall not forget.”

    On Tuesday, police officers arrived at campus entrances to try to clear the barricades. They fired tear gas, but retreated.

    Students have called on the president, Xiang Zhang, to forcefully condemn the police, but he has refrained from doing so, and, unlike Mr. Tuan, rarely holds open forums. On occasion, professors have shown up at the front lines to speak to students, as William Hayward, dean of social sciences, did on Tuesday.
    “Obviously, as it goes on and as it gets more polarized, this becomes increasingly a challenge,” Mr. Hayward later said of student engagement. “Some of them do really open up, but at the same time, you know, of course they’re trying to figure out — is he on our side or is he trying to silence us?”
    As night fell on Tuesday, students traded shifts at the barricades, walking past a famous eight-meter statue of orange corpses, “The Pillar of Shame,” that memorializes the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy students and workers around Tiananmen Square in Beijing by the Chinese government.
    Paul Mozur and Katherine Li contributed reporting.


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    6) New York’s Jails Are Failing. Is the Answer 3,600 Miles Away?
    City officials are looking to Norway, whose correctional system is a radical departure from cold, harsh American prisons.
    By Henrik Pryser Libell and Matthew Haag, November 12, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/nyregion/nyc-rikers-norway.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

    Credit...David B. Torch for The New York Times

    ULLENSAKER, Norway — From the outside, Romerike Prison looks like many correctional facilities in the United States: barbed-wire fences, guard stations and inmate cells scattered across acres of land.
    But inside is a different story. 
    Hard plastic windows allow prisoners to look outside. Contemporary artwork lines the hallways. And when prisoners are released — almost all of them will eventually be freed — a warden gives them his personal cellphone number. Call if you need help, he tells them.
    In nearly every measurable way, the Norwegian correctional system is a radical departure from cold, harsh American prisons and jails. Yet those stark differences were exactly what led officials in New York City to travel recently to Norway. 
    For the first time in a century, the city is embarking on an ambitious plan to rebuild its jails, the second largest correctional system in the United States.

    By 2026, four new jails in neighborhoods across New York have been proposed to replace those at Rikers Island, the notorious jail complex plagued by abuse and neglect that has come to symbolize a criminal justice system that ensnares black and Hispanic people in disproportionate numbers. 
    With the new jails, city officials want to reimagine not only physical features but also how they operate on the inside, creating an opportunity for New York City, supporters say, to become a national model of more humane incarceration. 
    “All of us feel, not just within the city but across the justice system, that we’re really at this kind of transformational moment,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the city agency helping lead the project. “That sounds quite grandiose, but it feels very real.”

    The City Council approved the $8 billion jails plan in October, but essential questions remain. What should modern jails look like? How should they fit into neighborhoods? What is the role of a correction officer?

    In recent months, city officials have set out to find answers, touring facilities across the United States and in Europe. In late September, they touched down in a place far different from New York: Norway, a welfare state with a low crime rate whose population is fairly homogeneous and smaller than New York’s.
    New York and Norway also have other significant differences that raise questions about how the country’s practices can be applied in a large urban setting. The city’s new jails will be in the middle of densely populated neighborhoods, while most facilities in Norway are in rural settings. In 2018, Norway had 26 homicides — about how many New York City averages every month.
    Most notably, Norway has a broad social safety net, including generous education benefits and pensions, which helps prisoners both while in prison and after their release. Inmates receive a daily allowance of about $7.60, which they can save or spend at the commissary.
    Still, its incarceration system has become a model worldwide.
    One stop was Halden Prison, tucked among birch and pine trees about an hour’s drive south of Oslo. It has about 200 inmates, roughly half of whom were convicted of violent crimes, including murder, rape and assault.
    Inside the perimeter of 25-foot-tall smooth concrete barriers, inmates can wear their own clothing and have some freedom to move around the grounds alone. It is eerily quiet — no sounds of slamming metal doors or dangling key chains or shouting inmates and officers.
    It is often considered the world’s most humane maximum-security prison. 
    “Halden is in this extraordinarily beautiful, rural setting, and that’s obviously not New York City,” said Ms. Glazer, who toured the property with one of the prison’s architects. “But there are elements of what’s in Halden that you can find anywhere: the openness of light, the effect of air coming through.”

    Later in the weeklong visit, the team, which also included criminal justice advocates, visited Romerike, a high-security prison about 65 miles north of Halden in a town of about 39,000 people. 
    Tunnels connect prison cells to a cafeteria and a recreation area, allowing inmates to move without officers by their sides. Inmates can decorate their cells with personal items.
    There are workshops with wood milling machines, a gym, a stocked kitchen for cooking classes and a library. 
    Perhaps the most startling difference, though, is the relationship between officers and inmates. 
    Every officer is assigned to about five or six inmates, compared with about 50 prisoners for every officer in New York. In Norway, officers socialize with them over meals and prepare them for life after their release. In fact, when inmates leave they must have a place to live and be enrolled in school or have found a job.
    That connection, one Romerike guard told the group from New York, made them “kind of friends” — a remark that startled some visitors.

    In an interview, Leif Arne Rosand, a warden at Romerike, said the officer’s comment had been lost in translation, but acknowledged that the way guards open up to inmates might seem unusual to Americans. 
    It is called “dynamic security,” a theory that interpersonal relationships among officers and inmates help promote safety. Mr. Rosand offered an example: “If you’re in dialogue with a group where the role of being a father is discussed, you need to tell them you are a father, too,” he said.
    During a walk through the prison yard, Mr. Rosand came across one of Romerike’s better-known inmates. He had been convicted of drug-related charges and spent time in a prison in Lithuania. Prison officials asked that his name be withheld because he had not given consent to an interview.
    “I am dead tired of being here,” the man told Mr. Rosand, laughing. But he added that the prison was much nicer than the one in Lithuania, which he described with a profanity and added, “Six men per cell and rats.” 
    Brenda Cooke, the chief of staff at New York City’s Department of Corrections who also traveled to Norway, said officers in New York already got to know inmates, though on a limited basis.
    “The difference was that connection between the relationship of understanding the person who was with us in custody and then how you can support, direct help and shape their opportunity once they’re released,” Ms. Cooke said.

    Jarrod Shanahan, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University outside Chicago who has written extensively about Rikers, said he had little faith in correction officers and administrators being capable of change.
    “They can try to implement whatever design and management plan they please, but it will be futile in the face of the immense political power wielded by the city’s jail guards and police,” Dr. Shanahan said. “These entities, backed by powerful unions, simply disregard civilian command and do as they wish in their dealings with working-class communities of color.”
    Elias Husamudeen, the president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, the union that represents nearly all of the city’s 11,000 jail officers and that opposed the closing of Rikers, said city officials did not need to travel to Norway to learn how officers could help inmates.
    “I’ve been doing this for 31 years and there are inmates I see on the street who were in my custody, and I ask, ‘How are you doing? Are you staying out of trouble?’” said Mr. Husamudeen, illustrating the rapport he had established with prisoners.
    Still, in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other country, some of Norway’s methods have been adopted by Oregon and North Dakota. 
    Officials in those states, as well as those from New York City, traveled to Norway with a group called Amend, a program at the University of California, San Francisco, that works to improve prison culture and the health of inmates and employees.
    “When people come with us, they see that there is a different way,” said Brie Williams, Amend’s director and a professor of medicine at the university. “Treating people with respect and dignity and humanity is key to making things safer and the lives of people incarcerated more meaningful.”

    Yet there are fundamental differences between Norway and the United States. America has a history of mass incarceration and stiff punishments, while the longest sentence in Norway for most crimes is 21 years. (The far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 attack, was sentenced to 21 years, though his sentence can be extended by five-year increments for the rest of his life.)
    In New York, the city tracks the use of force by officers on inmates and how often released inmates end up back in custody.
    Ms. Glazer of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice said that when she asked Norway correction officials for that kind of data, they said they either did not keep track or did not know; they also did not know how much it costs to run the country’s prisons. (Mr. Rosand, the warden, says Romerike averages about three or four use-of-force incidents per week, though the vast majority do not involve a weapon; New York City averages about 18 per day.)
    Norwegian officials have explained their approach as the honorable way to treat people, arguing that anything less would reflect poorly on the country.

    “It is a social welfare state, so there is a level of resources applied, whether you’re in or out, that’s just different from here,” Ms. Glazer. “Those big investments, obviously, are beyond our scope.”
    Now that the City Council has approved the jails plan, the city is expected to work with architects, designers and construction firms to incorporate the best design aspects they have studied.
    “We have an opportunity here to really push the industry to bring us creativity,” Ms. Cooke said. “We’re building these facilities not for today or tomorrow but for 50 years from now.”
    Henrik Pryser Libell reported from Ullensaker and Oslo, and Matthew Haag from New York.


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    7)  Soldier Kills Man at Lebanon Protest, 1st Fatality in Nation’s Turmoil
    The killing was sure to inflame tensions already running high in the country, which has been engulfed by protests for the past month.
    By The Associated Press, November 12. 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/world/americas/lebanon-protester-shot.html

    Credit...Nabil Mounzer/EPA, via Shutterstock

    BEIRUT, Lebanon — A local official for a Lebanese political party was shot dead by soldiers trying to open a road closed by protesters in southern Beirut late Tuesday, the army reported, marking the first death in 27 days of nationwide protests.
    An army statement said the man was shot in the Khaldeh neighborhood after an altercation during which a soldier opened fire to disperse the crowd, hitting one person. It said the army command had opened an investigation.
    The killing was sure to inflame tensions already running high in the country, which has been engulfed by nationwide protests since Oct. 17. The leaderless, economically driven protests were triggered by new proposed taxes and have quickly evolved into the most sustained that Lebanon has seen in years.

    The victim was identified as a local official with the Progressive Socialist Party headed by Walid Jumblatt, political leader of Lebanon’s Druze community. It was confirmed by the party’s Al-Anbaa newspaper.

    Protesters had poured into the streets Tuesday night closing roads around Lebanon after President Michel Aoun said in a televised interview that there could be further delays before a new government is formed.
    Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned his government Oct. 29 in response to the demonstrations. Protesters are demanding a government made up of technocrats that would address the worst economic and financial crisis Lebanon has confronted in decades. 
    Lebanon’s banking association said banks would remain closed because of a strike by employees. Banks were supposed to have reopened Tuesday following a three-day closure. Depositors have rushed to withdraw money in recent days amid the rapidly deteriorating economic and financial crisis.


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    8) Handcuffed for Selling Churros: Inside the World of Illegal Food Vendors
    On the male-dominated black market, a permit for mobile food vending can easily cost $25,000.
    By Sharon Otterman, November 12, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/nyregion/churro-lady-subway-vendors.html

    Credit...Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

    The hot dog carts that are synonymous with New York City street food are run mostly by men. So are the ice cream stands in Central Park, and the halal carts dishing out aromatic tins of chicken and rice in Midtown. 
    But just as much a part of New York City life, if harder to spot, are the female street vendors, who often hawk their wares from small pushcarts. They sell things like sliced mangos on busy street corners, churros on subway platforms and Italian ices outside of schools in warm weather, usually for a dollar or two.
    A video of police officers handcuffing a woman selling churros on Friday in a subway station in Brooklyn has focused attention on this subset of street sellers, who generally work without permits or permanent locations. That puts them at risk of fines, property confiscation and arrest.

    Their decision to work illegally, those who study street vendors say, is linked to a broader problem: It is practically impossible to get a permit for mobile food vending in New York City, except on the black market. In that booming, male-dominated economy, $200 city-issued permits, good for two years, can easily rent for upward of $25,000 each.

    The woman’s detention was also part of a string of recent incidents posted to social media that some say highlight aggressive policing in the subways, even as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo calls for 500 more officers to join the force. On Monday afternoon, another woman was arrested after selling churros at a different station in Brooklyn. The police said she had two outstanding warrants, for prior summonses for selling unlicensed food.
    Edward Delatorre, the chief of the Police Department’s transit bureau, said a common theme was that people refused to cooperate with the police.
    “When people don’t follow our requests or commands, there’s a potential for escalation,” Chief Delatorre said at a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board meeting on Tuesday.

    To operate legally, mobile food vendors need two documents: a mobile food vending license for themselves, which costs $50, and a mobile food vending permit for each cart or food truck, which costs $200.

    The city limits the number of citywide mobile food vending permits to 2,900 — a cap that has remained unchanged since 1983. Even though an additional 2,200 permits are issued for things like seasonal food selling and fruit and vegetable vendors, demand far exceeds supply. 
    Because of the permits’ scarcity, the market for them functions a bit like the taxi medallion market, said Mohamed Attia, executive director of the Street Vendor Project, which supports lifting the cap. Owners sometimes lease their permits to other vendors — mostly poor, immigrant families — for upward of 125 times the price, which can drive the vendors into debt. 
    This practice violates city Department of Health regulations, because the permits are nontransferable. As a result, Mr. Attia said, transactions are typically all-cash deals and no paperwork is exchanged, leaving the lessees particularly vulnerable. 
    Kabir Ahmed, a halal cart vendor profiled by The New York Times in 2017, for example, said he had paid $25,000 to lease his license.
    “We think it doesn’t make any sense that they are able to get vending licenses, but not vending permits,” Mr. Attia said.

    New York capped its wait-list for citywide permits in 2007, when there were 2,500 names on it, Mr. Attia said. So, vendors who have gone into business since then are likely leasing their permits. The Street Vendor Project estimates that some 20,000 vendors work on the city’s streets, more than half of whom sell food.

    Immigration status is not a central factor limiting people’s access to their own permits, Mr. Attia added. Undocumented immigrants can get both mobile food vending licenses and permits, because only a tax identification number is required for them.
    A special class of permits exists for disabled veterans, who are permitted to sell food along the perimeter of city parks without restriction. Also, unlimited permits can be granted for food vending on private property, with a lease agreement from the owner, the Department of Health said.

    The City Council is considering legislation to gradually increase the number of mobile food vending permits over the next several years. Councilman Rafael L. Espinal Jr. said on Monday that 29 Council members had signed on; his district includes the subway station, Broadway Junction, where the woman was handcuffed on Friday.
    In the State Senate, Jessica Ramos of Queens has introduced a billthat would eliminate caps on the number of food and merchandise street vendors statewide. The legislation is similar to a recent law in California that largely legalized street selling.
    “It’s about legalizing their small businesses,” Ms. Ramos said.

    Opponents of issuing more permits, which include the restaurant industry and various business improvement district groups, say the changes would hurt brick-and-mortar storefronts and congest sidewalks. They want robust enforcement of the existing rules and more regulations dictating where street vendors can operate. 
    Mayor Bill de Blasio did not throw his weight behind adding permits in 2017, when an earlier version of the bill was considered in the City Council. He has since said he supports an increase. 
    Also in 2017, the city’s Department of Health warned that without additional sanitary commissaries to house food carts, and better enforcement of the smoke some of them produce, more carts could pose health challenges.

    On Friday, several police officers surrounded Elsa Morochoduchi, a 43-year-old immigrant from Ecuador who was selling churros in a subway station, which is not permitted by the M.T.A. They handcuffed her, confiscated her cart and ultimately gave her a summons. 
    Mr. Attia said that he had later met with Ms. Morochoduchi and that she did not have a vending license or a permit for her churro cart. If she had both documents, she would have been able to sell on the street, but not in the station.

    Yes. In October, the Urban Justice Center published what it believes is the first survey of female street vendors in New York. Of the 50 women surveyed, 36 were from Mexico or Ecuador, like Elsa. Their average age was 46, and most were the primary breadwinners in their families.
    The vendors typically lived in Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx, and 72 percent of them did not have vending permits. The women said the work could be dangerous, but some said they still preferred it over domestic or restaurant work, their other main employment options.

    The issue is lightly researched, so it is impossible to know. On the lucrative, tourist-rich corners of Manhattan, mobile food vendors tend to be men. But in some immigrant neighborhoods, the majority of the sellers are women. 
    In Corona, Queens, for example, a Street Vendor Project survey in 2017 found that 79 percent of the vendors were women. The organization also found that women seem to be disproportionately penalized for street vending. 
    In 2018, 57 percent of the tickets for unlicensed mobile food vending were issued to women, according to data from the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. At the same time, only 22 percent of the 46,000 people who received mobile food vending licenses from 2000 to 2018 were female, the Street Vendor Project found. 
    Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.


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    Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations! 
    Charity for the Wealthy!






























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