After a public kiss, vacationing lesbian couple violently arrested in Hawaii by off-duty cop
Friday, October 30, 2015
Polish Court Turns Down U.S. Request for Roman Polanski’s Extradition
Polish Court Turns Down U.S. Request for Roman Polanski’s Extradition
"Judge Mazur sided with Mr. Polanski’s lawyers. “I’m terrified by the statements of some of my colleagues in the U.S.,” he said, citing an account last year that a Los Angeles judge thought Mr. Polanski should “cool his heels in jail” if he returned to the United States under a proposed deal in which the authorities would agree that the filmmaker had already served his punishment. (The deal did not happen.)
“If I were to behave like them, I’d lose the respect of all my subordinates here,” Judge Mazur said. “I do not find any logical, rational explanation as to why the U.S. is pursuing the extradition.”
Shaker Aamer Is Released From Guantánamo Prison After 13 Years
Shaker Aamer Is Released From Guantánamo Prison After 13 Years
"Held in direct violation to the US Constitution. "WASHINGTON — Shaker Aamer, whose detention at theGuantánamo Bay prison in Cuba attracted the attention of human rights lawyers, political leaders and rock stars, was freed on Friday after more than 13 years in captivity, British officials announced. Mr. Aamer, a Saudi citizen and British resident, was flown to London.
Mr. Aamer’s transfer, which was confirmed by the British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, ends one of the best-known cases at the American prison.
At its center was a charismatic, English-speaking detainee who has been the subject of intense dispute. Military officials have portrayed Mr. Aamer, 46, as a dangerous Islamist leader, while human rights advocates see him as a victim falsely accused of ties to terrorism. Now Mr. Aamer will be free to speak his mind in public."
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
Video recordings of police officers battering or even murdering unarmed black citizens have validated longstanding complaints by African-Americans and changed the way the country views the issue of police brutality. Police officers who might once have felt free to arrest or assault black citizens for no cause and explain it away later have been put on notice that the truth could be revealed by a cellphone video posted on the Internet.
This kind of public scrutiny is all to the good, given the damage police brutality has done to African-American communities for generations and the corrosive effect it has on the broader society. Yet the peeling away of secrecy on these indisputably unconstitutional practices is now being challenged by politicians who want to soft-pedal or even ignore police misconduct while attacking the people who expose it or raise their voices in protest against it. This trend is like something straight out of Orwell.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — the increasingly desperate presidential candidate who is going nowhere fast — took this posture on Sunday when he accused President Obama of encouraging “lawlessness” and violence against police officers by acknowledging that the country needed to take both police brutality and the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement seriously.
The president is absolutely right. This movement focuses on the irrefutable fact that black citizens are far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police. The more the country ignores that truth, the greater the civic discord that will flow from it.
The recent remarks of James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were not as racially poisonous as Mr. Christie’s, but they were no less incendiary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that heightened scrutiny of police behavior — and fear of appearing in “viral videos” — was leading officers to avoid confrontations with suspects. This, he said, may have contributed to an increase in crime.
There is no data suggesting such an effect, and certainly Mr. Comey has none. But his suggestion plays into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public. Justice Department officials who have made a top priority of prosecuting police departments for civil rights violations — and who dispute that heightened scrutiny of the police drives up crime — were understandably angry at Mr. Comey’s speculations.
His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers battering suspects in the first place.
A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times published a lengthy investigation into racial profiling and abusive police behavior in Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After reviewing tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters found that the police pulled over African-American drivers at a rate far out of proportion to their share of the local driving population. The police searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites — even though whites where significantly more likely to be caught with drugs and weapons.
Greensboro police officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for no reason and more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when the driver offered no physical resistance. A black Greensboro man who nearly lost his job as a result of asking an officer why he was being ordered out of his car during a nightmarish encounter said: “Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldn’t call one.”
This is the kind of treatment that some Americans routinely face at the hands of their police departments. Mr. Comey’s speculations about alleged pressure on officers to stand down shows that he hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
This kind of public scrutiny is all to the good, given the damage police brutality has done to African-American communities for generations and the corrosive effect it has on the broader society. Yet the peeling away of secrecy on these indisputably unconstitutional practices is now being challenged by politicians who want to soft-pedal or even ignore police misconduct while attacking the people who expose it or raise their voices in protest against it. This trend is like something straight out of Orwell.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — the increasingly desperate presidential candidate who is going nowhere fast — took this posture on Sunday when he accused President Obama of encouraging “lawlessness” and violence against police officers by acknowledging that the country needed to take both police brutality and the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement seriously.
The president is absolutely right. This movement focuses on the irrefutable fact that black citizens are far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police. The more the country ignores that truth, the greater the civic discord that will flow from it.
The recent remarks of James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were not as racially poisonous as Mr. Christie’s, but they were no less incendiary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that heightened scrutiny of police behavior — and fear of appearing in “viral videos” — was leading officers to avoid confrontations with suspects. This, he said, may have contributed to an increase in crime.
There is no data suggesting such an effect, and certainly Mr. Comey has none. But his suggestion plays into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public. Justice Department officials who have made a top priority of prosecuting police departments for civil rights violations — and who dispute that heightened scrutiny of the police drives up crime — were understandably angry at Mr. Comey’s speculations.
His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers battering suspects in the first place.
A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times published a lengthy investigation into racial profiling and abusive police behavior in Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After reviewing tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters found that the police pulled over African-American drivers at a rate far out of proportion to their share of the local driving population. The police searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites — even though whites where significantly more likely to be caught with drugs and weapons.
Greensboro police officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for no reason and more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when the driver offered no physical resistance. A black Greensboro man who nearly lost his job as a result of asking an officer why he was being ordered out of his car during a nightmarish encounter said: “Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldn’t call one.”
This is the kind of treatment that some Americans routinely face at the hands of their police departments. Mr. Comey’s speculations about alleged pressure on officers to stand down shows that he hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
Monday, October 26, 2015
NYTimes: The Law School Debt Crisis
NYTimes: The Law School Debt Crisis
"In 2013, the median LSAT score of students admitted to Florida Coastal School of Law was in the bottom quarter of all test-takersnationwide. According to the test’s administrators, students with scores this low are unlikely to ever pass the bar exam.
Despite this bleak outlook, Florida Coastal charges nearly $45,000 a year in tuition, which, with living expenses, can lead to crushing amounts of debt for its students. Ninety-three percent of the school’s 2014 graduating class of 484 had debts and the average was almost $163,000 — a higher average than all but three law schools in the country. In short, most of Florida Coastal’s students are leaving law school with a degree they can’t use, bought with a debt they can’t repay.
If this sounds like a scam, that’s because it is. Florida Coastal, in Jacksonville, is one of six for-profit law schools in the country that have been vacuuming up hordes of young people, charging them outrageously high tuition and, after many of the students fail to become lawyers, sticking taxpayers with the tab for their loan defaults.
Yet for-profit schools are not the only offenders. A majority of American law schools, which have nonprofit status, are increasingly engaging in such behavior, and in the process threatening the future of legal education.
Why? The most significant explanation is also the simplest — free money."
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Recommended read from Salon.com: Holocaust experts shame Netanyahu: "He is as bad a historian as he is a politician”
"JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stirred controversy by intimating the Holocaust may not have been Adolf Hitler’s idea, and that in fact, he had been led down the garden path by the then Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian.
Germany’s response: No, no, it was us.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews and Hajj Amin al-Husseini went to him and said if you expel them they’ll all come here. So what should I do with them? He asked. Burn them, he said.” These were Netanyahu’s words before the World Zionist Congress on Tuesday night."
Israeli military kills Palestinian kids, United Nations whitewashes it - Salon.com
Israeli military kills Palestinian kids, United Nations whitewashes it - Salon.com
"Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon capitulated to pressure from the Obama administration and removed Israel’s armed forces from a child rights “blacklist.” The decision not only undermines a strong global tool necessary to protect children in armed conflict, but provides Israeli forces with tacit approval to continue committing egregious violations against children with impunity."
Why Palestinians Need an International Protection Force | The Nation
Why Palestinians Need an International Protection Force | The Nation
"It will ensure that lives are placed above politics, and defend a besieged population nearing its 50th year under brutal occupation."
"If elected president, Ben Carson won’t just continue to wage the perennially failing War on Drugs, like all of his predecessors in both parties since Richard Nixon—he would intensify the failed policy, because ..."
Ben Carson, Pot Prohibitionist - The Atlantic
"If elected president, Ben Carson won’t just continue to wage the perennially failing War on Drugs, like all of his predecessors in both parties since Richard Nixon—he would intensify the failed policy, because ... well, better to quote him directly.
Here is the hard-to-follow reasoning he offered in an interview with Glenn Beck:
Glenn Beck: Do you continue the War on Drugs?
Ben Carson: Absolutely.
Beck: You do?
Carson: I intensify it.
Beck: Let me ask you a question. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be working now.
Carson: Yeah, well, go down to the border in Arizona like I was a few weeks ago. I mean, it’s an open highway. And the federal government isn’t doing anything to stop it.
Beck: Okay. Legalize marijuana?
Carson: I disagree with it.
The implication seems to be that the federal government isn’t trying very hard to interdict drugs coming across the Mexican border, or that the double border-fence that Carson advocates would somehow make the War on Drugs a winning proposition."
Thursday, October 22, 2015
The Two Asian Americas - The New Yorker
The Two Asian Americas - The New Yorker. According to Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America,” published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act, signed into law on October 3, 1965, this swarm of circumstances undid Bagai. In the room in San Jose, he left a suicide note addressed, in an act of protest, to the San Francisco Examiner. The paper published it under the headline “Here’s Letter to the World from Suicide.” “What have I made of myself and my children?” Bagai wrote. “We cannot exercise our rights. Humility and insults, who is responsible for all this? Me and the American government. Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and bridges burnt behind.”
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Homophobia In Myanmar: The Cruel Legacy Of A Colonial-Era Law
Homophobia In Myanmar: The Cruel Legacy Of A Colonial-Era Law
"Like Malaysia, Myanmar -- also a former British colony -- still has Section 377 of the penal code on its books. The law criminalizes “carnal intercourse,” which includes same-sex intercourse. It is punishable by 10 years to life in prison. (Myanmar's famous politician and human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi has called for the repeal of Section 377 in the past.)"
Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo' Guzmán injured after narrowly evading capture | World news | The Guardian
"Guzmán, the world’s most wanted narcotics baron, was injured in the leg and face when he was nearly cornered by police, the Mexican government said. "
'Driving is a privilege, voting is a right': Alabama license-office cuts bite deep | US news | The Guardian
"A series of recent government maneuvers in Alabama may prevent some citizens from voting across large swathes of the state, particularly in poverty-stricken Black Belt counties.
The first of the moves happened a year ago, when Alabama enacted a law requiring voters to present government-issued identification at the polls. The second happened two weeks ago, when the state shut down dozens of driver’s license-issuing offices, leaving 28 counties with no means of issuing the most common form of ID.
The Republican governor, Robert Bentley, says the office closures are a cost-cutting measure. Opponents say they are an effort toward disenfranchisement that harkens back to Alabama’s painful past. A half-century ago, Bloody Sunday in Selma led to the Voting Rights Act, removing obstacles for black voters."
Friday, October 16, 2015
Torture by another name: CIA used 'water dousing' on at least 12 detainees | Law | The Guardian
Torture by another name: CIA used 'water dousing' on at least 12 detainees | Law | The Guardian
"At least a dozen more people were subjected to waterboard-like tactics in CIAcustody than the agency has admitted, according to a fresh accounting of the US government’s most discredited form of torture.
The CIA maintains it only subjected three detainees to waterboarding. But agency interrogators subjected at least 12 others to a similar technique, known as “water dousing”, that also created a drowning sensation or chilled a person’s body temperature – sometimes through “immersion” in water, and often without use of a board."
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Ben Carson Is Wrong on Guns and the Holocaust
Ben Carson Is Wrong on Guns and the Holocaust
"TO anyone who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust for a living, as I do, Ben Carson’s statements about gun control are difficult to fathom. “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” the Republican presidential candidate said in a recent interview.
Mr. Carson’s argument, which he made in his new book “A More Perfect Union” and was asked to defend last week, is strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into a historical situation where it was not seen as important. I can think of no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust in which Nazi gun control measures feature as a significant factor. Neither does gun control figure in the collective historical memory of any group that was targeted by the Nazi regime, be they Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, gay people or Poles. It is simply a nonissue."
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
All In with Chris Hayes - If Americans cannot see that killing this 12 year old boy was unjustified how can I ever hope for justice? 400 years have passed and Euro-Americans still do not value "Black Lives". This is not a universal indictment of Euro-Americans but their inability to control or demand justice from their political leaders condemns them for the sin of inaction. They would not be passive if it was their children. Thank you Chris Hayes for consistently shining a light on this countries horrible human rights record.
Two reviews find that the officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice acted reasonably
Posted by All In with Chris Hayes on Tuesday, October 13, 2015
All In with Chris Hayes
NYTimes: Native Lives Matter, Too
NYTimes: Native Lives Matter, Too
"IN August 2010 John T. Williams, a homeless woodcarver of the Nuu-chah-nulth tribe who made his living selling his work near the Pike Place market in Seattle, was shot four times by a police officer within seconds of failing to drop the knife and piece of cedar he was carrying (Mr. Williams had mental health problems and was deaf in one ear). He died; the folding knife was found closed on the ground. The young police officer who shot Mr. Williams resigned, but he never faced criminal charges, even though the Seattle Police Department’s Firearms Review" Board called the shooting unjustified.
Inglis, Florida: home to the 1,000th US mass shooting since Sandy Hook
Inglis, Florida: home to the 1,000th US mass shooting since Sandy Hook
"Four people died following an attack in the tiny town of Inglis, Florida, on the same day as the massacre at an Oregon community college – but the shooting in the south-east failed to register on the national consciousness. "
Chinese activists urge Xi Jinping to learn from Magna Carta
Chinese activists urge Xi Jinping to learn from Magna Carta
"Civil rights campaigners hope arrival of ‘Great Charter’ of 1215 will act as reminder to president about abuses of state power. "
From suffering to detention: why does the US put asylum seekers behind bars?
From suffering to detention: why does the US put asylum seekers behind bars?
"Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers are languishing in US detention centers – completely removed from the political radar. Despite increased attention in recent years over the plight of undocumented people and the Obama administration’s deportation boom, detainees from Africa and the Middle East are often forgotten. The incarceration of some now even borders on indefinite detention."
Credit scores in America perpetuate racial injustice. Here's how
Credit scores in America perpetuate racial injustice. Here's how
"For decades, banks have systematically redlined black and Latino neighborhoods, refusing to make conventional loans or locate branches in non-white and lower-income areas, notwithstanding laws that obligate banks to meet the credit needs of all communities they serve, consistent with safe and sound banking operations. Thanks to financial services deregulation and the advent of asset-backed securitization, a multi-billion dollar “fringe” financial system has filled the void, characterized by high-cost, destabilizing products and services, from payday loans to check-cashers – which banks typically also own orfinance.
People and communities of color have beendisproportionately targeted for high-cost, predatory loans, intrinsically risky financial products that predictably lead to higher delinquency and default rates than non-predatory loans. As a consequence, black people and Latinos are more likely than their white counterparts to have damaged credit.
This firmly-entrenched two-tiered financial system has had devastating consequences for entire neighborhoods of color. Starting in the 1990s, financial institutions began flooding historically-redlined neighborhoods with predatory mortgages that ultimately led to the meltdownof the global economy. Waves of foreclosures hammered neighborhoods of color for more than a decade before the crash and black and Latino Americans bore the brunt of the ensuing foreclosure crisis, recession and spiking unemployment. Droves of people turned to high-rate credit cards to cover even basic expenses, contributing to the consumer debt crisis and spawning a bottom-feeding debt-buying industry that purchases old debts on the cheap and then uses the courts to extract judgmentsdisproportionately from people and communities of color."
Tamir Rice family attorney says expert reports have 'tainted grand jury process'
Tamir Rice family attorney says expert reports have 'tainted grand jury process'
"Newly unearthed comments about deadly police shootings made by the two experts who defended an Ohio officer’s killing of Tamir Rice have intensified criticisms of prosecutors for selecting them to review the 12-year-old’s death.
One appeared to publicly cast doubt on whether the officer who killed Rice was at fault even before he was commissioned to write a report on the case, the Guardian has learned; the other saw her interpretation of a key US supreme court ruling on police shootings rejected by the Justice Department as too generous to officers.
Attorneys for the family of Rice, who was killed by police officer Timothy Loehmann while holding a pellet gun in a park in Cleveland in November last year, said the pair of external reports had “tainted the grand jury process” that is considering criminal charges against Loehmann."
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Recommended read from Salon.com: The discomfiting truth about white feminism: Meryl Streep, Amy Poehler & the movement's long history of racial insensitivity
"After a very unfortunate joke about pedophilia and Blue Ivy Carter in the opening show of a new series produced by Amy Poehler, I waited for white feminists to speak up. I waited for my feminist sisters who claim that feminism is indeed for more than just white women, to make the case about why the joke was in terrible taste, and that it would never have been made about a young white child. I waited for Amy Poehler, who I myself have genuinely admired for her politics and hilarious show "Parks & Rec," to say something. I waited for the think pieces by white feminists calling for a reckoning of the unexamined racism inherent in the joke. I waited. And waited. Instead, I saw a few pieces explaining why the joke was not actually the joke, and that it was intended to be that vile to make a point about what a terrible person the main character is. Of course the conversation on Black Twitter was vibrant and Black feminists wrote some powerful pieces. More than a month later, I have yet to see deeper analysis from white feminists, speaking to each other, about how inexcusable such a ‘joke’ really is and whether it would have happened if it was at the expense of a white toddler. (If you’ve seen such an analysis in response, please share in the comments or via Twitter!) Amy Poehler has not spoken publicly about it, nor has the actress who delivered the lines in the show, nor has anyone affiliated with Hulu, which hosts the series."
Being black can be bad for your health: Race, medicine and the cruelest unfairness of all
"Why do black people suffer more health problems than other groups? What do these challenges mean in their everyday lives? How do their struggles play out before a largely white medical community? How can we begin to solve these seemingly intractable problems? Do I have a special role to play as a black physician? Confronting these questions has led me on an intellectual and emotional journey, one that I’ve tried to capture in the pages that follow.
I’ve divided the book into three sections, corresponding to the different phases of my medical life. Part I surveys my medical school years. Part II explores my grueling twelve months of medical internship as a newly minted doctor. Part III examines my subsequent years in psychiatry training and in early clinical practice. Throughout each stage, race played a recurrent role, at turns predictable and unexpected, often annoying, sometimes disheartening, and occasionally uplifting. By sharing my story, as well as the stories of some of the patients I’ve met over the past fifteen years, I hope to humanize the dire statistics and bitter racial debates and paint a fuller picture of the experiences of black patients, as well as that of the black doctors who navigate between the black community and the predominately white medical world.
In tracing my journey along the intersection of race and medicine at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first, I make no claim to speak for all black physicians or black patients, yet I am confident that much of what I have written will ring true to their varied experiences. By putting human faces on these serious dilemmas, I hope to contribute to a much-needed public dialogue on improving the health of black people. Jim’s fate—a young black person robbed of his future—is one that far too many of us suffer."
Why is none going to jail - Feds: Fifth Third Bank to pay $18M for overcharging blacks,... | www.ajc.com
Fifth Third Bank, a Cincinnati-based financial institution with branches in Georgia, has agreed to an $18 million settlement after being accused of charging blacks and Hispanics more than others for auto loans made through dealerships, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The banking company also agreed to change the way it prices its loans by limiting dealer markup to 125 basis points, or 1.25 percent, for loans of 60 months or less, and to 100 basis points, or 1 percent, for loans greater than 60 months. Previously, Fifth Third allowed dealers to raise interest rates as they saw fit.
Feds: Fifth Third Bank to pay $18M for overcharging blacks,... | www.ajc.com
Saturday, October 10, 2015
BREAKING: California Will Automatically Register Millions Of Voters | ThinkProgress
BREAKING: California Will Automatically Register Millions Of Voters | ThinkProgress
"On Saturday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allow the state to automatically register millions of residents to vote, using their DMV records.
Starting in 2016, every eligible California citizen who goes to a DMV office to get a driver’s license or renew one will be instantly registered to vote, unless he or she chooses to opt out.
“Citizens are currently forced to opt-in to their fundamental right to vote through registration,” said Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who wrote the bill and pushed for its passage. “We do not have to opt-in to other rights. We do not have to opt-in to free speech or due process. The right to vote should be no different.”
Freedom and the Veil - The New Yorker
"The current campaign controversy arose from the Conservative government’s decision to ban women from wearing the niqab—an Islamic veil that covers the face, but is not the full-body burka—at citizenship ceremonies. Harper has said that the practice of wearing the niqab is “offensive” and “not how we do things here.” A Pakistani-born woman named Zunera Ishaq challenged the ban in 2014, and the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeals have now both ruled in her favor. Harper’s government has said that it intends to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. The case has become a major campaign issue. Canada, in some ways even more visibly than the United States, is of course a nation of immigrants, whose numbers are swelling all the time."
Thursday, October 08, 2015
"The retired neurosurgeon is apparently a fan of the "do as I say I would do, not as I actually did" school of punditry, as he related to Hunter what happened in a Baltimore Popeye's when a robber "stuck a gun in [his] ribs."
"I have had a gun held on me when I was in a Popeye’s organization," he said. "Guy comes in, put the gun in my ribs."
Carson calmly recounted how he calmly responded, "I just said, 'I believe you want the guy behind the counter.'" In other words, instead of charging the gunman, as Carson recommends other Americans do, the good doctor directed the man to the likely teenage, certainly minimum-wage-earning employee."
Dumb, dumb and dumber.
Home Depot customer with a concealed handgun opened fire on shoplifting suspect
Apparently a Michigan woman with a conceal-carry permit and a loaded handgun thought it was her duty to step in and help a Home Depot employee stop a suspected shoplifter. Did she follow their car? Nope. She opened fired on the suspected shoplifter's SUV as they drove out of the parking lot"
Wednesday, October 07, 2015
Doctors Without Borders: we received no advance warning of US airstrike
"The US military never gave Doctors Without Borders prior notification of a deadly airstrike on its field hospital in Kunduz, the aid group said on Wednesday, in an apparent violation of the Pentagon’s explicit 2015 instructions on the rules of war."
Tuesday, October 06, 2015
The Young Survivors of Boko Haram - The New Yorker
"In Nigeria, what happened on the night of April 14th, 2014, can seem like a fever dream, a surreal nightmare that, as soon as you wake up, lingers uncomfortably, poking at the edges of your waking life. In the early hours of the 15th, members of the Boko Haram terrorist group arrived at a girls’ boarding school in a hamlet called Chibok, in the northeastern state of Borno. Chibok residents saw them coming and warned the military hours before the attack, but no help came. By the time Boko Haram was done at the school, they had taken more than three hundred girls, looted food and supplies, and lit the place on fire. In the days that followed, fifty-seven girls escaped, doing things that their young bodies were not designed to do: jumping out of giant trucks, running through forests without rest for hours on end, picking through tangles of brush and trees after being herded around like animals. The rest of the girls—more than two hundred—are unaccounted for; Boko Haram propaganda videos allege that they have been paired off to fighters as sex slaves, or are being used as fighters and suicide bombers themselves. The mass kidnapping marked the first time that many foreigners, and many Nigerians for that matter, had woken up to Boko Haram’s reign of terror in Nigeria’s north, and the ways in which the group had disrupted, stolen, and ended innocent lives.
How to Reduce the Gun Carnage - The New York Times
"To the Editor:
Re “Killers Fit a Profile, but So Do Many Others” (front page, Oct. 4):
James Alan Fox, a criminologist, is correct in saying, “We can’t round up all the people who scare us.” But we can do a lot more to sever the link between them and easy access to guns.
Most mass killers obtained guns legally, because of the sieve-like national background check system — unlike the system in New York. To receive my pistol permit, I was asked about my employment and other history, and I submitted the names of four character references who completed multi-page questionnaires probing the kind of person I was, including my “demeanor or behavior.”
All this information and more was submitted to law enforcement and a county judge (I was also interviewed). They could decline my application if the information suggested that I was troubled. Too bad most states don’t conduct real background checks.
ROBERT J. SPITZER
Cortland, N.Y.
The writer, a professor of political science at SUNY Cortland, is the author of five books on gun policy."
NYTimes: The Aftermath of a Deadly Airstrike in Afghanistan
"Two things are known for certain about the deadly American airstrike on the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, run by Doctors Without Borders. One is that the attack killed 22 people, including 12 staff members. The other is that an initial Pentagon statement saying the strike may have caused “collateral damage” was outrageous and dehumanizing.
Beyond that, there are many unanswered questions and much confusion about how the hospital, a major health care facility in Afghanistan’s northeastern region, came to be a target.
Gen. John Campbell, who commands American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, acknowledged at a news conference on Monday that the airstrike by an American gunship on Saturday had “accidentally struck” civilians and promised a thorough investigation. That is not sufficient. In addition, an independent panel should quickly be empowered to obtain all the information needed to produce a credible conclusion about what went so horribly wrong."
Monday, October 05, 2015
"Doctors Without Borders says it is under "the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed" after a U.S.-led NATO coalition bombed its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
The aid organization, referred to internationally in French as Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF), asserted that it "condemn[s] this attack, which constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law."
The U.S. military's version of the story behind the bombing is full of holes, and constantly changing. After launching airstrikes on Kunduz, which has recently seen an insurgency by the Taliban, on Saturday morning, NATO said its bombing "may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility."
At least 23 people people were killed in the airstrikes, including 13 staff members and 10 patients, three of whom were children. A minimum of 37 more were wounded. A hospital nurse said there "are no words for how terrible it was," noting "patients were burning in their beds."
Prison vs. Harvard in an Unlikely Debate - WSJ
NAPANOCH, N.Y.—On one side of the stage at a maximum-security prison here sat three men incarcerated for violent crimes.
On the other were three undergraduates from Harvard College.
After an hour of fast-moving debate on Friday, the judges rendered their verdict.
The inmates won.
The audience burst into applause. That included about 75 of the prisoners’ fellow students at the Bard Prison Initiative, which offers a rigorous college experience to men at Eastern New York Correctional Facility, in the Catskills.
Prison vs. Harvard in an Unlikely Debate - WSJ
On Guns, Fear Is Winning - The New York Times
..."When I was growing up in the rural South, boys had rifles. There was nothing odd about it. Every boy in wood shop made a gun rack.
A rifle wasn’t a weapon as much as a tool. People hunted. They raised and slaughtered food animals. Rifles were used to keep the snakes out of the grass and the vermin out of the garden (though surely there must have been more humane ways to do this). They were poor folks’s fireworks on special occasions like New Year’s.
And they were a guard against intruders — though those intruders were more an idea than a reality in those parts — who might threaten life or property. Law enforcement officials were scarce, and 911 was nonexistent.
But that seems to me another time and place. There didn’t exist the fear and paranoia that grips so many now when it comes to gun ownership. And there wasn’t the fetish for military-style weapons and armor-piercing bullets.
And as I have mentioned before, my oldest brother is a gun collector. He is a regular at the gun shows, buying and selling, but even he talks about a sense of unease at those shows as people engage in what can only be described as panic buying and ammunition hoarding.
These people are afraid. They are afraid of a time conservative media and the gun industry has convinced them is coming when sales of weapons, particularly some types of weapons, will be restricted or forbidden. They are afraid of growing populations of people they don’t trust. Some are even afraid that a time will come when they will have to defend themselves against the government itself.
Unfortunately this fear is winning, as many Americans think crime is up, even though it’s down. This fear is winning as massacres, and the gun violence discussions that follow, don’t lead to fewer gun sales, but more. This fear is winning, following continued violence by antigovernment militias and hate groups.
Fear is winning as there are now close to as many guns in this country as people — with the gun industry producing millions more each year.
We have reached our supersaturation point as a culture. And with that many guns in circulation, too many will invariably make their way into the hands of people with ill intent.
But for how long we are willing to let fear overpower reason? We have to decide if the positives of having a gun culture outweigh the negatives.
Do we want a society in which some 33,000 people in America lose their lives to gun violence each year and more than twice as many are injured by guns? Do we want a society in which mass shootings are routine?
If we do, well, we have it. But if we don’t, and I believe that most of us don’t, then we have to start thinking about ways to not only keep guns out of the wrong hands, but also about how we slow or reverse the proliferation of guns.
If there is one thing that my brother’s collection has taught me, it is that guns outlive their owners. These hundreds of millions of guns will most likely be part of our society for decades, and some even for centuries, regardless of what laws we pass now. That is something of which we should truly be afraid."...
On Guns, Fear Is Winning - The New York Times
A rifle wasn’t a weapon as much as a tool. People hunted. They raised and slaughtered food animals. Rifles were used to keep the snakes out of the grass and the vermin out of the garden (though surely there must have been more humane ways to do this). They were poor folks’s fireworks on special occasions like New Year’s.
And they were a guard against intruders — though those intruders were more an idea than a reality in those parts — who might threaten life or property. Law enforcement officials were scarce, and 911 was nonexistent.
But that seems to me another time and place. There didn’t exist the fear and paranoia that grips so many now when it comes to gun ownership. And there wasn’t the fetish for military-style weapons and armor-piercing bullets.
And as I have mentioned before, my oldest brother is a gun collector. He is a regular at the gun shows, buying and selling, but even he talks about a sense of unease at those shows as people engage in what can only be described as panic buying and ammunition hoarding.
These people are afraid. They are afraid of a time conservative media and the gun industry has convinced them is coming when sales of weapons, particularly some types of weapons, will be restricted or forbidden. They are afraid of growing populations of people they don’t trust. Some are even afraid that a time will come when they will have to defend themselves against the government itself.
Unfortunately this fear is winning, as many Americans think crime is up, even though it’s down. This fear is winning as massacres, and the gun violence discussions that follow, don’t lead to fewer gun sales, but more. This fear is winning, following continued violence by antigovernment militias and hate groups.
Fear is winning as there are now close to as many guns in this country as people — with the gun industry producing millions more each year.
We have reached our supersaturation point as a culture. And with that many guns in circulation, too many will invariably make their way into the hands of people with ill intent.
But for how long we are willing to let fear overpower reason? We have to decide if the positives of having a gun culture outweigh the negatives.
Do we want a society in which some 33,000 people in America lose their lives to gun violence each year and more than twice as many are injured by guns? Do we want a society in which mass shootings are routine?
If we do, well, we have it. But if we don’t, and I believe that most of us don’t, then we have to start thinking about ways to not only keep guns out of the wrong hands, but also about how we slow or reverse the proliferation of guns.
If there is one thing that my brother’s collection has taught me, it is that guns outlive their owners. These hundreds of millions of guns will most likely be part of our society for decades, and some even for centuries, regardless of what laws we pass now. That is something of which we should truly be afraid."...
On Guns, Fear Is Winning - The New York Times
The Biggest Questions Awaiting the Supreme Court - The New York Times
When the Supreme Court’s most recent term ended in June, same-sex marriage was legal nationwide, and two major pieces of federal legislation — the Affordable Care Act and the Fair Housing Act — remained intact, despite carefully coordinated legal attacks meant to destroy them.
The court’s new term, which starts Monday, will jump right back into high-profile constitutional battles like voting rights, affirmative action and the death penalty, as well as a new attack on public-sector labor unions. And the justices may well agree to take up issues of abortion and contraception again, in cases that could further strip away reproductive rights. The decisions last term showed a court willing to take into account the effects of the law on individual lives. This term, the justices have many opportunities to show that same type of awareness.
The Biggest Questions Awaiting the Supreme Court - The New York Times
The court’s new term, which starts Monday, will jump right back into high-profile constitutional battles like voting rights, affirmative action and the death penalty, as well as a new attack on public-sector labor unions. And the justices may well agree to take up issues of abortion and contraception again, in cases that could further strip away reproductive rights. The decisions last term showed a court willing to take into account the effects of the law on individual lives. This term, the justices have many opportunities to show that same type of awareness.
The Biggest Questions Awaiting the Supreme Court - The New York Times
Friday, October 02, 2015
Meet the NRA's Board of Directors | Mother Jones
"The National Rifle Association claims to speak for more than 4 million gun owners. But the shots are really called by a hush-hush group of 76 directors. The majority are nominated via a top-down process and elected by a small fraction of NRA members. A breakdown of the current board, based on their official bios:
87 percent are men. 93 percent are white.25 percent are current or former federal, state, or local lawmakers or officials.22 percent are current or former law enforcement officers. 30 percent are current or former members of the military.24 percent are lawyers.12 percent are entertainers or athletes.64 percent are hunters. 71 percent are sport or competitive shooters.At least 71 percent were nominated, endorsed, or selected by the NRA's Nominating Committee."
994 mass shootings in 1,004 days: this is what America's gun crisis looks like
"The Oregon school shooting is evidence that the US response to gun violence ‘has become routine’, Barack Obama says. The data compiled by the crowd-sourced site Mass Shooting Tracker reveals an even more shocking human toll: there is a mass shooting – defined as four or more people shot in one incident – nearly every day. "
"While conservatives are busying trying to shutdown any debate on gun control following the 45th school shooting this year by yelling about Chicago’s murder rates — apparently unaware that Chicago is the third largest city in the country but not even in the top five cities with the highest murder rate per capita — and reflexively decrying any mention of gun control as a “gun grab,” what if we just entertained their wildest conspiracy theories for just a bit?
A 2015 study found that when guns are used to kill people in the United States, they are overwhelmingly used for murder rather than self-defense. That study found that in 2012, there were only 259 justifiable homicides, or what is commonly referred to as self-defense, compared to 8,342 criminal firearm homicides. In 2008-2012, the report says, guns were used in 42,419 criminal homicides and only 1,108 justifiable homicides."
"hile conservatives are busying trying to shutdown any debate on gun control following the 45th school shooting this year by yelling about Chicago's murder rates -- apparently unaware that Chicago is the third largest city in the country but not even in the top five cities with the highest murder rate per capita -- and reflexively decrying any mention of gun control as a "gun grab," what if we just entertained their wildest conspiracy theories for just a bit?
A 2015 study found that when guns are used to kill people in the United States, they are overwhelmingly used for murder rather than self-defense. That study found that in 2012, there were only 259 justifiable homicides, or what is commonly referred to as self-defense, compared to 8,342 criminal firearm homicides. In 2008-2012, the report says, guns were used in 42,419 criminal homicides and only 1,108 justifiable homicides."
Oregon’s Gun Debate Goes Beyond Liberals vs. Conservatives - The New York Times
"SEATTLE — Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon signed a bill in May that requires greater background checks for gun transfers.
It was the state’s first major gun-control law in more than a decade, and for Ms. Brown, Oregon’s former secretary of state, who took office in February during a political scandal, it was also a firm statement of the new direction she wanted the state to take.
The Douglas County sheriff, John Hanlin, who is now leading the team investigating the shootings on Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, was one of the bill’s main opponents."
Chief Williams becomes emotional on shooting death of baby: “Enough is enough” | fox8.com
Americans must raise the decision costs for police who are murdering our children. The American Revolution was fought over far less grievances. We must pressure the establishment to crack down on their public servants and force them to act like servants, not murderous tyrants.
Obama: Inaction on gun violence is a political decision | MSNBC
For the second day in a row, President Obama spoke forcefully about the scourge of gun violence in America.
“This is happening every single day in forgotten neighborhoods around the country. Every single day, kids are just running for their lives just trying to get to school,” Obama said at a White House press conference that followed an event announcing the departure of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
On Thursday, America experienced yet another mass shooting when a heavily armed gunman killed nine people and injured several others at a community college in southwest Oregon. The gunman – identified by authorities as 26-year-old Christopher Harper Mercer – apparently left a hate-filled note at the crime scene, according to law enforcement officials. Harper Mercer owned a total of 13 guns, all purchased legally, according to authorities. Six of the weapons were recovered at the scene of the shooting.
Asked Friday what he would do differently to address gun violence, Obama said he has directed his staff to identify ways to enforce existing laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Obama once again called on the American people to pressure Congress to pass gun control legislation.
Obama: Inaction on gun violence is a political decision | MSNBC
The very definition of an old school "Uncle Tom" - In jest, Ben Carson tells the whole truth about police shootings, then quickly backs off of it. "
"On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson reflected on his youth. Remembering when he and his friends would be chased by police for mischief, he said, "That was back in the day before they would shoot you."
There was laughter from the almost exclusively white crowd. Carson, perhaps sensing that he went too far, then immediately backed off of the statement and said, "I'm just kidding, you know they wouldn't do that."
Except that is exactly what police do nowadays. They shoot and kill young black men and women in instances where lethal force was absolutely preposterous."
Thursday, October 01, 2015
The candidate of racists, bigots and Islamophobes - Trump: I would send Syrian refugees home - Al Jazeera English
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has said he would send back Syrian refugees taken in by the US if he is elected president.
Trump said during a rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday that he was worried the refugees could be disguised members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
"I am putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, if I win, they are going back, they are going back, I am telling you, they are going back," Trump said.
Trump: I would send Syrian refugees home - Al Jazeera English
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