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BREAKING NEWS - Lynne Stewart Petition Campaign Urgent Update
May 13, 2013 2:00 p.m. PST:Urgent: Please sign the petition for compassionate release for Lynne Stewart
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2
The International Petition Campaign to Free Lynne Stewart and Save Her Life is gratified to report that today, May 13, following urgent communications from former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and social activist Dick Gregory, that Federal Bureau of Prisons General Counsel Kathleen Kenney telephoned Ramsey Clark to advise that a recommendation of Compassionate Release for Lynne Stewart from FMC Carswell Warden Jody R. Upton is on the desk of FBP Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. with a full package of documentation.
Ramsey Clark and the International Petition Campaign are on stand-by for further news regarding Federal Bureau of Prisons implementation of Compassionate Release for Lynne Stewart with the appropriate filing of this Motion with Judge John Koetl.
We call upon all to intensify our collective efforts and expand the Petition Campaign as this life and death decision for Lynne Stewart is pending.
Our grateful thanks to all for your dedication and commitment in waging this struggle for justice, compassion and freedom for Lynne Stewart
(This Breaking News Update was prepared by Co-Cordinators Mya Shone, Ralph Schoenman and Ralph Poynter.)
For more information, go to http://www.lynnestewart.org
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
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Stop the media blackout on Bradley Manning's trial!
Sign our petition demanding that he ensure journalists can record Bradley Manning's court martial proceedings! When you sign our petition, our e-mail system will send a message on your behalf to the office of Secretary of Defense.
http://www.bradleymanning.org/featured/stop-the-media-blackout-on-bradley-mannings-trial
*****
Want to flashmob for WikiLeaker Bradley Manning?
Some San Francisco activists and all-around fun folks are organizing a flash mob on Saturday, June 1st, an International Day of Action for whistle-blower Bradley Manning before his court martial begins. And we want YOU to join us!
Wondering what a "flash mob" is? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob)
Our flash mob, which we view as a creative way to bring public attention to the plight of Bradley Manning, will consist of people in military-style jackets saluting, then removing the jackets to reveal "Free Bradley Manning" t-shirts while dancing to Michael Jackson's "They Don't Care About Us."
The dance comes from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YklR5sRMHm0 but will be easier and shorter (sans Drill). If you don't know the dance, we're going to teach you! We don't care if you 'dance' or not. Practice will be on all Mondays leading up to the day of action.
Practice times: Mondays, 7:45 - 9:30pm, starting now. This Monday (April 22nd) we'll start from the beginning of the dance, and teach the first half.
Practice location: Feintech room @ ODC (351 Shotwell b/w 17th & 18th Streets in the Mission)
Instructional videos:
Full speed (we're skipping Drill, so start at 1:10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B1yMhpfBoQ
Breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeaICotBAUc
Please RSVP to join our practices on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/610475588979938
Hasta la victoria! (See you Monday.)
Leez, Emma and Mariko
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BOOK:
ANNOUNCING: IZ, by Robert Davis, originally published by Lost Books Press, is now available on Kindle for $7.
This odyssey of a 13 yr. old musical prodigy born into a family of hustlers, criminals and fanatics, takes place at the height of the Vietnam War. It has been called "a masterpiece," "porno," "the product of a deranged mind," "a wonderful comic romp," and various unmentionable things. When it first appeared in 1995, it won no awards and sold few copies. Very few – and those mainly to relatives and friends who after reading it quit speaking to the author.
But thanks to cheap digital publishing, the world may now be ready for IZ.
Izzy Aronson, on Kindle, is definitely ready for the world.
[Just had to pass this around. It's a great little novel with a real flavor of San Francisco in those times....Bonnie Weinstein]
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. ARTICLES IN FULL
B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
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A. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust
By MICHAEL WINES
HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.
Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past.
“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”
The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.
Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.
And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.
On some farms, big center-pivot irrigators — the spindly rigs that create the emerald circles of cropland familiar to anyone flying over the region — now are watering only a half-circle. On others, they sit idle altogether.
Two years of extreme drought, during which farmers relied almost completely on groundwater, have brought the seriousness of the problem home. In 2011 and 2012, the Kansas Geological Survey reports, the average water level in the state’s portion of the aquifer dropped 4.25 feet — nearly a third of the total decline since 1996.
And that is merely the average. “I know my staff went out and re-measured a couple of wells because they couldn’t believe it,” said Lane Letourneau, a manager at the State Agriculture Department’s water resources division. “There was a 30-foot decline.”
Kansas agriculture will survive the slow draining of the aquifer — even now, less than a fifth of the state’s farmland is irrigated in any given year — but the economic impact nevertheless will be outsized. In the last federal agriculture census of Kansas, in 2007, an average acre of irrigated land produced nearly twice as many bushels of corn, two-thirds more soybeans and three-fifths more wheat than did dry land.
Farmers will take a hit as well. Raising crops without irrigation is far cheaper, but yields are far lower. Drought is a constant threat: the last two dry-land harvests were all but wiped out by poor rains.
In the end, most farmers will adapt to farming without water, said Bill Golden, an agriculture economist at Kansas State University. “The revenue losses are there,” he said. “But they’re not as tremendously significant as one might think.”
Some already are. A few miles west of Mr. Yost’s farm, Nathan Kells cut back on irrigation when his wells began faltering in the last decade, and shifted his focus to raising dairy heifers — 9,000 on that farm, and thousands more elsewhere. At about 12 gallons a day for a single cow, Mr. Kells can sustain his herd with less water than it takes to grow a single circle of corn.
“The water’s going to flow to where it’s most valuable, whether it be industry or cities or feed yards,” he said. “We said, ‘What’s the higher use of the water?’ and decided that it was the heifer operation.”
The problem, others say, is that when irrigation ends, so do the jobs and added income that sustain rural communities.
“Looking at areas of Texas where the groundwater has really dropped, those towns are just a shell of what they once were,” said Jim Butler, a hydrogeologist and senior scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey.
The villain in this story is in fact the farmers’ savior: the center-pivot irrigator, a quarter- or half-mile of pipe that traces a watery circle around a point in the middle of a field. The center pivots helped start a revolution that raised farming from hardscrabble work to a profitable business.
Since the pivots’ debut some six decades ago, the amount of irrigated cropland in Kansas has grown to nearly three million acres, from a mere 250,000 in 1950. But the pivot irrigators’ thirst for water — hundreds and sometimes thousands of gallons a minute — has sent much of the aquifer on a relentless decline. And while the big pivots have become much more efficient, a University of California study earlier this year concluded that Kansas farmers were using some of their water savings to expand irrigation or grow thirstier crops, not to reduce consumption.
A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.
At an average 14 inches per acre in a growing season, a corn crop soaks up groundwater like a sponge — in 2010, the State Agriculture Department said, enough to fill a space a mile square and nearly 2,100 feet high.
Sorghum, or milo, gets by on a third less water, Kansas State University researchers say — and it, too, is in demand by biofuel makers. As Kansas’ wells peter out, more farmers are switching to growing milo on dry land or with a comparative sprinkle of irrigation water.
But as long as there is enough water, most farmers will favor corn. “The issue that often drives this is economics,” said David W. Hyndman, who heads Michigan State University’s geological sciences department. “And as long as you’ve got corn that’s $7, then a lot of choices get made on that.”
Of the 800 acres that Ashley Yost farmed last year in Haskell County, about 70 percent was planted in corn, including roughly 125 acres in Section 35. Haskell County’s feedlots — the county is home to 415,000 head of cattle — and ethanol plants in nearby Liberal and Garden City have driven up the price of corn handsomely, he said.
But this year he will grow milo in that section, and hope that by ratcheting down the speed of his pump, he will draw less sand, even if that means less water, too. The economics of irrigation, he said, almost dictate it.
“You’ve got $20,000 of underground pipe,” he said. “You’ve got a $10,000 gas line. You’ve got a $10,000 irrigation motor. You’ve got an $89,000 pivot. And you’re going to let it sit there and rot?
“If you can pump 150 gallons, that’s 150 gallons Mother Nature is not giving us. And if you can keep a milo crop alive, you’re going to do it.”
Mr. Yost’s neighbors have met the prospect of dwindling water in starkly different ways. A brother is farming on pivot half-circles. A brother-in-law moved most of his operations to Iowa. Another farmer is suing his neighbors, accusing them of poaching water from his slice of the aquifer.
A fourth grows corn with an underground irrigation system that does not match the yields of water-wasting center-pivot rigs, but is far thriftier in terms of water use and operating costs.
For his part, Mr. Yost continues to pump. But he also allowed that the day may come when sustaining what is left of the aquifer is preferable to pumping as much as possible.
Sitting in his Ford pickup next to Section 35, he unfolded a sheet of white paper that tracked the decline of his grandfather’s well: from 1,600 gallons a minute in 1964, to 1,200 in 1975, to 750 in 1976.
When the well slumped to 500 gallons in 1991, the Yosts capped it and drilled another nearby. Its output sank, too, from 1,352 gallons to 300 today.
This year, Mr. Yost spent more than $15,000 to drill four test wells in Section 35. The best of them produced 195 gallons a minute — a warning, he said, that looking further for an isolated pocket of water would be costly and probably futile.
“We’re on the last kick,” he said. “The bulk water is gone.”
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2) Suburbs’ Share of Poor Has Grown Since 2000
By SAM ROBERTS
The suburbs, which in 2000 accounted for 29 percent of the region’s poor people, a decade later were home to 33 percent of metropolitan New Yorkers living below the federal poverty level, according to an analysis of the latest census results.
The analysis, released on Monday by the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution, also found that while the number of poor people in New York City and Newark declined by 7 percent, or 120,000, the number in the suburbs rose by 14 percent, or 100,000, from 2000 to the census’s rolling 2008-10 American Community Survey.
The poor have typically been concentrated in big cities and rural America. Increasing poverty in the New York metropolitan area’s historically affluent suburbs mirrored a national trend detailed in the analysis, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America” by Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Alan Berube, a deputy director of the program.
The first decade of the 21st century was a tipping point, the authors wrote. Suburbia, they said, is now home to the “fastest-growing poor population in the country.”
While New York and Newark’s combined share of poor people in the region dipped from 71 percent to 67 percent, the cities were home to twice the 800,000 or so people who officially qualified as poor in the suburbs in 2010.
“It seems like as the city prospered and got more expensive over the 2000s, poverty crept up in a lot of the region’s older suburban communities,” Mr. Berube said.
“It might not have been people moving from city to suburban neighborhoods per se, but as the region creates more low-wage jobs, and attracts more new immigrants, low-income households that in the past might have located in the Bronx or Brooklyn are now settling in places like northern New Jersey and Westchester County.
“It’s telling that the city’s ‘suburban’ borough, Staten Island, is the only one that saw its poor population increase over the 2000s.”
Christopher Jones, vice president for research of the Regional Plan Association, blamed higher housing prices for the demographic shift.
The rising cost of shelter pushed poorer people out of Manhattan and Brooklyn, in particular.
Also, he said, a smaller percentage of workers from suburban areas like Nassau County were commuting to high-paying jobs in Manhattan, and the jobs that were in their hometowns were at shopping malls, in health care and in landscaping, and generally paid less.
At the same time, tenants were doubling up and living in illegal apartments.
Dozens of smaller cities, townships and boroughs registered double- and even triple-digit increases in their poverty rates over the decade.
Among the places where the population of poor residents increased since 2000 were, in New Jersey, Bayonne, Bergenfield, Clifton, Edison Township, Garfield, Hoboken, Hunterdon County, Lakewood, Linden, Mount Olive, New Brunswick, Passaic, Paterson, Perth Amboy, Raritan, Summit, Teaneck and Woodbridge; on Long Island, Brookhaven and Glen Cove; in Westchester, Ossining; in Putnam County, Carmel; and in Rockland County, Ramapo.
Poverty rates increased in some places even after the recession officially ended in 2009, according to the Brookings analysis, but the poor population declined from 2000 to 2010 by 11 percent in Brooklyn and by 10 percent in Manhattan.
It rose 18 percent on Staten Island.
According to federal guidelines, the current poverty level for a family of four is annual income below $23,350.
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3) Public Outrage Over Factory Conditions Spurs Labor Deal
By LIZ ALDERMAN
STOCKHOLM — For a global retailer, it was the worst kind of publicity.
Two weeks after the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed in one of the worst industrial disasters in history, a brash human-rights ad went viral. It paired a smiling photo of the chief executive of H&M, the Swedish retailer that is the world’s largest buyer of clothes from Bangladesh, with a picture of an anguished woman at the Rana Plaza rubble.
The headline read: “Enough Fashion Victims?”
It did not matter that no clothes produced by H&M had been found among the twisted metal and broken concrete as the death toll rose beyond 1,100. The refusal of a major Swedish newspaper to print the ad simply added to the notoriety online.
“They felt it was too tough,” Alex Wilks, the campaign director of Avaaz, the global advocacy group that created the ad, said of H&M. “But our feeling was this is a really tough topic. Lots of people lost their lives, so it’s worth escalating the discussions.”
In interviews last week, executives of the H&M Group, which operates six chains owned by H&M Hennes & Mauritz, said that the Avaaz ad had no influence on its thinking that led to its signing an agreement that for the first time would legally bind Western retailers to invest in improving worker safety in Bangladesh and other low-cost countries.
The company, which sold $22 billion in clothes and accessories last year, had already been making efforts to get other retailers to join it in improving the safety of factories used by its suppliers, the executives said.
But it was clear that after the April 24 Rana Plaza disaster, pressure was mounting on H&M — known as a purveyor of “cheap chic” and a leader in the so-called fast-fashion business, which relies on rapid turnarounds from order to delivery — to make good on past promises to help improve labor conditions in Bangladesh.
H&M’s Facebook page, adorned with photos of Beyoncé in bikinis made in Bangladesh and other low-wage countries, was becoming littered with customer complaints. Avaaz had circulated an online petition that gathered more than 900,000 signatures, calling for H&M to sign an agreement to help pay to meet fire safety standards and reduce workplace hazards in its Bangladesh factories.
Influential retail unions, which had long pushed H&M and other companies to step up their safety investments, also turned up the heat through phone calls and Skype video chats with H&M officials, including Helena Helmersson and Anna Gedda, who head up the company’s programs to improve the labor conditions and minimize the environmental impact of clothing production.
At the same time, H&M was trying to persuade some of the other big clothing retailers, including its main rivals, to step forward in unison on the issue.
Finally, last Monday, H&M decided to make the leap on its own.
“We were devastated by the incident in Bangladesh,” Ms. Gedda said last week in an interview in the company’s sleek Stockholm headquarters, a half-block away from three mammoth H&M stores that dominate the downtown streetscape. “We really have a genuine interest in making sure this leads to improvements on the ground,” she said.
UNI Global Union, a federation of retail and service workers, was a driving force behind the agreement. “You can imagine the might in front of us, the sheer scale of business and sales volumes they represent,” said Philip J. Jennings, general secretary of UNI Global. “But we did not relent.”
H&M’s decision broke the dam. Following its lead, other major European retailers, including Carrefour, Marks & Spencer and Inditex, parent of the huge Zara brand, said last week they would sign the accord, setting the stage for an industrywide collaboration to improve factory safety. The Bangladeshi government also vowed to upgrade safety standards and revise labor laws to allow unions to form, after a multitude of earlier pledges went largely unfilled.
All the parties have 45 days to work out the details of the program, and no one has yet estimated the overall cost. There will be limits: for the biggest companies, like H&M, the annual contribution for the first five years will be capped at 500,000 euros ($640,000). Smaller companies would pay less.
Despite the broad agreement, the American retail giants Wal-Mart Stores and Gap have declined to endorse the pact, citing legal concerns. Both say they will continue pursuing their own worker safety programs.
For many activists, the question is why H&M, with its outsize influence in the apparel industry, did not take that step sooner — especially after a deadly fire in 2010 killed 21 people at the Garib & Garib sweater factory in Bangladesh, for which H&M was a major customer.
“This was exactly the right thing to do three years ago — but they didn’t do it,” said Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, a group opposing sweatshops, based in Amsterdam. Moving sooner, she said, “could have helped avoid these deaths.”
Even after the Rana Plaza disaster, H&M required persuading, said Jyrki Raina, the general secretary for IndustriALL Global Union, a federation of 50 million workers from 140 countries who also negotiated the binding accord with H&M and other retailers. “Unless they were really pushed,” he said, “we would not be where we are today.”
Ms. Gedda insists that H&M, which has taken great pains over the years to burnish its image as socially responsible, “had already been working toward this for a long time.”
“Consumers and other groups were not the tipping point,” she said. “The tipping point was that we reached an accord that we felt was really going to produce change.”
Until last week, big apparel companies like H&M and Gap worked independently on factory safety in Bangladesh. In H&M’s case, the company educated suppliers about workplace safety, created safety videos for workers and demanded factory inspections.
The failure of the patchwork approach in an industry driven by relentless pressure to cut costs and turn out an ever-greater volume of affordable clothing became evident as more people died in factory disasters. Last November, at least 112 workers, some producing garments to be sold by Wal-Mart, perished in a blaze at the Tazreen Fashions factory outside Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. Many were unable to escape because of locked windows and doors.
Spurred by that and earlier disasters, two companies — PVH, the American parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and Tchibo, a modest-size German retailer — last year endorsed a plan for Western companies to finance fire safety efforts and structural upgrades to Bangladeshi factories. But that agreement, essentially similar to the one H&M signed last week, was not to take effect until enough others signed on.
In January, eight more Bangladeshi workers were killed when a fire swept through the Smart Garment Export factory in Dhaka, where a supplier was filling orders for Inditex, which is based in Spain and is a main rival to H&M.
Soon after, Mr. Raina, the labor leader, convened a meeting in Geneva with representatives of the world’s largest brands — including H&M, Inditex, Gap, Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer and Tesco — to push them toward a joint solution for factory safety in Bangladesh.
The response was not what he expected.
“I was astonished to see how complacent they were,” Mr. Raina said. “People were dying and they said, ‘We’re already working on this.’ But it was window-dressing to tell consumers they were doing something.”
Only Inditex was ready to take the plunge, he said.
Another meeting with the major retailers was scheduled for April 29 outside Frankfurt, to be led by the government-run Society for International Development, known as GIZ.
Five days before that date, the Rana Plaza complex collapsed.
“There is a point where the straw breaks the camel’s back, and you say, this can’t go on,” said Mr. Jennings, of UNI Global Union. “When you saw the horror of Rana Plaza, you knew that the rules of the game had to be changed, right now.”
Yet even at the April 29 meeting, as the Rana Plaza death toll was mounting, retailers were not willing to agree to financial commitments to ensure factory safety. “They still wanted to talk about principles,” Mr. Jennings said.
All the while, global outrage was growing. Unions circulated a letter calling on the brands to commit to a legally binding safety agreement by May 15. Knowing most companies might balk, they set their sights on H&M and its outsize influence in the retail sector. Get H&M on board, the thinking went, and others would follow.
So the negotiations went into top gear with H&M officials, including Ms. Gedda and her boss, Ms. Helmersson.
“They didn’t much like it, because they now saw a legally binding document,” said Mr. Raina, who said he had a heated argument on the telephone about the matter with Ms. Helmersson before H&M accepted the agreement.
An H&M spokesman said Ms. Helmersson was not available to comment for this article.
As the negotiations continued during the week of May 6, Web sites and radio reports picked up on the refusal by a big Swedish newspaper, Dagens Industri, to publish Avaaz’s ad with the smiling photo of H&M’s chief executive, Karl-Johan Persson.
Ms. Gedda said a confluence of factors, including the Bangladeshi government’s pledge for reforms and the involvement of the International Labor Organization as a monitor, led H&M to sign the pact. She emphasized that H&M already had a long history of trying to improve factory safety. “What was really important was for us to have an accord that we believed would make a difference on the ground” and that others would endorse as well, she said.
Even as H&M sought the support of other retailers, Gap made an alternate proposal that would largely have eliminated potential legal liabilities. Inditex, which was getting ready to sign, suddenly veered toward Gap’s plan, Mr. Raina said.
But last Monday morning, when H&M made its announcement, Inditex followed suit just minutes later. Within days, three dozen other major retailers signed on.
Gap, Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, Target and many other big United States brands remain opposed, citing the risk of legal liability.
Labor groups say the Bangladesh safety accord may be undermined if the American retail giants keep holding out. But Ms. Gedda said H&M believed there was enough support for real change.
“We would have appreciated having as broad a coalition as possible,” she said. “But we think with the brands we now have on board, we have very good conditions for this to work.”
There is still a long way to go before the lives of Bangladeshi factory workers improve. And then there are all the other emerging market countries where conditions in fast-fashion factories remain a concern. On Wednesday, a factory in Cambodia making athletic shoes for Asics collapsed, killing three workers. It was not far from a site where, in 2012, more than 200 workers at a factory making H&M clothes collapsed simultaneously from noxious fumes and heat.
Last week, at one of the giant H&M stores in Stockholm, labels on three racks of clothes read like a United Nations roll call of emerging nations: shorts made in Pakistan, a white blouse from Cambodia, cheap tank tops from Bangladesh, a skirt from Sri Lanka and so on.
“This is really just the end of the beginning,” Mr. Jennings of UNI Global said.
Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting from New York.
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4) Torture Victim’s Body Is Found Near U.S. Base, Afghans Say
By ROD NORDLAND
KABUL,
Afghanistan — The footless corpse of an Afghan man missing since
November was found on Tuesday near the former American Special Forces
base to which he was last seen being taken, according to Afghan
officials and victims’ representatives.
Afghan investigators said that after his disappearance, the man, Sayid Mohammad, was seen in a video undergoing torture at the hands of an Afghan-American named Zakaria Kandahari, who was the chief translator for an American Army Special Forces A Team stationed at the base, in Nerkh district of Wardak Province. The American military denies that Mr. Kandahari is an American citizen, and said he was no longer working for the A Team when the video was made.
Mr. Mohammad’s body was found about 200 yards outside the perimeter of the Nerkh base, which is now occupied by Afghan special forces after the American unit was removed following protests by Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai. Mohammad Hanif Hanafi, the Nerkh District governor, said it was found by laborers digging a water ditch when they unearthed what appeared to be a military-style black body bag.
Relatives of Mr. Mohammad said his corpse was largely complete, except both of his feet had been cut off. They took his remains to the Nerkh district government center in protest. The partial remains and clothing of another missing person were earlier found near the base, family members and Afghan officials have said.
Afghan officials are seeking Mr. Kandahari’s arrest on murder, torture and abuse of prisoner charges, and accuse the American military of shielding him from capture.
American military officials have insisted they do not have Mr. Zakaria and do not know his whereabouts; they also say that repeated military investigations into the disappearances and murders of at least 15 people from Wardak Province have shown no wrongdoing by American soldiers. The results of those investigations, however, have not been made public.
The senior Afghan investigator for the Ministry of Defense, who asked to speak anonymously in line with his division’s policy, said that investigators had now raised the toll of missing and dead to 17 people, all of whom disappeared after having been taken into custody by the A Team in Nerkh District. He provided a list of those peoples’ names. And while there was no testimony tying American soldiers directly to abuse of those detainees, the investigator said, none of them have been seen alive since. Nine are still missing up to six months later, and eight have been found dead.
His figures did not include the latest body to be discovered, which would mean of the 17, 8 are still missing and 9 have been found dead.
“There is no question that Zakaria directly tortured and murdered,” the investigator said. “But who is Zakaria? Who recruited him, gave him his salary, his weapons? Who kept him under their protection? He worked for Special Forces. That a member of their team was committing such crimes and they didn’t know it is just not credible.”
The Afghan investigator, however, disputed earlier Afghan official accounts that suggested an American voice could be heard in the videotaped session of Mr. Mohammad’s torture, and he said the torture session took place in Afghan government offices in Nerkh district, not on the base itself. The videotape has not been released publicly.
On that video, officials who have seen it said, a furious Mr. Kandahari in military uniform can be seen repeatedly kicking a seated and handcuffed Mr. Mohammad, sometimes so severely it knocked him over.
The American military has described Mr. Kandahari as a freelance translator who was working “pro bono” for the American Special Forces at Nerkh, who allowed him to live at their base in exchange for his help.
Afghan officials, however, described Mr. Kandahari as having a leadership role and conducting operations on his own initiative, including detaining suspects and taking them into the Special Forces base last November and December, when the disappearances occurred. The American military withdrew the Special Forces A Team from Nerkh in March, after public protests from family members, and a series of Afghan government investigations into the disappearances.
The investigations prompted Afghan officials to demand that American authorities turn over Mr. Kandahari, but American officials told the Afghans that he had escaped, which infuriated Mr. Karzai, who then demanded that all Special Forces units leave Wardak, a troubled province as little as an hour’s drive from the capital. A compromise was struck in which only the team in Nerkh was removed.
“What we want from ISAF is their cooperation,” the senior Afghan investigator said, referring to the International Security Assistance Force, as the American-led coalition is called. “They should bring Zakaria and surrender him to the Afghan government.” The official rejected suggestions that he had escaped, saying he could not have done so without official help. “He is not someone who can leave the camp at midnight, he was such a criminal that he could not stay one hour outside the base by himself.”
Mr. Mohammad, a farmer from Karim Dad village, was 23 when he was arrested on Nov. 21 by A Team members on quad bikes, the investigator said. He is survived by a wife, a daughter and two sons, according to his father, Sher Mohammad.
“All I can say is that we had absolutely nothing to do with that man’s death,” said Col. Thomas W. Collins, a spokesman for the American military.
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul.
Afghan investigators said that after his disappearance, the man, Sayid Mohammad, was seen in a video undergoing torture at the hands of an Afghan-American named Zakaria Kandahari, who was the chief translator for an American Army Special Forces A Team stationed at the base, in Nerkh district of Wardak Province. The American military denies that Mr. Kandahari is an American citizen, and said he was no longer working for the A Team when the video was made.
Mr. Mohammad’s body was found about 200 yards outside the perimeter of the Nerkh base, which is now occupied by Afghan special forces after the American unit was removed following protests by Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai. Mohammad Hanif Hanafi, the Nerkh District governor, said it was found by laborers digging a water ditch when they unearthed what appeared to be a military-style black body bag.
Relatives of Mr. Mohammad said his corpse was largely complete, except both of his feet had been cut off. They took his remains to the Nerkh district government center in protest. The partial remains and clothing of another missing person were earlier found near the base, family members and Afghan officials have said.
Afghan officials are seeking Mr. Kandahari’s arrest on murder, torture and abuse of prisoner charges, and accuse the American military of shielding him from capture.
American military officials have insisted they do not have Mr. Zakaria and do not know his whereabouts; they also say that repeated military investigations into the disappearances and murders of at least 15 people from Wardak Province have shown no wrongdoing by American soldiers. The results of those investigations, however, have not been made public.
The senior Afghan investigator for the Ministry of Defense, who asked to speak anonymously in line with his division’s policy, said that investigators had now raised the toll of missing and dead to 17 people, all of whom disappeared after having been taken into custody by the A Team in Nerkh District. He provided a list of those peoples’ names. And while there was no testimony tying American soldiers directly to abuse of those detainees, the investigator said, none of them have been seen alive since. Nine are still missing up to six months later, and eight have been found dead.
His figures did not include the latest body to be discovered, which would mean of the 17, 8 are still missing and 9 have been found dead.
“There is no question that Zakaria directly tortured and murdered,” the investigator said. “But who is Zakaria? Who recruited him, gave him his salary, his weapons? Who kept him under their protection? He worked for Special Forces. That a member of their team was committing such crimes and they didn’t know it is just not credible.”
The Afghan investigator, however, disputed earlier Afghan official accounts that suggested an American voice could be heard in the videotaped session of Mr. Mohammad’s torture, and he said the torture session took place in Afghan government offices in Nerkh district, not on the base itself. The videotape has not been released publicly.
On that video, officials who have seen it said, a furious Mr. Kandahari in military uniform can be seen repeatedly kicking a seated and handcuffed Mr. Mohammad, sometimes so severely it knocked him over.
The American military has described Mr. Kandahari as a freelance translator who was working “pro bono” for the American Special Forces at Nerkh, who allowed him to live at their base in exchange for his help.
Afghan officials, however, described Mr. Kandahari as having a leadership role and conducting operations on his own initiative, including detaining suspects and taking them into the Special Forces base last November and December, when the disappearances occurred. The American military withdrew the Special Forces A Team from Nerkh in March, after public protests from family members, and a series of Afghan government investigations into the disappearances.
The investigations prompted Afghan officials to demand that American authorities turn over Mr. Kandahari, but American officials told the Afghans that he had escaped, which infuriated Mr. Karzai, who then demanded that all Special Forces units leave Wardak, a troubled province as little as an hour’s drive from the capital. A compromise was struck in which only the team in Nerkh was removed.
“What we want from ISAF is their cooperation,” the senior Afghan investigator said, referring to the International Security Assistance Force, as the American-led coalition is called. “They should bring Zakaria and surrender him to the Afghan government.” The official rejected suggestions that he had escaped, saying he could not have done so without official help. “He is not someone who can leave the camp at midnight, he was such a criminal that he could not stay one hour outside the base by himself.”
Mr. Mohammad, a farmer from Karim Dad village, was 23 when he was arrested on Nov. 21 by A Team members on quad bikes, the investigator said. He is survived by a wife, a daughter and two sons, according to his father, Sher Mohammad.
“All I can say is that we had absolutely nothing to do with that man’s death,” said Col. Thomas W. Collins, a spokesman for the American military.
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul.
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5) Arizona Desert Swallows Migrants on Riskier Paths
By FERNANDA SANTOS and REBEKAH ZEMANSKY
TUCSON — In the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office here — repository of the nation’s largest collection of missing-person reports for immigrants who have vanished while crossing the United States-Mexico border — 774 sets of remains awaited identification in mid-May, stored in musty body bags coated in dust.
For the family of Andrés Valenzuela Cota, the remains represent a chance to turn the page on a sad chapter of family history. Mr. Cota was 45 when he disappeared on July 15, 2011, after calling a niece in Los Angeles and asking her to send $100 to a Western Union office in Cananea, Mexico, a staging point for smugglers bringing migrants through Arizona.
As Congress debates the most sweeping changes to the country’s immigration system in decades, the remains stored here are also a nagging reminder of the complicated variables of the border-security equation. The number of migrant apprehensions declined precipitously in recent years, one of the strongest indicators that fewer people have tried to cross the border illegally. But the number of migrant deaths has remained high.
“Less people are coming across,” said Bruce Anderson, the chief forensic anthropologist at the medical examiner’s office, “but a greater fraction of them are dying.”
There were 463 deaths in the past fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30 — the equivalent of about five migrants dying every four days, according to an analysis by the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. In the time federal statistics have been compiled, only 2005 had more deaths, and in that year, there were more than three times as many apprehensions.
As security at the border has tightened, pushing migrants to seek more remote and dangerous routes, the largest number of the deaths last year occurred along the punishing stretch of desert that spans the southernmost tip of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, the busiest along the border.
The only riskier stretch is the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas, where, from Oct. 1 to April 30, law enforcement officers or ranchers found the bodies of 77 immigrants, or more than half the number of bodies recovered there in all of the past fiscal year: 150.
In that sector, the most deaths have occurred in Brooks County, small and struggling at 944 square miles, where the average household income is $25,000. The number of migrant remains recovered is on pace to double that of last year, a record for the county, at 129, said a county judge, Raul Ramirez. Most of the dead are believed to be from Central America, Judge Ramirez said.
In Tucson, the medical examiner’s office, which handles autopsies for the border counties in the Tucson sector — three of Arizona’s four border counties — received 49 sets of remains from Jan. 1 to May 9, Dr. Anderson said. Each was assigned a number, then photographed, cataloged, weighed and measured. Clothes, tattered by the elements and wildlife, were placed in plastic bags.
For years, identification of the remains was elusive because there were so few clues. Few immigrants from impoverished rural communities could be traced with dental records. ID cards, found in pockets and backpacks, were unreliable because many were forgeries, bought by Central Americans to elude the authorities in Mexico, which the migrants had to cross illegally before reaching the United States.
Assembling the remains, like linking a mandible that arrived in the office early this spring to a set of remains that was missing one, is like solving a grisly puzzle. It requires manually searching the color-coded paper case files lining the walls in Dr. Anderson’s office: one shelf for cases from the late 1990s, when there were few, and the rest for the more than 2,100 deaths since 2001.
“The cause and manner of death is easy: it’s either there or it’s undetermined,” said Dr. Gregory L. Hess, chief medical examiner in Pima County. “It’s what goes on in trying to identify the person that can take a long time.”
Early this month, the office unveiled a computerized mapping database bearing the records of 1,826 migrants who died in the desert, listing GPS coordinates for where they were found and, if known, their sex, age and cause of death. It gives the public the first comprehensive glimpse of the complexity of the problem. Combined, the hundreds of red dots that represent people who died of exposure to the intense desert heat and cold, by far the most common among the causes of death, look like an unshapely bruise.
The project began five years ago, through a partnership with Humane Borders, a nonprofit group that had already been plotting the deaths. An anonymous donor provided $175,000 to develop the database.
The lone mandible had been plucked from deep inside the desert near Three Points, west of Tucson. Angela Soler, a forensic anthropologist at the office, searched the database for bodies found in the same area. There were 52 in a six-mile radius.
Dr. Soler started by focusing on those that were closest. One was the complete body of a man found and identified in 2008. Another was found in 2012, an unidentified Hispanic man between 20 and 35, the most common demographic among dead migrants. She pulled the file and found that the body was missing a mandible. (DNA tests are under way to determine whether they are a match.)
“It took hours to do what might have taken months,” she said.
In March, the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office asked the family of Mr. Cota, the migrant who disappeared in 2011, for his dental records to see if he was among the unidentified dead stored there. There were seven possible matches among the bodies found in Cochise County, for which the office handles autopsies and where Mr. Cota is believed to have entered the country, based on what he told his relatives on his last phone call.
A brother-in-law, who asked not to be identified because he feared the drug cartels that control the human-smuggling business, said the family had filed missing-person reports on both sides of the border; visited local hospitals, police stations and prisons in Arizona; and retraced Mr. Cota’s route, posting fliers bearing his name and photograph in communities along the way.
“Every door we’re knocking is closed,” the brother-in-law said. “Nothing opens.”
Mr. Cota lived for 20 years in California, most of it illegally, overstaying a visa. When his mother became deathly ill, he left for Los Mochis, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, to say goodbye.
In September 2010, he tried to cross back through San Diego using a fake passport, but he was caught and imprisoned for 45 days. After his release, he tried twice to sneak across the border, without success. A relative eventually told him to go to a Mexican border city, Nogales, where a smuggler could bring him into Arizona “for a discounted rate,” his brother-in-law said.
On his last call, Mr. Cota said he was about to start his journey, but had to leave his cellphone behind. He promised to call again in six days.
On May 9, Robin C. Reineke, a cultural anthropologist at the medical examiner’s office, searched the database for a match, going through the cases from Cochise County one by one.
Mr. Cota was not among them. The search goes on.
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6)Camping Out for Five Days, in Hopes of a Union Job
By JESSICA GLAZER
The men began arriving last Wednesday, first a trickle, then dozens. By Friday there were hundreds of them, along with a few women.
They set up their tents and mattresses on the sidewalk in Long Island City, Queens, unpacked their Coronas and cards – and settled in to wait as long as five days and nights for a slender chance at a union job as an elevator mechanic.
On Monday morning, Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would hand out applications for its training program. Those in line – there were more than 800 by sun-up Monday — were hoping for a chance at job security, higher salaries and other benefits.
Andres Loaiza, 25, had his eye on a position that includes minimal physical labor.
“I want to get to that point where I would troubleshoot and not kill my back anymore,” said Mr. Loaiza, who currently does nonunion electrical and mechanical elevator work. And the union, he added, looking years down the road, would provide college funding for his son, who is now 4.
Every 18 to 20 months, the union accepts 750 applications for the 150 to 200 spots in its four-year apprenticeship program, distributing them from the second-floor office of its elevator division on 36th Street. Those who pass a test and are accepted start out making $17 an hour. If they complete the program, which includes college-level classes, they become journey workers, making $35 to $40 an hour with pensions and full medical benefits.
While they waited, the hopefuls lined the sidewalk along 36th Street, across from people drinking beer at Studio Square, past the Astor Room pumping jazz fusion from its speakers, and along the huge building of Kauffman Studios, where one morning some men said they were given leftover breakfast originally intended for the movie studio’s extras.
The union had rented six port-a-potties and hired a 24-hour security guard. The police from the 114th Precinct stopped by to ensure order. Moving the process off the street would not have made things much easier for the union, said Nicholas LaGuardia, director of the union’s elevator division.
“If we did it online or we did it like a mail-in, we’d have to go through 10,000 applications,” he said.
While the job seekers came prepared with dominoes, iPhones, camping lights and tarps, by Friday many of them were bored, pacing. Overnight, they brushed their teeth with bottles of water; tucked into their sleeping bags, folding chairs or cars; and tried to get some rest.
On Saturday as a light drizzle fell, four new friends leaned over a camping grill with sizzling burgers and sausages that they bought from a nearby grocery store, which had also opened its bathroom to them.
Gerry Dubatowka, 20, whose father is in Local 3, had come down from Orange County, N.Y., to wait for his shot. He is studying electrical technology at Orange County Community College, but said he would rather work with his hands than be in school.
“I just want to do whatever, wherever I got to start,” said Mr. Dubatowka. “I want steady work all the time.”
Mr. Dubatowka met Mr. Loaiza and two other men, Carlos Ramirez, 23, and Edwin DeLeon, 38, waiting in the line. Soon, they started referring to one another as neighbors with rent-stabilized homes on the sidewalk, though Mr. Dubatowka actually spent nights in his car.
After Sunday’s drenching rain, Monday morning dawned gray. A few arguments erupted as people tried to cut the line. A security guard yelled not to take up the whole sidewalk.
“I’m going to spend the next four days in the shower,” Mr. Dubatowka promised.
At 9 a.m. Monday, the door opened. The first man in line disappeared inside and emerged moments later with a wide smile across his face.
“Yay! No. 1!” one man yelled when he stepped onto the sidewalk.
“Good luck, big guy!” said another. He cheered, throwing both hands into the air, one clutching the paperwork. A moment passed before a union representative brought things back to earth.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Move the line.”
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7) Why No Safe Room to Run To? Cost and Plains Culture
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The Web site for the City of Moore, Okla., recommends “that every residence have a storm safe room or an underground cellar.” It says below-ground shelters are the best protection against tornadoes.
But no local ordinance or building code requires such shelters, either in houses, schools or businesses, and only about 10 percent of homes in Moore have them.
Nor does the rest of Oklahoma, one of the states in the storm belt called Tornado Alley, require them — despite the annual onslaught of deadly and destructive twisters like the one on Monday, which killed at least 24 people, injured hundreds and eliminated entire neighborhoods.
It is a familiar story, as well, in places like Joplin, Mo., and across the Great Plains and in the Deep South, where tornadoes are a seasonal threat but government regulation rankles.
In 2011, a monster tornado razed large parts of Joplin, killing 160 people in a state that had no storm-shelter requirements. The city considered requiring shelters in rebuilt or new homes but decided that doing so would be “cost prohibitive” because the soil conditions make building basements expensive, said the assistant city manager, Sam Anselm. Even so, he estimated that half the homes that had been rebuilt included underground shelters. Schools were being rebuilt with safe rooms, he said.
In Moore, the Web site explains that the city has no community shelter because a 15-minute warning is not enough time to get to safety and because, “overall, people face less risk by taking shelter in a reasonably well-constructed residence.”
This is generally true, but not for a storm like Monday’s milewide tornado, which was a terrible reminder of a tornado that caused extensive damage on May 3, 1999.
Curtis McCarty, a member of the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission and a builder himself, said the twister on Monday would have defeated attempts to resist it above ground. “You cannot build a structure that’s going to take a direct hit from a tornado like that that’s going to stand,” he said.
The city’s Web site sounds tones that, in retrospect, might seem implausibly optimistic. It says the experience in 1999 — “an extremely unique event weatherwise” — meant that the standard “shelter in place” methods of protection were adequate. If another storm comes, “there’s only a less than 1 percent chance of it being as strong and violent as what we experienced” before.
Larry Graves, a project manager with Downey Consulting, an engineering company in Oklahoma City that works with schools, said buildings had been upgraded with safe rooms in a piecemeal way in recent years. “You’re seeing more of it, but it’s a big funding item,” he said, noting that a school district might reinforce a large common bathroom with concrete or build an extra-strong gymnasium as a shelter.
Without added protection, Mr. Graves said, the drill is roughly the same as it was when he was a schoolboy 40 years ago: “They move you into the hallway, and you stay there tucked up and wait it out.”
Construction standards in Moore have been studied extensively. In a 2002 study published in the journal of the American Meteorological Society, Timothy P. Marshal, an engineer in Dallas, suggested that “the quality of new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the tornado” in 1999.
Few homes built in the town after the storm were secured to their foundations with bolted plates, which greatly increase resistance to storms; instead, most were secured with the same kinds of nails and pins that failed in 1999. Just 6 of 40 new homes had closet-size safe rooms.
Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore said that since then, the town had strengthened building codes, including a requirement that new homes incorporate hurricane braces. The city has also aggressively promoted the construction of safe rooms and other measures, with more than $12 million from state and federal emergency management funds to subsidize safe-room construction by offering a $2,000 rebate, said Albert Ashwood, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. Still, he said, it has been several years since Moore has received new financing for the program.
About a year and a half ago, Mr. McCarty, the builder, spoke to a group of Oklahoma legislators who were considering mandating shelters for new homes, he recalled. But no legislation was proposed, he said, because of the bad economy. A small, prefabricated sunken shelter can cost $4,000, he said, and “mandating another three or four thousand dollars on every new home can really add up when you’re trying to keep houses affordable.”
Houses in Oklahoma, Mr. McCarty said, are usually built on slabs without basements or crawl spaces because the land is flat and the weather is temperate enough that digging a deep foundation is not necessary, as it is with homes built in the Northeast, where the temperatures regularly dip below freezing.
“When you look at the flat land, and the amount it would cost to excavate and remove the dirt, the cost of the foundation to build a basement just adds a substantial amount to the cost of a new home,” Mr. McCarty said.
Assessment calculations also discourage basement building, he said; assessors value basement square footage at half the rate of ground-level space.
Mike Gilles, a former president of the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association, said that he built safe rooms in all his custom homes, and that even many builders who build speculatively now make them standard.
But asked whether the government should require safe rooms in homes, he said, “Most homebuilders would be against that because we think the market ought to drive what people are putting in the houses, not the government.”
Mr. Anselm, the official in Joplin, said that the city had applied to Missouri for emergency funds for safe rooms, but that the state used money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency primarily for disaster relief from flooding.
Beyond expense and construction standards, there is a local attitude about tornadoes that borders on temerity. There is a joke among Oklahomans that when the storm sirens sound, instead of taking cover, everyone goes outside and looks for the storm.
That was what Leon and Larry Harjo did Monday. The 45-year-old twins sat outside their brick home to see what was going on as the sirens blared and hailstones pelted. Only when they glimpsed the enormous funnel cloud barreling their way did they run to a medical center across the street to take cover in a hallway.
Even that was a harrowing experience; Larry Harjo said the wind had blown him and his wife around as they clutched each other on the ground. A door was ripped off its hinges, ceiling tiles fell, and they heard cars crashing against the building.
Would surviving the tornado make them think twice about waiting so long to hunker down the next time?
Larry Harjo said: “You can’t run every time you hear a warning. You’ll be scared your whole life.”
His brother added: “Might as well just sit back. If it gets you, it gets you. If not, another day.”
John Eligon contributed reporting from Moore, Okla., and Laurie Goodstein from New York.
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8) Chicago School Closings May Leave Some Communities Without Old Lifelines
By STEVEN YACCINO
CHICAGO — Long after the last school bell scatters children back across this city each day, Tzia Ford is more often than not still inside Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School.
Years ago, when her mother walked these same halls, a competitive cheerleading team kept young girls off the street after class was over. For Tzia, a third grader who is on the student council, afternoons at the neighborhood school on Chicago’s West Side are a variety show of ballet and martial arts, hip-hop and cooking class, tutoring and fund-raisers. Five days a week, sometimes past nightfall.
“She will be at school all day if she can,” said her mother, Shawanna Turner, 30, whose family has attended Bethune for generations. “We know everybody in that school. I know the parents because I went to school with them.”
This fall, Tzia and her brother, Quinten, 5, may get to see Bethune only from the outside — its doors locked and its classrooms emptied. Students would still gather there each morning, but only to wait for a bus to take them to another elementary school a mile away.
After months of protests, lawsuits and public hearings, the Chicago Board of Education is scheduled to vote Wednesday on whether to shutter 53 public schools, part of a building consolidation plan that would save the district more than $500 million over the next decade in capital costs and operating expenses.
The proposed closings, announced in March and targeting schools like Bethune that are considered underused after years of population decline, have pitted an array of community complexities against the economics of urban education in this, the third-largest school district in the country. If approved, they would constitute the largest closing of public school campuses at one time by a city in recent memory.
“We’re paying for a 100,000 empty seats across the board,” said Tom Tyrrell, a Chicago Public Schools official. “It just doesn’t make any sense to keep paying for thousands of empty seats when we have an opportunity to restructure and put some assets into communities that have typically been underserved.”
At first glance, Bethune seems an obvious candidate for closing. Nestled in the poverty-battered East Garfield Park neighborhood, the school has a low academic rating and serves 377 students in a building that officials say should hold 780 (though critics have called such estimates unrealistic).
A mile away, John Milton Gregory Elementary School is in top academic standing and has at least a half dozen unused classrooms fully equipped with desks and whiteboards.
The demographics of the two schools are almost identical. If the two schools combine, the district expects to save about $700,000 annually in operating costs, money officials say can be repurposed for better educational tools like new computer labs, a science lab, and tablet computers.
And yet, the possible move to Gregory has generated a visceral reaction from Bethune families, underscoring broader fears about school closings that officials have found difficult to ease. By uprooting elementary schools like Bethune, where around 98 percent of the students are black and from low-income homes, parents say officials are uprooting the personal and academic lifelines of Chicago’s neediest communities.
“Bethune is a safe haven for me,” said Alicia Jefferson, 40, whose 13-year old daughter, Leonshay, attends the school.
Ms. Jefferson said that teachers at Bethune had assisted her with personal problems, including drug-related issues. Last year, she added, she got help from the school when she spent a night searching the city for her daughter after she stayed out until morning, checking hospitals and police stations. Her son, Brandon, now in high school, still returns to Bethune to get tutoring from a trusted staff member, she said.
A local alderman, Jason C. Ervin, said, “Bethune has been a neighborhood school as long as I’ve been living.” He has opposed shutting down Bethune. “It is a staple in our community.”
Academics at Bethune have improved since its entire staff turned over in 2009. While still below the district average, test scores have climbed and parents say that their children have been engaged in schoolwork now more than ever and that all the school needs is more time.
With money saved from the consolidation, the district has budgeted more than $4 million to upgrade Gregory with air-conditioning and other amenities, some of which teachers at Bethune say their school already has. Officials also said parents from both schools would help draft a transition plan to deal with safety and social integration concerns, as well as a smooth transfer of academic and after-school support programs.
It was not yet known how many teachers would follow students to consolidated schools. While district guidelines allow up to 31 students per class, teachers and parents said there were similar classes at Bethune that have as few as 17 students, raising concerns that they would not get the same level of individual instruction at Gregory.
While maybe not financially viable for the district, the extra attention from small class sizes at Bethune has helped Tzia’s grades, Ms. Turner said. She said one teacher singled her daughter out for individual music lessons, then gave Tzia an acoustic guitar because she knew the family could not afford one.
“With all these kids in one school, how’s a teacher going to notice a kid?” Ms. Turner asked, dreading what she fears will be the outcome of Wednesday’s vote. “I feel like it’s going to be chaos.”
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9) Cops Go Undercover at High School to Bust Special-Needs Kid for Pot: Why Are Police So Desperate to Throw Kids in Jail?
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10) Chicago Public Schools Approves Largest School Closure in City’s History
By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah and John Chase Tribune reporters
http://blackstarjournal.org/?p=2824
After hearing from aldermen, angry parents and community members in a meeting interrupted several times by protesters, the Chicago Board of Education today approved a plan to close 49 elementary schools and one high school program.
The board voted 4-2 to close Von Humboldt Elementary, then unanimously approved the rest of the closings in a single vote.
Before that, the board voted 6-0 to approve a last-minute recommendation by the district to spare four elementary schools: Manierre Elementary on the Near North Side, Mahalia Jackson and Garvey on the South Side and Ericson on the West Side.
After more than two hours of public comments, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and board members defended the plan to close the highest number of schools the city has ever shut down in a single year.
“We can no longer embrace the status quo because the status quo is not working for all Chicago school children,” Byrd-Bennett said before the vote was taken. “It is imperative that you take the difficult decision but essential steps.”
The district says it needs to close schools to address a looming $1 billion deficit and declining enrollment.
Board President David Vitale, in his remarks before the vote, said that while closing schools is difficult “ultimately it is our responsibility to choose.”
“Today’s reality requires change,” he said.
One by one, board members cited the necessity of closing schools to deal with the district’s fiscal challenges.
“We have to fix our schools and in order to do that we can’t continue to operate with the number of schools we have,” said board member Andrea Zopp said.
Board member Mahalia Hines said she wondered if CPS should wait another year and related it to a recent trip she made to the dentist’s office when he recommended an unpleasant procedure and she thought about waiting a year.
“He said it will continue to decay and the pain will be unbearable,” she said. “The decay can no longer continue.”
Board member Carlos Azcoitia said he wouldn’t have supported any of the actions if he felt CPS wasn’t going to fully support the remaining neighborhood schools.
“Now our big responsibility is to make this work and make neighborhood schools stronger as an option within our communities,” he said.
Board member Andrea Zopp said she is moved by the passion of protesters but that doing nothing is not an option.
“We have to fix our schools and in order to do that we can’t continue to operate with the number of schools we have,” Zopp said.
Before the meeting, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said that she thinks Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has lobbied for closings, all along that he wanted to shut down 50 schools.
“Four schools is a start,” Lewis said of the district’s decision to spare four schools at the 11th hour. “It’s a good start but it’s not enough.”
An hour and a half before the start of the meeting, about 30 protesters formed a circle in front of school board headquarters at 125 S. Clark Street and chanted, “Education is a right. Not just for the rich and white.”
The board room was packed with about 200 people, and during the public comment portion of the meeting, several aldermen spoke up for schools slated to be closed in their wards.
Ald. LaTasha Thomas, 17th, chairman of the education committee, asked the board to take “a step back.”
“How are the children and families better prepared to make positive change in their lives as a rult of the decision you make?” she asked.
“We’re talking about grammar school kids. We’re talking about babies,” said Ald. Walter Burnettt, 27th.
The school closings would be the most by an urban district in recent history, a fact noted by Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th.
“I urge you this is not a record we want to set,” he said. “We don’t want to look back in five years and say, ‘What did we do?’“ Pawar said.
A group of about 15 people came up to the podium and as one of them, Rebecca Martinez, spoke, a man standing with her, Shannon Bennett of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, started yelling.
“This board is illegitimate!” he said.
Security quickly moved in and tried to pull Bennett away from the podium. As security continued to try to pull the people out of the room, the group of 15 began singing, “We shall not be moved” while security tried to usher them out of the board room.
They continued signing as they were being ushered out of the room.
Parents at schools taken off the list by Byrd-Bennett expressed joy and relieve. Sherise McDaniel was at a meeting to discuss security at Jenner Elementary, where Manierre students were expected to go if there school was closed, when she learned that Manierre had been saved.
“We were jumping up and down, the kids were screaming. It was just a gift,” said McDaniel, who has two children at the Near NorthSide School.
“I had so many highs and lows with this situation,” McDaniel said. “One minute it was looking like there was no hope for us, no matter what was said, no one was listening, no one cared. And then in the next moment when the independent review board agreed with us, we thought, yes, we did it, we have a chance.”
“We feel extremely blessed. Our prayers were answered,” said Tyisha Whitmore, 34, whose daughters are in the 3rd and 8th grade at Garvey Elementary. “We are ecstatic, grateful, still sad about the other 50 schools that will still be closing, because no school should be closed.”
By law, the board was supposed to have a school closing plan in place by last Dec. 1. But Byrd-Bennett won an extension from the General Assembly, saying the district needed to engage the community before undertaking such a massive endeavor.
The following elementary schools, and one high school program, are closing:
1. Louis Armstrong Math & Science Elementary School
2. Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School
3. Arna Wendell Bontemps Elementary School
4. Kate S Buckingham Special Education Center
5. John Calhoun North Elementary School
6. Miriam G Canter Middle School
7. Ana Roque de Duprey Elementary School
8. Robert Emmet Elementary School
9. Nathan R Goldblatt Elementary School
10. Matthew A Henson Elementary School
11. Francis Scott Key Elementary School
12. William H King Elementary School
13. Alfred David Kohn Elementary School
14. Jean D Lafayette Elementary School
15. Guglielmo Marconi Elementary Community Academy
16. Garrett A Morgan Elementary School
17. Near North Elementary School
18. Anthony Overton Elementary School
19. Jesse Owens Elementary Community Academy
20. Ignance Paderewski Elementary Learning Academy
21. Francis Parkman Elementary School
22. Elizabeth Peabody Elementary School
23. Nathaniel Pope Elementary School
24. Betsy Ross Elementary School
25. Songhai Elementary Learning Institute
26. Graeme Stewart Elementary School
27. Lyman Trumbull Elementary School
28. Alexander von Humboldt Elementary School
29. West Pullman Elementary School
30. Granville T Woods Math & Science Academy ES
31. Elihu Yale Elementary School
32. Crispus Attucks Elementary School
33. John P Altgeld Elementary School
34. Benjamin Banneker Elementary School
35. Edward C Delano Elementary School
36. Dumas Technology Academy
37. Enrico Fermi Elementary School
38. Garfield Park Preparatory Academy ES
39. Elaine O Goodlow Elementary Magnet School
40. Victor Herbert Elementary School
41. Robert H Lawrence Elementary School
42. Horatio May Elementary Community Academy
43. William J & Charles H Mayo Elementary School
44. Pershing West Middle School
45. Martin A Ryerson Elementary School
46. Austin O Sexton Elementary School
47. Joseph Stockton Elementary School
48. Williams Multiplex Elementary School
49. Williams Preparatory Academy Middle School
50. Roswell B Mason Elementary School (high school program only)
After hearing from aldermen, angry parents and community members in a meeting interrupted several times by protesters, the Chicago Board of Education today approved a plan to close 49 elementary schools and one high school program.
The board voted 4-2 to close Von Humboldt Elementary, then unanimously approved the rest of the closings in a single vote.
Before that, the board voted 6-0 to approve a last-minute recommendation by the district to spare four elementary schools: Manierre Elementary on the Near North Side, Mahalia Jackson and Garvey on the South Side and Ericson on the West Side.
After more than two hours of public comments, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and board members defended the plan to close the highest number of schools the city has ever shut down in a single year.
“We can no longer embrace the status quo because the status quo is not working for all Chicago school children,” Byrd-Bennett said before the vote was taken. “It is imperative that you take the difficult decision but essential steps.”
The district says it needs to close schools to address a looming $1 billion deficit and declining enrollment.
Board President David Vitale, in his remarks before the vote, said that while closing schools is difficult “ultimately it is our responsibility to choose.”
“Today’s reality requires change,” he said.
One by one, board members cited the necessity of closing schools to deal with the district’s fiscal challenges.
“We have to fix our schools and in order to do that we can’t continue to operate with the number of schools we have,” said board member Andrea Zopp said.
Board member Mahalia Hines said she wondered if CPS should wait another year and related it to a recent trip she made to the dentist’s office when he recommended an unpleasant procedure and she thought about waiting a year.
“He said it will continue to decay and the pain will be unbearable,” she said. “The decay can no longer continue.”
Board member Carlos Azcoitia said he wouldn’t have supported any of the actions if he felt CPS wasn’t going to fully support the remaining neighborhood schools.
“Now our big responsibility is to make this work and make neighborhood schools stronger as an option within our communities,” he said.
Board member Andrea Zopp said she is moved by the passion of protesters but that doing nothing is not an option.
“We have to fix our schools and in order to do that we can’t continue to operate with the number of schools we have,” Zopp said.
Before the meeting, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said that she thinks Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has lobbied for closings, all along that he wanted to shut down 50 schools.
“Four schools is a start,” Lewis said of the district’s decision to spare four schools at the 11th hour. “It’s a good start but it’s not enough.”
An hour and a half before the start of the meeting, about 30 protesters formed a circle in front of school board headquarters at 125 S. Clark Street and chanted, “Education is a right. Not just for the rich and white.”
The board room was packed with about 200 people, and during the public comment portion of the meeting, several aldermen spoke up for schools slated to be closed in their wards.
Ald. LaTasha Thomas, 17th, chairman of the education committee, asked the board to take “a step back.”
“How are the children and families better prepared to make positive change in their lives as a rult of the decision you make?” she asked.
“We’re talking about grammar school kids. We’re talking about babies,” said Ald. Walter Burnettt, 27th.
The school closings would be the most by an urban district in recent history, a fact noted by Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th.
“I urge you this is not a record we want to set,” he said. “We don’t want to look back in five years and say, ‘What did we do?’“ Pawar said.
A group of about 15 people came up to the podium and as one of them, Rebecca Martinez, spoke, a man standing with her, Shannon Bennett of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, started yelling.
“This board is illegitimate!” he said.
Security quickly moved in and tried to pull Bennett away from the podium. As security continued to try to pull the people out of the room, the group of 15 began singing, “We shall not be moved” while security tried to usher them out of the board room.
They continued signing as they were being ushered out of the room.
Parents at schools taken off the list by Byrd-Bennett expressed joy and relieve. Sherise McDaniel was at a meeting to discuss security at Jenner Elementary, where Manierre students were expected to go if there school was closed, when she learned that Manierre had been saved.
“We were jumping up and down, the kids were screaming. It was just a gift,” said McDaniel, who has two children at the Near NorthSide School.
“I had so many highs and lows with this situation,” McDaniel said. “One minute it was looking like there was no hope for us, no matter what was said, no one was listening, no one cared. And then in the next moment when the independent review board agreed with us, we thought, yes, we did it, we have a chance.”
“We feel extremely blessed. Our prayers were answered,” said Tyisha Whitmore, 34, whose daughters are in the 3rd and 8th grade at Garvey Elementary. “We are ecstatic, grateful, still sad about the other 50 schools that will still be closing, because no school should be closed.”
By law, the board was supposed to have a school closing plan in place by last Dec. 1. But Byrd-Bennett won an extension from the General Assembly, saying the district needed to engage the community before undertaking such a massive endeavor.
- RelatedMonths of hearings drew often angry crowds through the winter as CPS gradually whittled down an initial list of 330 schools it said were underenrolled.The CTU, whose members stand to lose jobs, has led the opposition along with parents and community leaders. While some high performing teachers will follow students to new schools based on need, the vast majority will now be forced to look for jobs.The CTU has filed two federal lawsuits challenging the closings, arguing that discriminate against special needs children and African Americans, since most of the schools slated to be shut down are predominantly black.
1. Louis Armstrong Math & Science Elementary School
2. Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School
3. Arna Wendell Bontemps Elementary School
4. Kate S Buckingham Special Education Center
5. John Calhoun North Elementary School
6. Miriam G Canter Middle School
7. Ana Roque de Duprey Elementary School
8. Robert Emmet Elementary School
9. Nathan R Goldblatt Elementary School
10. Matthew A Henson Elementary School
11. Francis Scott Key Elementary School
12. William H King Elementary School
13. Alfred David Kohn Elementary School
14. Jean D Lafayette Elementary School
15. Guglielmo Marconi Elementary Community Academy
16. Garrett A Morgan Elementary School
17. Near North Elementary School
18. Anthony Overton Elementary School
19. Jesse Owens Elementary Community Academy
20. Ignance Paderewski Elementary Learning Academy
21. Francis Parkman Elementary School
22. Elizabeth Peabody Elementary School
23. Nathaniel Pope Elementary School
24. Betsy Ross Elementary School
25. Songhai Elementary Learning Institute
26. Graeme Stewart Elementary School
27. Lyman Trumbull Elementary School
28. Alexander von Humboldt Elementary School
29. West Pullman Elementary School
30. Granville T Woods Math & Science Academy ES
31. Elihu Yale Elementary School
32. Crispus Attucks Elementary School
33. John P Altgeld Elementary School
34. Benjamin Banneker Elementary School
35. Edward C Delano Elementary School
36. Dumas Technology Academy
37. Enrico Fermi Elementary School
38. Garfield Park Preparatory Academy ES
39. Elaine O Goodlow Elementary Magnet School
40. Victor Herbert Elementary School
41. Robert H Lawrence Elementary School
42. Horatio May Elementary Community Academy
43. William J & Charles H Mayo Elementary School
44. Pershing West Middle School
45. Martin A Ryerson Elementary School
46. Austin O Sexton Elementary School
47. Joseph Stockton Elementary School
48. Williams Multiplex Elementary School
49. Williams Preparatory Academy Middle School
50. Roswell B Mason Elementary School (high school program only)
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11) One Drone Victim’s Trail From Raleigh to Pakistan
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — When Jude Kenan Mohammad was about 18 and living in Raleigh, N.C., according to people who knew him, he came under the influence of an older man, Daniel Patrick Boyd, who taught him a violent, radical version of Islam.
Mr. Boyd would be charged in 2009 and eventually imprisoned as the ringleader of a group of North Carolina residents who had vowed to carry out a violent jihad both in the United States and overseas. Mr. Mohammad was also charged, but by then, partly at the direction of Mr. Boyd, he had traveled to Pakistan, where he had joined a group of militants in that country’s tribal area.
On Wednesday, the United States government officially acknowledged for the first time what had long been rumored among his friends in Raleigh: that Mr. Mohammad was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike on a compound in South Waziristan, Pakistan, on Nov. 16, 2011. He was 23.
He was one of at least four Americans to have been killed in “counterterrorism operations,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a letter sent on Wednesday to Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Only one of those killed, the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was deliberately targeted, Mr. Holder said. The others were killed in strikes that did not specifically target them, he said, including Samir Khan, another young man from Raleigh who had joined the Qaeda branch in Yemen and was killed with Mr. Awlaki; Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, killed two weeks later; and Mr. Mohammad.
American officials said on Wednesday that Mr. Mohammad had been killed with about 12 other insurgents in what the C.I.A. calls a “signature strike,” an attack based on patterns of activity, such as men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the sharpest divisions inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.
After the strike, the family friend said, Mr. Mohammad’s wife, whom he had met and married after moving to Pakistan, called his mother in North Carolina to say he had been killed.
Reflecting the covert nature of the drone program in Pakistan, the F.B.I. had left Mr. Mohammad’s name on its wanted list after his death. An F.B.I. spokesman, Kathleen Wright, said on Wednesday that it would be removed.
While Mr. Mohammad was not directly targeted, he had come under increasing scrutiny by American counterterrorism officials, who said he was involved in recruiting militants for Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, as well as making videos on YouTube to incite violence against the United States.
“He had risen to the top of the U.S. deck,” said Seth G. Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and former adviser to the military’s Special Operations Command. Mr. Jones said that while in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad had made contact with five young Virginia men who disappeared from their homes around Thanksgiving in 2009 and turned up seeking to join militant groups. Instead they were arrested and remain in Pakistani custody.
A family friend, who asked not to be named because she did not want to offend Mr. Mohammad’s family, called him “a good kid, but a follower.” His Pakistani father, Taj Mohammad, met his mother, Elena, an American who converted from Catholicism to Islam, in New York in the early 1980s. They lived in Pakistan for several years, but in the late 1990s, Elena moved back to the United States with their son.
Jude Mohammad dropped out of high school but later earned his high school equivalency certificate and attended Wake Technical Community College. He was “a regular around the mosque” in Raleigh and often volunteered in the mosque kitchen to help prepare communal meals, the friend said.
“He’d put food on the back of his bike and ride a couple of miles to deliver groceries to the homebound,” she said.
Later, after dropping out of school, he used drugs and described himself as “lost,” the friend said. “He was looking for a father figure.”
After meeting Mr. Boyd, a convert to Islam who called himself Saifullah, he came to see going overseas to fight as a way to purify himself.
Mr. Boyd, who had trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, was later banned from the mosque in Raleigh as a troublemaker. In September 2009, he was indicted with his two sons, Mr. Mohammad and four other men for conspiring to plot terrorist acts at home and abroad.
Among other things, Mr. Boyd was accused of carrying out “reconnaissance” of the Marine base at Quantico, Va., and plotting to stage attacks on service members there.
While he was a fugitive in Pakistan, Mr. Mohammad would sometimes call his American friends and family, especially on Muslim holidays, staying on the phone just long enough to offer a greeting for fear of having the call traced.
The calls stopped after November 2011, the friend said, and the reports of his death began to circulate through Raleigh’s Muslim community.
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12) Sweden: Riots Continue in Immigrant Neighborhoods
By REUTERS
Hundreds of young people burned cars and attacked police officers this
week in three nights of riots in immigrant neighborhoods of Stockholm, Sweden’s
capital. On Tuesday night, a police station in the Jakobsberg area in
northwest Stockholm was attacked, two schools were damaged and an arts
center was set ablaze, despite a call for calm from Prime Minister
Fredrik Reinfeldt. The riots appear to have been started by the police
killing of a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in Husby this month,
which prompted accusations of police brutality. The riots spread from
Husby to other poor parts of Stockholm suburbs.
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13) Protests Fail to Deter Chicago From Shutting 49 Schools
By STEVEN YACCINO
CHICAGO — Officials here in the third-largest district in the country voted Wednesday, after an emotional meeting, to close 49 public schools that they said were not being fully used.
The decision, passed overwhelmingly by the Chicago Board of Education, came after weeks of contentious public hearings that brought more than 34,000 people out to oppose the school consolidation plan at dozens of meetings across the city.
The move, which singled out schools that district officials said had too many empty desks after years of population loss — but that opponents argued unfairly targeted low-income minority communities — makes up the largest group of city schools to be closed at once in recent memory.
“The greatest challenge facing our school system right now is that tens of thousands of children every year are trapped in underutilized schools and under-resourced schools,” said Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, who had to pause her remarks more than once when protesters began shouting. She later added, “We cannot maintain a system that cannot be sustained and does not benefit the children.”
Chicago now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, and the district had already closed about 100 schools since 2001. In March, the Chicago Public Schools identified 53 more elementary schools that it planned to shutter, expecting to save about $500 million over 10 years in a district facing a $1 billion deficit.
The plan drew outrage from many parents in Chicago’s South Side and West Side areas. Opponents raised safety concerns about children having to walk farther distances, possibly crossing gang lines, to their new schools.
At the meeting on Wednesday, Ms. Byrd-Bennett removed four schools from her original recommended closing list, plus a fifth school she suggested should not be closed until next year. She said the district and the Police Department were working to develop a safety plan for consolidating schools.
Among the last-minute changes, the board decided to move Joseph Kellman Corporate Community, a West Side school not on the consolidation list, into the building of the nearby Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, which was voted to be closed Wednesday, giving the neighborhood an additional option for the next school year.
Tensions ran high during more than two hours of public comment, as teachers and parent made their final pleas to the board, at times shouting and weeping into a microphone at the front of the room. More than once, speakers were escorted from the room by security guards after refusing to yield after their allotted two-minute time periods. One protester sat down on the floor after speaking and chanted, “Every school is my school,” until she was carried out.
“These parents and these teachers are not dollar signs,” said Wanda Wilburn, a parent speaking out against all the school closings. “They are people with feelings and lives.”
Begging officials to keep her child’s South Side school from being boarded up, Sharon Taylor, a parent at Granville T. Woods Academy, added, “We have what you say my baby needs.”
In the end, only the four schools were spared, as Ms. Byrd-Bennett requested. But opponents say they are not done fighting. Last week, parents filed two lawsuits in federal court claiming that the closings would violate the Americans With Disabilities Act by uprooting and disrupting special education students.
One of those lawsuits also contends that the consolidation plan would disproportionately affect minority communities, violating Illinois civil rights law.
Motoko Rich contributed reporting from New York.
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14) Though Enrolling More Poor Students, 2-Year Colleges Get Less of Federal Pie
By DAVID LEONHARDT
WASHINGTON — Community colleges have received a declining share of government spending on higher education over the last decade even as their student bodies have become poorer and more heavily African-American and Latino, according to a report to be released Thursday.
“Many community colleges end up receiving minimal federal support,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which is publishing the report. “The kids with the greatest needs receive the fewest resources.”
The report argues that colleges have become increasingly separate and unequal, evoking the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which barred racial segregation in elementary and secondary schools. Higher education today, the report says, is stratified between four-year colleges with high graduation rates that serve largely affluent students and community colleges with often dismal graduation rates that serve mostly low-income students.
In 2009, community colleges spent $9,300 per student on educational resources, virtually unchanged from 1999 once inflation was taken into account. Public research universities spent $16,700, up 11 percent from 1999, and private research universities spent $41,000, an increase of 31 percent.
Community colleges often receive substantially less money per student than elementary or high schools, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin professor who served on the 22-member committee that wrote the report.
The other members included the chancellor of Syracuse University, the president of the New York Public Library and three community college presidents.
Community colleges, which enroll about 44 percent of the nation’s college students, will play a major role in determining how quickly educational attainment rises in the United States, experts say. While the United States once led the world in educational attainment by a wide margin, it has fallen behind some other rich countries over the past generation.
President Obama has called for the country to regain its lead by 2020, and community colleges would probably have to improve significantly for that goal to be met.
Although 81 percent of new students at community colleges say they want to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree, only 12 percent do so within six years, according to the report. Most entering students also fail to receive a two-year degree, although some community colleges have compiled an impressive record of graduating low-income students.
Community colleges began in the early 20th century, known then as junior colleges, and expanded rapidly in the 1960s. They became not only steppingstones to four-year colleges but also places that trained students for specific jobs, like nurses, paralegals or engineering technicians.
The largest, each with tens of thousands of students, include Miami Dade College; Northern Virginia Community College; City College of San Francisco; Lone Star College, in Houston; and Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn.
The report describes a network of federal and state educational policies that has failed to keep pace with the increasing enrollment of lower-income students in higher education. The largest federal financial aid program — Pell grants, which go to lower-income students to offset tuition — does relatively little to help community colleges because their tuition tends to be low.
“In the 20th century, going to college was not necessary for getting a job in the middle class,” said Eduardo J. Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College and a co-chairman of the 22-member committee. “But in today’s job market, if you don’t have a postsecondary credential, you can’t get a job that lets you achieve the American dream. It keeps you in a cycle of poverty.”
Community colleges and four-year colleges have both suffered in recent years from state budget cuts, said Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development. But four-year colleges have made up some of the shortfall through tuition increases, while community colleges have not increased tuition as rapidly.
The financing gap, Ms. Goldrick-Rab said, “is contributing to really appalling completion rates.”
The report recommended a series of policy changes, including more transparency about who benefits from federal education spending; more outcome-based financing, to reward colleges that do the best job with challenging students; and programs to make community colleges economically diverse. Community colleges could create more honors programs, including classes for high school students, and four-year colleges could set aside more slots for community college transfers, the authors said.
Other research has found that poor students tend to fare worse, all else equal, when enrolled in a school made up mostly of poor students. Yet over the last generation, higher education appears to have become more stratified.
In 2006, 28 percent of community college students came from the bottom quartile of the socioeconomic distribution, up from 21 percent in 1982. Only 16 percent of community college students came from the top quartile in 2006, down from 24 percent in 1982.
By comparison, only about 5 percent of students at the 200 most selective four-year colleges came from the bottom quartile in 2006, according to Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, of the Center on Education and the Workforce, at Georgetown University.
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15) U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
American retailers remain sharply opposed to joining an international plan to improve safety conditions at garment factories in Bangladesh as their European counterparts and consumer and labor groups dismiss the companies’ concerns about legal liability.
A few shareholders at Gap’s annual meeting this week questioned the company’s refusal to sign on to a plan that commits retailers to help finance safety upgrades in Bangladesh, where 1,127 workers died when the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed on April 24.
“In the United States, there’s maybe a bigger legal risk than there is in Europe,” Gap’s chief executive, Glenn Murphy, responded. “If we were to sign onto something that had unlimited legal liability and risk, I think our shareholders should care about that.”
Whether the new accord would subject retailers to substantial legal risks has been debated since nearly three dozen European retailers embraced the plan last week while almost all major American companies shunned it. The plan, called the Accord on Factory and Building Safety in Bangladesh, was forged by retailers, union leaders and government officials overseas.
Labor advocacy groups and other supporters of the plan pilloried the responses by Gap, Wal-Mart and other American retailers that have decided to rely on their own inspection systems rather than join the plan.
Johan Lubbe, a legal adviser to the National Retail Federation, asserts that the Americans’ worries about litigation are legitimate. “The liability issue is of great concern, at least on this side of the Atlantic,” Mr. Lubbe said. “For U.S. corporations, there is a fear that someone will try to impose liability and responsibility if something goes awry in the global supply chain.”
For example, if a Bangladesh factory burns and workers die, the victims’ families, represented by zealous American lawyers, might seize on the legal commitments in the accord to file lawsuits in the United States against retailers that bought apparel from the factory.
John C. Coffee Jr., a professor of corporate law at Columbia University, said American companies generally faced a higher risk of litigation than overseas competitors, largely because the court systems differ significantly. Unlike the system in the United States, courts in Europe generally prohibit class-action lawsuits, do not allow contingency fees for lawyers who win cases and require losing parties to pay legal fees for both sides. Those policies often discourage lawyers and plaintiffs from filing lawsuits.
But Professor Coffee also cited a Supreme Court decision last month that could greatly reduce the ability of overseas factory workers and their families to file lawsuits in United States courts.
“It may be that those retailers who worry about legal liability are pointing to an outdated sense of what liability is for actions taken abroad,” Professor Coffee said. He added that if an accident occurred abroad — for instance, at a factory in Bangladesh — “there is an increasing doubt that the American retailer could be sued in the United States,” because the Supreme Court ruling, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, went far to curb such lawsuits under the Alien Tort Claims Act.
Long before the Bangladesh safety plan was developed, overseas workers had sued American retailers over illegally low wages, 12-hour shifts and the use of guard dogs and barbed wire fences, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a university-backed factory monitoring group. In 2003, Gap, Nordstrom, Target, Wal-Mart and 20 other retailers settled a lawsuit for $20 million on behalf of 30,000 garment workers on the Pacific island of Saipan who alleged those abuses.
Mr. Lubbe cited a more recent lawsuit as evidence that American retailers still faced risks. Last year, the University of Wisconsin sued Adidas, demanding that it pay $1.8 million in severance benefits to former workers at an Indonesian factory it used. The factory’s owner had failed to comply with an order to pay those benefits to 2,800 workers who lost their jobs.
Mr. Nova said the University of Wisconsin lawsuit was based on a licensing agreement with more specific obligations than the Bangladesh accord. Adidas had pledged to comply with a labor code of conduct that said it must “ensure that all manufacturers comply” with the code and “provide legally mandated benefits,” such as severance benefits.
Under the international agreement, a great number of Bangladesh’s more than 5,000 apparel factories could be affected. Some workplace experts estimate that fixing safety problems could cost at least $500,000 on average per factory, meaning that the countrywide price tag could easily exceed $1 billion over several years. Some note, however, that the expense would be just a fraction of the $18 billion worth of apparel exported annually by Bangladesh, the second-largest garment exporter after China.
Gap’s spokesman, Bill Chandler, said the accord contained numerous provisions that worried American retailers. He said the plan’s binding, contractual nature could impose large legal obligations that were hard to estimate because of the plan’s ambiguities.
For instance, it does not detail how much the Bangladeshi apparel manufacturer should pay toward needed safety upgrades — perhaps factories lack a fire escape — and how much the Western companies that use those factories should pay. Another ambiguity is how costs for safety improvements will be apportioned among the several Western companies that buy garments from a given factory in Bangladesh.
“The language is vague and unclear and thus there can be too much legal liability for our company in Bangladesh,” Mr. Chandler said. Such statements cause some supporters of the plan to assert that American retailers’ real objection is the price of financing safety improvements.
Paul Lister, director of legal services at Associated British Foods, the parent of Primark, a retailer that has signed the Bangladesh accord, acknowledged that the plan has ambiguities. He said the signatories planned to work with government and labor officials over the next 45 days to decide on the details.
“It’s not a perfect document,” Mr. Lister said. “We’ll deal with the imperfections in the document, and we have to deal urgently with the underlying issue — the moral and ethical issues of fire safety and building integrity in Bangladesh.”
Sounding far different from American retailers, Anna Gedda, manager for social sustainability at H&M, the Swedish company that is the biggest buyer of apparel from Bangladesh, voiced little concern about legal liability.
“The fact that it was a legally binding accord was not a big issue,” she said. “I know it is for American brands but it isn’t for us.” The accord contains a clause that calls for settling disputes through independent arbitrators in an effort to keep disputes out of court.
“This whole fear of lawsuits is a straw man,” said Philip J. Jennings, general secretary of Uni Global Union, a worldwide federation of 20 million retail and service workers, who has negotiated with various retailers to develop the plan and persuaded them to join it. “If these American retailers get 20 lawyers in a room, they start hyperventilating about lawsuits and they’ll have a communal anxiety attack.”
Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, gave another reason for opposing the Bangladesh plan, saying it “seeks to advance a narrow agenda driven by special interests,” a reference to the labor unions that helped shape the plan and then pressed retailers to sign on.
Jyrki Raina, general secretary of IndustriALL, a union federation with 50 million members from 140 countries, said that European retailers were receptive because they often deal with and negotiate with labor unions.
In rejecting the accord, Wal-Mart outlined its own proposals that it said would meet or exceed the accord’s goals. The company, the world’s largest retailer, predicted quicker results, saying it would inspect all of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh over the next six months.
While Wal-Mart, voicing concern about potential liability, said the plan “introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government.”
Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, who has urged the Obama administration to do more to improve factory safety in Bangladesh, criticized Wal-Mart’s approach. “It’s been left up to the retailers, suppliers and government all these years, and that hasn’t worked,” he said.
Liz Alderman contributed reporting.
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B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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This Saturday all over Northern CA!
National Day of Action – March Against Monsanto
Major Actions happening in Oakland, San Francisco, and Sacramento and hundreds of demonstrations taking place in at least 38 countries around the world.
http://occupy-monsanto.com/march-against-monsanto-may-25-2013/
Oakland
Sat., May 25th, 11am
NEW LOCATION: Clinton Square,
Corner of International Blvd. at 6th Ave
San Francisco
Sat., May 25th, 11am
Union Square Rally
March along Market St. at 12pm
Sacramento
Sat., May 25th, 11am
State Capitol
Meet at North Steps for Rally
On May 25, activists around the world will unite to March Against Monsanto.
Why do we march?
Research studies have shown that Monsanto’s genetically-modified foods can lead to serious health conditions such as the development of cancer tumors, infertility and birth defects.
In the United States, the FDA, the agency tasked with ensuring food safety for the population, is steered by ex-Monsanto executives, and we feel that’s a questionable conflict of interest and explains the lack of government-led research on the long-term effects of GM products.
Recently, the U.S. Congress and president collectively passed the nicknamed “Monsanto Protection Act” that, among other things, bans courts from halting the sale of Monsanto’s genetically-modified seeds.
For too long, Monsanto has been the benefactor of corporate subsidies and political favoritism. Organic and small farmers suffer losses while Monsanto continues to forge its monopoly over the world’s food supply, including exclusive patenting rights over seeds and genetic makeup.
Monsanto's GM seeds are harmful to the environment; for example, scientists have indicated they have contributed to Colony Collapse Disorder among the world's bee population.
What are solutions we advocate?
• Voting with your dollar by buying organic and boycotting Monsanto-owned companies that use GMOs in their products.
• Labeling of GMOs so that consumers can make those informed decisions easier.
• Repealing relevant provisions of the US's "Monsanto Protection Act."
• Calling for further scientific research on the health effects of GMOs.
• Holding Monsanto executives and Monsanto-supporting politicians accountable through direct communication, grassroots journalism, social media, etc.
• Continuing to inform the public about Monsanto's secrets.
• Taking to the streets to show the world and Monsanto that we won't take these injustices quietly.
We will not stand for cronyism. We will not stand for poison. That’s why we March Against Monsanto.
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STOCKTON, FRI., MAY 31st - 2 pm - JUSTICE FOR JAMES RIVERA
Just want to let folks that a bus will be available to transport folks from Oscar Grant Plaza to Stockton on May 31st. Bus leaves at 12:30pm.
MAY 31,2013 @ 2:00 Stockton court house come out and support Justice 4 James E. Rivera Jr.
Visit the Oscar Grant Committee at www.oscargrantcommittee.weebly.com.
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COURAGE TO RESIST SF BAY AREA EVENTS
May 17, 2013 ~ "Supporting the troops who refuse to fight!"
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We are less than a month away from heroic WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning's court martial. Even though he will be tried at Fort Meade, Maryland, there are many local ways to get involved as well. Here are three upcoming events:
Tuesday, May 21 ~ 5pm
BRADLEY MANNING SUPPORT NETWORK MAILING PIZZA PARTY
55 Santa Clara Ave, Oakland 94610
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/05/09/18736576.php
https://www.facebook.com/events/500398416675943/
Saturday, June 1-8
BRADLEY MANNING FLASH MOB ACTIONS
We’re going to flashmob Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us” June 1st-8th, the international week of action for Bradley Manning, at SF Pride, and at various open spaces until Bradley can come dance with us.
PRACTICE SESSION: MONDAYS, 7:45pm – 9:30pm
Feintech room @ ODC (351 Shotwell b/w 17th & 18th Sts) San Francisco
https://orders.bradleymanning.org/support_events/dance-flashmob-for-bradley
https://www.facebook.com/events/610475588979938/
Sunday, June 30 ~ 10am
BRADLEY MANNING SF PRIDE OFFICIAL CONTINGENT
Meet at Beale and Howard Sts (near the temporary Trans-bay Terminal)
https://orders.bradleymanning.org/support_events/bradley-manning-sf-pride
https://www.facebook.com/events/327236664071988/
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COURAGE TO RESIST
484 Lake Park Ave. #41, Oakland CA 94610
http://couragetoresist.org
510-488-3559
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Please Sign Immediately and pass on!
EMERGENCY CALL! JOIN US IN STOPPING TORTURE IN US PRISONS!
June 21, 22 and 23 Will Be Days of Solidarity With the Struggle to End Prison Torture!
Tens of thousands of people imprisoned in the US are being subjected to torturous, inhumane conditions. Many are:
· Held in long term solitary confinement; locked in tiny, windowless, sometimes sound proof, cells; cut off from fresh air and sunlight for 22-24 hours every day and given small portions of food that lacks basic nutritional requirements.
· Denied human contact and violently taken from their cells for petty violations.
· Put in solitary arbitrarily, often because of accusations of being members of prison gangs based on dubious evidence, and have no way to challenge the decisions of prison authorities to place them in solitary.
Many are forced to endure these conditions for months, years and even decades! Mental anguish and trauma often results from being confined under these conditions. Locking people down like this amounts to trying to strip them of their humanity.
These conditions fit the international definition of torture! This is unjust, illegitimate and profoundly immoral. WE MUST JOIN IN AN EFFORT TO STOP IT, NOW!
People imprisoned at Pelican Bay State Prison in California have called For a Nation-wide Hunger Strike to begin on July 8, 2013. They have also issued a call for unity among people from different racial groups, inside and outside the prisons. People who are locked down in segregation units of this society's prisons, condemned as the "worst of the worst," are standing up against injustice, asserting their humanity in the process. We must have the humanity to hear their call, and answer it with powerful support!
A Nation-wide and World-wide Struggle Needs to Be launched NOW to bring an End to this widespread Torture Before those in the Prisons Are Forced to Take the Desperate step of going on hunger strikes and putting their lives on the line!
To the Government: We Demand an Immediate End to the Torture and Inhumanity of Prison House America – Immediately Disband All Torture Chambers. Meet the demands of those you have locked down in your prisons!
To People in this Country and Around the World: We Cannot Accept, and We Should Not Tolerate This Torture. Join The Struggle to End Torture in Prisons Now!
To Those Standing Up in Resistance Inside The Prisons: WE SUPPORT YOUR CALL FOR UNITY IN THIS FIGHT, AND WE WILL HAVE YOUR BACKS!
June 21, 22 and 23 Will Be Days of Solidarity With the Struggle to End Prison Torture! There will be protests, cultural events, Evenings of Conscience, sermons in religious services, saturation of social media – all aimed at laying bare the ugly reality of wide spread torture in US prisons and challenging everyone to join in fighting to STOP it.
Send Your endorsements (name . and if you wish, organization and/or title, to:
StopMassIncarcerationBayArea@gmail.com
For more information and to join in this struggle contact the Stop Mass Incarceration Network at:
http://www.stopmassincarceration.org/support-california-prison-hunger-strikers.html
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Wealth Inequality in America
[This is a must see to believe video...bw]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM
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Read the transcription of hero Bradley Manning's 35-page statement explaining why he leaked "state secrets" to WikiLeaks.
March 1, 2013
Alternet
The statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bradley-mannings-surprising-statement-court-details-why-he-made-his-historic?akid=10129.229473.UZvQfK&rd=1&src=newsletter802922&t=7
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Please forward widely
Lynne Stewart Emergency Alert!
Dear Friends,
Below you will find today's critical communication from longtime Lynne Stewart supporter, Betty Davis. The information concerns Lynne's health and her legal status.
As you will read below Lynne's breast cancer has returned. Lynne was successfully treated, we had hoped, two years ago and given a clean bill of health, as much as such diagnoses can be counted on. But a single spot was found on one lung a few months ago. Now another has appeared on the other lung and others in her upper back, all associated with her original breast cancer.
Her husband Ralph Poynter told me today that Lynne's condition was still very treatable and that a cure was not at all to be ruled out and especially so if prison officials allowed her the expert treatment afforded her previously in a prominent New York City hospital. Lynne's request to be moved to that facility was denied. She is to be treated in a prison related facility, but fortunately under the direction of and using the protocols of her doctor/daughter, who is expected to be with Lynne at any moment.
We are still hopeful for a positive outcome, even under the most difficult conditions.
Meanwhile, Lynne's appeal preparations for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court are now in progress, with Lynne having assembled a first rate team of attorneys including members of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild.
Lynne campaigned for Mumia's freedom for the several years that she was free on bail and traveling the country in her own defense. She was present at Mumia's court hearing in Philadelphia and appeared on Democracy Now!, with Mumia phoning in in her defense.
I urge you to carefully read the material below and lend a hand. The stakes are high. We will continue to demand the finest medical treatment for Lynne and, of course, continue to campaign for her freedom and immediate release.
Lynne, a prominent civil rights attorney of 30 years, was the victim of a government-orchestrated 2005 frame-up trial that was riddled with violations of fundamental legal principles. She was convicted on five counts of conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism. This was based on the government's charge that her public issuance a press release on behalf of her client, the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rachman, an Egyptian cleric who was similarly framed up and imprisoned for life on "terrorism" charges, was illegal.
Ironically, Rachman's freedom is today being demanded by Egypt's new President Mohamed Morsi.
Lynne, 72, was originally convicted and sentenced to 28 months in prison, but this "light" sentence was contested by the reactionary U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and her sentence was outrageously increased to 10 years, by the compliant Federal District Court trial judge, John Koeltl.
I urge you to write to Lynne and convey your love and solidarity. She toured the Bay Area several times in previous years, always speaking to admiring and stunned audiences, who realized that Lynne's case was central to everyone's civil liberties. Lynne's conviction was a message to all attorneys that defense of the unpopular, defense of democratic rights and especially defense of Muslim victims of government persecution, was dangerous. Lynne's conviction and extended sentence served to massively chill the defense bar.
Lynne's freedom and life itself in large part depends on our solidarity.
Write Lynne at:
Lynne Stewart 53504-054
Federal Medical Center Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, Texas 76127
Send your generous contribution payable to:
Lynne Stewart Organization
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
In solidarity,
Jeff Mackler, West Coast Coordinator
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
510-268-9429
jmackler@lmi.net
URGENT MESSAGE OF APPEAL FOR LYNNE STEWART- THE PEOPLE'S ATTORNEY
Greetings
It is urgent that you listen to the audio email below. It is the latest update from Ralph Poynter, Mya Shone & Ralph Schonmann about LYNNE STEWARTS fate in prison.
Lynne Stewart's breast cancer is spreading to her lungs and shoulders. She needs immediate treatment NOW. The prison authorities have known
this since September.
WE ARE ALSO IN THE PROCESS OF LAUNCHING HER APPEAL TO THE SUPREME COURT. DEADLINE FEBRUARY 21, 2013.
All we are asking you to:
Listen to the audio below and update yourself on the facts. Check out the website as well.
You don't have to write the prison authorities because THEY READ EVERYTHING WE SEND AND TELL HER SO.
Send this email out to all your listservs, especially to LAWYERS because we are asking ALL ATTORNEYS SUPPORT HER CERT , (A REQUEST FOR THE SUPREME COURT TO HEAR HER CASE.)
When it comes to the oppressed, there is no such thing as law or justice. THEREFORE, the movement determines the argument before the courts, not this myth of justice before the law. We need attorneys who understand this and understand that LYNNE STEWART was one of the very few attorneys who understood this. She never had her political prisoners surrender their right to self defense or self determination. In her trial when questioned she still defended this human right and her right to give her clients the best defense possible. When she was resentenced from 28 months to ten years, one of the reasons was that SHE "SHOWED NO REMORSE." SHE DOES NOT FEEL REMORSE FOR DEFENDING THE BILL OF RIGHTS, therefore, we should defend her and all POLITICAL PRISONERS.
BETTY DAVIS
NEW ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT
Write a letter of support to Lynne Stewart- 53504 - 054, FEDERAL MEDICAL CNTR, CARSWELL, P.O. BOX 27137, FT. WORTH, TEXAS 76127.
-----Original Message---
But, to listen to the report, go to:
128 kbps version (hi fi):
http://www.takebackwbai.org/lynnestewart/2013-01-16.LynneStewartReport-128.mp3
32 kbps version (lo fi):
http://www.takebackwbai.org/lynnestewart/2013-01-16.LynneStewartReport-32.mp3
Please listen from the links here in this email. Let me know what you think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Abdel-Rahman
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Petition to US White House and State Department: Condemn Israeli Aggression in Gaza
Please spread the word far and wide about this petition.
https://www.change.org/petitions/us-white-house-and-state-department-condemn-israeli-agression-in-gaza
Please invite all of your facebook friends to the "event" to sign the petition.
https://www.facebook.com/events/510061649012070/?context=create
If you are on twitter, sign the petition there as well and pass it around.
http://twitition.com/xpj6d/
In solidarity and peace,
BlackCommentator.com
African Americans for Justice in the Middle East and North Africa
Statement Regarding the Aggression Against Gaza
African Americans for Justice in the Middle East and North Africa (AAJMENA) strongly condemns Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza. The arguments offered by the Israeli government for its attack on Gaza are nakedly cynical in both form and content. That a truce had been negotiated, with the assistance of the Egyptian government, between Israel and Hamas only to be broken by the Israeli assassination of Hamas military commander Ahmad Jabari clearly indicates that the Netanyahu government is not interested in peace. Israel is responsible for the escalating violence and for this epic breach of human rights.
This crisis underscores a stunning power imbalance. Nuclear-armed Israel, by far the most powerful military force in the Middle East (and among the mightiest in the world), has unleashed its immense war making capacity on Gaza's captive population, mobilizing warships and tanks and launching more than 1,000 F-16 airstrikes since the attack began. The use of such weapons on civilians is a flagrant violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.
The aggression against Gaza must be understood as the latest act in the decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli government. Blockaded Gaza has been plunged into misery by the Israeli-U.S. effort to thwart the democratic will of the Palestinian people as demonstrated in their 2006 legislative elections. When a coup was attempted against Hamas—and failed—the Israelis sealed Gaza, spinning events to make it appear that those not interested in peace were the Palestinians. As a result, Gaza is the largest open-air prison in the world, with 1.5 million people locked into a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land. This latest humanitarian crisis has caused the disproportionate death and suffering of Palestinians, but casualties on both sides will be the consequence of Israeli aggression.
Rather than taking a stand against Israeli's onslaught and issuing an unambiguous demand for an end to the bloodshed, the Obama administration has condemned alleged Palestinian terrorism, repeating the dishonest line that this violent attack is merely in defense of Israel (a position reinforced by the one-sided coverage of the corporate news media). This represents a massive failure on the administration's part. For all Obama's denunciation of the Assad regime in Syria, it appears that his administration regards the outright slaughter of civilians in Palestine as acceptable. It is crucial that we recognize the extent of U.S. complicity in the bloodshed; our tax dollars ($8.5 million a day) enable Israeli militarism at a time when those funds are desperately needed to fill gaps in services and infrastructure back home.
As African Americans and people of African descent in the U.S. from academia, activism and various social movements, we cannot remain silent. We call upon all people of good will to:
1. Endorse this statement.
2. Communicate with the White House and the U.S. Department of State to request that President Obama demand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and the IDF cease the bombardment of Gaza and withdraw their armed forces immediately. Insist that the U.S. condition aid to Israel on compliance with U.S. and international law.
3. Contact the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. and demand that Israel withdraw its forces and end the blockade.
4. Send your local media outlet a "letter to the editor" expressing outrage against the provocative and murderous acts of the Israeli government.
5. Join protests against Israeli aggression.
6. Support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (www.bdsmovement.net) and U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (www.usacbi.org), and back the efforts of labor unions and student groups to compel their employers and administrators to divest from companies that do business in Israel.
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You Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters
Posted 1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Occupy Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists – please click here to support the NLG.
We strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number (888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy. This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.
You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement Encounters
What Rights Do I Have?
Whether or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your political activities.
Standing Up For Free Speech
The government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a "subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.
What if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?
What if an agent or police officer comes to the door?
Do not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions. Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future. Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.
Do I have to answer questions?
You have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you reside.
Do I have to give my name?
As above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name could in some circumstances be a crime.
Do I need a lawyer?
You have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.
If I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have something to hide?
Anything you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights and refusing to answer questions.
Can agents search my home or office?
You do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of your workspace without your permission.
What if agents have a search warrant?
If you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes, including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first. (Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant is present.)
Do I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?
No. If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.
What if I speak to government agents anyway?
Even if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.
What if the police stop me on the street?
Ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not consent to a search of your bags or other property.
What if police or agents stop me in my car?
Keep your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance. You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one has to answer any questions.
What if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?
Write down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as possible.
What if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer their questions?
A grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.
What if I receive a grand jury subpoena?
Grand jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping ("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense attorney immediately.
The government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and disruption, discouraging continued activism.
Federal grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries, testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony, should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in your testimony.
Frequently prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.
In front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.
What if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?
If you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare instances you may face criminal contempt charges.
What If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the purposes of this pamphlet.
■ Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.
■ Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney. If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be barred from returning.
Based on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.
Do I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or signing any DHS papers?
Yes. You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you a list of free or low cost legal service providers.
Should I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?
If you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be. Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.
Am I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?
If you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider refusing to talk to the agent at all.
If I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?
Yes. In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief for you.
Can I call my consulate if I am arrested?
Yes. Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the right to refuse help from your consulate.
What happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing is over?
You could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.
What should I do if I want to contact DHS?
Always talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of your options to you.
What Are My Rights at Airports?
IMPORTANT NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches, detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion, sex or ethnicity.
If I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop and search me?
Yes. Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.
Can my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?
Yes. Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.
If I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get off the plane?
The pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.
What If I Am Under 18?
Do I have to answer questions?
No. Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.
What if I am detained?
If you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no cost.
Do I have the right to express political views at school?
Public school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.
Can my backpack or locker be searched?
School officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.
Disclaimer
This booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.
NLG National Hotline for Activists Contacted by the FBI
888-NLG-ECOL
(888-654-3265)
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Letter from Lynne Stewart
9/27/12 9:15 am
Once again the 2d Circuit has turned me down–this time the whole Court, en
banc. Not surprising, I was well aware that we were dealing with the Company
Store and could expect very little. Nonetheless as a favorite line from Edna
St Vincent Millay:
"Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the Quick mind beholds at every turn"
I never lose hope that my case will be resolved as being too obvious a
contradiction to justice for them to sustain !
Our next stop is the petition for Certiorari to the Supreme Court, asking them
to hear us. We will be trying to impress them with the significant
wrongfulness of the whole prosecution itself and of the errors at trial and
later at sentencing. Our due date is some time in late December and we are
hoping to have Amicus support, so if you are part of a group that supports
lawyers or civil rights etc. please suggest it as early as possible. Contact
Jill Shellow, my lawyer by email, for further explanations.
Looking forward to my 73 birthday on October 8, the one bright ray of light is
that my husband, Ralph Poynter, will be speaking at the National Lawyers Guild
convention held in Pasadena, California from the 10th to 14th of October.
Addressing the Plenary he will speak of my case and that of other political
prisoners locked away for decades by a vindictive government. I wish I could
attend and meet and greet and hug and laugh with my lawyer buddies of many
years and many conventions but I will have to be content with my usual micro-
management style from afar — Texas, that is !!!
Meanwhile, I continue to tough it out. I am feeling quite well after the
surgery, an infection and then a severe iron deficiency — my usual vim and
vigor are back and ready for the fight with the Supreme Court who thinks
corporations are people—what will they make of me, a real person ??!! (smile)
Join me. Bring me Home, where I can join in some of the epic battles now at
hand.
Posted in BEHIND BARS, FROM LYNNE | No Comments »
"Court Denies Lynne Stewart Re-hearing" by Jeff Mackler
September 26th, 2012
Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart,
On Monday, September 24, 2012 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
rejected Lynne's appeal for a re-hearing before the entire court. Her original
conviction was upheld in 2009 by a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit.
The Second Circuit's opinion was not unexpected. This was the same court that
earlier pressed Federal District Court John Koeltl to re-consider his original
28-month sentence and instead sentence Lynne to ten years.
Lynne, a leading civil rights attorney for 30 years, was convicted in 2005 on
frame-up charges of conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism. Her crime? She
issued a press release on behalf of her client, the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel
Rachman, a leading Egyptian Islamic cleric, was also a victim of the U.S. "war
on terror" when a government-instigated frame-up trial convicted him of
conspiracy to destroy New York buildings. Typical of "conspiracy" convictions,
no evidence of wrongdoing was presented at his trial.
Rachman, a leading critic of the Hosni Mubarack dictatorship in Egypt, and now
serving a life sentence in Rochester, Minnesota, was the subject of national
attention a few months ago when Egypt's new president, Mohammad Morsi,
embarrassed the Obama administration by demanding his release.
Lynne's attorneys explained on Monday that "The clock now starts running on
our Petition for Certiorari to the Supreme Court. We have 90 days to get it
filed (with the possibility of a 30-day extension)."
Lynne is presently imprisoned at FMC Carswell outside of Fort Worth, Texas.
She has successfully recovered from a difficult surgery that was spitefully
delayed by prison authorities. For the past 45 days Lynne was denied all
visitors, mail and other basic prison rights on the trumped-up accusation that she violated prison rules in assisting a fellow prisoner certify a legal document.
Her spirits are high and she is now going through a backlog of some 100-plus
letters from friends and supporters.
Here's a brief summary/timeline of Lynne's case.
- indicted on April 9, 2002;
- on February 10, 2005, convicted on all counts of conspiracy to aid and
abet terrorism;
- on October, 17, 2006, sentenced to 28 months;
- on November 17, 2009, a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit three-
judge panel upheld the conviction, shamelessly accusing Lynne of "knowingly
and willfully making false statements," re-directing her case to District
Court Judge John Koeltl for re-sentencing, instructing him to consider
enhancements for terrorism, perjury, and abuse of her position as a lawyer –
an outrageous mandate intimidating Koeltl to comply.
- on November 19, 2009, Stewart jailed at MCC-NY, 150 Park Row, New York, NY;
andon July 15, 2010, Stewart re-sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for doing
her job honorably, ethically, and admirably with distinction for 30 years.
Disgracefully, Judge Koeltl explained it, saying: ."(C)omments by Stewart in
2006, including a statement in a television interview that she would do `it'
again and would not `do anything differently' influenced (the)
decisionŠ.indicat(ing) the original sentence `was not sufficient' to reflect
the goals of sentencing guidelines."
Forgotten were Koeltl's October 2006 comments, calling Lynne's character
"extraordinary," saying she was "a credit to her profession," and that a long
imprisonment would be "an unreasonable result," citing "the somewhat atypical
nature of her case (and) lack of evidence that any victim was harmed."
He also considered her age (70), health (at times poor), distinguished career
representing society's disadvantaged and unwanted, and the unlikelihood she'd
commit another "crime." However, the Second Circuit Appeals Court intimidated
him to comply, his own career perhaps on the line otherwise.
Please write Lynne at:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
FMC Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Ft. Worth, Texas 76127
In solidarity,
Jeff Mackler, West Coast Coordinator
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
-->
Write to Lynne Stewart Defense Committee at:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information: 718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Visiting Lynne:
Visiting is very liberal but first she has to get people on her visiting list;
wait til she or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on
weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the
machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting
forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of
you.
Commissary Money:
Commissary Money is always welcome It is how Lynne pay for the phone and for
email.
Also for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries"
(pens!) (A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing, ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely
not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa, etc. To add money,
you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money
order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to
Federal
Bureau of Prisons, 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa
50947-001
(Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days.
Western
Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be
on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated? Of course, it's the BOP !)
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Free Mumia NOW!
Prisonradio.org
Write to Mumia:
Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, PA 17932
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Wolkenstein
August 21, 2011 (917) 689-4009
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ILLEGALLY SENTENCED TO
LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE!
FREE MUMIA NOW!
www.FreeMumia.com
http://blacktalkradionetwork.com/profiles/blogs/mumia-is-formally-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-w-out-hearing-he-s
On August 13, 2012, without any notice and in violation of his constitutional rights and state law, Mumia Abu-Jamal was formally sentenced by Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe to life imprisonment without parole. The impact of this illegal sentencing is to prevent a possible challenge to the slow death of life imprisonment. All sentences, including "mandatory" sentences, require a formal proceeding allowing the person to be sentenced the right to be heard and to challenge his sentence.
Mumia confirmed to his son Jamal and to attorney Rachel Wolkenstein during a visit with him on Sunday, August 19, 2012, that he had no prior knowledge of the re-sentencing. The record of this re-sentencing is contained in the official Court of Common Pleas Docket Sheet. In attempting to find out more details, Wolkenstein searched for the court file on August 20. But there is no file containing a record of this sentencing with the Criminal Division Court of Common Pleas Clerk. The information released so far by Elaine Rattliff, Deputy Clerk of Courts is that the sentencing followed a call from the Department of Corrections and further explanation awaits a call back from Court of Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe.
Notably Judge Dembe is same judge who refused in 2001 to consider a legal challenge to "hanging judge" Albert Sabo's self-confessed racism and bias against Mumia during his trial and post-conviction appeals from 1995-1998. Court reporter Terri Mauer-Carter heard Sabo declare before the start of the trial, "I'm going to help them fry the n-----."
For thirty years Mumia was kept in solitary confinement on death row under a death sentence that was illegally and unconstitutionally imposed. Federal district court Judge William Yohn ruled in December 2001 that Judge Albert Sabo incorrectly and unconstitutionally instructed the jury in deciding on life or death. Despite this decision, Mumia was kept on death row, in solitary confinement for the next ten years, while the prosecution pursued two appeals in the Federal Court of Appeals and two attempts at U.S. Supreme Court rulings to uphold the death sentence. All that time, Mumia sat in solitary confinement. According to Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rappatour on Torture, solitary confinement for longer than 15 days is a form of torture! Mumia should be freed from prison, now!
This latest legal outrage comes nine months after the state conceded defeat in obtaining its desired "legal lynching" of Mumia. On December 8, 2011, Philadelphia District Attorney, Seth Williams—with the support of Maureen Faulkner, the Fraternal Order of Police and former District Attorney, Philadelphia Mayor and PA governor, Edward Rendell—announced that they were no longer seeking a death sentence for Mumia. This was their recognition that it was neither legally possible nor politically advantageous to hold a new sentencing hearing.
Mumia's 1982 trial contained violations of every single element of due process and a fair trial. But it began with framing an innocent man. Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit. His crime in the eyes of the state is that he was and continues to be "the voice of the voiceless," a former spokesman for the Black Panther Party and continuing supporter of the MOVE organization.
In his first phone call from general population on January 28, 2012, Mumia relayed the following message to his wife, Wadiya Jamal: "My dear friends, brothers and sisters – I want to thank you for your real hard work and support. I am no longer on death row, no longer in the hole, I'm in population. This is only Part One and I thank you for the work you've done. But the struggle is for freedom!"
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Police Attack Antiwar Protester
HANDS OFF NATE BUCKLEY!
http://vimeo.com/23300350#at=0
Police Brutality Against Anti War demonstrator Buffalo New York 2011
NFTA Police and anti terror task force assault anti war demonstration in Buffalo.
Nate Buckley maced while in handcuffs. His new trial date is October 16, 2012.
For updates or to donate please go to:
http://natebuckleydefense.wordpress.com/
Sign the petition:
https://www.change.org/petitions/district-attorney-drop-the-charges-against-nate-buckley
Watch a video of the incident:
http://vimeo.com/23300350#at=0
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Sign the petition for the NATO 5!
Drop all charges against the NATO 5 and all anti-NATO protesters!
Protesters are still being held in Cook County Jail in Chicago. Release them all
now!
Sign the Petition Here:http://www.iacenter.org/dropchargesonnatodefendants
The charges against the NATO 5 and the others are false. All these prisoners
urgently need your solidarity. Please sign our petition. Share it with your
family, friends and coworkers. Signing the petition will generate a direct email
to:
Illinois State's Attorney Anita Alvarez
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, and
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
and several other public officials, demanding all charges against the NATO5
be dropped.
Email addresses for the targets
mayor.emanuel@cityofchicago.org
garry.mccarthy@chicagopolice.org
statesattorney@cookcountyil.gov
sheriff.dart@cookcountyil.gov
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war
and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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Tarek Mehanna - another victim of the U.S. War to Terrorize Everyone. He was
targeted because he would not spy on his Muslim community for the FBI. Under the
new NDAA indefinite military detention provision, Tarek is someone who likely
would never come to a trial, although an American citizen. His sentencing is on
April 12. There will be an appeal.
Another right we may kiss goodbye. We should not accept the verdict and continue
to fight for his release, just as we do for hero Bradley Manning, and all the
many others unjustly persecuted by our government until it is the war criminals
on trial, prosecuted by the people, and not the other way around.
Marilyn Levin
Official defense website: http://freetarek.com/
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HANDS OFF IRAN PETITION
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/hands-off-iran/?utm_medium=email&utm_sour\
ce=system&utm_campaign=Send%2Bto%2BFriend
(For a complete analysis of the prospects of war, click here)
http://nepajac.org/unaciran.htm
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"A Child's View from Gaza: Palestinian Children's Art and the Fight Against
Censorship" book
https://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=25
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Justice for Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace: Decades of isolation in Louisiana
state prisons must end
Take Action -- Sign Petition Here:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/justice-for-albert-woodfox-and-herm\
an-wallace
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WITNESS GAZA
http://www.witnessgaza.com/
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Write to Bradley
http://bradleymanning.org/donate
View the new 90 second "I am Bradley Manning" video:
I am Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-P3OXML00s
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
"A Fort Leavenworth mailing address has been released for Bradley Manning:
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
The receptionist at the military barracks confirmed that if someone sends
Bradley Manning a letter to that address, it will be delivered to him."
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-42811
This is also a Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207100509321891#!/event.php?eid=2071005093\
21891
Courage to Resist needs your support
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning
has been defending and supporting our Constitution." --Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon
Papers whistle-blower
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly
becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to
make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might also be interested in
supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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The Battle Is Still On To
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610
www.laboractionmumia.org
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the
holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After"
demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up
as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to
spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to
mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE HANDS OFF
WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic
Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already
been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too. Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or
whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's
death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&\
b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's
work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown
on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l
Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected
over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial
support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html
and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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NYC RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded
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On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded
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Danny Glover Greetings to the Labour Start Global Solidarity Conference
Join Danny Glover in supporting Nissan Mississippi workers' right to have a free and fair union election. Go to: www.labourstart.org/nissan and send a message to Nissan to stop the union busting and DO BETTER. For more information go to: www.DoBetterNissan.org.
Danny Glover, the star of Lethal Weapon and other Hollywood blockbusters, delivered a message to the LabourStart conference which opened yesterday in Sydney, Australia.
I'd like to ask you to take a minute to watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nkZ6yi8xzY&feature=youtu.be
Then please sign up to the online campaign, here:
http://www.labourstart.org/nissan
Here's why:
Management at Nissan's plant in Mississippi is running an aggressive and sophisticated anti-union campaign against its employees who are forming a union to achieve a voice in the workplace.
Nissan is denying these workers a fair, democratic election, and management has sent a clear message to the workforce that considering a union could cost them their job.
Supported by workers, students, community leaders and human rights activists around the world, the United Auto Workers (UAW) have launched a campaign on LabourStart calling on Nissan's Chief Operating Officer, Toshiyuki Shiga, to intervene to make things right in Mississippi.
Speaking yesterday at the LabourStart conference now taking place in Sydney Jeffrey Moore, one of the Mississippi auto workers, said:
"Nissan workers are seeking union representation because they want fairness and a chance to be heard. They are seeking a voice on the job just like their colleagues in Japan and elsewhere."
"At Canton Mississippi, Nissan management is making propaganda against the UAW and intimidating workers depriving them from a free choice. This is unacceptable and against freedom of association," said Jyrki Raina, General Secretary of IndustriALL Global Union in support of the workers' campaign.
"UAW has offered Nissan a positive, collaborative approach, but the US management is refusing partnership despite the fact that most of Nissan's operations in countries such as Mexico, Spain, UK, Russia, Japan, Australia, South Africa and Thailand are unionized and enjoy constructive labour and management relations," said Raina.
Please spread the word -- let's make sure that Nissan is overwhelmed with messages of support for the workers in Canton, Mississippi. Please forward this message to your fellow union members, your friends and your family.
Thank you.
Eric Lee
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Fukushima Never Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU
"Fukushima, Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the Japanese government.
This is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.
The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then
when the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.
It also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks
the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.
Production Of Labor Video Project
P.O. Box 720027
San Francisco, CA 94172
www.laborvideo.org
lvpsf@laborvideo.org
For information on obtaining the video go to:
www.fukushimaneveragain.com
(415)282-1908
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Labor Beat: SOJO - The Fight for Social Justice High School
["This is not an education plan, it's a business plan." quote from the video...bw]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEkn1wmxCcE&feature=youtu.be
The fight for community democratic control of Social Justice High School is an important battle waged during the countdown to a possible strike of the Chicago Teachers Union in early September, 2012. And on August 31, students and faculty achieved a victory in forcing SOJO (as the High School is known) to hire back two teachers who were earlier fired for opposing destructive changes in the school's programs. All this took place in the midst of a student sit-in, an intense mass meeting of the school community, and a powerful student protest campaign that got the fired teachers reinstated.
Here are scenes from that fight: The dramatic August 23 mass meeting, testimonies of student leaders (one who reads a poem she was earlier prohibited from reading by CPS toadies), a big Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign indoor rally featuring speeches by the two fired teachers Angela Sangha and Katie Hogan; the student protest march two days later; the reinstatement of the two fired faculty members.
Speaking/interviewed: Andrea Guzman (Little Village community activist); Professor David Stovall (Advisory Local School Council representative); Dennis Kosuth (Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign member); Angela Sangha (founding teacher, Social Justice High School); Katie Hogan (founding teacher, Social Justice High School); Professor Rico Gutstein (University of Illinois - Chicago).
Please make a Donation to Labor Beat (Committee for Labor Access) and help rank-and-file tv:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=2F96...
Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is a non-profit 501(c)(3) member of IBEW 1220. Views are those of the producer Labor Beat. For info: mail@laborbeat.org, www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit YouTube and search "Labor Beat".
On Chicago CAN TV Channel 19, Thursdays 9:30 pm; Fridays 4:30 pm. Labor Beat has regular cable slots in Chicago, Evanston, Rockford, Urbana, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Princeton, NJ; and Rochester, NY. For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org.
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all the sons
By Tommi Avicolli Mecca
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp2jvlAk8-w&list=PL835C332FF6CFF1F3&index=1&feature=plcp
Published on Aug 27, 2012 by avimecca
Men have been going off to war for centuries. In the past couple centuries, they have been migrating to other countries (especially the U.S.) for work. They have been organizing, too, to fight oppression and stop the deaths of their sons and brothers.
"And I don't know why it has to be this way again."
I wrote this song for the mothers, too, who lose their sons to war and murder by police officers. Maybe someday "it doesn't have to be this way again."
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Labor Beat: Chicago Teachers Stand Strong
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOLj6B4cF2w&feature=youtu.be
On May 23, 2012, Chicago Teachers Union held a massive rally at the Auditorium
theater to inform their membership about the coming contract struggle they face.
In the climate of school closings, budget cuts, a terrible new proposed
contract, and teacher-bashing on the part of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Chicago
schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizzard, CTU took to the streets to show their numbers
and appeal to the public, and within two weeks CTU was voting to authorize a
strike.
Meanwhile a few blocks away, Stand Up Chicago, Action Now, and many other
community organizations rallied against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME,
the operator of the Chicago Board of Trade) and the $110 million tax break
they've been given by Illinois. CME is one of the most profitable companies in
the region, and yet now Illinois government is making broad cuts to social
programs needed by struggling families. These two marches converged at Jackson
and LaSalle in a unified demand for economic justice for Chicago's 99%.
Please make a Donation to Labor Beat (Committee for Labor Access) and help
rank-and-file tv:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9789970
Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is
a non-profit 501(c)(3) member of IBEW 1220. Views are those of the producer
Labor Beat. For info: mail@laborbeat.org, www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For
other Labor Beat videos, visit YouTube and search "Labor Beat".
On Chicago CAN TV Channel 19, Thursdays 9:30 pm; Fridays 4:30 pm. Labor Beat has
regular cable slots in Chicago, Evanston, Rockford, Urbana, IL; Philadelphia,
PA; Princeton, NJ; and Rochester, NY.
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Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Were Tortured with Sesame Street
http://www.inquisitr.com/245285/guantanamo-bay-prisoners-were-tortured-with-sesa\
me-street/
Guantanamo Bay prisoners were reportedly tortured with the sounds of children's
Sesame Street songs, in an attempt to get them to talk.
Read more at
http://www.inquisitr.com/245285/guantanamo-bay-prisoners-were-tortured-with-sesa\
me-street/#HYqlyB1jssypzpFM.99
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15 yr old Teen girl in jail beating video speaks out on cop attacking her in
Police brutality case
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDzQ8Vay3Pg&feature=share
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1000 year of war through the world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share
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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded
Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder
To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures
Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter
(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)
The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in
mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report
confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.
"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common
amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations
that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced
"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious
that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising
alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have
weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the
questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however
is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which
means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my
hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."
A Film By SBS
Distributed By Journeyman Pictures
April 2012
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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-sooti\
ng-of-trayvon-martin.html?hp
SPD Security Cams.wmv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WWDNbQUgm4&feature=player_embedded
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Kids being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate locations" in
Terror Drills
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ
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Private prisons,
a recession resistant investment opportunity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg
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Attack Dogs used on a High School Walkout in MD, Four Students Charged With
"Thought Crimes"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wafMaML17w
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Common forms of misconduct by Law Enforcement Officials and Prosecutors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSpM4K276w&feature=related
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Organizing & Instigating: OCCUPY - Ronnie Goodman
http://arthazelwood.com/instigator/occupy/occupy-birth-video.html
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Rep News 12: Yes We Kony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8
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The New Black by The Mavrix - Official Music Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rLfja8488
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Japan One Year Later
http://www.onlineschools.org/japan-one-year-later/
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The CIA's Heart Attack Gun
http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/assassination-studies/the-cias-heart-attack-g\
un-.html
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The Invisible American Workforce
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison
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Labor Beat: NATO vs The 1st Amendment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQxnb4so3U
For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org.
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Anti-War Demonstrators Storm Pentagon 1967/10/24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDiFkckszCw
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Liberal Hypocrisy on Obama Vs Bush - Poll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl_HGEXq_aM&feature=player_embedded
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Greek trade unionists and black bloc October 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHMLD_Vql0o&feature=player_embedded#!
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The Battle of Oakland
by brandon jourdan plus
http://vimeo.com/36256273
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Officers Pulled Off Street After Tape of Beating Surfaces
By ANDY NEWMAN
February 1, 2012, 10:56 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/officers-pulled-off-street-after-ta\
pe-of-beating-surfaces/?ref=nyregion
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Defending The People's Mic
by Pham Binh of Occupy Wall Street
The North Star
January 20, 2012
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=53
Grand Central Terminal Arrests - MIRROR
Two protesters mic check about the loss of freedom brought about by the passage
of the NDAA and both are promptly arrested and whisked out of public sight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7Tj7tEVx8A&feature=player_embedded
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This is excellent! Michelle Alexander pulls no punches!
Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow, speaks about the political
strategy
behind the War on Drugs and its connection to the mass incarceration of Black
and Brown people in the United States.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75cbEdNo2U&feature=player_embedded
If you think Bill Clinton was "the first black President" you need to watch this
video and see how much damage his administration caused for the black community
as a result of his get tough attitude on crime that appealed to white swing
voters.
This speech took place at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on January 12,
2012.
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Release Bradley Manning
Almost Gone (The Ballad Of Bradley Manning)
Written by Graham Nash and James Raymond (son of David Crosby)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYG7yJpBbQ&feature=player_embedded
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School police increasingly arresting American students?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-efNBvjUU&feature=player_embedded
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FYI:
Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"
The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are
plotted visually and audibly on a world map.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&feature=share&mid=5408
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We Are the 99 Percent
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to
choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are
suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay
and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1
percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
Brought to you by the people who occupy wall street. Why will YOU occupy?
OccupyWallSt.org
Occupytogether.org
wearethe99percentuk.tumblr.com
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
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Drop All Charges on the 'Occupy Wall Street' Arrestees!
Stop Police Attacks & Arrests! Support 'Occupy Wall Street'!
SIGN THE ONLINE PETITION AT:
http://bailoutpeople.org/dropchargesonoccupywallstarrestees.shtml
DROP ALL CHARGES ON THE OCCUPY WALL STREET ARRESTEES!
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We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAOJsBxAxY
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In honor of the 75th Anniversary of the 44-Day Flint Michigan sit-down strike at
GM that began December 30, 1936:
According to Michael Moore, (Although he has done some good things, this clip
isn't one of them) in this clip from his film, "Capitalism a Love Story," it was
Roosevelt who saved the day!):
"After a bloody battle one evening, the Governor of Michigan, with the support
of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, sent in the National
Guard. But the guns and the soldiers weren't used on the workers; they were
pointed at the police and the hired goons warning them to leave these workers
alone. For Mr. Roosevelt believed that the men inside had a right to a redress
of their grievances." -Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'
- Flint Sit-Down Strike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8x1_q9wg58
But those cannons were not aimed at the goons and cops! They were aimed straight
at the factory filled with strikers! Watch what REALLY happened and how the
strike was really won!
'With babies & banners' -- 75 years since the 44-day Flint sit-down strike
http://links.org.au/node/2681
--Inspiring
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HALLELUJAH CORPORATIONS (revised edition).mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g
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ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTS ON YOUTUBE SO FAR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C-qIgbP9o&feature=share&mid=552
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ILWU Local 10 Longshore Workers Speak-Out At Oakland Port Shutdown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JUpBpZYwms
Uploaded by laborvideo on Dec 13, 2011
ILWU Local 10 longshore workers speak out during a blockade of the Port of
Oakland called for by Occupy Oakland. Anthony Levieges and Clarence Thomas rank
and file members of the union. The action took place on December 12, 2011 and
the interview took place at Pier 30 on the Oakland docks.
For more information on the ILWU Local 21 Longview EGT struggle go to
http://www.facebook.com/groups/256313837734192/
For further info on the action and the press conferernce go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3fE-Vhrw8&feature=youtu.be
Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org
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UC Davis Police Violence Adds Fuel to Fire
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
19 November 11
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8485-uc-davis-police-violence-add\
s-fuel-to-fire
UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4&feature=player_embedded
Police PEPPER SPRAY UC Davis STUDENT PROTESTERS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I&feature=player_embedded
Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmJmmnMkuEM&feature=player_embedded
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UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CZ0t9ez_EGI#!
Occupy Seattle - 84 Year Old Woman Dorli Rainey Pepper Sprayed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTIyE_JlJzw&feature=related
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THE BEST VIDEO ON "OCCUPY THE WORLD"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S880UldxB1o
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Shot by police with rubber bullet at Occupy Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded
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Copwatch@Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Infiltrators and Provocateurs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0
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Occupy Oakland 11-2 Strike: Police Tear Gas, Black Bloc, War in the Streets
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tu_D8SFYck&feature=player_embedded
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Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest
were actually undercover Quebec police officers:
POLICE STATE Criminal Cops EXPOSED As Agent Provocateurs @ SPP Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoiisMMCFT0&feature=player_embedded
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Quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=player_embedded
G20: Epic Undercover Police Fail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ7aU-n1L8&feature=player_embedded
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WHAT HAPPENED IN OAKLAND TUESDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 25:
Occupy Oakland Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlPs-REyl-0&feature=player_embedded
Cops make mass arrests at occupy Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27kD2_7PwU&feature=player_embedded
Raw Video: Protesters Clash With Oakland Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpO-lJr2BQY&feature=player_embedded
Occupy Oakland - Flashbangs USED on protesters OPD LIES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqNOPZLw03Q&feature=player_embedded
KTVU TV Video of Police violence
http://www.ktvu.com/video/29587714/index.html
Marine Vet wounded, tear gas & flash-bang grenades thrown in downtown
Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMUgPTCgwcQ&feature=player_embedded
Tear Gas billowing through 14th & Broadway in Downtown Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4Y0pwJtWE&feature=player_embedded
Arrests at Occupy Atlanta -- This is what a police state looks like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStWz6jbeZA&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: Hey You Billionaire, Pay Your Fair Share
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8isD33f-I
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Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA48gmfGB6U&feature=youtu.be
Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjKZpOk7TyM&feature=related
*---------*
#Occupy Wall Street In Washington Square: Mohammed Ezzeldin, former occupier of
Egypt's Tahrir Square Speaks at Washington Square!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziodsFWEb5Y&feature=player_embedded
*---------*
#OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street
By adele pham
http://vimeo.com/30146870
*---------*
Live arrest at brooklyn bridge #occupywallstreet by We are Change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULSI-31Pto&feature=player_embedded
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FREE THE CUBAN FIVE!
http://www.thecuban5.org/wordpress/index.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmS4kHC_OlY&feature=player_embedded
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One World One Revolution -- MUST SEE VIDEO -- Powerful and beautiful...bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson
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Japan: angry Fukushima citizens confront government (video)
Posted by Xeni Jardin on Monday, Jul 25th at 11:36am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/national-call-in-for-bradley
I received the following reply from the White House November 18, 2011 regarding
the Bradley Manning petition I signed:
"Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning
"Thank you for signing the petition 'Free PFC Bradley Manning, the accused
WikiLeaks whistleblower.' We appreciate your participation in the We the People
platform on WhiteHouse.gov.
The We the People Terms of Participation explain that 'the White House may
decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or
similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or
agencies, federal courts, or state and local government.' The military justice
system is charged with enforcing the Uniform Code of
Military Justice. Accordingly, the White House declines to comment on the
specific case raised in this petition...
That's funny! I guess Obama didn't get this memo. Here's what Obama said about
Bradley:
BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!
"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be
charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the
President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with
a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!
Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-
Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at
fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political
action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand
Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse
Sharkey, Vice
President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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