The Country’s Worst Voting Restrictions Won’t Be In Effect This November | The Nation

"On July 29, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s sweeping voting restrictions, saying they targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” The decision was the most significant victory for voting rights since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Today the Supreme Court declined to reinstate three key voting restrictions that had been appealed by North Carolina—the state’s voter-ID law, cutbacks to early voting and elimination of preregistration for 16- and-17-year-olds. The Court deadlocked 4-4, which upholds the Fourth Circuit ruling. The death of Justice Scalia left conservatives short of the five votes they needed—Justice Thomas would’ve reinstated all of the restrictions, while Justices Roberts, Kennedy, and Alito would’ve reinstated everything except the elimination of preregistration."

The Country’s Worst Voting Restrictions Won’t Be In Effect This November | The Nation

Clinton: Donald Trump has shown us who he is | MSNBC

Clinton: Donald Trump has shown us who he is | MSNBC

Living in L.B.J.’s America - The New York Times

"For those puzzled about why so many evangelical leaders were willing to endorse Donald J. Trump, the most openly irreligious major-party presidential candidate in our history, Jerry Falwell Jr. provided the answer in his singularly graceless speech at the Republican National Convention: “Mr. Trump has added a plank to this party’s platform to repeal I.R.S. rules sponsored by Lyndon Johnson in 1954 barring churches and nonprofits from expressing political free speech.” Mr. Falwell assured his audience, “Trust me, the repeal of the Johnson Amendment will create a huge revolution for conservative Christians and for free speech.”



Mr. Falwell was referring to a change to the tax code added by Johnson when he was the Senate minority leader. The amendment, as The Times reported in 2011, was not aimed at churches, but at “two nonprofit groups that were loudly calling him a closet Communist.” These were the Facts Forum, funded by the Texas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt to produce and distribute McCarthyist books, television programs and radio shows; and the Committee for Constitutional Government, another far-right, multimedia and mass-mailing center founded by the newspaper magnate Frank Gannett.



The Johnson Amendment stated that “all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” In other words, tax-deductible charitable contributions could not be used to fund election campaigns. This was considered so uncontroversial at the time that no record of what Johnson was thinking or precisely how he got this clause attached to the tax code seems to have survived. It was passed by a Republican Congress, and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.



Churches on all sides, liberal and conservative, proved able to skirt the provisions of the amendment easily enough, and it went largely unchallenged until 2008, when the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal and political organizing arm of right-wing Christian evangelicals, started a campaign to repeal it. The A.D.F. began an annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday, in which ministers were encouraged to give overtly political sermons, and then send recordings of these talks to the I.R.S."



Living in L.B.J.’s America - The New York Times

‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias - The New York Times

"She seemed like the model tenant. A 33-year-old nurse who was living at the Y.W.C.A. in Harlem, she had come to rent a one-bedroom at the still-unfinished Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. She filled out what the rental agent remembers as a “beautiful application.” She did not even want to look at the unit.



There was just one hitch: Maxine Brown was black.



Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump.



“I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,’” Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview.



It was late 1963 — just months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act — and the tall, mustachioed Fred Trump was approaching the apex of his building career. He was about to complete the jewel in the crown of his middle-class housing empire: seven 23-story towers, called Trump Village, spread across nearly 40 acres in Coney Island.



He was also grooming his heir. His son Donald, 17, would soon enroll at Fordham University in the Bronx, living at his parents’ home in Queens and spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father’s Cadillac, driven by a black chauffeur.



“His father was his idol,” Mr. Leibowitz recalled. “Anytime he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side.”



Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle.



The Justice Department undertook its own investigation and, in 1973, sued Trump Management for discriminating against blacks. Both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, were named as defendants. It was front-page news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.



“Absolutely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying of the government’s allegations.



Looking back, Mr. Trump’s response to the lawsuit can be seen as presaging his handling of subsequent challenges, in business and in politics. Rather than quietly trying to settle — as another New York developer had done a couple of years earlier — he turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients” and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation.



When it was over, Mr. Trump declared victory, emphasizing that the consent decree he ultimately signed did not include an admission of guilt.



But an investigation by The New York Times — drawing on decades-old files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors — uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.



That history has taken on fresh relevance with Mr. Trump arguing that black voters should support him over Hillary Clinton, whom he has called a bigot."



‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias - The New York Times

Hillary Clinton Denounces the ‘Alt-Right,’ and the Alt-Right Is Thrilled - The New York Times

Hillary Clinton Denounces the ‘Alt-Right,’ and the Alt-Right Is Thrilled - The New York Times

Is Donald Trump a Racist? - The New York Times

"One early red flag arose in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals.

I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military.

To prove the discrimination, blacks were repeatedly dispatched as testers to Trump apartment buildings to inquire about vacancies, and white testers were sent soon after. Repeatedly, the black person was told that nothing was available, while the white tester was shown apartments for immediate rental.

A former building superintendent working for the Trumps explained that he was told to code any application by a black person with the letter C, for colored, apparently so the office would know to reject it. A Trump rental agent said the Trumps wanted to rent only to “Jews and executives,” and discouraged renting to blacks.

Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.

In fairness, those suits date from long ago, and the discriminatory policies were probably put in place not by Donald Trump but by his father. Fred Trump appears to have been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927; Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Trump property in the 1950s, lambasted Fred Trump in recently discovered papers for stirring racial hatred.

Yet even if Donald Trump inherited his firm’s discriminatory policies, he allied himself decisively in the 1970s housing battle against the civil rights movement." http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opinion/sunday/is-donald-trump-a-racist.html

Is Donald Trump a Racist? - The New York Times

Hillary Clinton goes after Trump's controversial "alt-right" supporters

Clinton ad ties Trump to KKK, white supremacists - POLITICO

Clinton ad ties Trump to KKK, white supremacists - POLITICO

All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

Daniel Harris shooting: Family wants answers after trooper kills deaf man - CNN.com

"(CNN)Days after his deaf and speech-impaired brother was shot and killed by a North Carolina state trooper, Sam Harris wonders whether the shooting happened because his sibling's disabilities led to a misunderstanding.



No official has said this was the case. But Harris says his family is pressing for more information about why Daniel Kevin Harris was shot near his Charlotte home Thursday after what police say was a roughly 7-mile vehicle chase.

Daniel Harris' relatives told a crowd of dozens gathered for a vigil outside his house Monday night that they want more answers about the 29-year-old's death."



Daniel Harris shooting: Family wants answers after trooper kills deaf man - CNN.com

Auto Lending: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation - The New York Times

"In fact, a New York Times analysis of 2014 census figures shows that income alone cannot explain, nor would it likely end, the segregation that has defined American cities and suburbs for generations.

The choices that black families make today are inevitably constrained by a legacy of racism that prevented their ancestors from buying quality housing and then passing down wealth that might have allowed today’s generation to move into more stable communities. And even when black households try to cross color boundaries, they are not always met with open arms: Studies have shown that white people prefer to live in communities where there are fewer black people, regardless of their income.

The result: Nationally, black and white families of similar incomes still live in separate worlds.

In many of America’s largest metropolitan areas, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, black families making $100,000 or more are more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than even white households making less than $25,000. This is particularly true in areas with a long history of residential segregation, like metropolitan Milwaukee."

Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation - The New York Times

Racist red flags follow Trump Breitbart hire, Steve Bannon | MSNBC

Racist red flags follow Trump Breitbart hire, Steve Bannon | MSNBC

Does Henry Kissinger Have a Conscience? - The New Yorker

"Last March, when President Obama travelled to Argentina to meet with the country’s new President, Mauricio Macri, his public appearances were dogged by protesters who noisily demanded explanations, and apologies



"Last March, when President Obama travelled to Argentina to meet with the country’s new President, Mauricio Macri, his public appearances were dogged by protesters who noisily demanded explanations, and apologies, for U.S. policies, past and present. There are few countries in the West where anti-Americanism is as vociferously expressed as in Argentina, where a highly politicized culture of grievance has evolved in which many of the country’s problems are blamed on the United States. On the left, especially, there is lingering resentment over the support extended by the U.S. government to Argentina’s right-wing military, which seized power in March of 1976 and launched a “Dirty War” against leftists that took thousands of lives over the following seven years."





Does Henry Kissinger Have a Conscience? - The New Yorker

Chicago’s predictive policing tool just failed a major test | The Verge

"A RAND report shows that the ‘Strategic Subject List’ doesn’t reduce homicides



Struggling to reduce its high murder rate, the city of Chicago has become an incubator for experimental policing techniques. Community policing, stop and frisk, "interruption" tactics — the city has tried many strategies. Perhaps most controversial and promising has been the city’s futuristic "heat list" — an algorithm-generated list identifying people most likely to be involved in a shooting.



The hope was that the list would allow police to provide social services to people in danger, while also preventing likely shooters from picking up a gun. But a new report from the RAND Corporation shows nothing of the sort has happened. Instead, it indicates that the list is, at best, not even as effective as a most wanted list. At worst, it unnecessarily targets people for police attention, creating a new form of profiling.



Funded through a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Justice, the list’s algorithm identifies people by looking not only at arrests, but also whether someone is socially connected with a known shooter or shooting victim. The program also has a kind of pre-crime feature in which police visit people on the list before any crime has been committed.



One of the list’s most promising aspects was that it wasn’t just a police officer who would visit. Social workers would show up, too — employees of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group at John Jay College. The list was designed to let Chicago police engage with at-risk (and potentially dangerous) citizens, but also to provide social services, such as access to counseling, to people who were in danger.



"We want to show them the carrot and the stick," said Christopher Mallette, executive director of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group, in a conversation with The Verge last year. "We want them to know they can get help — but we also want them to know that if they don’t keep in line, there’s a jail cell waiting for them."



CPD wasn’t shy about touting the importance of the list, later rebranded as the Strategic Subjects List, or SSL. In 2014, the CPD official in charge of the program, Commander Jonathan Lewin, told The Verge: "This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives."



But the study from RAND, which was granted extraordinary access to CPD when it launched the list in 2013, found that the program has saved no lives at all. The RAND researchers were allowed to view the list, sit in on internal meetings, and generally observe how the tool was being used. They discovered that CPD wasn’t using the list as a way to provide social services; instead, CPD was using it as a way to target people for arrest."



Chicago’s predictive policing tool just failed a major test | The Verge

Police killings of favela residents continue as Games go on in Rio | World news | The Guardian

Jonathan Watts in Vila da João

Friday 19 August 201614.31 EDTLast modified on Friday 19 August 201619.03 EDT

• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Google+

Shares

356

Comments

187

 Save for later

"While much of the world’s media has focused on US swimmer Ryan Lochte’s fabricated account of an armed robbery, the real victims of Olympic crime in Rio de Janeiro are the city’s poorest residents, caught on the frontline of conflict between the authorities and drug traffickers.

Since the start of the Olympics, local media have reported at least 14 deaths in shootouts between gang members and police or soldiers from the 85,000-member security force deployed for the Games."

Police killings of favela residents continue as Games go on in Rio | World news | The Guardian

Seminole - The Unconquered (How the west was lost)

John Griffin Black Seminole descendant and Historian.

Forgotten Rebellion: Black Seminoles and the Largest Slave Revolt in U.S...

Who Will Watch the Watch List? - The New York Times

"New Haven — When a police officer pulled over Peter Santilli last December in Newtown, Ohio, it seemed like a routine traffic stop. But when the officer ran his data in the law enforcement database, Mr. Santilli’s name came up as a match on a terrorist watch list. The cop “pulled out his weapon immediately,” Mr. Santilli said, and told him to put his hands up.



The police later admitted that it was a false match. It’s likely that the match came from a huge, secretive database called the Known or Suspected Terrorist File. The file is linked to the National Crime Information Center database, which law enforcement officers across the country access over 12 million times a day.



Although less known than watch lists like the no-fly list, the K.S.T. contributes to the secret blacklisting and surveillance of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Without due process protections, the file has the potential to ruin innocent people’s lives, while its size dilutes its effectiveness in tracking actual terrorist threats. Moreover, in light of the continuing debate about whether a no-buy list ought to prevent watchlisted people from purchasing guns, it is vital that we re-examine the accuracy and effectiveness of these lists.



In a study of the nation’s growing watch lists, we reviewed more than 13,000 pages of records about the K.S.T., which the American Civil Liberties Union and the Civil Liberties and National Security Clinic at Yale Law School obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents cast light on the rapid growth of the file and its predecessor, the Violent Gangs and Terrorist Organizations File. From about 13,000 entries in 2003, it grew over 2,000 percent in five years — an average of 144 new names being added every day. By 2008, it contained more than 272,000 records. Though the current total is unknown, it’s most likely far larger: In 2013 alone, 468,749 names were submitted to the database, and only 1 percent of those were rejected."



Who Will Watch the Watch List? - The New York Times

When Police Are Poor Role Models for One Another - The New York Times

"The drug trade is so insidious in some neighborhoods of Baltimore that when I was a detective there I sometimes had to arrest children for selling narcotics. Sad as that was, a drug counselor told me, they learned to do it from the people around them.



Police officers learn egregious behavior from those around them, too, I thought, when I read the Department of Justice report issued last Wednesday about the Baltimore Police Department’s systematic abuse of black citizens and violation of their rights.



In one incident mentioned in the report, a Justice Department investigator went on a patrol with a sergeant. The sergeant saw a group of young black men on a street corner and told an officer to order them to leave. The officer said he had no reason to do so. “Make something up,” the sergeant replied.



That the sergeant would do this in front of a federal official investigating civil rights violations may be astounding, but it demonstrated his mind-set. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He must have been in the department for years and had probably been taught to take such action by his field training officer, and even the department’s commanders. It was learned behavior, part of a culture rooted in an “us versus them” mentality."



When Police Are Poor Role Models for One Another - The New York Times

National Guard Deployed in Milwaukee Amid Unrest Over Fatal Police Shooting - The New York Times

National Guard Deployed in Milwaukee Amid Unrest Over Fatal Police Shooting - The New York Times

Dad and his 7-year-old daughter held at gunpoint in terrifying encounter with out-of-control AZ cop

"A California man and his 7-year-old daughter had a terrifying run-in with the Arizona Highway Patrol Friday night on their way to visit the Grand Canyon.



In a lengthy Facebook post, Ken Walton described the experience, in which he and his daughter were held at gunpoint by an out-of-control highway patrolman.



Late Friday night, Walton wrote, “Tonight, I was arrested at gunpoint by an Arizona highway patrol officer who threatened to shoot me in the back (twice) in front of my 7-year-old daughter. For a moment, I was certain he was going to kill me for no reason. I’m alive, and I need to share the story. PLEASE SHARE IT, because I have an important reason for staying up past 1AM to write it down.”



He went on to say that he and his daughter were making their way to the Grand Canyon in a rented Toyota Camry they’d picked up in Las Vegas.



“In Williams, Arizona, as I exited Interstate 40 to head north toward the Canyon rim, I was pulled over by an AHP officer who’d been tailing me for a couple of miles. I hadn’t been speeding, so I wondered if perhaps the car had a broken taillight or something. I rolled down my window and waited,” he said.



Instead of coming around to the driver’s side, however, the officer “rapped on the rear passenger side window with his pistol. My daughter, who was sitting inches from the barrel of his gun, jumped with fear as the officer yelled at me to roll down the front passenger window, his service weapon pointed directly at me.”



“My daughter rolled down her window and I explained that we were in a rental car, that we had no weapons, and I was having trouble figuring out how to roll down the front passenger window from my driver’s side door,” Walton reported.



However, the officer just kept shouting orders, ignoring the girl and becoming increasingly agitated.



“My daughter panicked and tried to get out of her booster seat to reach forward to roll down the front window, and the officer screamed her at her not to move as he pointed his pistol at her,” Walton wrote.



On the officer’s orders, Walton exited the car, where he was ordered to face away from the officer and assume to position to be arrested at gunpoint.



“Then, as I had my hands in the air, he yelled, at the top of his lungs, in a voice I will never forget, as my daughter looked on in terror, ‘Get your hands away from your waist or I’ll blow two holes through your back right now!'” Walton said, noting that his hands were already in the air when the officer made the threat.



“I was utterly terrified,” Walton said. “I’ve heard stories of police yelling out false things like this before they unjustifiably attack someone as a way to justify the attack, and I thought this was what was happening to me. I braced for bullets to hit me and all I could think of was my daughter having to watch it happen and being left alone on the side of the highway with an insane, violent cop.”



The officer never fired and Walton was handcuffed and placed in the back of the officer’s cruiser while more police arrived.



“Why was I arrested?,” he wrote. “The car I was had rented had previously had its front license plate lost or stolen, so the car rental company reported this to the Nevada DMV. The Arizona highway patrol officer, who looked up my plate number while he was tailing me, misinterpreted this Nevada DMV report as meaning that I was driving a car with a stolen license plate, and somehow this prompted him to approach me at gunpoint and threaten to kill me in front of my little girl.”



Walton said that he confronted the officer for overreacting and for threatening to kill him in front of his little girl.



“He stood by his story that I had made a threatening movement toward my waist, and I said it wasn’t true, and he said this wasn’t the place to discuss it. He let me go attend to my daughter but continued to ‘detain’ us for another 20 minutes as he talked to his supervisors, presumably plotting damage control.”



Walton got the officer’s name — Oton Villegas — and badge number, his supervisors’ names and information. He said that his daughter was thoroughly traumatized by the event and that he has not decided yet what recourse to take.



In the end, Walton urged anyone reading the story to think about how it could have turned out differently. “(I)f I’d looked just a little bit more threatening to him — because I was black, or young, or long-haired, or tattooed, or didn’t speak English — I believe he might have pulled the trigger.”



“If you are a person who has ever looked skeptically at the claims of Black Lives Matter, or others who talk about police violence, I urge you to consider what happened to me and put yourselves in the shoes of others. I just survived a bizarre gunpoint situation in which I was as innocent as Philando Castile, who was not as lucky as I was,” he concluded."







Dad and his 7-year-old daughter held at gunpoint in terrifying encounter with out-of-control AZ cop

Eric Holder: We Can Have Shorter Sentences and Less Crime

"Washington — As a college student in Virginia, Corey Jacobs started selling drugs with the help of a group of friends to make some extra money. A Bronx native, Mr. Jacobs was no kingpin, and no aspect of their drug conspiracy involved violence. Now age 46, Mr. Jacobs has served 16 years of a sentence of life without parole in the federal system.

No question, Corey Jacobs should have gone to prison for his felony. But does he deserve to die there?

His sentencing judge does not think so. Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr. wrote in a letter supporting clemency for Mr. Jacobs that had the law not mandated a life sentence, he would not have imposed one for a first felony conviction."

Race and the Olympic Games - The New York Times

"The opening ceremony included an acknowledgment of slavery (as captured in the photo above). How would you interpret what was going on there?



A. I thought it was really significant that the slave trade was not just mentioned but portrayed in movement and dance in the way that it was. It’s not quite a taboo subject, but it’s something that is still not widely discussed or widely studied in Brazil, which received far more slaves than any other place in the Americas — more than 10 times the amount of slaves that went into North America.



Rio was the epicenter of this trade, and even within Brazil there is a misconception about how it functioned; many people here still think Salvador in the northeast received far more slaves when that just wasn’t the case.



Rio was the economic heart of Brazil at that time and then it was the seat of the empire. It was this linchpin of just a really brutal period in the country’s history. So I think it’s contributing to greater awareness and more discussion about the origins of the country.



Somewhat symbolically, the first gold medal winner for Brazil, Rafaela Silva, was also this incredibly gifted competitor in judo and she grew up very poor — she’s Afro-Brazilian, and she grew up very poor in Cidade de Deus, the City of God, the huge favela where Fernando Meirelles, the director of the opening ceremony, made his film of the same name. And her victory really resonated with a lot of people in Brazil, including in the favela where she was raised."



Race and the Olympic Games - The New York Times

Andrea Tantaros Breaks Silence On Roger Ailes

The Daily Show - A Suspicious Police Shooting in Chicago

Dozens shot dead in anti-government protests across Ethiopia says opposition | World news | The Guardian

"Dozens of people were shot dead by security forces in protests across Ethiopia’s Oromiya and Amhara regions at the weekend, residents and opposition officials have said.



Unrest flared in Oromiya for several months until early this year over plans to allocate farmland surrounding the regional capital for development. Authorities scrapped the scheme in January, but protests flared again over the continued detention of opposition demonstrators.



At the weekend, protesters chanted anti-government slogans and waved dissident flags. Some demanded the release of jailed opposition politicians.



“So far, we have compiled a list of 33 protesters killed by armed security forces that included police and soldiers but I am very sure the list will grow,” Mulatu Gemechu, deputy chairman of the opposition Oromo Federalist Congress, said.





Ethiopia's farmers fight devastating drought with land restoration

 Read more

The deaths were in at least 10 towns across Oromiya, he said, including Ambo, Dembi Dolo and Nekemt - areas that saw previous rounds of protest."



Dozens shot dead in anti-government protests across Ethiopia says opposition | World news | The Guardian

Police will be required to report officer-involved deaths under new US system | US news | The Guardian

"Police departments will be required to give the US justice department full details of deadly incidents involving their officers each quarter, under a new government system for counting killings by police that was influenced by the Guardian.



Announcing a new program for documenting all “arrest-related deaths”, federal officials said they would actively work to confirm fatal cases seen in media reports and other open sources rather than wait for departments to report them voluntarily.



The Counted: people killed by police in the United States – interactive

The Guardian has been counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies since 2015. Read their stories and contribute to our ongoing, crowdsourced project

 Read more

The methodology of the new system, which aims to replace a discredited count by the FBI, mirrors that of The Counted, an ongoing Guardian effort to document every death caused by law enforcement officers in 2015 and 2016."



Police will be required to report officer-involved deaths under new US system | US news | The Guardian

Ferguson two years later: What has changed? The community of Ferguson, Missouri is remembering Michael Brown on the two-year anniversary of his death, which sparked a national movement questioning police tactics. Ferguson’s police chief, Delrish Moss, who was hired after the shooting, joins AM Joy to discuss. AM Joy on MSNBC

AM Joy on MSNBC

New Labeling Law for Genetically Engineer Food Considered a Major Civil Rights Setback | Afro

"The bill makes it mandatory to label foods with GMO but the information will be contained in QR (Quick Response) codes, not written on the product’s label. Consumers will be forced to rely on a mobile service, an Internet connection and access to a smartphone to scan a QR code, call a 1-800 number, or visit a website if they want to know whether or not their food is genetically modified.

“What we have here is a civil rights issue that is along the digital divide,” the Center for Food Safety’s Executive Director Andrew Kimbrell, told the AFRO. “It’s a really dangerous and alarming precedent. All Americans that buy food for themselves or their families should have equal information so they can judge what’s right and healthy for their families.”

Kimbrell, along with others represented by his organization, plans to sue over what he called the discriminatory nature of the law, which he said only passed after big food companies pressured politicians to take multiple votes on the matter. only to be defeated in March of this year.

According to the studies completed by the Pew Research Center on smartphone usage in 2015, only “two-thirds of Americans own a smartphone.” This means that of the roughly 234 million people in the U.S. today, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, less than 100,000,000 will be left on the wrong side of technology, thus, limiting their ability to choose or refuse genetically engineered products."

New Labeling Law for Genetically Engineer Food Considered a Major Civil Rights Setback | Afro

Courts push back on voter ID laws Chris Hayes talks to ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Dale Ho and MSNBC National Reporter Zachary Roth about the rash of court decisions and Roth's new book 'The Great Suppression.' - All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

Uganda: Police Attack LGBT Pride Event | Human Rights Watch

"The Chick Filet owners family gave money to an extremist Christian group which was supporting a bill to make gay acts punishable by the death penalty. "“We strongly condemn these violations of Ugandans’ rights to peaceful association and assembly,” said Nicholas Opiyo, a human rights lawyer and executive director at Chapter Four Uganda. “These brutal actions by police are unacceptable and must face the full force of Ugandan law.”<br /><br />

The police locked the gates of the club, arrested more than 16 people – the majority of whom are Ugandan LGBT rights activists – and detained hundreds more for over 90 minutes, beating and humiliating people; taking pictures of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) Ugandans and threatening to publish them; and confiscating cameras. Witnesses reported that the police assaulted many participants, in particular transgender women and men, in some cases groping and fondling them. One person jumped from a sixth-floor window to avoid police abuse and is in a hospital in critical condition.<br /><br />

By approximately 1:20 a.m., all those arrested had been released without charge from the Kabalagala Police Station. This episode of police brutality did not happen in isolation, the groups said. It comes at a time of escalating police violence targeting media, independent organizations, and the political opposition.<br /><br />

“Any force by Ugandan police targeting a peaceful and lawful assembly is outrageous,” said Frank Mugisha, executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), who was among those arrested. “The LGBTI community stands with all Ugandan civil society movements against police brutality.”



Uganda: Police Attack LGBT Pride Event | Human Rights Watch

Jailing of Rape Victim Could Spur Criminal-Justice Reform in Texas - Hit & Run : Reason.com

"Texas may get a revision to its witness detention laws after a Harris County rape victim was held in jail for nearly a month, including over Christmas, because prosecutors worried she may not testify against her attacker unless forced to. The attacker, Keith Hendricks, was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The victim, "Jenny," went on to file a federal lawsuit against Harris County. According to the lawsuit, Jenny—who suffers from mental health issues—was jailed for 27 days after an emotional breakdown on the witness stand made prosecutors doubt she would return to court."



Jailing of Rape Victim Could Spur Criminal-Justice Reform in Texas - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Rep. Lewis teaches the civil rights movement in graphic novel | MSNBC

Rep. Lewis teaches the civil rights movement in graphic novel | MSNBC

America has seen very little change. "SPARTA, Ga. — When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites. But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote." It just goes through a Sisyphean cycle of progress and retrenchment. The racist caste structure is permanent. - Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls - The New York Times

Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls - The New York Times