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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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You are invited to a special public event featuring:
Albert Woodfox of the Angola 3
Finally free after 43 years in solitary confinement!
Wed. Sept. 7, 7pm
2969 Mission St., San Francisco
Albert Woodfox, the last of the prisoners known as the Angola 3 was finally released from prison on his birthday, February 19, 2016, after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, most of those years in the infamous Angola State Prison in Louisiana. He and his comrades Robert King and the late Herman Wallace, were subjected to horrific abuse for decades for organizing a chapter of the Black Panther Party inside Angola. Albert has joined Robert King in speaking across the nation and internationally, calling for an end to solitary confinement and mass incarceration.
Join us in welcoming this heroic fighter for justice to San Francisco!
$5-10 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Wheelchair accessible. Refreshments provided.
More info: 415-821-6545 or www.ANSWERsf.org
Albert Woodfox, the last of the prisoners known as the Angola 3 was finally released from prison on his birthday, February 19, 2016, after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, most of those years in the infamous Angola State Prison in Louisiana. He and his comrades Robert King and the late Herman Wallace, were subjected to horrific abuse for decades for organizing a chapter of the Black Panther Party inside Angola. Albert has joined Robert King in speaking across the nation and internationally, calling for an end to solitary confinement and mass incarceration.
Join us in welcoming this heroic fighter for justice to San Francisco!
$5-10 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Wheelchair accessible. Refreshments provided.
Wheelchair accessible. Refreshments provided.
More info: 415-821-6545 or www.ANSWERsf.org
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UNACpeace@gmail.com 518-227-6947 www.UNACpeace.org
| UNACpeace@gmail.com 518-227-6947 www.UNACpeace.org |
Join UNAC at the No War 2016 conference in Washington, DC, September 23 - 25, 2015
For more information: http://worldbeyondwar.org/NoWar2016/
Save the Date.
The next UNAC conference will be held in Richmond, VA from April 21 - 23, 2017
Also, UNAC is a co-sponsor of the Southern Human Rights Organizers' Conference, which will be held in Mississippi from December 9 - 12. UNAC has been making important inroads in the South for the movement against the wars at home and abroad. This will be an important conference for the movement as a whole and UNAC will also contribute financially to make it a success. If you can help with this effort by making a contribution for the conference, please contribute here:https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html and the money will be used for the SHROC.
UNAC has added a page on political prisoners in the U.S. to our web site. Please see:https://www.unacpeace.org/political-prisoners.html
UNAC will also be adding a blog to our web site with articles, video and more from our members and friends. More information will follow soon.
* All reports and articals represent the ideas of the author and not necessarily of UNAC or any of its affiliated groups.
If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html
Join UNAC at the No War 2016 conference in Washington, DC, September 23 - 25, 2015
For more information: http://worldbeyondwar.org/NoWar2016/
UNAC has added a page on political prisoners in the U.S. to our web site. Please see:https://www.unacpeace.org/political-prisoners.html
UNAC will also be adding a blog to our web site with articles, video and more from our members and friends. More information will follow soon.
For more information: http://worldbeyondwar.org/NoWar2016/
| Save the Date. The next UNAC conference will be held in Richmond, VA from April 21 - 23, 2017
Also, UNAC is a co-sponsor of the Southern Human Rights Organizers' Conference, which will be held in Mississippi from December 9 - 12. UNAC has been making important inroads in the South for the movement against the wars at home and abroad. This will be an important conference for the movement as a whole and UNAC will also contribute financially to make it a success. If you can help with this effort by making a contribution for the conference, please contribute here:https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html and the money will be used for the SHROC.
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UNAC has added a page on political prisoners in the U.S. to our web site. Please see:https://www.unacpeace.org/political-prisoners.html
UNAC will also be adding a blog to our web site with articles, video and more from our members and friends. More information will follow soon.
* All reports and articals represent the ideas of the author and not necessarily of UNAC or any of its affiliated groups.
If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html
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Don't forget to save dates for Ali Abunimah speaking in Berkeley on Oct. 18, Chivvis Moore's book event on Sept. 27 in Oakland -- and Noura Erakat in Oakland Nov. 17!
Tickets for Ali's event will be available very soon, more info on all these events below.
Book Reading with Bay Area Author/Activist Chivvis Moore
Tuesday, September 27 in Oakland
Please Join Us!
Book Reading with Bay Area Author/Activist CHIVVIS MOORE
& her new memoir:
First Tie Your Camel, Then Trust in God:
An American Feminist in the Arab World
Tuesday, September 27, 7pm
360 42nd Street, Oakland
FREE -- and we hope you’ll buy Chivvis’ book, which benefits MECA!
What begins as a trip to meet Hassan Fathy – Egyptian author of the influential Architecture for the Poor – becomes a 16-year odyssey, one that stretches from a year working in a master carpenter’s shop in Egypt to 11 years teaching English in Palestine. Offering a portrait of a land and a people not found in headlines or sound bytes, Chivvis’ book humanizes the misunderstandings and tragedies that arise when we fail to appreciate the humanity at the core of us all.
“I have been reading your beautiful, sad, and deeply moving story, learning a lot of disturbing history about something I thought I knew about but never saw in such depth. This is an important memoir that…evokes tears and also some laughter, with a great sense of compassion and empathy.”
–Alan Rinzler, former editor, Simon & Schuster
“I cried all the way through reading First Tie Your Camel. The tone, the genuine and honest description of reactions and feelings about the experiences, enabled me to truly understand for the first time why, as a Palestinian living in the West Bank, I always feel so upset and physically ill.”
– Muna Giacaman, Instructor, Bir Zeit University, West Bank
“Chivvis takes us on a journey that is fascinating, eye-opening, and ultimately heart-breaking – initially as a fresh-eyed newcomer working in a 1970’s community in Cairo that most Americans have never seen – to life in occupied Palestine, before and after the 2nd intifada…She leads from the heart, earning hard-won respect from Palestinian neighbors, students, colleagues. Honest, unassuming and vulnerable, she asks the hard questions.”
– Penny Rosenwasser, MECA staffer & author, Hope into Practice, Jewish women choosing justice despite our fears
Chivvis Moore lived 16 years in the Arab world, including 11 years in the West Bank. She has earned her living as a journalist, carpenter/general building contractor, editor and teacher.
Wheelchair accessible
Cosponsored by Joining Hands, Jewish Voice for Peace/Bay Area
SAVE THE DATE!
Electronic Intifada co-founder/director Ali Abunimah
Tuesday, October 18 in Berkeley
Electronic Intifada co-founder/director ALI ABUNIMAH!
Tuesday, October 18, 7pm
First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way (@ Dana)
Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian-American journalist and author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” -- which won the 2014 Palestine Book Award -- and “One Country, A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.” He received the 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship and has been an activist on these issues for over 20 years.
Alice Walker calls him “a special voice to champion us, one that is… fierce, wise -- a warrior for justice and peace -- someone whose large heart, one senses, beyond his calm, is constantly on fire.”
Tickets available soon!
Benefit for MECA, wheelchair accessible
Cosponsored by KPFA, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Jewish Voice for Peace/Bay Area
COMING UP NOVEMBER 17 IN OAKLAND: Palestinian Activist/Scholar/Human Rights Attorney
NOURA ERAKAT, Back in the Bay!
COMMUNITY EVENTS
Rumi's Caravan: Recitation of World Poetry -- benefiting MECA
Saturday, September 10 in Oakland
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Chelsea faces charges related to suicice attempt
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Chelsea Manning threatened with indefinite solitary confinement for suicide attempt
Yesterday, (July 28) Chelsea Manning found out she is yet again being threatened with the possibility of indefinite solitary confinement.
In a jarringly callous move, Army officials are charging Chelsea with “offenses” related to her suicide attempt earlier this month.
If convicted, her punishment could be indefinite solitary confinement,reclassification into maximum security, and an additional nine years in medium custody. Her chance of parole may be negated.
Read the charge sheet here, dictated over the phone by Chelsea to a Support Network volunteer.
“It is deeply troubling that Chelsea is now being subjected to an investigation and possible punishment for her attempt to take her life. The government has long been aware of Chelsea's distress associated with the denial of medical care related to her gender transition and yet delayed and denied the treatment recognized as necessary,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Chase Strangio.
“Now, while Chelsea is suffering the darkest depression she has experienced since her arrest, the government is taking actions to punish her for that pain. It is unconscionable and we hope that the investigation is immediately ended and that she is given the health care that she needs to recover.” Read more here
Chelsea has already faced indefinite solitary confinement threats last year, for innocuous institutional offenses, such as having an expired tube of toothpaste.
Yesterday, (July 28) Chelsea Manning found out she is yet again being threatened with the possibility of indefinite solitary confinement.
If convicted, her punishment could be indefinite solitary confinement,reclassification into maximum security, and an additional nine years in medium custody. Her chance of parole may be negated.
Read the charge sheet here, dictated over the phone by Chelsea to a Support Network volunteer.
“It is deeply troubling that Chelsea is now being subjected to an investigation and possible punishment for her attempt to take her life. The government has long been aware of Chelsea's distress associated with the denial of medical care related to her gender transition and yet delayed and denied the treatment recognized as necessary,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Chase Strangio.
“Now, while Chelsea is suffering the darkest depression she has experienced since her arrest, the government is taking actions to punish her for that pain. It is unconscionable and we hope that the investigation is immediately ended and that she is given the health care that she needs to recover.” Read more here
Chelsea has already faced indefinite solitary confinement threats last year, for innocuous institutional offenses, such as having an expired tube of toothpaste.
Sign the petition
Our friends at Fight for the Future have created a petition where you can sign on to a letter condemning the US Army’s attack on Chelsea.
Our friends at Fight for the Future have created a petition where you can sign on to a letter condemning the US Army’s attack on Chelsea.
Write the Secretary of the Army
Pressure the Secretary of the Army to take a personal interest and dismiss these cruel and absurd charges against Chelsea.
SECRETARY OF THE ARMY JOHN MCHUGH
101 ARMY PENTAGON
WASHINGTON, DC 20310-010
Pressure the Secretary of the Army to take a personal interest and dismiss these cruel and absurd charges against Chelsea.
SECRETARY OF THE ARMY JOHN MCHUGH
101 ARMY PENTAGON
WASHINGTON, DC 20310-010
Help us pay for Chelsea's legal representation
This May, Chelsea's appellate team filed a brief beginning her appeal process. Your support is critical, not just to continue fighting these ongoing threats from prison officials, but to help challenge Chelsea's draconian 35-year prison sentence and her unjust Espionage Act conviction.
Thank you to those who have already contributed, and to everyone who continues to support Chelsea during this long and strenuous process.
This May, Chelsea's appellate team filed a brief beginning her appeal process. Your support is critical, not just to continue fighting these ongoing threats from prison officials, but to help challenge Chelsea's draconian 35-year prison sentence and her unjust Espionage Act conviction.
Thank you to those who have already contributed, and to everyone who continues to support Chelsea during this long and strenuous process.
Chelsea can continue to be a powerful voice for reform, but we need your help to make that happen. Help us support Chelsea in prison, maximize her voice in the media, continue public education, fund her legal appeals team, and build a powerful movement for presidential pardon.
Please donate today!
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591
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Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson featuring exchanges with an Outlaw Kindle Edition
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Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!
Click HERE to view in browser
http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/
UPDATE:
Today is the 406th day that Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
languishes in prison doing felony time for a misdemeanor crime he did not
commit. Today is also the day that Robert McKay, a spokesperson for the
Free Rev. Pinkney campaign, gave testimony before United Nations
representatives about the plight of Rev. Pinkney at a hearing held in
Chicago. The hearing was called in order to shed light upon the
mistreatment of African-Americans in the United States and put it on an
international stage. And yet as the UN representatives and audience heard
of the injustices in the Pinkney case many gasped in disbelief and asked
with frowns on their faces, "how is this possible?" But disbelief quickly
disappeared when everyone realized these were the same feelings they had
when they first heard of Flint and we all know what happened in Flint. FREE
REV. PINKNEY NOW.
Please send letters to:
Marquette Branch Prison
Rev. Edward Pinkney N-E-93 #294671
1960 US Hwy 41 South
Marquette, MI 49855
Please donate at http://bhbanco.org (Donate button) or send checks to BANCO:
c/o Dorothy Pinkney
1940 Union St.
Benton Harbor, MI 49022
BACKGROUND:
On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.
The prosecutor, with the judge's approval, repeatedly told the jury "you don't need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney." And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE 'ALTERED' PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.
This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.
With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney's appeal.
Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney. Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.
Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.
For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search "Pinkney").
We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center
MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY
I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist."
Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney
Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.
No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an "Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers' Association of America]" demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.
Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.
The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!
To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.
Contributions for Rev. Pinkney's defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022
Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.
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State Seeks to Remove Innocent PA Lifer’s Attorney! Free Corey Walker!
The PA Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed legal action to remove Corey Walker’s attorney, Rachel Wolkenstein, in November 2014. On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 the evidentiary hearing to terminate Wolkenstein as Corey Walker’s pro hac vice lawyer continues before Judge Lawrence Clark of the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas in Harrisburg, PA.
Walker, assisted by Wolkenstein, filed three sets of legal papers over five months in 2014 with new evidence of Walker’s innocence and that the prosecution and police deliberately used false evidence to convict him of murder. Two weeks after Wolkenstein was granted pro hac vice status, the OAG moved against her and Walker.
The OAG claims that Wolkenstein’s political views and prior legal representation of Mumia Abu-Jamal and courtroom arrest by the notorious Judge Albert Sabo makes it “intolerable” for her to represent Corey Walker in the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Over the past fifteen months the OAG has effectively stopped any judicial action on the legal challenges of Corey Walker and his former co-defendant, Lorenzo Johnson against their convictions and sentences to life imprisonment without parole while it proceeds in its attempts to remove Wolkenstein.
This is retaliation against Corey Walker who is innocent and framed. Walker and his attorney won’t stop until they thoroughly expose the police corruption and deliberate presentation of false evidence to convict Corey Walker and win his freedom.
This outrageous attack on Corey Walker’s fundamental right to his lawyer of choice and challenge his conviction must cease. The evidence of his innocence and deliberate prosecutorial frame up was suppressed for almost twenty years. Corey Walker must be freed!
Read: Jim Crow Justice – The Frame-up Of Corey Walker by Charles Brover
Go to FreeCoreyWalker.org to provide help and get more information.
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TAKE ACTION: Mumia is sick
Website:
| Judge Robert Mariani of the U.S. District Court has issued an order in Mumia’s case, granting Mumia’s lawyers Bret Grote and Robert Boyle’s motion to supplement the record. New medical records documenting Mumia’s deteriorated condition from February and March, will be presented June 6th. Judge Mariani has also instructed the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to provide any updates and changes in DOC hep C treatment and policies which affect the plaintiff’s treatment. Calling into Prison Radio, Mumia noted: “My friends, my brothers, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, but there is some motion. It means that we’re moving closer to hopefully some real treatment not of my symptoms, but of my disease. I thank you all for being there. And freedom is a constant struggle. I love you all. From what used to be death row, this is Mumia, your brother.” Mumia remains quite ill. While stable, his curable hepatitis C is still active and progressive. The only treatment Mumia has received over the last 14 months to this day is skin ointment and photo therapy. He has not received the medically indicated treatment for hep C, the very condition that put him in the Intensive Care Unit in March 2015. Hepatitis C is a progressive disease that attacks Mumia’s organs, skin and liver. Unless the court orders the new hepatitis C treatment - one pill a day for 12 weeks, with a 95% cure rate - Mumia's health will remain at serious risk. Before the court is the preliminary injunction motion, which demands immediate medical care. The exhaustion of administrative remedy and the procedural hurdles make it extremely difficult for people in prison to actually get their grievances heard through the review process. The Prison Litigation Reform Act was passed specifically to create these very almost insurmountable barriers to access to the courts. Please read the New Yorker article, Why it is Nearly Impossible for Prisoners to Sue Prisons. In Abu-Jamal vs. Kerestes, one very telling point was when the DOC's Director of Medical Care, Dr. Paul Noel, took the stand. He said that he had never testified before in court! He has worked for the DOC for over a decade. That meant that no prisoner had access to adversarial cross examination. Before Mumia’s day in court in late December 2015, no prisoner ever had the opportunity to expose the PA DOC’s blatant lies. Lies so bold that Dr. Noel disavowed his own signed affidavit, and in court he stated that he “did not sign it and it was false and misleading”. The knowingly false and fabricated document was put in the record by Laura Neal, Senior DOC attorney. Take Action for MumiaCall prison officials to demand immediate treatment! Dr. Paul Noel-Director of Medical Care, DOC 717-728-5309 x 5312 John Wetzel- Secretary of DOC 717+728-2573 x 4109 Dr. Carl Keldie-Chief Medical Officer, Correct Care Solutions 800-592-2974 x 5783 Theresa DelBalso-Superintendent, SCI Mahanoy 570-773-2158 x 8101 |
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PUBLIC HEALTH, NOT CORPORATE WEALTH!
WE DEMAND:
PUBLIC HEALTH, NOT CORPORATE WEALTH!
IMMEDIATE AND FREE TREATMENT FOR ALL HCV-INFECTED PRISONERS!
NO EXECUTION BY MEDICAL NEGLECT!
JAIL DRUG PROFITEERS, FREE MUMIA!
This message from:
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610 • www.laboractionmumia.org
06 January 2016
Mumia Is Innocent! Free Mumia!
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Imam Jamil (H.Rap Brown) moved
Some two weeks ago Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) was moved by bus from USP Canaan in Waymart, PA. to USP Tucson, Arizona. His mailing address is: USP Tucson United States Penitentiary P.O. Box Tucson, AZ. 85734 (BOP number 99974555)
Sign the Petition:
https://www.causes.com/actions/1671495-the-forgotten-imam-jamil-abdullah-al-amin-h-rap-brown?utm_campaign=post_mailer%2Fcampaign_update.cb_71432&utm_medium=email&utm_source=causes
Sign the Petition:
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, THE Bureau of Prisons, The Governor of Georgia
We are aware of a review being launched of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted and or deserve a new trail because of flawed forensic evidence and or wrongly reported evidence. It was stated in the Washington Post in April of 2012 that Justice Department Officials had known for years that flawed forensic work led to convictions of innocent people. We seek to have included in the review of such cases that of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. We understand that all cases reviewed will include the Innocence Project. We look forward to your immediate attention to these overdue wrongs.
ASAP: The Forgotten Imam Project
P.O. Box 373
Four Oaks, NC 27524
ASAP: The Forgotten Imam Project
P.O. Box 373
Four Oaks, NC 27524
Signed,
Luqman Abdullah-ibn Al-Sidiq
Luqman Abdullah-ibn Al-Sidiq
https://www.causes.com/actions/1671495-the-forgotten-imam-jamil-abdullah-al-amin-h-rap-brown?utm_campaign=post_mailer%2Fcampaign_update.cb_71432&utm_medium=email&utm_source=causes
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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence
Sign the Petition:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/petition.php
Urge Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case. Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.
"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case
Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.
In 1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue of his preliminary hearing.
Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.
Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.
Following his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."
Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.
Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.
In 2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.
In solidarity,
James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA
Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.
Convicted in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin. He has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence. In a dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d 581.
There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:
The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their bedsides?
The sole surviving victim of the murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr. Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's not the man who did it."
Josh Ryen's description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.
These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.
The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.
Lacking a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder scene.
The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to convict.
The evidence the prosecution presented at trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been discredited… (Continue reading this document at: http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)
This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015
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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!
Sign the Petition:
http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos
Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:
Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.
I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.
American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families
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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
Write: Lorenzo Johnson
DF 1036
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Rd.
Frackville, PA 17932
Email: Through JPay using the code:
Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
or
Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com
freelorenzojohnson.org
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Sign the Petition:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/petition.php
"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case
Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.
In 1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue of his preliminary hearing.
Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.
Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.
Following his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."
Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.
Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.
In 2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.
In solidarity,
James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA
Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.
Convicted in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin. He has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence. In a dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d 581.
There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:
The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their bedsides?
The sole surviving victim of the murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr. Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's not the man who did it."
Josh Ryen's description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.
These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.
The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.
Lacking a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder scene.
The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to convict.
The evidence the prosecution presented at trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been discredited… (Continue reading this document at: http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)
This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!
Sign the Petition:
http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos
Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:
Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.
I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.
American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families
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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
|
DF 1036
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Rd.
Frackville, PA 17932
Email: Through JPay using the code:
Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
or
Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com
freelorenzojohnson.org
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B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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B. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Supreme Court to Consider Legal Standard Drawn From ‘Of Mice and Men’
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2) North Dakota Oil Pipeline
Battle: Who’s Fighting and Why
WASHINGTON — In 2002, the Supreme Court barred the execution of the intellectually disabled. But it gave states a lot of leeway to decide just who was, in the language of the day, “mentally retarded.”
Texas took a creative approach, adopting what one judge there later called “the Lennie standard.” That sounds like a reference to an august precedent, but it is not. The Lennie in question is Lennie Small, the dim, hulking farmhand in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”
The Lennie in question is fictional.
Still, Judge Cathy Cochran of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wrote in 2004 that Lennie should be a legal touchstone.
“Most Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck’s Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt” from the death penalty, she wrote. “But, does a consensus of Texas citizens agree that all persons who might legitimately qualify for assistance under the social services definition of mental retardation be exempt from an otherwise constitutional penalty?”
Judge Cochran, who later said she had reread “all of Steinbeck” in the 1960s while living above Cannery Row in Monterey, Calif., listed seven factors that could spare someone like Lennie, whose rash killing of a young woman was seemingly accidental.
For instance: “Has the person formulated plans and carried them through, or is his conduct impulsive?”
And: “Can the person hide facts or lie effectively?”
This fall, in Moore v. Texas, No. 15-797, the United States Supreme Court will consider whether the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’ highest court for criminal matters, went astray last year in upholding the death sentence of Bobby J. Moore based in part on outdated medical criteria and in part on the Lennie standard.
Mr. Moore killed James McCarble, a 70-year-old grocery clerk, during a robbery in 1980 in Houston.
No one disputes that Mr. Moore is at least mentally challenged or, as a psychologist testifying for the prosecution put it at a 2014 hearing, that he most likely “suffers from borderline intellectual functioning.”
Mr. Moore reached his teenage years without understanding how to tell time, the days of the week or the relationship between subtraction and addition. His I.Q. has been measured as high as 78 and as low as 57, averaging around 70. On the other hand, the psychologist testified, the young Bobby Moore had shown skill at mowing lawns and playing pool.
The state judge who heard this evidence, relying on current medical standards on intellectual disability, concluded that executing Mr. Moore would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
But the Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the ruling, saying the judge had made a mistake in “employing the definition of intellectual disability presently used.”
Under medical standards from 1992, endorsed in Judge Cochran’s 2004 opinion, Mr. Moore was not intellectually disabled, the appeals court said. The court added that the seven factors listed in the 2004 opinion weighed heavily against Mr. Moore. He had, for instance, worn a wig during the robbery and tried to hide his shotgun in two plastic bags, which prosecutors said was evidence of forethought and planning.
In dissent, Judge Elsa Alcala said the 1992 medical standards used by the majority were “outdated and erroneous.” As for the seven factors, she wrote, “The Lennie standard does not meet the requirements of the federal Constitution.”
“I would set forth a standard,” Judge Alcala wrote, “that does not include any reference to a fictional character.”
In a brief, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, defended the seven factors, though without mentioning Lennie. He also urged the Supreme Court to let judges and juries, rather than medical professionals, decide who should be spared the death penalty.
That echoed a 2014 dissent from Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who said it was a bad idea to rely on the shifting views of medical experts to decide who must be spared execution based on intellectual disability. The majority in that case, Hall v. Florida, struck down Florida’s I.Q. score cutoff of 70 as too rigid.
In doing so, Justice Alito wrote, the majority had effectively overruled the part of its 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision that allowed states to use their own definitions of intellectual disability, and instead imposed “the evolving standards of professional societies, most notably the American Psychiatric Association.”
An article last year in the Yale Law Journal presented an intriguing alternative to the evolving standards that bothered Justice Alito. Drawing on historical materials, Michael Clemente, then a law student at Yale and now a law clerk for a federal judge, demonstrated that the original understanding of the Eighth Amendment, based on English common law, barred the execution of people whose mental abilities were below those of an ordinary child of 14.
Such a standard, steeped in originalism, a mode of constitutional interpretation embraced by Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, would seem to spare both Mr. Moore and Lennie. On the other hand, it is not clear that Lennie himself would have escaped execution under Texas’ Lennie standard. He did, for instance, try to conceal his crime, hiding his victim’s body.
In a 1937 interview with The New York Times, John Steinbeck said he had based Lennie on a man who had killed a ranch foreman but was shown leniency. “Lennie was a real person,” Mr. Steinbeck said. “He’s in an insane asylum in California right now.”
Seventy-five years later, Mr. Steinbeck’s son Thomas heard about Texas’ Lennie standard.
“The character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability,” Thomas Steinbeck, who died this month, said in a 2012 statement. “I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic.”
“I am certain that if my father, John Steinbeck, were here, he would be deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way,” he said. “And the last thing you ever wanted to do was to make John Steinbeck angry.”
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2) North Dakota Oil Pipeline
Battle: Who’s Fighting and Why
This week, an impassioned fight over a 1,170-mile oil pipeline moved from the prairies of North Dakota to a federal courtroom in Washington. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose reservation lies just south of the pipeline’s charted path across ranches and under the Missouri River, has asked a judge to halt construction. The American Indian tribe argues that a leak or spill could be ruinous.
It may take until Sept. 9 for a federal judge to decide whether to allow the Dakota Access pipeline to move ahead, or grant an injunction that would press the pause button on construction.
Here is a look at how the battle over the pipeline has become an environmental and cultural flash point, stirring passion across the Plains and drawing hundreds of protesters to camp out in rural North Dakota.
What Is Happening in North Dakota?
American Indians have been gathering since April outside Cannon Ball, a town in south central North Dakota near the South Dakota border, to protest the Dakota Access pipeline as construction commences. Starting with members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, the protest has since grown to several hundred people — estimates vary — most of them from tribes across the country.
The protesters have encamped in a field belonging to the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Each day, they march a mile up a highway to a construction site where preparatory work is being done for the pipeline. While the protesters say they are peaceful, there have been reports of heated confrontations with law enforcement officers and construction workers, and 20 people have been arrested. Construction on a road to the pipeline has stopped for the moment. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, has sued several protesters, claiming they have threatened and intimidated contractors and were blocking work at the site.
What Does Each Side Want?
The Dakota Access pipeline is a $3.7 billion project that would carry 470,000 barrels of oil a day from the oil fields of western North Dakota to Illinois, where it would be linked with other pipelines. Energy Transfer says the pipeline will pump millions of dollars into local economies and create 8,000 to 12,000 construction jobs — though far fewer permanent jobs to maintain and monitor the pipeline.
Members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe see the pipeline as a major environmental and cultural threat. They say its route traverses ancestral lands — which are not part of the reservation — where their forebears hunted, fished and were buried. They say historical and cultural reviews of the land where the pipeline will be buried were inadequate. They also worry about catastrophic environmental damage if the pipeline were to break near where it crosses under the Missouri River.
What About Protests in North Dakota?
For the moment, the mood there is calm, but anxious. North Dakota’s governor has declared a state of emergency there, and law enforcement has barricaded the main highway leading to the protest site and the campers.
Hundreds of people are camped out about a mile down the road from the construction site. They say they are there to pray and protest peacefully, but some people are worried that the situation could turn volatile if work resumes at the site or the government tries to disband the camp.
Are Others Fighting the Pipeline?
Yes. State and federal agencies have approved the pipeline, and some farmers and ranchers have welcomed the thousands of dollars in payments that came with signing agreements to allow it to across their land. But others oppose the pipeline.
In Iowa, one of the four states that the pipeline would traverse, some farmers have gone to court to keep it off their land. They say that Iowa regulators were wrong to grant the pipeline company the power of eminent domain to force its way through their farms. Most landowners in the 346-mile path of the pipeline through Iowa, however, have signed easements allowing it to be built across their land.
How Many Pipelines Cross the United States?
The United States has a web of 2.5 million miles of pipelines that carry products like oil and natural gas, pumping them to processing and treatment plants, power plants, homes and businesses. Most of the lines are buried, but some run above ground.
While a natural gas line to a newly built subdivision is not likely to generate national controversy, proposed major pipelines like the Keystone XL, the Dakota Access or the Sandpiper in northern Minnesota have generated huge opposition from environmental groups and people living in their paths.
How Safe Are Pipelines?
Energy companies and their federal overseer, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, promote the safety record of pipelines. Pipeline companies say it is far safer to move oil and natural gas in an underground pipe than in rail cars or trucks, which can crash and create huge fires.
But pipeline spills and ruptures occur regularly, sometimes in small leaks and sometimes in catastrophic gushers. In 2013, a Tesoro Logistics pipeline in North Dakota broke open and spilled 865,000 gallons of oil onto a farm. In 2010, an Enbridge Energy pipeline dumped more than 843,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, resulting in a cleanup that lasted years and cost more than a billion dollars, according to Inside Climate News.
In a 2012 examination of pipeline safety, ProPublica reported that more than half of the country’s pipelines were at least 50 years old. Critics cited aging pipelines and scant federal oversight as factors that put public health and the environment at risk.
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3) From Bikinis to Burkinis, Regulating What Women Wear
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4) Why Black Men Quit Teaching
"Black male teachers are not just expected to teach and be role models; they are also tasked with the work of disciplinarians. The stereotype is that they are best at dispensing “tough love” to difficult students. Black male educators I work with have described their primary job as keeping black students passive and quiet, and suspending them when they commit infractions. In this model, they are robbed of the opportunity to teach, while black male students are robbed of opportunities to learn."
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3) From Bikinis to Burkinis, Regulating What Women Wear
PARIS — The policeman in the photo is nattily attired and appears to have a slight smirk as he writes out a ticket for the woman standing before him awkwardly in her offending swimwear; perhaps he enjoys making her feel uncomfortable.
No, she is not wearing a burkini.
The photo dates from 1957. The woman is wearing a bikini on the beach at Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At the time, Italy prohibited the revealing bathing suit; it was too immodest to be worn in public.
In the midst of France’s fight over banning the burkini, the bikini is celebrating its 70th anniversary, and photographs chronicling its debut and early history in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s are on display in one of Paris’s chic galleries, prompting parallels to the uproar over the burkini today.
What is it about women’s swimwear and more generally women’s attire that over and over in history has attracted controversy and impelled societies to legislate or regulate women’s choices?
Historians, sociologists and anthropologists have argued about it for decades, but the seemingly simplistic statement that women’s bodies are a battleground has some truth to it. Formally or informally, men (primarily) have been making rules about women’s attire for a very long time.
“Can’t we decide what we want to wear in 2016?” wondered Sarah Fekih, 23, from Lyon, France, in a comment she wrote to The New York Times. “If one wishes to dress skimpily or to be almost nude or to be covered from head to toe, isn’t that a personal choice that can not be dictated by law?”
Of course, the burkini debate is not only about feminism. It is foremost a debate about the visibility and presence of Islam in France, and it comes in the context of the most recent act of terror to traumatize the country, this one in Nice, on the Mediterranean coast.
On July 14, a man drove a cargo truck into crowds of people there, killing 86 and wounding 300. The Islamic State later called him one of its “soldiers.”
Less than a month later, the first of at least 30 bans on “inappropriate” clothing on beaches — meant to target Muslim attire — was enacted in Cannes, about 20 miles from Nice.
Although France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, struck down one town’s burkini ban on Friday — and clearly would do the same for other towns if lawsuits were brought — the fight is far from over.
The Parliament could enact a ban, and some of France’s 2017 presidential candidates on the right and far right have pledged to enact measures that run from banning the Muslim veil in universities and businesses to banning almost all religious attire in public.
As the debate continues, much that is important will be said about France and racism and Islam, but it is worth pondering that it is women’s clothes that are at issue.
Throughout history, a combination of legislation, local regulation and social pressure has influenced the way women have dressed — corsets and décolleté, hoop skirts and bustles, the controversial advent of pants. France is now a society demanding that women undress, but in many ways this debate is part of the same narrative.
In the case of both the bikini and the burkini, “people in positions of power say, ‘We’re putting these rules in place for the woman’s good,’” said Deirdre Clemente, a history professor at the University of Nevada who has studied dress codes for women. “The implication is that women are unable to regulate their appearance themselves.”
As recently as the 1980s, a number of large American corporations had extensive dress codes for women. “There would be four pages on what a woman could wear to work, and four sentences for men,” Professor Clemente said.
When it came to the bikini, not only was it forbidden in some countries, with women forced to pay fines and leave many beaches if they wore one. It was also seen as subversive and a sign of moral weakness.
Italy, Spain and some beaches on the Atlantic coast of France prohibited wearing the swimsuit in the first few years after it went on the market, said Ghislaine Rayer, a co-author of “Bikini: La Légende,” a history of the mini-swimsuit.
That prohibition resonates in today’s burkini debate, said Hanane Karimi, a graduate student of sociology at the University of Strasbourg. She is the leader of a feminist Muslim collective that wants mosques in France to make more space for women at prayers and to be more respectful of their involvement in religious affairs.
“In some countries that had strong religiosity, like Italy, controlling women’s bodies was a part of the country’s religious morality; today in France there is a civil religion of secularity,” she said. “And it has the exact same logic in respect to the control of women’s bodies: Those women who adhere to that secular morality are undressed on the beaches; nothing is hidden.”
Today the French seem to believe as strongly that such undress is mandatory as Italy, under the Vatican’s influence, felt it was necessary to hide women’s bodies, she added.
It was not always that way. When the designer of the first bikini, Louis Réard, coined the name (a play on the tiny atoll of Bikini, where the United States had just tested the atomic bomb) and showed his new swimsuit at the Molitor Pool in Paris on July 5, 1946, he could not find models willing to wear it.
So he hired dancer-strippers from the Paris Casino. “It was avant-garde; it was ahead of its time,” said Ms. Rayer, the co-author of the book on the bikini’s history. “In that epoch, we were still puritan.”
Although the bikini quickly became popular in movies, it took more than 15 years, and longer in many places, to enter the fashion mainstream. France embraced it ahead of several other countries and eventually even allowed women to sunbathe or swim topless.
Joan Wallach Scott, a social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, sees France’s approbation of revealing swimwear, as well as the current burkini bans, as products of ideas going back to the French Revolution of 1789.
“What you have in French republicanism is a conflict between a commitment to equality and the notion that sexual difference is a natural difference which explains why there can’t be equality between women and men,” she said.
The French believe it is necessary to show the difference between men and women physically even while proclaiming their equality, Ms. Scott said.
The painter Eugène Delacroix depicted “Liberty” as a bare-breasted woman leading the righteous French. Sculptures and reliefs of a bare-breasted or semi-bare-breasted Marianne, a French symbol of the revolution and liberty, can still be found on government documents, buildings and postal stamps. The very depiction of women reflects how the sexes differ.
“Then on the other side you have Muslim society saying that sex and sexual difference is a problem, and women, whether submitting or not, are covered. So in a sense they are exposing the contradiction in French society, and that’s intolerable,” Ms. Scott said. “It becomes a commentary on the French need to have women uncovered.”
Indeed, the deputy mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, who is a political power broker on the Côte d’Azur, has repeatedly referred to the covering of women on the beach — whether in a burkini or a large T-shirt, pants and hijab — as a “provocation,” suggesting a challenge to the French order.
Such language mystifies one of the burkini’s designers, who sells her pieces in France. Vanessa Lourenço, the designer, said she had started creating them to give Muslim women a chance to participate in the same activities as the rest of the community.
She loves to swim herself, she said, so seeing religious Muslims or other people not go swimming “struck me as unacceptable.”
Ms. Lourenço, whose internet business sells swimwear in 120 countries, is not Muslim, and people often ask her why she designs for Muslim women.
“My answer is simple: At the end of the day women are women, whether Muslim or not, and we all want to be comfortable, look beautiful and feel feminine,” she said.
“Most of our clients message us saying it is the first time that they were confident enough to be at a public beach enjoying themselves with their family.”
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4) Why Black Men Quit Teaching
"Black male teachers are not just expected to teach and be role models; they are also tasked with the work of disciplinarians. The stereotype is that they are best at dispensing “tough love” to difficult students. Black male educators I work with have described their primary job as keeping black students passive and quiet, and suspending them when they commit infractions. In this model, they are robbed of the opportunity to teach, while black male students are robbed of opportunities to learn."
How can we help black boys succeed in school? One popular answer is that we need more black male teachers.
The logic appears simple: Black boys are not faring well, and the presence of black men as teachers and role models will fix this problem. The former secretary of education, Arne Duncan, brought this theory to national attention with a number of speeches at historically black colleges and universities. His successor, John King Jr., has taken up the argument, often repeating the statistic that only 2 percent of our nation’s teachers are African-American men.
The argument may be well intentioned, but it is a cop-out. Schools are failing black male students, and it’s not because of the race of their teachers. These students are often struggling with the adverse effects of poverty, the inequitable distribution of resources across communities and the criminalization of black men inside and outside of schools. Black male teachers can serve as powerful role models, but they cannot fix the problems minority students face simply by being black and male.
Black male teachers are not just expected to teach and be role models; they are also tasked with the work of disciplinarians. The stereotype is that they are best at dispensing “tough love” to difficult students. Black male educators I work with have described their primary job as keeping black students passive and quiet, and suspending them when they commit infractions. In this model, they are robbed of the opportunity to teach, while black male students are robbed of opportunities to learn.
Teachers hear the phrase “tough love” all the time; it is used to justify hurtful practices such as not giving black students the second chances that others receive to complete assignments, suspending students for breaking minor rules that others are not punished for, or yelling at students for being playful or asking too many questions.
Many black male teachers at first believe in the need for “tough love.” When they realize it is code for doing damage to black students, they are filled with remorse and often leave the field of teaching. About a year ago, a teacher named Joseph Mathews came rushing into my office saying: “I can’t look those black boys in the face and make them feel like I felt in school anymore. I have to quit.” This is a pervasive yet under-researched phenomenon that seriously affects teacher retention.
To his credit, Mr. King has recognized what he calls “the invisible tax”on minority educators. This tax is paid in the extra disciplinary and relationship-building work that black teachers do beyond teaching. Unfortunately, acknowledging the tax does little to alleviate it or its consequences.
Instead of fixating on black male teachers, we need to examine how teachers are trained, their beliefs about young minority men, and how they engage their students. They should be prepared to teach to each student’s unique needs, and to recognize that no student learns best under conditions that make him feel uncared for. If the notion that we must hire black male teachers in order to have positive role models for black youth makes sense, how can we not recognize that untrained and unprepared black male teachers can cause more harm than good?
I vividly remember, as a boy, having a black male teacher who didn’t see any value in me as a person, and who didn’t seem to enjoy teaching black and brown boys. Our school was diverse, with students from many ethnic and racial backgrounds, and this teacher clearly treated black male students differently, raising his voice and enforcing rules more strictly. He was allowed to teach the way he did because he was dealing with black male students who were perceived to need “tough love.” But I felt targeted by the very teacher who (because he was black) was supposed to be the person I connected to.
This cycle of dysfunction is repeated in schools across the country when black men, unprepared and burdened with expectations that inhibit them from being effective, are placed in front of students and told to teach. A better solution is to train all teachers, black and white, to acknowledge the biases they hold about their students based on their race, class, gender, sexual orientation and physical ability. Then they can learn strategies for being effective with these students despite their differences.
The new crop of black male teachers being herded into schools this fall as saviors of the same black children that schools have failed need to be told that teachers are not heroes; they do not need to save children, they just need to educate them.
This is not a call for more white teachers or a statement about some inherent inability of black male teachers. It is a call for a more thoughtful approach to teacher recruitment and retention, and a renewed focus on teacher preparation. Have we not seen the effects of programs that recruit mostly white, middle-class college graduates to “tough schools” only to see high teacher turnover, ineffective teaching and increasing achievement gaps? Why are we embracing a black male version of the same broken model, instead of working to fix the problem?
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5) Why Colin Kaepernick Didn’t Stand for the National Anthem
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6) An Epidemic of ‘Dead Eyes’ in Kashmir as India Uses Pellet Guns on Protesters
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7) When Technology Sets Off a Populist Revolt
5) Why Colin Kaepernick Didn’t Stand for the National Anthem
When the national anthem played before the start of the preseason game with the Green Bay Packers on Friday night, Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, took a stand by not standing.
Explaining the gesture, Kaepernick said that he had decided to remain seated as a statement against racial oppression.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he told NFL Media in an interview published on Saturday.
“To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way,” he said.
On his Twitter feed, Kaepernick curates a timeline of events that have found a place in the national discourse about race, politics and police behavior, including a protest by white supremacists in front of an N.A.A.C.P. headquarters in Houston, an article about how Arizona teenagers were forced by their school to change out of their Black Lives Matters shirts, and the fatal police shooting of an armed black man in Milwaukee.
“There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” he said.
Kaepernick, who is biracial and was adopted by white parents, said he had discussed his feelings with his family and, after months of witnessing recent civil unrest, he decided to be more active, according to the NFL Media report.
He said he had not informed the team of his intentions.
“This is not something that I am going to run by anybody,” he said. “I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed.”
He continued, “If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.”
In a statement, the 49ers said the pregame presentation of the national anthem was an opportunity to honor the country and the liberties afforded to its citizens.
“In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem,” the team said.
And the league said in a statement, “Players are encouraged but not required to stand during the playing of the national anthem.”
Kaepernick was not asked about his decision in the news conference after the game, which Green Bay won 21-10, The San Jose Mercury News reported in a blog post. It noted that Kaepernick sat in front of the water coolers on the sideline while his teammates stood during the national anthem.
Kaepernick did not play in the first two exhibitions because of a sore throwing shoulder. An NFL Network reporter said, however, that Kaepernick had also remained seated during the anthem before those games.
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6) An Epidemic of ‘Dead Eyes’ in Kashmir as India Uses Pellet Guns on Protesters
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — The street outside is patrolled by riot police officers in camouflage, bracing for the nightly spasm of violence, but it is quiet here inside the operating room. The surgeon’s knife slides into an eyeball as if it were a soft fruit.
The patient’s eyelids have been stretched back with a metal clamp, so his eyeball bulges out of glistening pink tissue. The surgeon sits with his back very straight, cutting with tiny movements of his fingers. Every now and then, a thread of blood appears in the patient’s eye socket. The patient is 8 years old.
“Very bad,” murmurs the surgeon, Dr. S. Natarajan. But then, all 13 cases he will see today will be very bad.
Since mid-July, when the current wave of protests against the Indian military presence started, more than 570 patients have reported to Srinagar’s main government hospital with eyes ruptured by lead pellets, sometimes known as birdshot, fired by security forces armed with pump-action shotguns to disperse crowds.
The patients have mutilated retinas, severed optic nerves, irises seeping out like puddles of ink. “Dead eyes,” the ophthalmology department’s chief calls them.
Every season of popular revolt in Kashmir has its marker.
This summer’s protests in the part of Kashmir controlled by India, the most sustained and violent since 2010, caught the authorities in New Delhi unaware. The stone-throwing crowds have no political leaders, put forward no specific demands and metastasized with alarming speed. Around 60 civilians and two members of the security forces have been killed; on each side, thousands have been wounded.
But 2016 will almost certainly be remembered as the year of dead eyes. The eye injuries have become such a focus of public anger that last week, in a conciliatory gesture, India’s home minister, Rajnath Singh, promised that the pellet guns, as they are known here, would be replaced by another type of nonlethal weapon in the coming days.
On the ophthalmology ward at the main Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, however, new patients arrive every day. Walking the hospital hallway, you first notice a handful of young men in blackout goggles. Then you see them everywhere. A weary ophthalmologist looks on from the break room as Dr. Natarajan’s young patient, waking from anesthesia, stirs and begins to moan.
“That 8-year-old boy, he will live for 70 or 80 years,” says the doctor, Afroz Khan. “The history remains there, even if it is not in the books.”
Retinal Repair
On July 9, Tariq Qureshi, the head of the ophthalmology department, was at a seminar on pediatric retinal repair.
The previous day, Indian security forces raided a village and killed Burhan Muzzafar Wani, a 22-year-old militant leader whose videos posted on WhatsApp and Facebook attracted a vast following. But major violence was not expected. Dr. Qureshi was in the seminar when his phone rang.
It was the hospital emergency room, calling to let him know that two patients had come in with pellets in their eyes. Dr. Qureshi sent a doctor over, and the seminar resumed. Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the same doctor in the emergency room, telling Dr. Qureshi to come immediately, that the number of patients had risen to 15.
The four ophthalmologists, who were across the hospital campus from the emergency room, ran.
For the next 72 hours, they operated in shifts around the clock, suturing the eyes to keep the matter inside from leaking out. In most cases, it became clear, the pellets had burst into through the cornea and out through the retina, leaving little hope of fully restoring vision. Twenty-seven patients were hit in both eyes. The pellets, when they could be removed, were preserved on the heads of cotton swabs.
“Once it goes in the eye, it rotates like this, and destroys everything there inside,” Dr. Qureshi said. “It’s physics. This is a high-velocity body. It releases a high amount of energy inside. The lens, the iris, the retina get matted up.”
The doctors were told to take all possible measures to save their patients’ vision, including complex surgery, at a cost to the government of 70,000 rupees, or around $1,040, per operation, Dr. Qureshi said.
The worst cases go to Dr. Natarajan, the director of Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital in Mumbai, whose visits are facilitated by the Borderless World Foundation, a nonprofit group. Dr. Natarajan specializes in patients whose eyes have been punctured by projectiles — typically, children standing too near fireworks, or industrial workers who did not wear protective goggles, or boxers whose eyes have been punctured by thumbs.
He works in a bubble of calm, eyes pressed to a microscope, using his hands to work a cutter and a light, and using his bare feet to control the machines that surround him. On a screen opposite him is an image captured by a microscopic camera inside the boy’s eye. At times the image is cloudy, a flashlight searching in the fog; at one point there are swimming glints of colored light, like those cast by a chandelier in the sun.
In cases of catastrophic injuries, Dr. Natarajan’s goal is to save a small portion of the eye’s function, enough to sense light, or movement of a hand.
“Even that minor change from zero matters a lot, for a man with no light,” Dr. Natarajan said. “It is like, if you have no money in your pocket, 10 rupees seems like big money.”
Slowly, as residents stood around him in hushed silence, the surgeon flattened out the boy’s retina, as thin and delicate as a lace doily, and used a laser to reattach it to the back of his eye.
Boys Hurling Stones
For an Indian security official, to be engulfed by a hostile crowd in Kashmir is, without a doubt, a life-threatening situation.
At sunset on Friday, Bhavesh Chaudhary, the second-in-command of the 161st Battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force, was drinking tea in the camp garden when an officer called with the news that 20 or 30 young men had begun to gather, chanting slogans. He continued drinking tea. The crowd outside kept growing.
Then, all of a sudden, Commandant Chaudhary and his troops strapped on helmets and leapt into a column of armored vehicles. As they raced through the neighborhood, masked boys appeared from the left and the right, darting out of alleyways, hurling stones. The troops sent stones rocketing back with small slingshots. The convoy halted at an intersection. Chanting could be heard, coming closer: “What do we want? Freedom!”
Commandant Chaudhary would spend the next hour and a half trying to push the crowd back. His troops may be heavily armed, but especially at sunset, when they withdraw to their encampments for the night, it is clear to everyone that they are outnumbered.
On the streets of Srinagar, which have a ghostly emptiness after 50 days of curfew, people have scrawled, “Indian dogs,” “Go India, go back,” “We love Pakistan” and “Burhan is alive in our hearts.”
Commandant Chaudhary has dedicated much of his career to battling stone-throwing crowds. He knows the current of excitement that will surge through them if they see his forces retreat even a few feet — or, more powerfully, if they see an officer fall. If the stone-throwers managed to reach the camp, he said, they would set it on fire.
“They are not afraid, that is the thing,” he said of the protesters. “Once somebody has put on a uniform and picked up a weapon, the law should be maintained, just because the person is there. That is not happening these days. We lost that in 2010.”
Indian troops use pellet guns for crowd control only in Kashmir. They were introduced in 2010, halfway through a particularly bloody season of protest. Pellet guns have been used to break up protests in Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia, but most countries do not use them on unarmed civilians, as the pellets spray widely and cannot be aimed. For Commandant Chaudhary, who sometimes faces crowds of more than 1,000 hostile young men with a contingent of 20 or 30, it is by far the most effective weapon at his disposal.
“It causes bodily injury, so you will be feared,” he said.
His battalion commander, Rajesh Yadav, nodded at this assessment. “If you pinch them,” he said, “only then people will understand.”
This year, the use of pellets on Kashmiri protesters increased sharply, with the police firing more than 3,000 canisters, or upward of 1.2 million pellets, in the first 32 days of the protests, the Central Reserve Police Force has said.
Though troops are instructed to aim them below the waist, “sometimes it is difficult to go in for precise aimed fire at a moving, bending and running target,” the police explained in response to a lawsuit seeking to ban their use. If they are withdrawn from the arsenal, Commander Yadav said matter-of-factly, troops will have to use their firearms.
As for the government hospital, now jammed with injured protesters and sympathetic volunteers, Commander Yadav said it was no longer a safe place for his officers to go. Not long ago, one of his men sought medical help for chest pain but fled in fear of being lynched.
8-Year-Old’s Prognosis
In a recovery ward at Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, a nurse pushes a trolley down a row of beds, distributing cups of tea and slices of white bread to a row of young men in sunglasses.
To converse with them is to see new energy coursing into Kashmir’s old cycle of violence. It is difficult to find a patient here who admits to mourning the loss of his eye. They say it is an acceptable price to pay for azadi, or freedom from Indian rule. Quite a few offer to sacrifice their second eye for the cause.
Wazira Banwo, 40, is watching her 8-year-old son, Asif Sheikh, recover from surgery. The boy is curled on his side under a blanket, his head swathed in surgical gauze, woozy and sick. It was his third operation; now, with his retina reattached, he may be able to see for a distance of three to five feet, according to Dr. Natarajan.
Asked whether she was grateful to the government for providing the child medical care, Ms. Banwo grimaces.
“Not a single person from the government has come to help,” she says. “If any one of them come to me, I will tell them, ‘You give me your eyes, I will put them in my child.’”
Ms. Banwo says she often participated in anti-Indian protests herself but discouraged Asif from taking part this summer because of his youth.
On the day he was injured, she says, he just happened to be standing in the market when security forces arrived in a van and fired pellet guns.
“This time he is very young,” she says. “But he will grow. He will understand what happened to him. And he will go out to the street and throw stones.”
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7) When Technology Sets Off a Populist Revolt
MENLO PARK, Calif. — To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.
But there is another conversation happening in the valley today. Its premise is that, when it comes to populist revolt, we may have seen nothing yet.
The idea is: If you think globalization, immigration, trade and demographic change have contributed to displacement and political anger, wait until robots take away millions and millions of jobs, including those requiring the use of a well-trained brain.
Some believe it will be glorious to live in this “disruptive” future; others believe it will pose devastating social and political challenges that dwarf anything being discussed in this election.
And then there are those, like Vinod Khosla, who ardently believe both things.
Mr. Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist and a Silicon Valley celebrity, is gung-ho on disruption and an investor in start-ups that are building technology to take away people’s jobs.
“If you’re doing anything disruptive, you’re disrupting somebody, and somebody’s getting hurt,” he said at a conference last year. “Revolutions are hard on people. People get killed. People get hurt.”
And yet Mr. Khosla is part of a cohort of Silicon Valley types who have begun to sound warnings about the very future they are invested in.
“It seems likely that the top 10 to 20 percent of any profession — be they computer programmers, civil engineers, musicians, athletes or artists — will continue to do well,” he told me. “What happens to the bottom 20 percent or even 80 percent, if that is the delineation? Will the bottom 80 percent be able to compete effectively against computer systems that are superior to human intelligence?”
Others in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have dismissed this concern as Luddism, assuring people that new jobs always replace the ones that vanish.
And it is hardly surprising for stalwarts of an industry to claim it won’t harm anyone. What is more notable is what sometimes is called “argument against interest” — people criticizing a thing from which they stand to benefit.
Mr. Khosla looks at the technologies he and others are investing in and sees massive displacement down the road. He thinks of it as both an entertainment problem (how would we occupy the minds of all those jobless people?) and a political problem (how do we keep those people from revolting?).
“I worry a lot about how do you keep humans motivated to live,” he said.
In the world Mr. Khosla envisions, technology will continue to widen inequality by amplifying the productivity of some hypertalented people — 100xers, they are sometimes called in Silicon Valley — even as it beaches many others.
The only answer, he believes, is massive economic redistribution via something like a guaranteed minimum income. The idea has been gaining ground.
“Does capitalism need to be reinvented for modern technology? I’m absolutely convinced it does,” he said.
In primordial capitalism, he said, the challenge was efficiency — how to juice as much as possible from scarce resources. In a coming world of abundance, he added, the problem will be political: how to create the conditions in which a minority of hyperproductive people can do their work.
And then he said, “Capitalism is interesting, because capitalism as a system is by permission of democracy, right?”
My eyes drifted over to a wall of glass to my right and, beyond it, a lovely garden. “Otherwise, there’ll be people coming in through the windows all the time?” I asked.
“Imagine 10 times as many people were unemployed today than are,” Mr. Khosla said.
To be plain, Mr. Khosla and others of like mind in the valley are not radicals. They are speaking of a new social contract, in which an undisrupted few assume new obligations to the disrupted many, in order to be freed to go back to their disruptive works.
“To put it crudely, it’s bribing the population to be well-enough-off,” Mr. Khosla said. “Otherwise, they’ll work for changing the system.”
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8) Long Nights With Little Sleep for Homeless Families Seeking Shelter
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9) Passenger Jet Service From U.S. to Cuba Starts Wednesday
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8) Long Nights With Little Sleep for Homeless Families Seeking Shelter
On Wednesday, New York City hit a record 59,373 people in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services.
There is no clearer indicator of the homelessness crisis than in the Bronx at the intake center for families with children, where on a recent Saturday morning at 7:30, Larissa Galindo had just gotten off the bus from a temporary shelter.
“We’re tired,” Ms. Galindo, 19, said, burying her face in her hands and trying to wipe the sleep and frustration from her eyes. Unique, her 1-year-old daughter, looked up from a stroller. They had left the center, known as PATH, short for Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing, four hours earlier.
“I want to go to sleep,” Ms. Galindo said.
In a cascade of good intentions and unintended consequences, homeless parents and their children are facing dayslong waits and sleepless nights as they flood the city’s already overwhelmed homeless services.
Under a 1999 law that was supposed to give homeless families dignity and relief, parents and children seeking shelter are not allowed to sleep at the center. Instead, those still in the process of applying for housing at 10 p.m. must be given beds for the night. The city must also transport them to and from wherever they sleep so families can continue the application process the next morning.
But with 12,913 families in homeless shelters, which is also a record, and the city trying to avoid giving them “overnights” twice in a row, New York has created a bureaucracy of sleep that, paradoxically, keeps many families from getting any rest. Some yellow school buses transporting them to shelters leave the PATH center as late as 4 a.m. People who are loaded onto them then are bused back two hours later so they can be seen by 11 a.m., before a new wave of families arrives.
As a result, overnight shelter has come to mean a few hours — or mere minutes — in a bed. Parents must haul suitcases, strollers and their children into the intake center, onto the bus, into the temporary shelter, back onto the bus and back to the PATH center.
Ms. Galindo, who works at a Fine Fare supermarket in Harlem, was lucky. After waiting hours to apply for shelter a day earlier, she got two hours of rest in a bed.
“What’s going on now is a direct result of capacity,” said Kathryn Kliff, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which is pushing the city to improve its services for homeless people. “This is not the norm. This isn’t how overnights go.”
The record number of people in shelters overseen by homeless services does not count several thousand more who are in specialized shelters for homeless youths and domestic violence victims.
The 1999 law was championed by Steven Banks, when he was a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society working to improve conditions for families with children. He is now the commissioner of the Department of Social Services overseeing homeless services.
The intent was to end the longtime practice of having families sleep overnight in chairs, on desks and on the floor of the intake office in the Bronx. The sight had become a symbol of the city’s poor management of homelessness at the time, and the city had paid $5 million in fines over four years for violating a court order to stop it.
“It was to end the practice of using a welfare office as a de facto shelter with families with children sleeping on the floor for days on end,” Mr. Banks said in a recent interview. “That was the intent of the law, and that’s the practice that it has eliminated. But it didn’t eliminate the lack of affordable housing. It didn’t eliminate poverty. It didn’t eliminate domestic violence.
“Those are the drivers that result, that cause people to seek shelter from us,” he said.
Wages have not kept pace with rising rents, and the city’s long-term initiatives — such as building more affordable housing, expanding rental assistance programs and increasing legal aid to tenants fighting evictions — have not kept up with the continuing surge of people who simply cannot afford to pay the rent. Mr. Banks said the number of homeless people in shelters had also risen as the city boosted efforts to shelter people living on the street, a visible sign of the crisis that the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has prioritized.
Mr. Blasio, a Democrat, shook up his administration in December to combat the increase in homelessness. In March, he consolidated homeless services and welfare under a single commissioner, Mr. Banks.
But August has traditionally been a month when the city sees increases, Mr. Banks and advocates for the homeless said. Families, hoping to find housing before the new school year starts, arrive at the PATH center looking for help.
The PATH center is a gleaming office building, opened in 2011 to replace an outdated one. It is across the street from an older, worn apartment building. Families said they dreaded entering, never knowing how long they might have to stay and when they might have to go back.
Inside, where parents were slumped in chairs and children were sprawled on the floor waiting hours to be interviewed by caseworkers to determine if they are eligible for more permanent shelter, tensions have run high. “It looked like a FEMA camp,” said Allen McKinney, a 29-year-old father of two, who was seeking shelter for his family after arriving from California days earlier.
Mr. McKinney, who is a gospel drummer looking for work, said he was grateful that there was somewhere to turn for help, but he and his family were weary. He and his wife, Jenee McKinney, said they arrived around 4 p.m. on Friday and got on a yellow school bus around 3 a.m. on Saturday to go to the overnight shelter. They were back at the PATH center five hours later, where they stayed until 3 a.m. on Sunday when the city placed them in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “I’m not complaining. We could be on the street,” said Mr. McKinney, who along with his wife asked to go by his middle name because they did not want to their family to be identified as homeless.
For several months, the vacancy rate in shelters for families with children has been less than 1 percent. In a further demonstration of the whack-a-mole nature of the problem confronting the city, that unusually low rate is not only a result of the increase in homelessness among families with children, but also of the increase in the number of adult families without shelter. Adult families are any units or families without minor children.
At the adult family intake center in Manhattan, people have been sleeping overnight. While that is not against the law, the city this month has been taking steps to prevent what had become common practice there. The city had already moved 450 such families into housing that was supposed to go to families with children.
Mr. Banks said the city was opening additional shelters for adult families to relieve the pressure. “We’re moving as quickly as we can,” he said, adding that other reforms, such as expanding a program that offers potentially homeless people rental assistance, were underway.
Mr. Banks said the city was trying to get services to needy families while also carefully evaluating whether they were eligible for shelter or if they could benefit from rental assistance, intervention with a landlord or reunification with relatives who could house them.
Parents, meanwhile, are braced to wait 12 hours or more at the PATH center, where they are not allowed to bring in food. Some walk to a nearby McDonald’s or other restaurants, at the risk of missing their name when it is called. (They must eat the food outside.) Otherwise, they make do with sandwiches, graham crackers and the school-cafeteria-size cartons of milk provided by the city.
On a Sunday morning, two days after she had arrived, Ms. Galindo was back at the PATH center, waiting. The city had found her shelter in Far Rockaway, Queens, far from her job in Harlem and far from a babysitter for her 1-year-old daughter.
Unfortunately, job location is a low priority with a less than 1 percent vacancy rate, Ms. Kliff, of Legal Aid, said.
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9) Passenger Jet Service From U.S. to Cuba Starts Wednesday
MIAMI — The first scheduled passenger jet service in history from the United States to Cuba will take off Wednesday morning from Fort Lauderdale, another important step toward normalized relations between two former Cold War foes.
It has been so long since an airline in the United States flew a regularly scheduled flight to the island that the last time it happened, the passengers flew on a propeller plane, said Marty St. George, the executive vice president of JetBlue.
JetBlue took the time to research this historic aviation fact because on Wednesday morning, it is expected to become the first American airline to fly scheduled service to Cuba in more than 50 years. The 9:45 a.m. flight will land in Santa Clara, about 175 miles east of Havana.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx will be on board.
“We do think it’s an important part of history,” Mr. St. George said. “From a challenge perspective, we know the drill. Cuba has some unique elements because of 50 years of history between the U.S. and Cuba, but we’re ready to go.”
The scheduled air service is the latest in a string of important changes between the nations since President Obama decided nearly two years ago to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba. Embassies were opened, direct mail service was restored and Carnival cruise lines has sailed to Cuba.
Other moves, such as ferry service and the building of an American tractor assembly plant, were authorized by the Obama administration, but stalled by the Cuban government.
“Anyone who suggests that the regulatory and policy changes made by the United States made in the last 664 days are not impressive is being delusional,” said John S. Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, who counts the days since relations were restored and what actions have been taken since that date. “There’s absolutely no question that the U.S. government has given far more to Cuba than Cuba has given to the U.S. There’s no debate there.”
Six airlines were approved for flights to nine Cuban cities, but not all of them have announced their schedules, Mr. Kavulich said.
The difference for passengers will be immense. Until now, people flying to Cuba had to book charter flights, which required passengers to arrive at the airport four hours before takeoff. Prices were high, lines were long and flights were often hours late. The document review process was time-consuming, while passengers stood in separate lines to check in, check bags, weigh bags and pay for the checked luggage.
“Up to a year ago, we were doing reservations by fax machines,” said Peter Sanchez, the chief executive of Cuba Tours and Travel.
Now customers who qualify under the 12 authorized categories approved for travel can book directly on an airline’s website.
JetBlue expects to have up to seven daily flights to Cuba, although most of them to cities other than Havana, like HolguÃn and Camagüey, which begin in the fall.
Silver Airways, a commuter airline, will begin offering three weekly flights to Santa Clara on Thursday, and then will offer flights to Cienfuegos, Santiago de Cuba, Cayo Coco, Varadero, Cayo Largo and Manzanillo later this year. American Airlines begins service on Sept. 7 to Cienfuegos and HolguÃn, and will expand to three more Cuban cities this year.
Frontier Airlines, Sun Country Airlines and Southwest Airlines were also approved for flights.
The Department of Transportation is expected to announce on Wednesday which airlines will fly to Havana.
Although the number of Americans flying to Cuba has been soaring, experts say it is unlikely that the market will be able to bear such an abundance of seats.
“There’s going to be a lot of seats on the market,” said Michael Zuccato of Cuba Travel Services, a charter company whose business will be in peril now that consumers can book directly with airlines. “I do not believe the flights are going to be full.”
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10) Their Soil Toxic, 1,100 Indiana Residents Scramble to Find New Homes
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11) Court Costs Entrap Nonwhite, Poor Juvenile Offenders
"Fines, fees and restitution mandates are levied on juvenile offenders to varying degrees in every state..."
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12) Lead Tests on New York City Schools’ Water May Have Masked Scope of Risk
10) Their Soil Toxic, 1,100 Indiana Residents Scramble to Find New Homes
EAST CHICAGO, Ind. — Stephanie King, a single mother of five, has adopted a grim routine over the past month: mopping with bleach twice a day and sweeping even more often to remove any dirt her family might have tracked inside. She has a haunted look, and for good reason.
Ms. King and other residents of the West Calumet Housing Complexhere learned recently that much of the soil outside their homes contained staggering levels of lead, one of the worst threats to children’s health.
Ms. King’s 3-year-old son, Josiah, has a worrisome amount of lead in his blood, according to test results she received last week. Like about 1,100 other poor, largely black residents of West Calumet, including 670 children, she is scrambling to find a new home after Mayor Anthony Copeland of East Chicago announced last month that the residents had to move out and that the complex would be demolished.
“If I’d have known the dirt had lead, he wouldn’t have been out there playing in it,” Ms. King, 35, said a few nights ago as Josiah begged to follow his older brothers outside. “Oh, my God, I’m ready to go.”
The extent of the contamination came as a shock to residents of the complex, even though it is just north of a huge former U.S.S. Lead smelting plant and on top of a smaller former smelting operation, in an area that was designated a Superfund site in 2009. Now, in a situation that many fearful residents are comparing to the water crisis in Flint, Mich., they are asking why neither the state nor the Environmental Protection Agency told them just how toxic their soil was much sooner, and a timeline is emerging that suggests a painfully slow government process of confronting the problem.
The mayor’s sudden decision to raze the complex, which is run by the East Chicago Housing Authority, and close an adjacent elementary school turns on its head a plan the E.P.A. has had since 2012 to remove the contaminated soil without displacing residents.
People in this heavily industrialized city just south of Chicago are also asking why their governor, Mike Pence, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, visited flood victims in Baton Rouge, La., this month while campaigning with Donald J. Trump, but has not found time to come to East Chicago. Kara Brooks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Pence, wrote in an email that he had “directed his staff and cabinet to provide support to the federal government” there, and that some of his staff and cabinet members visited the area last week.
But the most pressing question for residents is why they were not informed until last month that even the top six inches of soil in their yards had up to 30 times more lead than the level considered safe for children to play in, and that it also had hazardous levels of arsenic. Farther down, the contamination is much worse.
There have been no satisfactory answers. A spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said the E.P.A. was “the lead agency with the authority and responsibility for this site.”
Robert A. Kaplan, the E.P.A.’s acting regional administrator for the Great Lakes region, said that for many years, cleanup efforts focused on the former smelting plant and not on nearby neighborhoods. In 2008, as the E.P.A. sought Superfund status for the plant and the surrounding area, tests of several dozen yards at and near the housing complex found some “hot spots,” Mr. Kaplan said, but also soil with lead “under the level we’d be concerned about.”
The E.P.A. removed soil from the hot-spot areas, he said, and did so again in 2011 after another round of limited testing.
The E.P.A. began suing the companies responsible for the contamination in 2009, and by 2012 had a cleanup plan that involved removing all lead- and arsenic-contaminated soil from the housing complex.
Extensive testing to figure out which soil needed to be removed did not begin until November 2014, Mr. Kaplan said. And the E.P.A. did not receive the final results showing “exactly where” the contamination was, he said, until this May. The delay, he said, was due to problems with the contractor the agency hired to tabulate the data and concerns about the data’s quality.
“Our first priority after that was making sure every resident knew not to dig, not to be in contact with the soil,” Mr. Kaplan said. Since early June, he said, the E.P.A. has been covering bare soil in the complex with mulch; going door to door with fliers; and posting signs that warn, “Do not play in the dirt or around the mulch.” The E.P.A. has also tested for lead in homes and offered to deep-clean them as a temporary measure.
Mr. Kaplan said the E.P.A. had in fact warned West Calumet residents for at least a decade to avoid the soil, with public notices and community meetings. Mr. Kaplan said the hot spots discovered during preliminary testing had not created a sense of urgency partly because a 2011 federal assessment of the Superfund site concluded that “breathing the air, drinking tap water or playing in soil” in the area “is not expected to harm people’s health.”
When the E.P.A. gave the lead and arsenic data to city officials May 24, Mr. Copeland decided to seek to demolish the housing complex instead of moving ahead with the E.P.A.’s soil removal plan.
“I cannot multiply this enough times, to tell you the irreparable damage that can happen to your child,” Mr. Copeland told residents of the complex at a meeting Aug. 3. “I do not see how you can remove tons and tons of dirt and don’t aggravate the problem.”
Mr. Kaplan said the E.P.A. still believed that removing the contaminated soil was safe. But, he added, “we respect the mayor saying he wants to go a different way.”
Mr. Copeland’s office referred questions to Carla Morgan, the city attorney, who reiterated that the mayor had sought to relocate West Calumet residents as soon as he learned the specific lead and arsenic levels in their soil.
Last week at the complex, which was built in 1972, some older residents said they resented being forced out, while many younger ones said they could not wait to move. Some, including Ms. King, were already packing.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has provided the East Chicago Housing Authority with $1.9 million to help residents pay for new rentals in the city or anywhere in the country, starting next month.
But many questions remain, including whether the city, state or federal government will cover residents’ moving expenses and security deposits and whether they will be able to find safe, affordable housing with the amounts they receive. So far, only $100,000 has been allocated, by the state, for moving expenses.
“I have a voucher for Sept. 1,” said Akeeshea Daniels, 40, who is waiting for lead test results on her 12-year-old, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and her 18-year-old, who ends up in the emergency room every few months with severe stomachaches. “But they all want deposits, large amounts, which I don’t have lying around.”
Ms. Daniels is named in a housing discrimination complaint, filed Tuesday by the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago, that says the East Chicago Housing Authority’s plan for relocating residents violates federal civil rights laws.
Jennifer O’Malley, a spokeswoman for the Indiana State Department of Health, said that since early July, 474 residents of the housing complex and surrounding neighborhoods had been screened for lead and that 29, including 19 children younger than 8, had elevated levels in their blood.
But in a July 14 letter to the E.P.A., Mr. Copeland said preliminary tests had found that “hundreds of children suffer from excessive levels of lead in their blood,” according to The Times of Northwest Indiana.
Shantel Allen, 27, who has lived at the complex for five years, said tests had shown that all five of her children, who range in age from 2 to 10, had alarmingly high levels of lead. She said she had been told that her yard had some of the highest lead and arsenic levels.
“They show all the signs and symptoms of lead poisoning — they vomit randomly, have headaches,” said Ms. Allen, who said she had retained a lawyer. “Nobody’s given us any advice other than give them foods high in iron.”
Ms. Allen said that she would like to stay in East Chicago so her children could continue at their school, but that she would probably have to move.
“Nobody wants to answer our questions,” she said. “They just want to give us a voucher and send us away.”
Standing on her front steps, Ms. Allen pressed her body against her front door to keep her 2-year-old, Samira, from running outside. But children were playing throughout the complex, including Kaelynn Lott, 4, who picked up a ball from a patch of dirt as her mother, Nayesa Walker, begged her to stay on the sidewalk.
None of Ms. Walker’s three children have elevated blood levels, she said, but she is weary of trying to corral them inside their small apartment.
“They’re just too young to understand why,” she said.
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11) Court Costs Entrap Nonwhite, Poor Juvenile Offenders
"Fines, fees and restitution mandates are levied on juvenile offenders to varying degrees in every state..."
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — When Dequan Jackson had his only brush with the law, at 13, he tried to do everything right.
Charged with battery for barging into a teacher while horsing around in a hallway, he pleaded guilty with the promise that after one year of successful probation, the conviction would be reduced to a misdemeanor.
He worked 40 hours in a food bank. He met with an anger management counselor. He kept to an 8 p.m. curfew except when returning from football practice or church.
And he kept out of trouble.
But Dequan and his mother, who is struggling to raise two sons here on wisps of income, were unable to meet one final condition: payment of $200 in court and public defender fees. For that reason alone, his probation was extended for what turned out to be another 14 months, until they pulled together the money at a time when they had trouble finding quarters for the laundromat.
Dequan’s experience is hardly an isolated one. The ways that fines and fees can entrap low-income people in the adult courts has received enormous attention in the past year or two. But the systematic imposition of costs on juvenile offenders, with equally pernicious effects on the poorest of them, is far less known.
And for Dequan and his family, it got worse. Duval County, where they live, charges a dollar per day for probation supervision, so that meter kept on ticking. On a recent evening in their sparse apartment, in a rough public housing complex here, his mother, Shenna Jackson, displayed their unpaid bill from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice’s Cost of Care Recovery Unit: $868.
“You feel like you’re drowning and you’re trying to get some air, but people are just pouring more water into the pool,” is how Dequan, now a 16-year-old honor student and star linebacker at Robert E. Lee High School, described his despair over what, for this family, is a crushing financial burden.
Fines, fees and restitution mandates are levied on juvenile offenders to varying degrees in every state, a new national survey of these practices has found. The effects are greatest on the poor and racial minorities, creating a two-tiered system of justice, according to the report, published by the Juvenile Law Center, a legal aid and advocacy group in Philadelphia.
In juvenile systems intended to help wayward youths go straight, the study found, these costs are often counterproductive, drawing young people, especially poor minorities, ever deeper into the maze of criminal courts and straining already-fragile families.
These measures are intended to help recoup public costs, make offenders feel accountable and repay crime victims for losses, but in practice they often do not meet these goals, researchers say. “Asking people to pay what they don’t have doesn’t help anyone,” said Jessica Feierman, an associate director of the law center and the chief author of the report.
In some places, offenders may be offered a chance to enter an after-school program instead of being formally charged — but only if they can pay a program fee, the report found. So, instead, they miss the chance for help and gain a criminal record.
If they cannot pay fees, impoverished offenders may, like Dequan, spend extra months and years on probation. In some cases, they may even be incarcerated longer because they cannot pay the daily fee for a GPS ankle bracelet. One 13-year-old in Arkansas who could not pay several hundred dollars in fines for truancy, the report found, spent three months in detention instead.
In another practice that deepens inequities, about 20 states charge fees to have juvenile records expunged or sealed; in South Carolina, for example, juvenile offenders must pay more than $300.
A new analysis of juvenile cases in the Pittsburgh area found that unrealistic fines and fees contribute to recidivism and have an unequal effect on nonwhite offenders.
Nonwhite offenders owed more on average than white offenders at the time their cases were closed, said Alex R. Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas and an author of the study, which will be published in the journal Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. Even accounting for the severity of offenses, those who owed the most were more likely to be rearrested.
Kate Weisburd, the director of the Youth Defender Clinic of the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, Calif., recalled her surprise in 2014, when she discovered that an offender owed more than $4,000, including $29 per night for his stay at a detention center.
“There’s no point in trying to have low-income defendants pay for the justice system,” she said. “It’s like drawing blood from a stone, and it only pushes them further into debt.”
She praised Alameda County for a recent decision to stop imposing courtroom, probation and other fees.
Restitution — requiring offenders to compensate their victims for damages — presents a more complicated challenge, experts agree.
“We want kids to learn from their mistakes, and part of that is making the victim whole,” said Brent Pattison, the director of a center for children’s rights at the Drake Law School in Des Moines. “But we also have to be realistic,” he added.
Back when Dequan Jackson’s mother was unable to pay his court costs, the family was scraping by on meager slices of the father’s disability checks. Six months ago, Ms. Jackson finally landed a job, as a cashier at Walmart, but the probation bill still seems beyond reach, she said, because “we are literally living from paycheck to paycheck.”
If the arrears are not paid, they could be converted to a civil liability when Dequan turns 18, a financial cloud that could prevent him from getting credit or worse.
If his family had been able to hire a private lawyer, Dequan might have been diverted to a community program and never charged in the first place.
Once charged, the court and probation fees might have been waived on hardship grounds, if the family had received proper advice from overburdened public defenders and probation officers. But bewildering bureaucracies, and a lack of sustained legal help, are common obstacles.
The courts “don’t equip the families with the knowledge they need to navigate the system,” said Amy Donofrio, who teaches Dequan and other at-risk boys in a leadership class at Robert E. Lee High School.
In the end, it took the volunteer help of justice officials who met Dequan through that class for him to obtain this year the promised reduction of his crime to a misdemeanor.
Dequan dreams of getting a football scholarship to college and has already received strong interest from two schools, he said. But for college and after, it would clearly help to have his record expunged or sealed.
The family has not yet looked into the procedure. It will cost them $125.
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12) Lead Tests on New York City Schools’ Water May Have Masked Scope of Risk
When the results of tests for lead in the water at more than 1,500 New York City school buildings were announced in July, officials said that fewer than 1 percent of all the samples taken showed lead concentrations that exceeded Environmental Protection Agencyguidelines. Given other safety measures in place, officials assured parents, the water was safe to drink.
But a review of how the testing was conducted suggests that the amount of lead in the water that students consume could be greater than the results indicate.
According to the city, every water outlet in each school was turned on fully for two hours the night before the samples were taken — a practice known as pre-stagnation flushing that cleans most soluble lead and lead particles from pipes and thus reduces lead levels temporarily.
In February, the E.P.A. recommended against the use of pre-stagnation flushing when sampling water in homes, saying that the step “may potentially lower the lead levels as compared to when it is not practiced.”
Because the E.P.A. does not regulate the testing of water in schools, its guidance on pre-stagnation flushing does not apply directly to New York’s procedures. But the agency’s voluntary guidelines for schools do not recommend such flushing and generally direct schools to mimic normal consumption patterns when taking samples.
“The results should be thrown into the garbage, and the city should start over,” said Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech who helped uncover dangerously high lead levels in the water in Flint, Mich., touching off scrutiny of drinking water across the country.
Yanna Lambrinidou, an anthropologist who has worked with Dr. Edwards to expose lead contamination in water in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, and an affiliate faculty member at Virginia Tech’s Department of Science and Technology in Society, said in an email that New York City’s schools “may have just broken the national record for flawed testing.”
“Flushing is inappropriate any time you want to assess lead concentrations coming out of individual taps,” Dr. Lambrinidou wrote in the email. She said that water in schools is often stagnant for long periods of time — after school hours and on weekends, holidays and other breaks — and that the idea is to test it under conditions similar to those in effect when children might drink it. “Unless N.Y.C. schools flush every drinking water tap every evening for 2 hours routinely, their sampling technique is both unreliable and scientifically and morally indefensible,” she wrote.
Dan Kass, a deputy commissioner in the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, defended the process used to test the water. In an interview last week, he said the most important thing when sampling for lead was to have a period of stagnation, and that whether the water was flushed before that period began, and for how long, would not affect the results.
The purpose of a stagnation period, Mr. Kass said, “is that it essentially acknowledges that there’s going to be use of water the day before.” He continued, “Whether it’s flushing or actual use, it’s just use, and that’s entirely what’s intended by the overall testing protocol.”
Mr. Kass also said the flushing was intended to create a consistent baseline for the tests, regardless of whether the samples were taken on a Monday morning after a building had not been used over the weekend or collected on another day of the week.
At the city’s schools, contractors, after finishing the flushing, left for roughly eight hours and returned around 5 a.m. At each outlet to be tested, a sample was taken of the first water out of the tap, known as the first draw. The water was then run for 30 seconds and another sample — known as the second draw — was taken. A second-draw sample that shows an elevated lead concentration indicates a problem not simply with a fixture but a more sustained source of lead in the plumbing.
Over all, 510 of the city’s 1,520 occupied school buildings had at least one outlet where the first-draw water sample had a lead concentration over 15 parts per billion, the E.P.A.’s “action level” for lead in municipal water systems. And 153 buildings had at least one outlet where the second-draw sample exceeded the cutoff. Eight buildings had at least one outlet where a first- or second-draw sample had a lead concentration over 500 parts per billion.
Public School 254 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, which has more than 700 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, was among the schools with the most samples showing elevated lead levels: 13 first-draw samples and five second-draw samples had concentrations over 15 parts per billion. The first-draw sample at one water fountain had a concentration of 712 parts per billion; the second-draw sample had a concentration of 34.8 parts per billion.
A fountain at Public School 42 on Staten Island, which has roughly 950 students, yielded a first-draw sample with a lead concentration of 2,087 parts per billion, and a second-draw sample with a concentration of 607 parts per billion.
Officials said the city had acted to protect children in the buildings that had samples with lead levels exceeding 15 parts per billion. Where a water outlet yielded a sample with a concentration above the cutoff, the outlet was replaced and the building’s custodian was told to flush all outlets in the school every Monday morning and after every holiday. The city said those buildings would be retested within two years.
Asked about the city’s procedure, Monica Lee, the E.P.A. press secretary, said it would not necessarily have yielded misleading samples. It was important, Ms. Lee said, for the conditions of sampling to “represent typical conditions under which water is being consumed.” She also said that schools were often tested during the summer, and in that case flushing was “necessary to simulate normal operating conditions when children are drinking the water.”
The tests in New York City were started in March and completed by the end of the school year.
Young children are particularly at risk from exposure to lead. High levels of lead in the blood can stunt mental development and damage organs, and even low levels can affect intellectual development, ability to pay attention and academic performance, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Lead poisoning among children has declined in New York City since 2005, according to a 2015 report by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In 2014, 840 children under 6 were newly identified with blood lead levels of at least 10 micrograms per deciliter — a level the C.D.C. used to use as its “level of concern” — down from 2,705 children in 2005. (The C.D.C. revised its guidelines in 2012, saying that five micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood should be of concern.)
On Monday, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, Freddi Goldstein, initially said that while the city believed its testing procedures were sound, “out of an abundance of caution” it would abandon pre-stagnation flushing when it began retesting schools in the fall. A short time later, she rescinded that statement and said the flushing would continue.
“No child has ever tested positive for lead poisoning as a result of the water in our schools,” she said. “Our testing protocols fall well within federal guidelines, and the latest results have made clear that our safeguards are absolutely effective at keeping water in our schools safe.”
The practice of pre-stagnation flushing received increased attention after the water crisis in Flint erupted. At the height of the problems there, the city, following guidelines from Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, told residents to flush the water in their homes for five minutes before letting it stagnate and then taking a sample. That, experts said, hid the lead problems. In April, two state environmental officials in Michigan were charged with multiple crimesrelated to their roles in the contamination of Flint’s water, including violating the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act with the flushing instructions.
Dr. Edwards and Dr. Lambrinidou said the most extreme example of flushing they had previously heard of was in the Washington, D.C., school system, which in 2007, began flushing water for 45 minutes the night before taking samples. The practice ended after an outcry from parents.
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Posted by: bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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