Friday, November 24, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2017

Thanksgiving on Death Row

By Kevin Cooper

Painting by Kevin Cooper

Editor's note: Kevin Cooper was convicted of a 1983 quadruple murder in a trial in which evidence that might have exonerated him was withheld from the defense. His case was scrutinized in a June 19 New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. Visit savekevincooper.org for more information.

DEATH ROW, SAN QUENTIN, Calif.—As I sit here in a 4½-by-11-foot cage on Thanksgiving Day, I first and foremost am thankful to be alive. On Feb. 10, 2004, I came within 3 hours and 42 minutes of being strapped down to a gurney, tortured with lethal poison and murdered by volunteer prison-guard executioners. So, yes, I am very thankful to be alive. I am also very thankful for all the people—my legal team, friends, family, supporters and activists working to end the death penalty—who have helped make my being alive possible.

I have been in a cage like this, with two feet of space between the side of the bed and the wall, for most of my adult life, for murders I did not commit. I eat prison slop for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the guards look up my butt at least once a day to make sure I don't have contraband when I leave this cage.

I have been on death row in the state of California for more than 32 years, having come to this place in May 1985, and I have been fighting for my life ever since. This modern-day plantation in which I am forced to live is a very dirty and inhumane place for any human being.

After my stay of execution in 2004, I went on to suffer from post-traumatic stress for years due to that sick ritual of death this prison put me through. No human being should ever have to endure what I have, not even if they are guilty of the crime they were convicted of committing.

I am innocent, and my fate now lies in the hands of Gov. Jerry Brown. On Feb. 17, 2016, Norman Hile, my pro bono attorney from the prestigious law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, filed my petition for clemency in the office of Gov. Brown. I have respectfully asked the governor and others to look at my case with an open mind, outside the legal box that has me close to being killed for murders of which I am innocent. Doing this is truly important, especially now that many Americans are learning from frequent news reports the truth about America's criminal justice system and some of the people who work within it.

People have learned that this system is dishonest, and that some of its investigators, prosecutors and judges cannot be trusted and are more concerned with winning cases or with following their political ideology than with truth or justice. This is especially true in my case.

Start with the fact that for the first time in the history of the death penalty in California, as well as within the history of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 11 federal circuit court judges dissented in one death penalty case—mine.

To show their concern as to why my case should be heard on its merits before I am executed, six of the 11 stated these words of dissent in my last appeal: "Public confidence in the proper administration of the death penalty depends on the integrity of the process followed by the state. … [Twenty-four] years of flawed proceedings are as good as no proceedings at all."

The other five judges, showing their concern about the truth not being told in my case, stated: "The state of California may be about to execute an innocent man." (One of them, Judge William Fletcher, later said in a speech at New York University Law School: "[Kevin Cooper] is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department framed him.")

A 12th judge wrote in a separate opinion: "Significant evidence bearing on Cooper's culpability has been lost, destroyed or left unpursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. … Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the outcome."

There have been many judges in other cases who have turned a blind eye to the truth and let a poor person get executed, even when there were serious doubts about that person's guilt, but it is rare for judges to speak out against a possible execution. If these 12 judges are ignored, what will happen to me will not be my execution but my murder at the hands of the state of California.

The political ideology of many judges allows them to ignore truth and injustice. Politics—the politics of life and death—do play a very real part in this country's criminal justice system. That is why Republicans in Washington, D.C., would not allow President Obama to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court [after his death]. This truth may never be admitted in words, but actions speak louder than words. Among these actions are the continuing oppression of people like me, who are poor and fighting for our lives from within this rotten criminal justice system.

So while finality, rather than justice, may be what certain judges are more concerned with, it is my hope that others in positions of authority—in particular the governor—will see the miscarriage of justice in my case and stand up and speak out to prevent this state from murdering me.

What makes my case unique in many ways is the fact that a dozen federal judges did just that—they stood up and spoke out against my questionable conviction—based on all the evidence and not just what the state claims after hiding, lying, destroying, tampering with, withholding and manipulating the evidence, all of which is exposed in my clemency petition to Gov. Brown.

Just because other judges in my case chose not to acknowledge the truth about it doesn't mean I'm guilty. This can be said for all the people who have been exonerated for crimes, including murder, they did not commit. Certain judges in their cases upheld bogus convictions and then closed the cases.

I am respectfully asking you, no matter who you are, no matter your religion, your political party, your skin color or your sexual orientation, no matter what your job is, your economic class, or anything else that makes you the individual you are, to please get involved in this fight to save my life, as well as the fight for our collective humanity.

While I may indeed be murdered by the state of California in the not-too- distant future, this fight is not just about me. It is much bigger than me or any one person. It is about us as a people bringing to an end the historic and horrific crime against humanity that is only done against America's poor people, especially its black people like me.

My legal team and I have petitioned the governor to grant me an innocence investigation so that he and everyone else can learn the truth about the law enforcement misconduct in my case, as well as DNA testing that we hope will reveal the real killer's DNA and exonerate me.

We are asking the governor to grant me a reprieve so that if this state resumes executions, I will not be executed. The state has me marked for death and has me at the top of the execution list, in part because it did not torture and murder me in 2004, and subsequently because of the attention my case is now receiving, with many people, including several jurors who convicted me, believing in my innocence.

There is entirely too much sadness and pain and inhumanity inside these modern-day prison/plantations to go into any one essay. Just know that I am thankful on this Thanksgiving Day that my spirit has endured and is keeping me alive, when all around me is death.

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Addicted to War:

And this does not include "…spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet…"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/funding-for-war-vs-natural-disasters/

Dear Comrades, attached is some new art, where Xinachtli really outdid himself some.

Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:

Love this guy!

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

B) ARTICLES IN FULL

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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Standing Rock raised the stakes for the global environmental and indigenous rights movements. Now, another victory. A North Dakota judge has ruled that my legal team is entitled to substantially more evidence from the North Dakota State Prosecutor's office than has been forthcoming in other water protector cases. We will be able to take sworn testimony and demand documents from Energy Transfer Partners and their private, militarized security firm, TigerSwan.

The timing on this ruling is important for all environmental protectors. 84 members of Congress—nearly all Republicans—recently sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions encouraging him to invoke the domestic terrorism statute to prosecute fossil fuel protesters. These attacks on our fundamental constitutional rights, spearheaded by Donald Trump and parroted by congressional shills of Big Oil, should deeply concern all citizens who value our right to speak freely and demonstrate.

Our team has produced a new video that explains how I was singled out and targeted—and the justification for our bold legal strategy to expose the illegal and immoral wedding of the fossil fuel industry, law enforcement, and militarized private security forces. You'll see why I took action on behalf of my people, millions of others downstream, and Unci Maka—Grandmother Earth. Please watch it, and share it widely.

Don't lose sight of what Standing Rock means. My tribe—one of the poorest communities in the nation—won't stop leading the struggles to protect the earth and freedom of expression. Continue to stand with me, my courageous fellow defendant HolyElk Lafferty, and hundreds of others being represented by our ally organization, the Water Protector Legal Collective. Our fight is your fight—and it is nothing less than the movement to protect freedom and the earth for future generations.

Wopila—I thank you.

Chase Iron Eyes
Lakota People's Law Project Lead Counsel

P.S. Help us reach 60,000 petition signatures. Please share our video with your network and together we will pressure North Dakota's legal authorities to do the right thing and #DropDAPLCharges. In the coming weeks, we will hand-deliver petitions to the state's attorney. More than 45,000 have already signed. Help us free the water protectors!

Lakota People's Law Project
547 South 7th Street #149
Bismarck, ND 58504-5859
United States

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1) F.C.C. Plans Net Neutrality Repeal in a Victory for Telecoms
By CECILIA KANG NOV. 21, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/fcc-net-neutrality.html?hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=
top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission chairman. Eric Thayer for The New York Times

The Federal Communications Commission released a plan on Tuesday to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for internet service companies to charge users more to see certain content and to curb access to some websites.

The proposal, made by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration. The rules prohibit high-speed internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites. They also prevent the companies from charging customers extra fees for high-quality streaming and other services.

The announcement set off a fight over free speech and the control of the internet, pitting telecom titans like AT&T and Verizon against internet giants like Google and Amazon. The internet companies warned that rolling back the rules could make the telecom companies powerful gatekeepers to information and entertainment. The telecom companies say that the existing rules prevent them from offering customers a wider selection of services at higher and lower price points.

"Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet," Mr. Pai said in a statement. "Instead, the F.C.C. would simply require internet service providers to be transparent about their practices so that consumers can buy the service plan that's best for them."

Mr. Pai, a Republican who has pursued an aggressive deregulation agenda, was widely expected to have his plan approved during a meeting on Dec. 14. The two other Republicans on the commission generally vote with Mr. Pai, giving them a majority over the two Democrats.

Telecom and internet companies are expected to lobby hard in Washington — and directly to the public — as they did when the current rules were adopted.

Some internet companies were expected to put up a fight to prevent the proposal from taking hold. The Internet Association, an industry group, joined a legal effort in 2015 to protect the existing rules. The agency has already received 20 million public comments, many of them in opposition of changing the rules, since Mr. Pai announced the broad outlines of his thinking early this year.

The big companies that provide internet access to phones and computers have fought for years against broadband regulations. Under the new plan, broadband providers will be able to block access, slow down or speed up service for its business partners in some cases — as long as they notify customers.

"This action will return broadband in the U.S. to a regulatory regime that emphasizes private investment and innovation over lumbering government intervention," said Joan Marsh, a vice president at AT&T.

Big online companies like Google and Facebook say the repeal proposal would allow telecom companies to play favorites by charging customers for accessing some sites or by slowing speeds to others. The existing rules were written to prevent such arrangements, adopting a policy often called net neutrality.

"We are disappointed that the proposal announced today by the F.C.C. fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone," Erin Egan, a vice president at Facebook, said in a statement. "We will work with all stakeholders committed to this principle."

Small online companies believe the proposal would hurt innovation, because telecom companies could force them to pay more for the faster connections. Only the largest companies, they say, would be able to afford the expense of making sure their sites received preferred treatment. Companies like Etsy and Pinterest, for example, credit their start to the promise of free and open access on the internet.

And consumers, the online companies say, may see their costs go up if, for example, they want high-quality access to popular websites like Netflix, a company that depends on fast connections for its streaming videos. Netflix said on Tuesday that it opposed Mr. Pai's proposal.

The action "represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans," said Michael Beckerman, chief executive of the Internet Association, a lobbying group that represents Google, Facebook, Amazon and other tech companies.

Mr. Pai said the current rules had been adopted to stop only theoretical harm. He said the rules limit consumer choice because telecom companies cannot offer different tiers of service, for example. As a result, he said, internet service companies cannot experiment with new business models that could help them compete with online businesses like Netflix, Google and Facebook.

"It's depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks and deterred innovation," Mr. Pai said Tuesday.

Comcast, one of the country's biggest broadband companies, said it would not slow websites that contain legally permitted material.

"We do not and will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content — and we will be transparent with our customers about these policies," the company said.

In a call with reporters, F.C.C. officials said the blocking and slowing of some content could be seen as anticompetitive. Those practices, they said, would be policed by the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department.

The plan to repeal the existing rules, passed in 2015, would reverse a hallmark decision by the agency to consider broadband a public utility, as essential as phones and electricity. The earlier decision created the legal foundation for the current rules and underscored the importance of high-speed internet service. It was put in place by Tom Wheeler, an F.C.C. chairman under President Obama.

Mr. Pai, who was appointed chairman by President Trump in January, has eliminated numerous regulations during his first year.

The agency has stripped down rules governing television broadcasters, newspapers and telecom companies that were meant to protect the public interest. On Tuesday, in addition to the net neutrality rollback, Mr. Pai announced a plan to eliminate a rule limiting any corporation from controlling broadcasts that can reach more than 39 percent of American homes.

The fight over net neutrality could end up being one of his biggest and most fraught decisions. For more than a decade, the agency has struggled with how to regulate internet service, leading to extended legal battles. The rules adopted under Mr. Wheeler were upheld in 2016 by a federal appeals court in Washington.

The proposal released on Tuesday will probably make its way to court as well. And companies like Google and Facebook are expected to push the public to speak out against the plan. They coordinated a huge online protest against the possible changes in July.

Some of the lobbying could take place in Congress, even though it may change little because Republicans control both houses. Nevertheless, Democrats have vowed to try to reconstruct the strict rules adopted by the F.C.C. in 2015.

The next three weeks promise to hold intense lobbying from both sides, but that might not be the end of it. The regulation of internet providers has already swung once on a change in the Oval Office.

"As good as the F.C.C.'s action is for I.S.P.s, it only assures nonregulation of broadband through 2020," said Paul Gallant, an analyst at the research firm Cowen.

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2) Colin Kaepernick and the Legacy of the Negro National Anthem
By BRENT STAPLES NOV. 21, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/opinion/kaepernick-negro-national-anthem.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

The lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key embraced the pop cultural tastes of his day when he wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" to commemorate an American victory over the British at Baltimore during the War of 1812. He gave his composition broad appeal with a melody derived from a popular British music club anthem that celebrated the virtues of love and wine.

Satirists pounced, lampooning the song with lyrics that depicted a man who staggers home drunk and sleeps well past "the dawn's early light" — that light through which Key had seen an American flag still flying above the fort that had repulsed the British invasion.

Abolitionists during Key's lifetime viewed "The Star-Spangled Banner" as they viewed the nation as a whole — through the lens of the injustice perpetuated by slavery. They argued that Key should have described America as the "land of the free and home of the oppressed."

The professional football player Colin Kaepernick appealed to that same sense of injustice last year when he knelt during "The Star-Spangled Banner" to protest police violence against African-Americans. By doing so, he tapped into a feeling of alienation from the anthem in the black community that dates back to the days of racial terrorism and lynching in the South.

Congress declared "The Star-Spangled Banner" the national anthem in 1931. Well before then, however, black communities across the Jim Crow South were instead embracing the soaring, aspirational lyrics of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" — otherwise known as the Negro National Anthem — which was sung in churches, at civic events and even in schools, where substituting the song for "The Star-Spangled Banner" was a quiet act of rebellion against the racist status quo.

By the late 1960s, many of us who had grown up black in an era when African-Americans were locked into Northern ghettos and murdered in the South for seeking the right to vote registered our grievances by refusing to stand for the anthem at sporting events.

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" became what the Princeton University scholar Imani Perry describes as a tale "of endurance, lament and supplication" that acknowledges the cruelties of racism while also pointing toward transcendence: "Lift every voice and sing/Till earth and heaven ring/Ring with the harmonies of Liberty/Let our rejoicing rise/High as the listening skies." As Ms. Perry writes in "May We Forever Stand" — her forthcoming history of the song — it spread rapidly through black America in the early 1900s, reflecting a growing sense that the promise of full citizenship in the nation's canonical texts simply did not apply to African-Americans.

The provenance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is itself deeply suspect. Key, who owned human beings, penned his celebration of freedom during a war in which the British had promised that very thing to enslaved African-Americans who agreed to fight on their side. The third stanza of the song — which ceased to be sung once warm relations were re-established with England — can be read as a reflection of Key's anger at Britain's overtures to the people he himself owned.

The passage reads in part: "No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave/And The Star-Spangled Banner in triumph doth wave/O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Contemporary thinkers disagree on whether the word "slave" was used as a generic insult that could be applied to people of any race or as a direct reference to African-Americans who joined the British side in the War of 1812. But imagine yourself an enslaved person serving refreshments to your masters and their guests as they all retire to the piano room to sing Key's song as he had written it. There can be little doubt about what the passage referring to a "slave" would mean to you.

The histories of the white and black anthems are strikingly different. James Weldon Johnson and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1900 to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday at a time when the government seemed to have abandoned altogether the promise of Reconstruction. Four years earlier, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, had validated the doctrine of "separate but equal." As the historian Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary writes in "To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism," the door had been opened for racists and nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to appoint themselves custodians of what it meant to be an American.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" began as an ordinary song that competed with other songs for space in the American imagination. It was not until the early 20th century that it acquired the stature of a sacred writ and became, in effect, a loyalty test and an excuse for people who called themselves patriots to harass and beat people who dissented from the song's message.

The truth is that the maxims about freedom implied in the song describe a condition the country has yet to achieve. People who confront that reality by kneeling prayerfully on the football field are often more determinedly patriotic than those who reflexively stand.

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3) Why Won't Israel Let Me Mourn My Father?
By RAED JARRAR NOV. 23, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/why-wont-israel-let-me-mourn-my-father.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

My father, Azzam Jarrar, died last month. He was a proud Palestinian, a refugee, a civil engineer, a farmer and an entrepreneur. He was also my friend and mentor. He taught me the multiplication tables on our way to school in Saudi Arabia. He taught me how to question authority when we lived in Iraq. He helped me finish my master's degree when I lived in Jordan. Above all, though, he was the gateway to my Palestinian roots and identity.

My dad fled his home with his family in 1967, when Israeli soldiers invaded and occupied the West Bank. He went first to Jordan and then to Iraq, where I was born. I was the first Jarrar to be born east of the Jordan River since our family was established on Palestinian land centuries ago.

I didn't have the chance to visit my relatives on the West Bank until 2015, when I traveled there for a short work trip while working for a Quaker nongovernmental organization. Being in the diaspora meant that I wasn't given the opportunity to connect with the land and people. My only connection to my family history was through old stories and a few blurry pictures that my father took with him when he left as a teenager.

That's why, after my father died in Jordan in October, it was so important for me to visit my extended family in the city of Jenin, to mourn his death with them. Unfortunately, I was prevented from doing so by the Israeli government.

I had visited Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip two more times since that first trip in 2015. Like most Palestinian-Americans, I was questioned at the border about my family and personal life for hours before being admitted.

My latest visit was different. This time, Israeli officials were mostly interested in my work, even though I made it clear that my partner, Alli McCracken, and I were traveling in our personal capacity to mourn my father and visit my family.

I'm the Middle East and North Africa advocacy director for the human rights organization Amnesty International U.S.A. In that capacity, I have played a leading role in a new campaign that seemed to get the Israeli border guards' attention, a campaign calling on governments to ban goods from Israeli settlements.

The officials who questioned me asked why Amnesty has a problem with Israel. I kept trying to steer the conversation back to my dad's memorial service, but they insisted on discussing the organization's work. Alli, who also works for Amnesty International, was questioned for a long time, too. They took her phone and went through her text messages.

After hours of back and forth, I was informed that I was being denied entry for reasons of "public order" and — believe it or not — "the prevention of illegal immigration." I called the American Consulate General in Jerusalem and was told that there was nothing the officials there could do to help.

Based on the questions I was asked, I had no doubt that this denial of entry was retaliation for my work. Amnesty International believesIsrael's settlement enterprise amounts to a war crime. Under international law, governments have an obligation not to recognize or assist "illegal situations." That's why Amnesty is calling on governments across the world, including the United States, to uphold that law and not allow Israeli businesses to profit from an illegal occupation.

Israel seems to have denied me entry under legislation passed in Marchthat bans entry to Israel for noncitizens who knowingly issue "a public call for boycotting Israel." This law pertains not only to the boycott of goods produced in Israel proper but also to goods produced in settlements. Although Amnesty International calls for a government ban on importing those goods — not a consumer boycott — the Israeli government seems to treat it the same way.

Could my teenage dad fleeing his hometown half a century ago have imagined this happening to his son? I wanted to visit his old school and my grandparents' old house. I wanted to touch the olive trees he climbed as little boy, and eat hareeseh, my favorite Palestinian dessert made of semolina and coconut, from the shop in central Jenin. Does it even exist anymore?

I wasn't just upset about missing my dad's memorial service. Before I left the United States, I told my 4-year-old son that I was going on a trip because his grandpa had died. He cried a lot. Then he asked me if we could plant his grandfather back in earth like a plant and wait until he grows back. I told him we couldn't. He said he would just use his imagination. I tried to use my imagination while I was being sent back from the border crossing — I tried to imagine my family's land that I couldn't plant my father back into.

When I returned home, my son asked me about the trip, and I had to tell him that I wasn't able to go. He looked confused. I couldn't explain the details — my work, Israel's settlements and the occupation, its unjust laws that stifle civil society. I know I'll have to tell him about all that someday.

It won't be an easy story to tell, not only because of the Israeli government's actions but also because of the United States government's lack of action. Although I've tried to follow up, my own government has not stepped in to protect my right to equal treatment, and yet continues to help sustain illegal settlements by allowing the flood of Israeli goods into American markets.

Israel must respect my right, and the rights of others, to engage in peaceful human rights work without fear of reprisal. Whether or not the Israeli government agrees with my work — and, of course, I know it doesn't — I still should have been able to take part in those most human of activities: mourning my father and celebrating his life.

Raed Jarrar (@raedjarrar) is the advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International U.S.A.

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4) Papua New Guinea's Police Storm Manus Island Refugee Camp
By DAMIEN CAVE and ADAM BAIDAWI NOV. 22, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/world/australia/papua-new-guinea-manus-island-detainees.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=
package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

In a photograph released by an Australian activist group, an asylum seeker appeared to have collapsed as Papua New Guinea police officers stormed a detention center on Manus Island on Thursday. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

SYDNEY, Australia — The authorities in Papua New Guinea confronted asylum seekers on Thursday inside a controversial detention center on Manus Island, ordering hundreds of detainees to leave and destroying their belongings in an attempt to end a standoff at the camp that has drawn international scrutiny to Australia's offshore detention policy.

By early afternoon, dozens of the asylum seekers had been removed from the camp and placed on three minibuses, said refugee advocates who were at the scene.

"They drove past with their heads out the windows, and they cried, 'Help us,'" said Tim Costello, chief advocate for World Vision Australia, a charity. "They looked sullen and disturbed and defeated."

Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a Sudanese asylum seeker in the camp, said the men taken away had been targeted because they were separated from a larger group and were easier to remove. "The problem was, those men split up from the rest of us," he said.

The Papua New Guinea authorities' aggressive move, which Australia's immigration minister confirmed was taking place, represented an escalation of the conflict over the Manus center. It comes three weeks after Australia officially closed the camp on Oct. 31, cutting off electricity, food and water as hundreds of the detainees, all of whom are men, refused to leave.

Since 2013, Australia has paid neighboring Papua New Guinea to shelter migrants who were intercepted at sea while trying to reach Australia. The country's policy, which the government says is meant to deter human trafficking, is that no such migrant will ever be allowed to settle in Australia.

Security forces stormed the camp around 7 a.m. Wednesday and began tearing through the men's shelters and makeshift water tanks, before announcing on a loudspeaker that the men had to leave for alternative facilities on the island, detainees said.

"They've destroyed everything: our belongings, our shelters, our rooms and beds," said Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish asylum seeker and journalist in the center. "They said, 'You must leave this prison camp.' "

Mr. Boochani said the authorities were confiscating mobile phones after a number of refugees photographed and filmed the episode, making it available to international news media outlets.

"At this moment that I'm talking with you, I'm in the toilet," said Mr. Boochani, who has regularly posted Twitter messages and written articles from the camp. "If I go outside, they'll take my phone. It's possible that if I go out, they'll arrest me. I'm only worried that I won't be able to write and tweet."

The asylum seekers' defiance was partly an act of protest, but it was also motivated by complaints that alternative facilities were not ready. Many of the men have also said they feared they would be attacked or intimidated by local residents who have resisted Australia's attempt to move them closer to the island's largest city, Lorengau.

On Thursday, Australia's immigration minister, Peter Dutton, accused the detainees of ruining the detention center and wasting Australian taxpayers' money.

"I think it's outrageous that people are still there," he told 2GB radio. "They've trashed the facility, they're living in squalor."

He compared the situation to building a new house for tenants who then refuse to move in. "The Australian taxpayers have paid about $10 million for a new facility and we want people to move," he said.

Detainee advocates have questioned Mr. Dutton's assessment, pointing to photographic evidence that the alternate facilities are not ready.

"I find it very hard to believe anything that the immigration minister is saying at this stage — that's based on the fact that I was at the camp on Manus Island last week," said Jana Favero, director of advocacy at the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. "The only thing that's making these men live in these conditions is the destruction that's been brought on them by authorities. I can understand why they're staying: because they're going to be moved from one prison to another."

Mr. Boochani said that the men were tired, and he demanded that the Australian government find a solution to the stalemate.

"We've been in this prison camp for more than four years," he said. "We are refugees, and we've been recognized as refugees by international law. Let us go to a third country. We don't want to go to Australia."

Of the 843 asylum seekers still on Manus, nearly 200 have not had their claims for refugee status approved or have been rejected, including many of the camp's leaders.

Just hours after Mr. Boochani said he feared arrest, asylum seekers on the island said he had been taken from the camp by the authorities. Mr. Boochani later said in a tweet that he had been released, and that the authorities had berated him over his reporting.

"I've just been released. They hancuffed me for more than two hours in a place behind the prison camp. The police commander yelled at me 'you are reporting against us.' They pushed me several times and broke my belongings. Will write more about it later."

9:49 PM - Nov 22, 2017

Mr. Boochani is a prominent figure at the camp. His writing has appeared regularly in the Australian news media and has won multiple awards, most recently from Amnesty International. "I have a feeling that was their strategy — to arrest a few key people," said Ms. Favero, the refugee advocate.

Damien Cave reported from Sydney, and Adam Baidawi from Melbourne, Australia.

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5) Thanksgiving for Native Americans: Four Voices on a Complicated Holiday
By JULIE TURKEWITZ NOV. 23, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/us/thanksgiving-for-native-americans-four-voices-on-a-complicated-holiday.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=
latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Sherman Alexie in Seattle. "You take the holiday and make it yours," he said of Thanksgiving. "That doesn't strip it of its original meaning or its context." Ian C. Bates for The New York Times

"Do Indians celebrate Thanksgiving?"

The Native American artist Sherman Alexie, who is Spokane-Coeur d'Alene, writes in his poem "Happy Holidays!" that he is asked that question a dozen times a year.

The implicit assumption is that indigenous people would never celebrate a holiday tied up with the arrival of white settlers and the myths of American foundation. The truth is more complicated.

Excerpted here are perspectives from four Native American writers.

Sherman Alexie: A Story of Survival

Q. Do you feel like you've been able to make Thanksgiving your own?

A. You take the holiday and make it yours. That doesn't strip it of its original meaning or its context. There's still the really sad holiday as well. It is a holiday that commemorates the beginning of the end for us, the death of a culture. I guess you could say Thanksgiving is also about survival, look how strong we are.

Q. How do you talk to your kids about the Thanksgiving story?

A. You just tell them the truth, the long historical nature of it. They're quite aware of what happened to us, the genocide and the way in which we survive and the way in which my wife and I have survived our individual Indian autobiographies.

I guess it's trash talking: "Look, you tried to kill us all, and you couldn't." We're still here, waving the turkey leg in the face of evil.

— Interview in Bitch Media

Winona LaDuke: Tired of Being Invisible

There is this magical made-up time between Columbus Day (or Indigenous People's Day for the enlightened) and Thanksgiving, where white Americans think about native people. That's sort of our window.

November is Native American Heritage Month. Before that, of course, is Halloween. Until about three years ago, one of the most popular Halloween costumes was Pocahontas. People know nothing about us, but they like to dress up like us or have us as a mascot.

We are invisible. Take it from me. I travel a lot, and often ask this question: Can you name 10 indigenous nations? Often, no one can name us. The most common nations named are Lakota, Cherokee, Navajo, Cheyenne and Blackfeet — mostly native people from western movies. This is the problem with history. If you make the victim disappear, there is no crime. And we just disappeared. When I travel, I get this feeling someone has seen a unicorn in the airport.

— Essay in Inforum

Jacqueline Keeler: A Hidden Heart

I see, in the First Thanksgiving story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.

Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.

Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving Day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.

And the healing can begin.

— Essay from the Pacific News Service

Simon Moya-Smith: When We Commemorate

Native American Heritage Day falls on the one day each year when Americans ravenously indulge in material possessions — Black Friday. So is this an insult to Native Americans? Of course it is. How could it not be?

If Native American Heritage Day fell on Nov. 5, for example, then students would be in the classroom and teachers could offer lessons about the Native American today. But no. Instead, streams of bundled-up shoppers are standing in line to make their purchases, with the class the last thing on any kids' minds as they sit watching TV.

If we're going to choose a day for Native American Heritage Day when school is out, then how about Thanksgiving Day itself? Why not? That way we could learn about the real history of the holiday, and not the romanticized version we all hear about.

— Essay on CNN

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6) Telling the Truth About the Cost of War
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDNOV. 23, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/america-war-casualties-soldiers.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

A half-century ago, the Pentagon’s misleading claims about civilian deaths in Vietnam eroded public trust and, ultimately, support for the war. The United States military today claims to have learned the hard lessons of that and subsequent wars. It’s put in place an elaborate system intended to minimize civilian casualties, including an Obama-era requirement that forces have “near certainty” that no civilian will be harmed before launching an attack. Intelligence analysts select targets, “targeteers” study models to calculate the most precise angles to strike, teams of lawyers evaluate plans and the Pentagon later discloses the few civilians who still, inevitably and tragically, wind up getting killed.

It turns out this is all, at least partly, an illusion. The Pentagon is killing far more civilians than it acknowledges, according to a recent report in The New York Times and other findings. A system intended to ensure transparency and accountability appears, instead, to be enabling the Pentagon to fool itself as well as the rest of us about the true cost of its strikes. It is often feeding bad intelligence into its intricate targeting system in the first place and then failing to thoroughly investigate civilians deaths after an attack.

The American-led military coalition has claimed, for instance, that the ratio of civilian deaths to airstrikes in the operation against the Islamic State in Iraq is one for every 157 strikes. The New York Times Sunday Magazine’s account found a ratio of one civilian death for every five airstrikes — more than 31 times the Pentagon’s claim. The true number, wrote the authors, Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, “is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history.”

Ms. Khan’s and Mr. Gopal’s reporting provided the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since the operation began in 2014. They visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes in northern Iraq after ISIS was expelled, and they interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors and others. They photographed bomb fragments and mapped the destruction with satellite imagery, and they took the data to experts at the United States base in Qatar.

The article’s organizing narrative was the tragic story of Bassim Razzo, whose wife, daughter, nephew and brother were killed in 2015 in coalition airstrikes on their side-by-side homes in Mosul, the main ISIS stronghold in Iraq. Video and written records showed that the coalition misidentified the two compounds as an ISIS car-bomb factory or command center. Before the writers took up the case, coalition officials had not included the Razzo family in its accounting of civilian victims. When Mr. Razzo asked for compensation, the military eventually offered the insulting sum of $15,000.

The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates over 200,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan since 2001. Most experts attribute a majority of the civilian deaths to extremists.

Although international law obligates combatants to minimize harm to civilians, it is unrealistic to think that all civilian deaths can be prevented. Yet the reporting by Ms. Khan and Mr. Gopal suggests that America could be doing far more to protect civilians. They said they found a “consistent failure” by the American-led coalition to investigate claims carefully and to keep proper records. Some deaths occurred because civilians were close to ISIS targets. Many others, however, appear to have been recorded wrongly by “flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants.” The article said the military seldom recognized its failures or made changes to prevent civilian deaths.

To some extent, the American people may be blind to this carnage, having been lulled by their military and political leaders into believing that advanced technology and precision strikes kill the bad guys while sparing the innocent. This seductive concept took hold with video of seemingly pinpoint strikes during the first Persian Gulf war and was reinforced since by widespread use of drone strikes by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump against faraway targets.

However precise the weapons, careful the planners and skilled the fighters, war inevitably includes mistakes that kill civilians. Leaders need to be honest that there is no such thing as antiseptic combat, while Americans need to understand the full cost and consequences of military actions undertaken in their names.

These are not idle concerns. The pace of attacks and civilian casualties seems to be rising, and with them the potential for alienating the very people America hopes to save. The anti-ISIS fight has quickened and moved into crowded cities, but the president has also given field commanders more authority to make battlefield decisions in an ill-defined hunt for terrorists.

Civilian deaths impose another penalty. They become a recruiting tool for terrorists and undermine counterterrorism operations. It’s up to Congress to ensure true accountability and transparency, if the administration does not, by holding hearings and demanding answers.

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7) The Horses on Standing Rock Get a Checkup

Traveling veterinarians, their patients and tradition.

By VICTOR J. BLUENOV. 23, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/sunday/the-horses-on-standing-rock-get-a-checkup.html?action=

click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=

opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

Kallen Harrison with his mare, Oreo. Behind them are volunteers from the Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service program, which provides free and low-cost care to horses in areas with few veterinarians. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

FORT YATES, N.D. — Arlene Grey Bear took Lucky and Rue and Kennedy to the rodeo grounds in Fort Yates, N.D., on the Standing Rock Reservation — Lucky and Rue, her ponies, for a checkup, Kennedy, her 16-year-old granddaughter, to help. And to learn.

Kennedy started riding a few years ago, Ms. Grey Bear said, and then her friends wanted to as well. So her grandmother made sure they had horses to ride. She said it keeps them out of trouble. They’re not running around or doing things they shouldn’t, she said, because “they’re always on a horse.”

From left: Eric Davis, Arlene Grey Bear and her granddaughter Kennedy at the clinic.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Ms. Grey Bear is a Lakota teacher at an elementary school nearby, important work because, she said, if “a lot of our kids don’t know our language, it gets lost.” That concern about heritage, and what might get lost, extends to teaching the children about horses.

“In our culture horses are well respected,” Ms. Grey Bear said. “We’re supposed to take care of our horses the right way. We teach our kids: You take care of your horse first. Take their saddles off, brush them off, give them water, give them feed. Then you can take care of yourself. The horse’s needs before yours.”

But how do you take care of the horses if there isn’t a vet nearby?

There are no full-time veterinarians on the Standing Rock Reservation, let alone specialists in equine health.

Enter Dr. Eric Davis, a veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, and the director of Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service, a program that has since 2011 sent veterinary students to clinics at farms, rodeo grounds and homes to provide free or reduced-cost care for horses.

“We seek out places where other people don’t go,” Dr. Davis said. “I think that you have the opportunity to do the most good if you go to a place that has the least resources.”

As Jamie Murphy, who keeps rescue ponies on her place in Porcupine, N.D., said, “We’re kind of out here in the middle of nowhere.”

The care the volunteer vets provide is essential: treating wounds, fixing teeth and trimming hooves — key to keeping the horses healthy on the Plains. Dr. Davis and his students also geld stallions, which can become uncontrollable without the procedure. For the students, Dr. Davis said, it is “ ‘hands on, get blood on your gloves’ training.”

The goal is bigger than just providing care, though. Dr. Davis wants young people in Standing Rock to get involved and perhaps even see veterinary medicine as a career. “I would love it if I can help get students, reservation youth, more interested in doing things with horses,” he said. But he added that doing that when “you are the old white guy on the reservation,” can be difficult: “I don’t know what to say or what to do or how to act. And I’d be faking it if I tried to, and I can’t fake stuff.” He hopes that will change next year, as the first Lakota recruit will join the program from the Cheyenne River Reservation.

He also wants his students, many of them from urban areas, to see what rural practice is like.

On a Friday evening after a day of work earlier this year, the students headed to a powwow at Porcupine, on the Standing Rock Reservation. They bought fry bread and tacos and sat in the stands, taking in the traditional Lakota dances. “We have very few students that come from a background of farming, where people have to work and struggle,” Dr. Davis said.

One vet student asked a dancer for a photo of a “No DAPL” beaded outfit, a reference to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Another, also a musician, was mesmerized by the drumming.

“I can give students the chance to look,” Dr. Davis said. “Whether they see or not is kind of up to them.”

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8) Does Race Matter in America’s Most Diverse ZIP Codes?
By JOHN ELIGONNOV. 24, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/us/does-race-matter-in-americas-most-diverse-zip-codes.html?hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=t
op-news&WT.nav=top-news

Darryl Johnson, center, and his wife, Marissa Johnson, with their daughter Sienna at their restaurant in Vallejo, Calif. The city is one of the most racially balanced in the United States.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

VALLEJO, Calif. — Beyond the burgers and fries coming from the kitchen and the oldies blaring from the radio, the scene playing out daily at the Original Red Onion might appear unfamiliar to much of the country.

The restaurant’s married owners — Marissa Johnson, a Filipino-American, and Darryl Johnson, an African-American — work alongside Jahira Fragozo, who is of Miskito and Yaqui Indian descent. Ms. Johnson bonds with a customer, Hillory Robinson, who is black, over the challenges of motivating their children in the winter. “They need something to do,” Ms. Robinson says.

Ms. Johnson gushes a short time later when a regular, Dylan Habegger, who is white, decides to tackle the restaurant’s new, spicy creation with a name that describes its effect. “Uh oh,” Ms. Johnson tells him, “you’re trying the Burner today.”

The Original Red Onion sits in one of the country’s most racially diverse ZIP codes: 94591, in Vallejo, Calif. About 30 miles north of Oakland, it is the rare place in the United States where black, white, Asian and Hispanic people not only coexist in nearly equal numbers, but actually connect.

At a time when race often still defines where people live and attend school, and the battles between alt-right and Antifa, nativist and immigrant, continue to rage, this Bay Area suburb of 120,000 can seem like a respite from the divided nation. Pick any two people out of this ZIP code, and there is a 76 percent chance they are a different race or ethnicity — and odds are they’ll be comfortable talking to each other.

“The gift about being in close proximity is that you’re desensitized to seeing a different culture and judging it right away,” said Lena Yee-Ross, a 17-year-old high school senior whose mother is Chinese-American and father is black.

Lena Yee-Ross, center, with her classmates Arabella Compton, left, and Christian Bustos at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Living next to one another for generations, since a major naval yard drew large numbers to the town with the promise of jobs, has mitigated much of the tension found in more segregated communities. People of all stripes sing arm in arm during Thursday night karaoke at Gentleman Jim’s bar, where on a recent evening a white man with a cowboy hat sat next to a Filipino man in a biker vest, and the songs ranged from Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” to the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly.”

Students of different races study side by side at one local high school, and their shades of skin color span such a spectrum that it is difficult to tell what races or ethnicities they are when they congregate for lunch.

Still, Vallejo (pronounced va-LAY-oh) is no promised land.

Stubborn racial divisions remain. The typical black family has a household income that is three-fourths of the city’s median. Nearly three out of every four members of the Police Department are white, and all of the City Council members are either Filipino or white.

Academic performance is improving in schools, but achievement gaps remain: Of the 11th graders at Jesse Bethel High School, which is in the 94591 ZIP code, 42 percent of black students and 51 percent of Hispanic ones tested proficient in English this year, compared with 63 percent of white students and 77 percent of Filipino ones.

Spencer Lane, a 17-year-old white senior at a high school where whites are in the minority, said classmates had told him that he looked as if he could shoot up a school. Ms. Yee-Ross said her mother once heard a news account of a robbery and insisted that the perpetrator had to be black. And the Johnsons have battled racial tension in their family and their business.

A white customer who had been a regular at the restaurant once asked the woman taking his order to make sure that a young black employee did not cook his food, Ms. Johnson said. When she heard commotion at the front of the restaurant, she said, she confronted the customer, who told her: “How can you have people like that working here? His pants are sagging.”

The Johnsons met in Vallejo in 2003, introduced by mutual friends. He liked her toothy smile, she liked his respect, but each harbored racial stereotypes.

Mr. Johnson, 33, assumed that she would be a devoted homemaker who would cook and clean for him. Ms. Johnson, 31, said she was impressed that he did not wear baggy pants and that “he doesn’t talk ghetto.”

As diverse as Vallejo is, Ms. Johnson said she grew up hanging out mostly with Filipinos, a clustering that many local residents of different races said is natural. Immigrants from Mexico or the Philippines may want the company of people who can help them navigate a new country.

But within these groups, stereotypes can fester.

When Mr. Johnson’s mother, Tanja Mayo-Pittman, found out he was dating Ms. Johnson, she thought of the time she worked at Home Depot. She was the only non-Filipino on her team, and felt ostracized in part because her co-workers spoke Tagalog and joked with one another, leaving her to wonder if they were teasing her.

“Until I met them, I couldn’t imagine that they just had open arms toward my child,” she said of her son’s future in-laws.

But those fears and barriers have dropped. “I stopped feeling judged or left out,” she said. “I stopped seeing them as Filipino. I started just seeing them as people.”

Ms. Mayo-Pittman, 52, also had to contend with her own formative years in nearby Pinole, when, as a fair-skinned woman, she had trouble fitting in — not black enough for the black people, or white enough to be white.

“To be honest with you, I never wanted my kids to be light-complected because I didn’t want them to have an identity crisis,” she said.

The Johnsons have four daughters together, from age 3 to 11, each with tawny brown skin.

As the girls lounged on the carpet of Ms. Johnson’s grandparents’ ranch-style home one evening, after a dinner of lumpia and white rice, Ms. Johnson joked about some of the questions that had come from her husband’s side of the family: Do you work at a nail salon? How do you speak such good English?

Ms. Johnson’s father, Al Remorin, 51, grew up in nearby Richmond, where most of his friends were black. He moved to Vallejo in 1979, when he was 13. That’s when he came to know a lot of other Filipinos. He was surprised, he said, to hear some of their racism. People asked him why he talked as if he were black.

Mr. Remorin quickly bonded with Mr. Johnson, often discussing sports. So Ms. Johnson said she was caught off guard by her father’s reaction when she became pregnant.

“How can you?” Ms. Johnson said her father asked. As in: How could she think it was O.K. to have biracial children?

Mr. Remorin said he did not recall saying that. He never had an issue with his daughter having biracial children, he said. Back in his day, he rarely saw “half-Filipinos and half-blacks, or half-this and half-that,” he said. “It’s hard enough as it is being nonwhite, and you imagine when they’re half-this and half-that.”

Things are different today. In the Vallejo-Fairfield metropolitan area, 22 percent of marriages from 2011 to 2015 were interracial, more than double the national rate in the same period, according to a Pew Research survey.

Even in 2001, The New York Times was reporting that Vallejo was one of the most racially balanced cities in the country. Then, as now, racial and ethnic groups often stuck with their own.

Back then, there were also concerns about the racial makeup of the police, with no African-Americans above the rank of sergeant. Today, the longest-serving member in the history of the department is black and currently a lieutenant, but there are no other African-Americans above the rank of sergeant.

“There is not really the interaction in the way we would like,” Liat Meitzenheimer, who is black and Japanese, said in 2001. “Kids in the neighborhoods play with each other, but by and large, people stay to themselves.”

A decade and a half later, Ms. Meitzenheimer still lives in Vallejo and she says those divisions still exist.

“For somebody who has lived here for 32 years now, it really hasn’t changed,” she said in a recent interview. “There are people actively trying to find ways to bring people together so that we participate from different communities together on single issues, whether it be sports or some artistic endeavor.”

Vallejo is even more racially balanced now, with the white population dropping and other racial and ethnic groups growing. Hispanic and white residents each make up about 25 percent of the population. A little more than 23 percent of the city is Asian and nearly 21 percent black.

The 94591 ZIP code — where the Johnsons live, own their business and send their children to school — is a sprawling swath of the city known as East Vallejo. Among ZIP codes with at least 50,000 residents, it is the third most diverse in the country, according to a Times analysis of census data.

Vallejo’s diversity stems from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which for nearly a century and a half attracted families with the promise of stable jobs. The yard closed in 1996, and with it went much of this town’s fortunes; the city declared bankruptcy in 2008. It remains a largely working-class bedroom community, though some fear that the relatively affordable housing could lure more affluent Bay Area residents, displacing low-income residents.

Past restrictions that kept people of color confined to certain neighborhoods have largely fallen, but glaring disparities endure. Black households rank lowest in median income, at $42,000. Residents have complained of brutality by the police force against black and brown people, and the seven-member City Council currently does not have a black or Hispanic member.

“I think that’s part of that racial divide, where Filipinos want to have Filipino leadership or African-Americans want to have an African-American leader or whites want to have a white leader, so they specifically target an individual for election,” said Bob Sampayan, who was elected the city’s first Filipino-American mayor last year.

But Mr. Sampayan and other local residents see promising signs of integration, like the diverse neighborhood watch patrols that sprang up after cuts to the Police Department and the diverse group involved in the city’s participatory budgeting process.

The Vallejo Chamber of Commerce, once a mostly white organization, now has its first Latina chairwoman, and nearly half of its board members are people of color. Different ethnic chambers of commerce — Filipino, Hispanic and African-American — work more closely with the city chamber under a group called the Vallejo Business Alliance.

Then there are the day-to-day interactions that blur conventions of race and culture.

Christopher Morales, 17, said his black friends were not offended when he, a Mexican-American, used an anti-black slur because their relationships transcended race. It is an attitude, he conceded, that puts Vallejo in something of a diversity bubble.

“It doesn’t really offend us,” he said, “until someone from, like, an outside town comes over here.”

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Friday, November 24, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2017

Thanksgiving on Death Row

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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No More War! — Käthe Kollwitz

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Labor Studies and Radical History

4444 Geary Blvd., Suite 207, San Francisco, CA 94118

415.387.5700

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/mayday.html

Hours(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

Services

Reference Librarian On-site Email and Telephone Reference Interlibrary Loan Online Public Access Catalog Microfilm Reader/Printer DVD and VCR players Photocopier Quiet well-lighted place for study and research For an appointment or further information, please email: david [at] holtlaborlibrary.org

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Prison Radio UPDATE: Please sign this petition:

Judge Orders DA to Produce Complete File for Mumia's Case

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Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

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FREE OUR BROTHERS Campaign to Stop Modern Day Slavery in Colorado, Demanding Equal Rights to the Under Represented http://freeourbrothers.com Petitioning Denver FBI & US Department of Justice

Stop Slavery in Colorado

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Support: CONTRIBUTE Thank you for being a part of this struggle.Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win! Noelle Hanrahan, Director To give by check: PO Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141 Stock or legacy gifts: Noelle Hanrahan (415) 706 - 5222

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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* *---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression

BAY AREA ANTI-REPRESSION COMMITTEE

Mothers Message to the NY/NJ Activist Community

In order to effectively combat the existing opportunism, hidden agendas and to better provide ALL genuinely good willed social justice organizations and individuals who work inside of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas... with more concrete guidelines;

The following "10 Point Platform and Justice Wish List" was adopted on Saturday, May 13, 2017 during the "Motherhood: Standing Strong 4 Justice" pre-mothers day gathering which was held at Hostos Community College - Bronx, New York.......

"What We Want, What We Need"

May, 2017 - NY/NJ Parents 10 Point Justice Platform and Wish List

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Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson featuring exchanges with an Outlaw Kindle Edition

Sherman Alexie: A Story of Survival

Winona LaDuke: Tired of Being Invisible

Jacqueline Keeler: A Hidden Heart

Simon Moya-Smith: When We Commemorate

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Hours

(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day

We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

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Prison Radio UPDATE:

Please sign this petition:

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FREE OUR BROTHERS

Campaign to Stop Modern Day Slavery in Colorado, Demanding Equal Rights to the Under Represented

http://freeourbrothers.com

Petitioning Denver FBI & US Department of Justice

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Support:

CONTRIBUTE

Thank you for being a part of this struggle.

Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win!

Noelle Hanrahan, Director

To give by check:

PO Box 411074

San Francisco, CA

94141

Stock or legacy gifts:

Noelle Hanrahan

(415) 706 - 5222

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When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression

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