Tuesday, November 21, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2017

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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

1) Justice at Last for the Youngest Inmates?
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/life-sentence-youth-parole.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

How many times does the Supreme Court have to repeat itself before its message gets through? In the case of life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, the answer seems to be: at least one more time.

On Tuesday, the justices will meet to consider whether to hear two separate cases asking them to ban those sentences categorically, in line with the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishments. It should be an easy call. For more than a decade, the court has been moving in the right direction, growing ever more protective of juveniles who are facing the harshest punishments in our justice system.

In 2005, the court banned the death penalty for people who committed their crimes before turning 18. In 2010, it outlawed juvenile sentences of life without the possibility of parole in all cases but homicide. In 2012, it barred mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles in all cases. And in 2016, it made that ruling retroactive for the more than 2,000 inmates already sentenced.

Every case turned on the developing awareness that young people are “constitutionally different” from adults — less in control of their emotions and more able to change over time — and should be punished differently. In the 2012 decision, Miller v. Alabama, the court said states could still impose life without parole, but only after providing “individualized sentencing decisions” that take into account the “hallmark features” of youth, like “immaturity, impetuosity and failure to appreciate risks and consequences.” The punishment should be reserved for “uncommon” cases, for that “rare juvenile offender who exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.”

A few states had by then recognized that minors are not as morally culpable as adults, and had barred juvenile life-without-parole sentences across the board. But since the court’s string of rulings, many more states have come on board; 20 states and the District of Columbia now ban the sentence in all cases. In four other states it exists on the books but is never imposed in practice. Even Pennsylvania, the juvenile-lifer capital of the country, has since the 2016 ruling avoided seeking such sentences in all but the rarest circumstances. Not surprisingly, new sentences of life without parole for juveniles have also dropped sharply.

But in a few states, prosecutors are still behaving as though the last 12 years never happened. The problem is worst in Louisiana and Michigan, which together account for more than a quarter of all juvenile lifers. In Michigan, prosecutors are seeking resentences of life without parole in more than half of all the state’s cases, which meets no one’s definition of “uncommon.” In Louisiana, the state wants life without parole for 82 of the 258 people whose mandatory sentence was struck down last year. The numbers are even worse at the local level. New Orleans prosecutors are seeking life without parole in half of all cases; in West Baton Rouge Parish, 100 percent.

Statistics like these have nothing to do with careful consideration of “the mitigating qualities of youth,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it in the Miller case, and everything to do with blind retribution. The insistence on maximum punishment is even harder to understand when one considers that the court has hardly issued a get-out-of-jail card to those juveniles serving life without parole. It has said only that people whose crime occurred when they were too young to vote or buy beer should get “some meaningful opportunity,” usually only after decades in prison, to make a case for release.

As long as there’s a loophole, however, Michigan and Louisiana appear eager to drive a truck through it. For the sake of the hundreds of juveniles in those states, many of whom have spent decades rehabilitating themselves, and to reaffirm the court’s role as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution, the justices should ban these sentences for good.

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2) Workers Lured to Australia Find Low Pay and Tough Conditions
By JACQUELINE WILLIAMSNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/temporary-work-visas-wages.html?hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=s
econd-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Gabi Cho in her home in Lidcombe, an area of Sydney, Australia. Ms. Cho has accused the hair salon she once worked at of underpaying her and exploiting her lack of English skills.Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

LIDCOMBE, Australia — Like many young South Koreans, Gabi Cho moved to Australia for the chance to learn English, breathe its famously clean air and make some money.

Two years ago, she found a job cutting hair in the Lidcombe area of Sydney. It paid about $9 an hour. To get the job, she put down about $380, refundable if she was never late or absent from work.

At the time, she said, she did not know all of that was illegal.

Ms. Cho, who now contends that the salon underpaid her by up to $30,000, is one of thousands of temporary foreign workers in Australia who are chronically underpaid by their employers, according to a survey released on Tuesday. It adds to growing evidence that Australia is home to a large but silent underclass of migrant workers, many of them international students or simply adventurous backpackers, who are rarely heard from despite widespread labor abuses.

“The owner exploited my lack of English, lack of knowledge of the law and work rights,” Ms. Cho said through a translator. “I want people to know what happened to me so it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

The survey comes amid a rising awareness of labor abuses among temporary workers in Australia. With its developed economy, healthy environment and tight job markets in many places, Australia looks appealing to those looking for a foothold to live there and to those who simply want to make some money while visiting.

A report prepared for lawmakers last year, A National Disgrace, described low pay and long hours for many temporary migrant workers. Local news reports have highlighted the working conditions of foreign workers at convenience stores and farms.

The discussion is also part of a broader debate over how many foreign workers to admit into the country and whether they should be allowed to stay permanently, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and others arguing that many foreign workers displace Australians looking for work.

The survey released Tuesday, called Wage Theft in Australia, covers an estimated 900,000 migrants with the right to work here. It found that roughly a quarter of international students made less than 12 Australian dollars, or $9, per hour, and almost half made 15 Australian dollars or less.

In Australia, the national minimum wage is 18.29 Australian dollars, or $13.84, per hour. Casual employees, who are not entitled to vacation or sick leave, typically make more.

The worst paid jobs were in fruit and vegetable picking and farm work, according to the survey.

“We know now that this is entrenched, it’s widespread, and for many of these migrant workers, wage theft is severe,” said Bassina Farbenblum, a co-author of the report and a lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Many of the workers knew they were being underpaid, the survey found. Because of their visa status, the authors said, they probably did not expect to receive the legal minimum wage.

“We’ve got an invisible, large, low-wage labor market,” said Laurie Berg, a law lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney and a co-author. “The issues are disguised and we’re not addressing that.”

The authors, who worked with local migrant and worker groups, acknowledged flaws in the survey, which included about 4,300 workers and was translated into 12 languages other than English. It was conducted online, which could exclude some groups, and because it was anonymous it could be completed more than once. Participants were invited to apply for a drawing for a total of about $1,000 in Amazon gift cards.

Still, its conclusions roughly match those of some Australian government officials. Young people and people from migrant backgrounds may be more susceptible to exploitation in the workplace, said Mark Lee, a spokesman from the Fair Work Ombudsman, an independent government agency that investigates workplace complaints and enforces labor law.

He added that this was because of a variety of factors, including “language barriers, lack of understanding of their workplace rights, limited knowledge of where to go for help and concerns over their visa status.”

Ms. Cho, the Lidcombe salon worker, said she was unaware of her rights until her husband pointed out a news article about a Sydney sandwich shop that the Fair Work Ombudsman accused of underpaying South Korean employees on working holiday and student visas by more than $100,000. She filed a complaint with the ombudsman’s office, which declined to comment on her complaint.

“This is a big issue in Korea,” said Ms. Cho’s husband, Andy Rim, a South Korean national who works as a warehouse supervisor. “They’re sending people overseas to work as slaves.”

Mr. Rim said he and his wife came to Australia through an employment program supported by the South Korean government.

Workers from Asian countries appeared particularly susceptible to tough labor conditions, the study suggested. Workers from Asian countries including China, Taiwan and Vietnam received lower wage rates than those from North America, Ireland and Britain, the survey found.

Daniel Song, 28, moved to Australia in April on a working holiday visa from a small town in the Chinese province of Shandong. He thought Australia would be a good place to learn English, he said, and he had heard that wages were higher than in China.

Working in construction in the central business district in the city of Brisbane, Mr. Song said he was paid 15 Australian dollars per hour. More than a third of workers at his site are Chinese or Taiwanese and on working holiday or tourist visas.

“The salary difference doesn’t seem fair,” he said. “But it makes sense, and I don’t feel I have a choice.”

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3) Debating Whether Reptiles or Amphibians Should Be House Pets
Many experts think these animals shouldn’t
be in your home. Turning them into pets raises
numerous ecological and ethical questions.
By JOANNA KLEINNOV. 10, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/science/reptiles-amphibians-pets.html?hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=
top-news&WT.nav=top-news

A snapping turtle surrendered to officials by its owner at an “exotic animal amnesty day” in Bridgeport, Conn.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Reclining with a laptop on my couch in Brooklyn, I searched “buy lizard online” and clicked the first link. I filled my cart with a flying dragon, a couple of caimans, a red-eared slider turtle, a poison dart frog and an albino garter snake.

I agreed to the terms and conditions, certifying that I knew the laws governing reptile ownership (it is illegal for me to own some of these reptiles in New York), that I understood exceptions for baby turtles (I still don’t), and that I wouldn’t hold the company responsible.

Now all I had to do was provide a credit-card number and my new pets would be delivered to my doorstep the next day.

That I can impulsively buy a reptile — or hundreds at the same time — without fully understanding what I’m getting into is startling to some experts concerned with animal welfare. And that is only part of a growing debate over whether it’s appropriate to keep reptiles and amphibians as pets.

At first, the justification seems simple: If you can keep an animal happy and healthy with proper food and housing, then it shouldn’t matter if it’s a dog, lizard or cat.

But animals and their requirements widely vary. For reptiles, there are particular concerns about welfare, ecological sustainability and human health.

These issues were examined in a collection of articles in a recent issue of the journal Veterinary Record. The authors hope pleas based on science will inform proposed restrictions for keeping exotic animals as pets.

A century ago, you could buy a living lizard lapel pin, one of a wide variety of domestic cruelties once inflicted on reptiles. Today, people are more keenly conscious of animal welfare, and keepers and breeders know more about nutrition and husbandry of reptiles and amphibians.

A multimillion-dollar industry has emerged around caring for them, with many veterinarians specializing in exotic pet care and herpetology. In addition to the internet, reptiles are sold at pet stores, flea markets, street vendors and herpetology fairs.

Reptiles are popular pets because they are relatively quiet, odorless and “compatible with modern lifestyles,” said Gordon Burghardt, a herpetologist who specializes in behavior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. (As a child in the 1950s, he got his start with dime-store turtles and lizards.)

Caring for these animals is rewarding to their keepers, inspiring for scientists, important for research, and may foster conservation efforts by improving public perceptions of reptiles like snakes, which have been unjustly killed in the past, argued Dr. Burghardt and Frank Pasmans, a veterinarian at Ghent University in Belgium and lead author of a review in the veterinary journal.

While there are worries about the impact of domestic reptiles on human health — especially in homes with children or people with compromised immune systems — the bigger concerns are animal welfare and ecological damage, said Dr. Pasmans.

On their journey to your living room, reptiles and amphibians first survive unregulated and sometimes illegal methods of capture or breeding, housing and transportation.

In 2014, researchers, vets and animal welfare workers investigated a major wholesale supplier of exotic animals. Eighty percent, including reptiles and amphibians, were sick, injured or dead as a result of overcrowding, stress, poor hygiene and nutrition, or cannibalism.

“High mortality rates are the cost of doing business, whether captured in the wild or bred in captivity,” said Debbie Leahy, a wildlife manager at The Humane Society of the United States who was not involved in the study.

Collector demand for rare animals means some suppliers seek threatened, new or unclassified species in the wild, a trend that has become so problematic that scientists withhold details about the locations of species they study in publications for fear of poaching.

To bypass international trade regulations, collectors may pass off wild animals as captive-bred. Overexploitation also becomes a problem when demand is high and wild animals are cheaper to capture than breed.

Captive breeding is favored over wild capture because of conservation concerns. But it isn’t perfect and may introduce problems, like increased susceptibility to disease in some species or contributing to demand for animals falsely claimed to be captive-bred.

In your home, it’s hard to read the demands of stone-faced herps evolved for wild living. They need proper temperature, humidity, food, lighting and exercise, and have other species-specific psychological and social requirements.

If you meet these needs, you must accept that your pet could grow quite big and live a couple decades. If you don’t, yours will probably die in its first year, like 75 percent of pet reptiles and amphibians brought home as pets.

Reptiles and amphibians don’t make good pets “and should not be part of the pet trade,” said Lorelei Tibbetts, a vet technician and manager at The Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine in New York. Most of the time, animal patients come to her with metabolic or reproductive issues related to improper nutrition, husbandry and life in captivity.

“It’s really not possible for us to care for these animals in order for them to thrive and live a decent life,” she said.

People may neglect pet reptiles and amphibians no more than common pets. But even the best environments “will result in ‘controlled deprivation’,” as is also the case with caged birds and rabbits, or fish in tanks, wrote Dr. Pasmans in his review.

Just as many pet owners provide a high standard of care for dogs, cats, birds or fish, it is possible, with a lot of effort, to properly look after some reptiles and amphibians in homes, he adds. For instance, bearded dragons adapt rather well to captivity.

Clifford Warwick, a consulting biologist on exotic animal welfare and lead author of a viewpoint in the journal, said we can’t provide proper care because we don’t know what many species need. Even when we do, misinformation on the internet leads pet owners astray.

It’s easy to buy a cute pet on impulse, but “when people find out how much trouble they are, they turn them loose,” said Ms. Leahy.

Generally, the limited options for dealing with unwanted exotic pets means many owners just release them. Discarded pets can wreak havoc on nonnative ecosystems. That red-eared slider in my cart from Mississippi is a huge problem in Europe and Asia.

And Florida is dealing with the biggest invasive species problem on the planet, mostly because of the pet trade. There, iguanas have destroyed concrete infrastructure and Burmese pythons have eaten protected and common species, setting off a disease-spreading chain reaction.

Despite all these concerns, reptile and amphibian owners aren’t going to disappear any sooner than dog, cat or bird owners.

In the past, people have summoned emotional arguments to single out slick-skinned exotic pets with bad reputations. But the animals aren’t as harmful as the harm inherent in trading them.

The contributors to the review hope that by heeding scientific arguments, rules about reptile ownership will be conceived of fairly.

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4) Trump Administration Ends Temporary Protection for Haitians
By MIRIAM JORDANNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/us/haitians-temporary-status.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=
rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Supporters of the program that gives people from some countries temporary protection from deportation rallied in Los Angeles last week. Emily Berl for The New York Times

The Trump administration is ending a humanitarian program that has allowed some 59,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States since an earthquake ravaged their country in 2010, Homeland Security officials said on Monday.

Haitians with what is known as Temporary Protected Status will be expected to leave the United States by July 2019 or face deportation.

The decision set off immediate dismay among Haitian communities in South Florida, New York and beyond, and was a signal to other foreigners with temporary protections that they, too, could soon be asked to leave.

About 320,000 people now benefit from the Temporary Protected Status program, which was signed into law by President George Bush in 1990, and the decision on Monday followed another one last month that ended protections for 2,500 Nicaraguans.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is still struggling to recover from the earthquake and relies heavily on money its expatriates send to relatives back home. The Haitian government had asked the Trump administration to extend the protected status.

“I received a shock right now,” Gerald Michaud, 45, a Haitian who lives in Brooklyn, said when he heard the news. He has been working at La Guardia Airport as a wheelchair attendant, sending money to family and friends back home. He said he feared for his welfare and safety back in Haiti now that his permission to remain in the United States was ending.

“The situation is not good in my country,” he said. “I don’t know where I am able to go.”

Haitians are the second-largest group of foreigners with temporary status. The protection is extended to people already in the United States who have come from countries crippled by natural disasters or armed conflict that prevents their citizens from returning or prevents their country from adequately receiving them. The government periodically reviews each group’s status and decides whether to continue the protections.

The Obama administration renewed the protections for Haitians several times, after determining that conditions in Haiti remained precarious. But the Trump administration, which has sought greater controls on immigration, has said that the program, which was intended to provide only temporary relief, has turned into a permanent benefit for tens of thousands of people.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that after meeting with Haitian government officials and Haitian communities in the United States, it had decided to let the protections end.

“Since the 2010 earthquake, the number of displaced people in Haiti has decreased by 97 percent,” the statement said. “Significant steps have been taken to improve the stability and quality of life for Haitian citizens, and Haiti is able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens.”

The protection for Haitians was most recently extended in May, by John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary at the time. He allowed only a six-month extension, a shorter one than is typical, saying that the Haitians “need to start thinking about returning.”

The decision on Monday by Elaine Duke, the acting secretary, set a termination date of July 2019 to give people time to make arrangements to leave.

The largest group of Temporary Protected Status beneficiaries, nearly 200,000 people, are from El Salvador. The Department of Homeland Security is scheduled to announce next month whether it will rescind or renew protection for that country, which is plagued with gang violence and high unemployment. The protection applies to Salvadorans who were in the United States without permission on Feb. 13, 2001, and was granted after deadly earthquakes in their home country.

Though Ms. Duke ended protections for Nicaraguans last month, she continued, at least for now, protections for Hondurans despite pressurefrom Mr. Kelly, now President Trump’s chief of staff, to end them.

Others who now benefit include people from Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen. In 2016, the Obama administration decided to end temporary protection for citizens from three West African countries that had been devastated by the Ebola virus several years ago.

The United States offered the protection to Haitians after the earthquake in January 2010 that killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced more than a million and led to a cholera outbreak. Haitians who entered the United States within a year of the disaster qualified for the status.

A variety of American groups, including the Congressional Black Caucus, the United States Chamber of Commerce and immigrant advocacy organizations had urged the Trump administration to extend the protections again. On Monday, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, called the decision “unconscionable.”

“There is no reason to send 60,000 Haitians back to a country that cannot provide for them,” he wrote on Twitter. “I am strongly urging the administration to reconsider.

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5) Judge Permanently Blocks Trump Sanctuary Cities Order
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSNOV. 20, 2017, 11:39 P.M. E.S.T
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/11/20/us/ap-us-sanctuary-cities.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=
rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Monday permanently blocked President Donald Trump's executive order to cut funding from cities that limit cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities.

U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick rejected the administration's argument that the executive order applies only to a relatively small pot of money and said Trump cannot set new conditions on spending approved by Congress.

The judge had previously made the same arguments in a ruling that put a temporary hold on the executive order targeting so-called sanctuary cities. The Trump administration has appealed that decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"The District Court exceeded its authority today when it barred the President from instructing his cabinet members to enforce existing law," Department of Justice spokesman Devin O'Malley said in a statement late Monday. "The Justice Department will vindicate the President's lawful authority to direct the executive branch."

Orrick's ruling came in lawsuits brought by two California counties, San Francisco and Santa Clara.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the ruling was "a victory for the American people and the rule of law."

"President Trump might be able to tweet whatever comes to mind, but he can't grant himself new authority because he feels like it," he said in a statement.

A lawyer for the DOJ argued during a hearing before Orrick in April that the executive order applied to only a few grants that would affect less than $1 million for Santa Clara County and possibly no money for San Francisco.

But the judge disagreed, saying in his rulings that the order was written broadly to "reach all federal grants" and potentially jeopardized hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to San Francisco and Santa Clara.

He cited comments by the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions as evidence that the order was intended to target a wide array of federal funding. And he said the president himself had called it a "weapon" to use against recalcitrant cities.

The Trump administration separately has also moved to withhold one particular law enforcement grant from sanctuary cities, prompting a new round of lawsuits that are pending.

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6) Most Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong
By MAYA SALAMNOV. 21, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” from 1914, by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe.

Not to rain on our Thanksgiving Day parade, but the story of the first Thanksgiving, as most Americans have been taught it, is not exactly accurate.

Blame school textbooks with details often so abridged, softened or out of context that they are rendered false; children’s books that distill the story to its most pleasant version; or animated Thanksgiving television specials like “The Mouse on the Mayflower,” which first aired in 1968, that not only misinformed a generation, but also enforced a slew of cringeworthy stereotypes.

High school textbooks are particularly bad about stating absolutes because these materials “teach history” by giving students facts to memorize even when the details may be unclear, said James W. Loewen, a sociologist and the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.”

“That mind-set pervades everything they talk about and certainly Thanksgiving,” he said.

The timeline is relative.

The Mayflower did bring the Pilgrims to North America from Plymouth, England, in 1620, and they disembarked at what is now Plymouth, Mass., where they set up a colony. In 1621, they celebrated a successful harvest with a three-day gathering that was attended by members of the Wampanoag tribe. It’s from this that we derive Thanksgiving as we know it.

But it wasn’t until the 1830s that this event was called the first Thanksgiving by New Englanders who looked back and thought it resembled their version of the holiday, said Kate Sheehan, a spokeswoman for Plimouth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth.

The holiday wasn’t made official until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared it as a kind of thank you for the Civil War victories in Vicksburg, Miss., and Gettysburg, Pa.

Beyond that, claiming it was the “first Thanksgiving” isn’t quite right either as both Native American and European societies had been holding festivals to celebrate successful harvests for centuries, Mr. Loewen said.

A prevalent opposing viewpoint is that the first Thanksgiving stemmed from the massacre of Pequot people in 1637, a culmination of the Pequot War. While it is true that a day of thanksgiving was noted in the Massachusetts Bay and the Plymouth colonies afterward, it is not accurate to say it was the basis for our modern Thanksgiving, Ms. Sheehan said.

And Plymouth, Mr. Loewen noted, was already a village with clear fields and a spring when the Pilgrims found it. “A lovely place to settle,” he said. “Why was it available? Because every single native person who had been living there was a corpse.” Plagues had wiped them out.

It wasn’t just about religious freedom.

It’s been taught that the Pilgrims came because they were seeking religious freedom, but that’s not entirely true, Mr. Loewen said.

The Pilgrims had religious freedom in Holland, where they first arrived in the early 17th century. Like those who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607, the Pilgrims came to North America to make money, Mr. Loewen said.

“They were also coming here in order to establish a religious theocracy, which they did,” he said. “That’s not exactly the same as coming here for religious freedom. It’s kind of coming here against religious freedom.”

Also, the Pilgrims never called themselves Pilgrims. They were separatists, Mr. Loewen said. The term Pilgrims didn’t surface until around 1880.

There’s no evidence that native people were invited.

Possibly the most common misconception is that the Pilgrims extended an invitation to the Native Americans for helping them reap the harvest. The truth of how they all ended up feasting together is unknown.

“The English-written record does not mention an invitation, and Wampanoag oral tradition does not seem to reach back to this event,” Ms. Sheehan said. But there are reasons the Wampanoag leader could have been there, she said, adding: “His people had been planting on the other side of the brook from the colony. Another possibility is that after his harvest was gathered, he was making diplomatic calls.”

It is true that the celebration was an exceptional cross-cultural moment, with food, games and prayer.

The deadly conflicts that came after, though, created an undercurrent that is glossed over, Mr. Loewen said. Still, “we might as well take shards of fairness and idealism and so on whenever we find them in our past and recognize that and give credit to them,” he said.

The role of Squanto is complicated.

Tisquantum, known as Squanto, did play a large role in helping the Pilgrims, as American children are taught. His people, the Patuxet, a band of the Wampanoag tribe, had lived on the site where the Pilgrims settled. When they arrived, he became a translator for them in diplomacy and trade with other native people, and showed them the most effective method for planting corn and the best locations to fish, Ms. Sheehan said.

That’s usually where the lesson ends, but that’s just a fraction of his story.

He was captured by the English in 1614 and later sold into slavery in Spain. He spent several years in England, where he learned English. He returned to New England in 1619, only to find his entire Patuxet tribe dead from smallpox. He met the Pilgrims in March 1621.

There was no turkey or pie.

There was no mention of turkey being at the 1621 bounty, and there was definitely no pie. Settlers lacked butter and wheat flour for a crust, and they had no oven for baking. What is known is that the Pilgrims harvested crops and that the Wampanoag brought five deer. If fowl graced the table, it was probably duck or goose.

The menu may have also included cornmeal, pumpkin, succotash and cranberries. There were no sweet potatoes in North America at the time.

Contrary to popular depictions, there were about 90 native people in attendance, almost double the number of Pilgrims by some accounts.

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7) Virginia Restricts Protests at Lee Monument in Richmond After Clashes
By MATTHEW HAAGNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/us/robert-e-lee-monument-richmond-virginia.html?rref=
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The Lee Monument in Richmond, Va., which was unveiled in 1890, will now have limitations on the number of people who can gather around it. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The State of Virginia imposed strict limitations on Monday on demonstrations at the Robert E. Lee statue in the state’s capitol, one of the oldest Confederate monuments in the country, after a string of clashes there.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia announced the emergency regulations, which restrict crowd sizes at the Lee Monument to 500, down from 5,000, and ban guns at permitted events. The rules will also require permits for events there that draw at least 10 people.

The regulations came out of a task force set up by the governor in August after a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis swarmed to protest that city’s decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee.

After that rally, Confederate symbols on public lands across the country faced a new reckoning, attracting impassioned protesters calling for them to be removed and pushing cities to dismantle them, even in the dead of night.

The Lee Monument in Richmond, erected in 1890 in the middle of a tree-lined roundabout on Monument Avenue in the capital, has been the site of clashes in recent months. Mr. McAuliffe said he enacted the limitations to protect public safety around the statue.

The restrictions “will balance First Amendment rights and ensure that all Virginians remain safe,” the governor said in a statement. He added, “We believe these regulations can be a model for localities across Virginia as they consider how to approach these types of events in the future.”

The emergency regulations will stay in place for 18 months while the state’s Department of General Services considers and finalizes a permanent resolution, and holds public hearings on the topic. The order applies only to the Lee Monument, which is on state property in the city. Five other monuments on the avenue are owned by the City of Richmond.

Mr. McAuliffe’s opinion of the Confederate monuments in the state have changed in recent years. Two years ago, Mr. McAuliffe, a Democrat, insisted that the statues should stay in their places, saying they were “all parts of our heritage.”

But he took a sharply different view after the clashes in Charlottesville, which resulted in the deaths of 32-year-old woman in a crowd hit by a car and two state troopers in a helicopter crash. He said then that Confederate monuments should be taken down and urged Virginia leaders to move them into museums.

The Lee Monument, a popular attraction and focal point in Richmond, has been a landmark in the city for nearly 130 years. Former soldiers in the Confederate States Army began advocating to have a monument to Lee in Richmond in the early 1870s. After years of planning, the bronze statue of Lee, astride a horse atop a granite pedestal, was unveiled in 1890 in front of a crowd of up to 25,000 people.

Descendants of Lee said in August that they were divided over whether his monuments should be taken down. “The war pitted brother against brother and cousin against cousin,” one family member said, “and we’re still at this today.”

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8) Lead Paint Failure May Bring Federal Monitor for Public Housing
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and WILLIAM NEUMANNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/nyregion/lead-paint-inspections-public-housing-de-blasio.html?rref=
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Mayor de Blasio, center, expressed his frustration on Monday about “mistakes that were made” by the city Housing Authority in not conducting lead-paint inspections in at-risk apartments.Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that he expected a federal monitor could be appointed to supervise the city’s vast Housing Authority, as he acknowledged that the city had failed for years to do required lead-paint inspections in thousands of public-housing apartments.

“There was no attempt to deceive,” the mayor said at a news conference in Queens. “We’ve been able to get a fuller picture and what happened should not have happened.”

The problems were manifold: The head of the New York City Housing Authority signed off on false certifications sent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, attesting to lead paint inspections that did not occur.

The communication to tenants was also imprecise; although City Hall officials said that residents in the 4,200 affected apartments were notified of the problem by letter, the communication did not mention the years of lapsed inspections — it only stated that the apartment required an inspection.

Two children were found to have elevated lead levels from their uninspected apartments, city officials said Monday, though they appeared to have no lasting health problems as a result.

“As troubling as this story is, when you dig into the facts, thank God, there is less here than appears,” the mayor said. “Thank God there has not been harm done to any child because of mistakes that were made.”

The mayor was forced to confront the lead issue as he returned from a weeklong vacation in Connecticut during which calls mounted for outside oversight, and for the firing of Shola Olatoye, the chairwoman of the Housing Authority.

While on vacation, Mr. de Blasio rushed to Ms. Olatoye’s defense, writing on Twitter that she was “turning N.Y.C.H.A. around and she isn’t going anywhere.” Ms. Olatoye was not at the news conference on Monday, but the mayor defended her again, saying that she has done “a very good job.”

He also had to confront a series of other issues that had accumulated in his absence, including an announcement in an interview on Sunday with Politico New York that he would be rekindling his efforts on behalf of national Democrats next month in Iowa.

“This is who I am,” he said of his out-of-state travel. “This is what I’m going to do.”

But it was questions about the 175,000-unit Housing Authority that dominated the news conference, and Mr. de Blasio sought to project a measured sense of outrage as he navigated the first crisis of his post-re-election mayoralty.

Federal rules require annual inspections of all public housing apartments where lead paint may be present, in about 55,000 public housing units in New York, and city law requires inspections of about 4,200 apartments where a child under the age of 6 resides.

Neither requirement had been followed starting in 2012, when a loosening of federal rules for general inspections of apartment conditions resulted in the city dropping all visual inspections for lead. They were not restarted when Mr. de Blasio became mayor in 2014, though he said it was not brought to his attention for more than two years.

In March 2016, the mayor said that the city had “a very stringent inspection effort,” remarks aimed at reassuring public housing residents who were learning then of a federal investigation into lead levels, and the possibility that false paperwork had been filed.

On Monday, Mr. de Blasio said that it was not long after making that statement that he learned it was not accurate — but said he could not pinpoint the timing — and he wished that he had publicly corrected his comments.

Mr. de Blasio said that he expected residents of public housing to be angry. “I’m angry, too, and I’m frustrated, too,” he said.

The mayor added that all of the apartments covered by city law had now been inspected, a process that began last year, and that further checks will be done.

A spokeswoman for the Housing Authority said that a contractor was “in process of inspecting the 55,000 units throughout 2018.” Those inspections began in October.

The city has been in talks with the United States attorney office for the Southern District of New York for two years, he said, as part of a continuing inquiry.

“We are looking forward to a resolution to the process in the next few months, that very well may include a federal monitor, which is something that we would be ready of course to accept,” Mr. de Blasio said. The Housing Authority has a court-appointed special master to address mold.

During the 75-minute news conference, Mr. de Blasio at times appeared contrite, but he was evasive at key points on a number of topics.

He refused to answer a question about a New York Post report that he would like to fire Mark G. Peters, the Department of Investigation commissioner, whose agency revealed the falsely filed paperwork on the lead paint inspections. In response, Mr. de Blasio said that he would not discuss personnel decisions.

He also said that the timing of resignations by two senior housing officials and the demotion of a third on Friday was not related to the Investigation Department report.

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9) Police on Long Island Are Working Illegally With ICE, Suit Says
By LIZ ROBBINSNOV. 20, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/nyregion/nassau-county-undocumented-immigrants-ice.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=
rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

Driving on Long Island in August, Denis Guerra Guerra was stopped by the police in Nassau County for failing to signal when changing lanes, a traffic infraction punishable by a ticket. Two weeks later, he was deported to El Salvador.

A police officer had taken his identification — a passport from El Salvador — and discovered a pending order of removal from immigration authorities.

On Monday, lawyers from the Central American Refugee Center, a Long Island immigrant legal services organization commonly known as Carecen, and the Hofstra Law Clinic filed suit against Nassau County in state Supreme Court, saying that the county police department was cooperating with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in ways that break state law.

Elise Damas, a lawyer for Carecen, announced the suit at a news conference at Hofstra University.

“Carecen seeks an ironclad assurance that Nassau County will act in accordance with New York State law, and not just with federal immigration policies,” she said. “Nassau County police are tasked with ensuring the safety of all communities countywide, a goal which cannot be achieved until immigrants feel protected.”

Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, called the lawsuit significant, saying: “New York State laws strictly define when it is O.K. and not O.K. for a state officer to make an arrest. And that does not include the authority to make civil immigration arrests.”

Mr. Guerra Guerra, 30, is not named in the lawsuit. He is a client of Ms. Damas’s, though, and she said he was the impetus for the suit. But since he is in El Salvador, the lead plaintiff in the case is “Jane Doe,” a 26-year-old undocumented immigrant living in Nassau County. The woman has had no interaction so far with local police but, the suit claims, is at risk because of county policies; the lawyers declined to name her because she is applying for asylum.

Lt. Richard LeBrun, a spokesman for the county police department, responded to the lawsuit by stating the department’s policy, which has been in effect since January 2007: “The Nassau County Police Department will not inquire into any person’s immigration status unless they are arrested for a crime. This includes the immigration status of crime victims, witnesses and anyone who calls the police seeking assistance.” The police may report the presence of an undocumented immigrant upon arrest, the policy says.

In August, Nassau’s acting police commissioner, Patrick J. Ryder, issued a statement saying that Mr. Guerra Guerra’s lack of a driver’s license and registration prompted further questions, which led to the discovery of a box cutter in his car. He was arrested on charges of possession of a weapon, but those charges were dropped at the precinct.

The Nassau County attorney, Carnell Foskey, said that he would not comment on “matters of litigation.”

The suit said the county’s policy was flawed on two fronts: first, that the Nassau police’s holding undocumented immigrants who are not accused of other crimes was unlawful, and second, that the county’s policy of honoring requests from ICE to hold immigrants for 48 hours at local jails, know as detainers, creates an environment of fear where immigrants would be reluctant to report crimes.

Ms. Damas said that the police department was afraid it would lose federal funding if the Trump administration considered the county unwilling to assist immigration authorities.

In fact, after the suit was filed on Monday, the Department of Justice announced it would award more than $98 million to police departments that promised to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The money would pay for additional officers.

“It’s the federal government coming in and getting involved in law enforcement in our community,” Ms. Damas said.

Donna Zak, the supervisor of the immigration unit at the Legal Aid Society on Long Island, said that before President Trump took office, “Someone who was brought in on a traffic infraction would not have been held for ICE.” Now, she said, “The ICE holds are growing in numbers.”

While there have been several federal challenges to local authorities cooperating with ICE detainers over time — and especially the last five years — a recent state court decision in Massachusetts offers a precedent for the New York case. The judge for the state Supreme Court determined that Massachusetts court officers could not arrest and hold an individual solely on the basis of a federal civil immigration detainer.

Asked about the Nassau suit, Christopher Lasch, a professor University of Denver Sturm College of Law, who studies detainer law, said, “It’s a sensible challenge because it goes straight to what is perhaps the easiest question for the state court to answer: does our state law give our officers the ability to make civil immigration arrests.”

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10) Chance The Rapper Wants Batman To Know Black Lives Matter In This “SNL” Sketch
Faast Company, Nov. 20, 2017
https://www.fastcompany.com/40498526/chance-the-rapper-wants-batman-to-know-black-lives-matter-in-this-snl-sketch?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=6&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11212017

What: A sketch that puts the mythology of Batman in a new perspective.

Who: Chance the Rapper and the team at Saturday Night Live.

Why we care: Is Batman maybe . . . not so good? Part of the much-ballyhooed grittiness of recent Dark Knight movies has grappled with that question. But perhaps not enough. On this week’s SNL, one sketch explored how a certain neighborhood in Gotham is more frustrated with the Caped Crusader than most supervillains in the DC Universe. Led by an assured turn from rookie comedic performer Chance the Rapper, the sketch is set at a gala for Batman’s alter-ego, the billionaire Bruce Wayne (Beck Bennett). While Wayne starts off with some cutesy hints about his relationship to Batman, it quickly becomes clear that the crowd he’s entertaining is not into it. These people hate Batman. Their reason? Batman’s consistent use of excessive force against low-level offenders. (Every story ends with Batman breaking someone’s jaw in three places for stealing a TV.) It’s a clever way to get Chance the Rapper–a real-life activist who has a special interest in police brutality–in a sketch that nods to the Black Lives Matter movement. And judging from the reviews, it’s probably more fun than watching Justice League.

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