End U.S. Wars at Home and Abroad

Sunday, April 15, 2018

11:00 A.M. Meet at Lake Merritt Amphitheater

12:00 P.M. March to Oscar Grant Plaza

1:00 P.M. Rally at Oscar Grant Plaza

Join us as part of a weekend of united, nationally-

coordinated regional mobilizations to challenge the war makers and

defend humanity.

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Cindy Sheehan and the Women’s March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

By Whitney Webb

WASHINGTON—In the last few years, arguably the most visible and well-publicized march on the U.S. capital has been the “Women’s March,” a movement aimed at advocating for legislation and policies promoting women’s rights as well as a protest against the misogynistic actions and statements of high-profile U.S. politicians. The second Women’s March, which took place this past year, attracted over a million protesters nationwide, with 500,000 estimated to have participated in Los Angeles alone.

However, absent from this women’s movement has been a public antiwar voice, as its stated goal of “ending violence” does not include violence produced by the state. The absence of this voice seemed both odd and troubling to legendary peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose iconic protest against the invasion and occupation of Iraq made her a household name for many.

Sheehan was taken aback by how some prominent organizers of this year’s Women’s March were unwilling to express antiwar positions and argued for excluding the issue of peace entirely from the event and movement as a whole. In an interview with MintPress, Sheehan recounted how a prominent leader of the march had told her, “I appreciate that war is your issue Cindy, but the Women’s March will never address the war issue as long as women aren’t free.”

War is indeed Sheehan’s issue and she has been fighting against the U.S.’ penchant for war for nearly 13 years. After her son Casey was killed in action while serving in Iraq in 2004, Sheehan drew international media attention for her extended protest in front of the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas, which later served as the launching point for many protests against U.S. military action in Iraq.

Sheehan rejected the notion that women could be “free” without addressing war and empire. She countered the dismissive comment of the march organizer by stating that divorcing peace activism from women’s issues “ignored the voices of the women of the world who are being bombed and oppressed by U.S. military occupation.”

Indeed, women are directly impacted by war—whether through displacement, the destruction of their homes, kidnapping, or torture. Women also suffer uniquely and differently from men in war as armed conflicts often result in an increase in sexual violence against women.

For example, of the estimated half-a-million civilians killed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of them were women and children. In the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the number of female casualties has been rising on average over 20 percent every year since 2015. In 2014 alone when Israel attacked Gaza in “Operation Protective Edge,” Israeli forces, which receives $10 million in U.S. military aid every day, killed over two thousand Palestinians—half of them were women and children. Many of the casualties were pregnant women, who had been deliberately targeted.

Given the Women’s March’s apparent rejection of peace activism in its official platform, Sheehan was inspired to organize another Women’s March that would address what many women’s rights advocates, including Sheehan, believe to be an issue central to promoting women’s rights.

Dubbed the “Women’s March on the Pentagon,” the event is scheduled to take place on October 21—the same date as an iconic antiwar march of the Vietnam era—with a mission aimed at countering the “bipartisan war machine.” Though men, women and children are encouraged to attend, the march seeks to highlight women’s issues as they relate to the disastrous consequences of war.

The effort of women in confronting the “war machine” will be highlighted at the event, as Sheehan remarked that “women have always tried to confront the war-makers,” as the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the men and women in the military, as well as those innocent civilians killed in the U.S.’ foreign wars. As a result, the push for change needs to come from women, according to Sheehan, because “we [women] are the only ones that can affect [the situation] in a positive way.” All that’s missing is an organized, antiwar women’s movement.

Sheehan noted the march will seek to highlight the direct relationship between peace activism and women’s rights, since “no woman is free until all women are free” and such “freedom also includes the freedom from U.S. imperial plunder, murder and aggression” that is part of the daily lives of women living both within and beyond the United States. Raising awareness of how the military-industrial complex negatively affects women everywhere is key, says Sheehan, as “unless there is a sense of international solidarity and a broader base for feminism, then there aren’t going to be any solutions to any problems, [certainly not] if we don’t stop giving trillions of dollars to the Pentagon.”

Sheehan also urged that, even though U.S. military adventurism has long been an issue and the subject of protests, a march to confront the military-industrial complex is more important now than ever: “I’m not alarmist by nature but I feel like the threat of nuclear annihilation is much closer than it has been for a long time,” adding that, despite the assertion of some in the current administration and U.S. military, “there is no such thing as ‘limited’ nuclear war.” This makes “the need to get out in massive numbers” and march against this more imperative than ever.

Sheehan also noted that Trump’s presidency has helped to make the Pentagon’s influence on U.S. politics more obvious by bringing it to the forefront: “Even though militarism had been under wraps [under previous presidents], Trump has made very obvious the fact that he has given control of foreign policy to the ‘generals.’”

Indeed, as MintPress has reported on several occasions, the Pentagon—beginning in March of last year—has been given the freedom to “engage the enemy” at will, without the oversight of the executive branch or Congress. As a result, the deaths of innocent civilians abroad as a consequence of U.S. military action has spiked. While opposing Trump is not the focus of the march, Sheehan opined that Trump’s war-powers giveaway to the Pentagon, as well as his unpopularity, have helped to spark widespread interest in the event.

Different wings of the same warbird

Sheehan has rejected accusations that the march is partisan, as it is, by nature, focused on confronting the bipartisan nature of the military-industrial complex. She told MintPress that she has recently come under pressure owing to the march’s proximity to the 2018 midterm elections—as some have ironically accused the march’s bipartisan focus as “trying to harm the chances of the Democrats” in the ensuing electoral contest.

In response, Sheehan stated that:

“Democrats and Republicans are different wings of the same warbird. We are protesting militarism and imperialism. The march is nonpartisan in nature because both parties are equally complicit. We have to end wars for the planet and for the future. I could really care less who wins in November.”

She also noted that even when the Democrats were in power under Obama, nothing was done to change the government’s militarism nor to address the host of issues that events like the Women’s March have claimed to champion.

“We just got finished with eight years of a Democratic regime,” Sheehan told MintPress. “For two of those years, they had complete control of Congress and the presidency and a [filibuster-proof] majority in the Senate and they did nothing” productive except to help “expand the war machine.” She also emphasized that this march is in no way a “get out the vote” march for any political party.

Even though planning began less than a month ago, support has been pouring in for the march since it was first announced on Sheehan’s website, Cindy Sheehan Soapbox. Encouraged by the amount of interest already received, Sheehan is busy working with activists to organize the events and will be taking her first organizing trip to the east coast in April of this year.

In addition, those who are unable to travel to Washington are encouraged to participate in any number of solidarity protests that will be planned to take place around the world or to plan and attend rallies in front of U.S. embassies, military installations, and the corporate headquarters of war profiteers.

Early endorsers of the event include journalists Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh and Margaret Kimberley; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly; FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley; and U.S. politicians like former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Activist groups that have pledged their support include CodePink, United National Antiwar Coalition, Answer Coalition, Women’s EcoPeace and World Beyond War.

Though October is eight months away, Sheehan has high hopes for the march. More than anything else, though, she hopes that the event will give birth to a “real revolutionary women’s movement that recognizes the emancipation and liberation of all peoples—and that means [freeing] all people from war and empire, which is the biggest crime against humanity and against this planet.” By building “a movement and not just a protest,” the event’s impact will not only be long-lasting, but grow into a force that could meaningfully challenge the U.S. military-industrial complex that threatens us all. God knows the world needs it.

For those eager to help the march, you can help spread the word through social media by joining the march’s Facebook page or following the march’s Twitter account, as well as by word of mouth. In addition, supporting independent media outlets—such as MintPress, which will be reporting on the march—can help keep you and others informed as October approaches.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, the Anti-Media, and 21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.

—MPN News, February 20, 2018

https://www.mintpressnews.com/cindy-sheehan-and-the-womens-march-on-the-pentagon-a-movement-not-just-a-protest/237835/

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It is so beautiful to see young people in this country rising up to demand an end to gun violence. But what is Donald Trump's response? Instead of banning assault weapons, he wants to give guns to teachers and militarize our schools. But one of the reasons for mass school shootings is precisely because our schools are already militarized. Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was trained by U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program while he was in high school.

The Armed Services Committees in Congress can stop the JROTC programs in our schools. Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry, of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, to take the war machine out our schools!

Yesterday, Divest from the War Machine coalition member, Pat Elder, was featured on Democracy Now discussing his recent article about the JROTC in our schools. The JROTC teaches children how to shoot weapons. It is often taught by retired soldiers who have no background in teaching. They are allowed to teach classes that are given at least equal weight as classes taught by certified and trained teachers. We are pulling our children away from classes that expand their minds and putting them in classes that teach them how to be killing machines. The JROTC program costs our schools money. It sends equipment. But, the instructors and facilities must be constructed and paid for by the school.

The JROTC puts our children's futures at risk. Children who participate in JROTC shooting programs are exposed to lead bullets from guns. They are at an increased risk when the shooting ranges are inside. The JROTC program is designed to "put a jump start on your military career." Children are funneled into JROTC to make them compliant and to feed the military with young bodies which are prepared to be assimilated into the war machine. Instead of funneling children into the military, we should be channeling them into jobs that support peace and sustainable development.

Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry to take the war machine out of our schools! The JROTC program must end immediately. The money should be directed back into classrooms that educate our children.

The Divest from the War Machine campaign is working to remove our money from the hands of companies that make a killing on killing. We must take on the systems that keep fueling war, death, and destruction around the globe. AND, we must take on the systems that are creating an endless cycle of children who are being indoctrinated at vulnerable ages to become the next killing machine. Don't forget to post this message on Facebook and Twitter.

Onward in divestment,

Ann, Ariel, Brienne, Jodie, Kelly, Kirsten, Mark, Medea, Nancy, Natasha, Paki, Sarah, Sophia and Tighe

P.S. Do you want to do more? Start a campaign to get the JROTC out of your school district or state. Email divest@codepink.org and we'll get you started!

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New Legal Action is a Path to Mumia Abu-

Jamal's Freedom, But a Re-ignited International Mobilization is Critical for Victory.

by Rachel Wolkenstein

For more information:

rachelwolkenstein@gmail.com

www.rachelwolkenstein.net

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DROP LWOP Town Hall

Date Saturday March 24

Time 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Import this event into your personal calendar.

Location Details

Red Bay Coffee Roastery, Bar & Garden, 3098 E 10th St, Oakland (Near Fruitvale Bart)

Event Type Teach-In

Organizer/Author California Coalition for Women Prisoners

Email info [at] womenprisoners.org

Phone 415-255-7036 x 4

Drop LWOP Town Hall will feature a panel of formerly incarcerated women describing the injustice of the Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP) sentence which condemns over 5,000 people in California prisons to a living death sentence. With food from Mamacitas Cafe, a raffle, and items for sale made by people living inside women's prisons. Donations Requested: $5-20. No one turned away for lack of funds.

For more event information:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1985868121...
Added to the calendar on Sunday Feb 25th, 2018 8:27 PM

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A Call for a National Conference to
Organize a Fightback to Defeat Austerity

Stop the war by the banks, corporations
and government on the workers and poor

Saturday March 24, 2018

Historic St. Matthews-St. Joseph's Church

8850 Woodward Avenue

(between Holbrook and King)

Detroit, MI 48202

10:00am-5:00pm

Special Conference Guest:
Ricardo Santos Ramos, former President,
Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER),
Puerto Rico.

Endorsers

To endorse, email defeatausterity@gmail.com

All progressive activists and organizations are invited to participate in the National Conference to Defeat Austerity taking place in Detroit on Saturday, March 24. The purpose of this gathering is to map out a strategy for defeating the war being waged by the banks, corporations and government against the workers and oppressed. Capitalism cannot continue unchallenged while our very lives are being jeopardized by the ruling elites who are determined to grow richer and more powerful at our expense while whipping up white supremacy, an anti-immigrant offensive, attacks on women and anti-LGBTQ bigotry to keep our class divided.

Detroit along with colonized Puerto Rico has been at the epicenter of bank-imposed austerity against the workers and oppressed in this hemisphere. But every U.S. city, from Chicago to Baltimore to Cleveland to Milwaukee, from New York City to Oakland and Seattle, has felt the brunt of this attack in the form of cutbacks, school closings, mass transit cuts, water shutoffs, gentrification and destruction of public service unions.

The Trump tax plan and Pentagon war build-up continue the massive transfer of wealth to the rich at the expense of the poor. This war by the banks and on the workers and poor is an international phenomenon spanning every continent. On March 24, we will hammer out a program on how to fight back against the corporations, the banks and their lackeys in government at all levels.

The Conference will discuss these issues in depth from the perspective of how they all are products of a capitalist system where profits are everything and people mean nothing. We will mobilize support for making May Day 2018 an anti-Austerity Day, as well as lending solidarity to the Poor Peoples Campaign. We will outline a program of action in solidarity with all movements working for social change and transformation.

For information on housing, please email Sharon at sfsharonfeldman@live.com

If you need child care, please email your request to defeatausterity@gmail.com

Please indicate your intent to participate in the conference by registering at CONFERENCE REGISTRATION.

Finally, donations are needed to cover the cost of the conference. Click here to donate online or write a check to Moratorium NOW, add #DefeatAusterity in the memo line, and mail the check to:

Moratorium NOW! Coalition

5920 Second Ave.

Detroit, MI 48202

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Tell the Feds: End Draft Registration

This morning, in a small community college classroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a newly formed federal commission scheduled its first public hearing on the future of draft registration in the United States. "The bipartisan, 11-member Commission was created by Congress to review the military selective service process," notes their press release. In addition to eight more (yet to be scheduled) public hearings across the United States over the next two years, the commission has invited feedback via a webform here.

Courage to Resist Podcast: The Future of Draft Registration in the United States

We had draft registration resister Edward Hasbrouck on the Courage to Resistpodcast this week to explain what's going on. Edward talks about his own history of going to prison for refusing to register for the draft in 1983, the background on this new federal commission, and he addresses liberal arguments in favor of involuntary service. Edward explains:

When you say, "I'm not willing to be drafted", you're saying, "I'm going to make my own choices about which wars we should be fighting", and when you say, "You should submit to the draft", you're saying, "You should let the politicians decide for you."

What's happening right now is that a National Commission … has been appointed to study the question of whether draft registration should be continued, whether it should be expanded to make women, as well as men register for the draft, whether a draft itself should be started, whether there should be some other kind of Compulsory National Service enacted.

The Pentagon would say, and it's true, they don't want a draft. It's not plan A, but it's always been plan B, and it's always been the assumption that if we can't get enough volunteers, if we get in over our head, if we pick a larger fight than we can pursue, we always have that option in our back pocket that, "If not enough people volunteer, we're just going to go go to the draft, go to the benches, and dragoon enough people to fight these wars."

[This] is the first real meaningful opportunity for a national debate about the draft in decades.

Learn more

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!

484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559

www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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PACK THE COURT FOR MUMIA

Tuesday, March 27, 8:00 A.M.

Court Hearing

Room 1108, Criminal Justice Center

1301 Filbert Street, Philadelphia

In a court case that could eventually lead to Mumia Abu-Jamal's freedom, Judge Leon Tucker has ordered the District Attorney's office to present new testimony in reference to Ronald Castille. A Status Hearing will take place Feb.26 followed by a court hearing on March 27.

Castille is a former PA Supreme Court

judge who refused to disqualify

Himself when Mumia's case came before the court despite having been the Philadelphia District Attorney during Mumia's prior appeals. The US Supreme Court has ruled such conduct unconstitutional.

The people's movement forced the courts to take Abu-Jamal off death row in 2011 but his freedom was not won. Despite his innocence he was re-sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

As an innocent man, Mumia must be freed! It is even more urgent that he gain his freedom because he is suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, severe itching and other ailments.

International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, International Action Center, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (NYC), Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, Educators for Mumia; Food Not Bombs Solidarity

What you can do:

 Call DA Larry Krasner at (215)686-8000.

Tell him to release all DA and police files on Mumia to the public.

Tell the DA to release Mumia because he's factually innocent.

 Pack the court on 2/26 and 3/27.

Mobilization4Mumia@gmail.com;

215-724-1618;
Donate: https://mobilization4mumia.com/donate-1/

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International Letter in Support of Mumia Abu-Jamal

http://www.prisonradio.org/sites/default/files/ABBREVIATED%20INTL%20LETTER%20DEC%2031%2C%202017.pdf

December 9, 2017
To:
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner From:
Concerned Members of International Community

A CALL TO RELEASE THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND POLICE FILES RELEVANT TO MUMIA ABU-JAMAL'S CASEAND TO FREE ABU-JAMAL NOW

We, the undersigned individual and organizational members of the international community concerned with issues of human rights, call your attention to an egregious example of human rights violations in your respective jurisdictions: the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Specifically, we call on you both, key officials with the power to determine Abu-Jamal's fate, to:

Assure that all the District Attorney and police files relevant to Abu-Jamal's case, be released publicly as the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas is reviewing the potential involvement of retired Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille in a conflict of interest when he reviewed Abu Jamal's case as a PA Supreme Court Justice.

Release Abu-Jamal now from his incarceration. That given the mounds of evidence of Abu-Jamal's innocence and even more evidence of police, prosecutorial, and judicial misconduct, his unjust incarceration, including almost 30 years on death row, his twice near-executions, his prison-induced illness which brought him to the brink of death, and the lack of timely treatment for his hepatitis-C which has left him with a condition, cirrhosis of the liver, which poses a potential threat to his life ... we call for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal now.

Now, Abu-Jamal has a new legal challenge in the Pennsylvania courts on the grounds that PA Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille had a conflict of interest when he denied Abu-Jamal's appeals from 1998-2014. The new action is based on a precedent setting U.S. Supreme Court decision, Williams v. Pennsylvania, that a judge who had been personally involved in a critical prosecutorial decision violates the defendant's right to an impartial judicial review if he then gets to rule on the case as a State Supreme Court Justice. Castille was the Philadelphia elected District Attorney during Abu-Jamal's first appeal process, after his conviction and death sentence, from 1986-1991. He was a PA Supreme Court Justice from 1994 to 2014, during which time Abu-Jamal's case came before him multiple times.

We demand: Public disclosure of the police and DA files! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!!

To sign onto this letter please email infomumia@gmail.com with the subject line "International Letter for Mumia." Submit your full name as you want it listed and your organizational or professional identification.This identification is critical in a letter of this sort, as names alone carry little leverage.

frantzfanonfoundation@amail.com - 58. rue Daquerre, 75014 Paris. +336 86 78 39 20. frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com

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Major George Tillery

A Case of Gross Prosecutorial Misconduct and Police Corruption

Sexual Favors and Hotel Rooms Provided by Police to Prosecution Fact Witness for Fabricated Testimony During Trial

By Nancy Lockhart, M.J.

August 24, 2016

Corruption in The State of Pennsylvania is being exposed with a multitude of public officials indicted by the US Attorney's office in 2015 and 2016. A lengthy list of extortion, theft, and corruption in public service includes a former Solicitor, Treasurer and Veteran Police Officer U.S. Department of Justice Corruption Prosecutions. On Monday August 15, 2016 Pennsylvania State Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane was found guilty of all nine counts in a perjury and obstruction case related to a grand jury leak. Pennsylvania's Attorney General Convicted On All Counts - New York Times

Although this is a small sampling of decades long corruption throughout the state of Pennsylvania, Major George Tillery has languished in prison over 31 years because of prosecutorial misconduct and police corruption. Tillery was tried and convicted in 1985 in a trial where prosecutors and police created a textbook criminal story for bogus convictions. William Franklin was charged as a co-conspirator in the shootings, he was tried and convicted in December of 1980, because he refused to lie on Tillery. Franklin is 69 years old according to the PADOC website and has been in prison 36 years.

Major Tillery Is Not Represented by an Attorney and Needs Your Assistance to Retain One. Donate to Major Tillery's Legal Defense FundMajor Tillery, PA DOC# AM9786, will turn 66-years-old on September 9, 2016 and has spent over three decades in prison for crimes he did not commit. Twenty of those 31 plus years were spent in solitary confinement. Tillery has endured many very serious medical issues and medical neglect. Currently, he is plagued with serious illnesses that include hepatitis C, stubborn skin rashes, dangerous intestinal disorders and a degenerative hip. His orthopedic shoes were taken by prison administrators and never returned.

Tillery, was convicted of homicide, assault, weapons and conspiracy charges in 1985, for the poolroom shootings which left one man dead and another wounded. William Franklin was the pool room operator at the time. The shooting occurred on October 22, 1976.

Falsified testimony was the only evidence presented during trial. No other evidence linked Tillery to the 1976 shootings, except for the testimony of two jailhouse informants. Both men swore that they had received no promises, agreements, or deals in exchange for their testimony. Barbra Christie, the trial prosecutor, insisted to the Court and Jury that these witnesses were not given any plea agreements or sentencing promises. That was untrue.

Newly discovered evidence is the sole basis for Tillery's latest Pro Se filing. According to the Post Conviction Relief Petition Filed June 15, 2016, evidence proves that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania committed fraud on the Court and Jury which undermined the fundamentals of due process. The newly discovered evidence in sworn declarations is from two prosecution fact witnesses. Those two witnesses provided the entirety of trial evidence against Major Tillery. The declarations explain false testimonies manufactured by the prosecution with the assistance of police detectives/investigators. On August 19, 2016 Judge Leon Tucker filed a Notice of Intent to Dismiss Major's PCRA petition. Notice to Dismiss

Emanuel Claitt Has Come Forth to Declare His Testimony as Manufactured and Fabricated by Police and Prosecutors. Claitt states that his testimony during trial was fabricated and coerced by Assistant District Attorney Barbara Christie, Detectives John Cimino and James McNeshy. Claitt swore that he was promised a very favorable plea agreement and treatment in his pending criminal cases. Claitt was granted sexual favors in exchange for his false testimony. Claitt states that he was allowed to have sex with four different women in the homicide interview rooms and in hotel rooms in exchange for his cooperation.

Prosecution fact witness Emanuel Claitt states in his Declaration of Emanuel Claitt, and Emanuel Claitt Supplemental Declaration that testimony against Major Tillery was fabricated, coerced and coached by Assistant District Attorney's Leonard Ross, Barbara Christie, and Roger King with the assistance of Detectives Larry Gerrad, Ernest Gilbert, and Lt. Bill Shelton. Claitt was threatened with false murder charges as well as, given promises and agreements of favorable plea deals and sentencing. In exchange for his false testimony, many of Claitt's cases were not prosecuted. He received probation. Additionally, he was sentenced to a mere 18 months for fire bombing and was protected after his arrest between the time of Franklin's and Tillery's trials.

Trial Lawyer Operated Under Actual Conflict of Interest. Tillery discovered that his trial lawyer, Joseph Santaguida, also represented the victim. In other words, the victim in this case was represented by trial lawyer Santaguida and Santaguida also represented Major Tillery. The Commonwealth has concealed newly discovered evidence as well as, evidence which would have been favorable to Major Tillery in the criminal trial. That evidence would have exonerated him. In light of the new Declarations which prove manufactured testimony by prosecutors and police, Major Tillery needs legal representation. He is not currently represented by an attorney.

Donate: Major Tillery's Legal Defense Fund: Click Here & Donate

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

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Art by Leonard Peltier

Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

By Leonard Peltier

I am overwhelmed that today, February 6, is the start of my 43rd year in prison. I have had such high hopes over the years that I might be getting out and returning to my family in North Dakota. And yet here I am in 2018 still struggling for my FREEDOM at 73.

I don't want to sound ungrateful to all my supporters who have stood by me through all these years. I dearly love and respect you and thank you for the love and respect you have given me.

But the truth is I am tired, and often my ailments cause me pain with little relief for days at a time. I just had heart surgery and I have other medical issues that need to be addressed: my aortic aneurysm that could burst at any time, my prostate, and arthritis in my hip and knees.

I do not think I have another ten years, and what I do have I would like to spend with my family. Nothing would bring me more happiness than being able to hug my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I did not come to prison to become a political prisoner. I've been part of Native resistance since I was nine years of age. My sister, cousin and I were kidnapped and taken to boarding school. This incident and how it affected my cousin Pauline, had an enormous effect on me.

This same feeling haunts me as I reflect upon my past 42 years of false imprisonment. This false imprisonment has the same feeling as when I heard the false affidavit the FBI manufactured about Myrtle Poor Bear being at Oglala on the day of the fire-fight—a fabricated document used to extradite me illegally from Canada in 1976.

I know you know that the FBI files are full of information that proves my innocence. Yet many of those files are still withheld from my legal team. During my appeal before the 8th Circuit, former Prosecuting Attorney Lynn Crooks said to Judge Heaney: "Your honor, we do not know who killed those agents. Further, we don't know what participation, if any, Mr. Peltier had in it."

That statement exonerates me, and I should have been released. But here I sit, 43 years later still struggling for my freedom. I have pleaded my innocence for so long now, in so many courts of law, in so many public statements issued through the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, that I will not argue it here. But I will say again, I DID NOT KILL THOSE AGENTS!

Right now, I need my supporters here in the U.S. and throughout the world helping me. We need donations large or small to help pay my legal team to do the research that will get me back into court or get me moved closer to home or a compassionate release based on my poor health and age. Please help me to go home, help me win my freedom!

There is a new petition my Canadian brothers and sisters are circulating internationally that will be attached to my letter. Please sign it and download it so you can take it to your work, school or place of worship. Get as many signatures as you can, a MILLION would be great!

I have been a warrior since age nine. At 73, I remain a warrior. I have been here too long. The beginning of my 43rd year plus over 20 years of good time credit, that makes 60-plus years behind bars.

I need your help. I need your help today! A day in prison for me is a lifetime for those outside because I am isolated from the world.

I remain strong only because of your support, prayers, activism and your donations that keep my legal hope alive.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

Doksha,

Leonard Peltier

If you would like a paper petition, please email contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info.

—San Francisco Bay View, February 6, 2018

http://sfbayview.com/2018/02/free-innocent-leonard-peltier-on-his-43rd-year-in-prison-he-yearns-to-hug-his-grandchildren/?t=1&cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email&iid=50e882c501eb45ed857b582d357f4385&uid=95102586&nid=244+272699400

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman I

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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More Artwork by Kevin Cooper

http://savekevincooper.org/pages/gallery.html

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SOLIDARITY with SERVERS — PLEASE CIRCULATE!

From Clifford Conner

Dear friends and relatives

Every day the scoundrels who have latched onto Trump to push through their rightwing soak-the-poor agenda inflict a new indignity on the human race. Today they are conspiring to steal the tips we give servers in restaurants. The New York Times editorial appended below explains what they're trying to get away with now.

People like you and me cannot compete with the Koch brothers' donors network when it comes to money power. But at least we can try to avoid putting our pittance directly into their hands. Here is a modest proposal: Whenever you are in a restaurant where servers depend on tips for their livelihoods, let's try to make sure they get what we give them.

Instead of doing the easy thing and adding the tip into your credit card payment, GIVE CASH TIPS and HAND THEM DIRECTLY TO YOUR SERVER. If you want to add a creative flourish such as including a preprinted note that explains why you are doing this, by all means do so. You could reproduce the editorial below for their edification.

If you want to do this, be sure to check your wallet before entering a restaurant to make sure you have cash in appropriate denominations.

This is a small act of solidarity with some of the most exploited members of the workforce in America. Perhaps its symbolic value could outweigh its material impact. But to paraphrase the familiar song: What the world needs now is solidarity, sweet solidarity.

If this idea should catch on, be prepared for news stories about restaurant owners demanding that servers empty their pockets before leaving the premises at the end of their shifts. The fight never ends!

Yours in struggle and solidarity,

Cliff

The Trump Administration to Restaurants: Take the Tips!

The New York Times editorial board, December 21, 2017

Most Americans assume that when they leave a tip for waiters and bartenders, those workers pocket the money. That could become wishful thinking under a Trump administration proposal that would give restaurants and other businesses complete control over the tips earned by their employees.

The Department of Labor recently proposed allowing employers to pool tips and use them as they see fit as long as all of their workers are paid at least the minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour nationally and higher in some states and cities. Officials argue that this will free restaurants to use some of the tip money to reward lowly dishwashers, line cooks and other workers who toil in the less glamorous quarters and presumably make less than servers who get tips. Using tips to compensate all employees sounds like a worthy cause, but a simple reading of the government's proposal makes clear that business owners would have no obligation to use the money in this way. They would be free to pocket some or all of that cash, spend it to spiff up the dining room or use it to underwrite $2 margaritas at happy hour. And that's what makes this proposal so disturbing.

The 3.2 million Americans who work as waiters, waitresses and bartenders include some of the lowest-compensated working people in the country. The median hourly wage for waiters and waitresses was $9.61 an hour last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, there is a sordid history of restaurant owners who steal tips, and of settlements in which they have agreed to repay workers millions of dollars.

Not to worry, says the Labor Department, which argues, oddly and unconvincingly, that workers will be better off no matter how owners spend the money. Enlarging dining rooms, reducing menu prices or offering paid time off should be seen as "potential benefits to employees and the economy over all." The department also assures us that owners will funnel tip money to employees because workers would quit otherwise.

t is hard to know how much time President Trump's appointees have spent with single mothers raising two children on a salary from a workaday restaurant in suburban America, seeing how hard it is to make ends meet without tips. What we do know is that the administration has produced no empirical cost-benefit analysis to support its proposal, which is customary when the government seeks to make an important change to federal regulations.

The Trump administration appears to be rushing this rule through — it has offered the public just 30 days to comment on it — in part to pre-empt the Supreme Court from ruling on a 2011 Obama-era tipping rule. The department's new proposal would do away with the 2011 rule. The restaurant industry has filed several legal challenges to that regulation, which prohibits businesses from pooling tips and sharing them with dishwashers and other back-of-the-house workers. Different federal circuit appeals courts have issued contradictory rulings on those cases, so the industry has asked the Supreme Court to resolve those differences; the top court has not decided whether to take that case.

Mr. Trump, of course, owns restaurants as part of his hospitality empire and stands to benefit from this rule change, as do many of his friends and campaign donors. But what the restaurant business might not fully appreciate is that their stealth attempt to gain control over tips could alienate and antagonize customers. Diners who are no longer certain that their tips will end up in the hands of the server they intended to reward might leave no tip whatsoever. Others might seek to covertly slip cash to their server. More high-minded restaurateurs would be tempted to follow the lead of the New York restaurateur Danny Meyer and get rid of tipping by raising prices and bumping up salaries.

By changing the fundamental underpinnings of tipping, the government might well end up destroying this practice. But in doing so it would hurt many working-class Americans, including people who believed that Mr. Trump would fight for them.

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Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations!

Charity for the Wealthy!

GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

By Jake Johnson, December 18, 2017

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/18/gop-tax-plan-would-give-15-americas-largest-corporations-236b-tax-cut-report

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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/

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Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:

Love this guy!

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B) ARTICLES IN FULL

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1) Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show
By ERIC LIPTON and LISA FRIEDMAN MARCH 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/climate/bears-ears-national-monument.html?rref=
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Comb Wash, a valley in Bears Ears National Monument near Blanding, Utah. Andrew Cullen/Reuters

WASHINGTON — Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.

The debate started as early as March 2017, when an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, asked a senior Interior Department official to consider reduced boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah to remove land that contained oil and natural gas deposits that had been set aside to help fund area public schools.

"Please see attached for a shapefile and pdf of a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument," said the March 15 email from Senator Hatch's office. Adopting this map would "resolve all known mineral conflicts," the email said, referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state's public schools wanted to lease out to bolster state funds.

The map that Mr. Hatch's office provided, which was transmitted about a month before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments, was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions President Trump announced in December, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has been focused on expanding oil, gas and coal development and sweeping away Obama-era environmental initiatives that the administration contends hurt America's energy industry. The debate over shrinking national monuments sparked a fierce political battle over how much land needs federal protection that is now being fought in the courts.

Mr. Zinke has said that the agency review process made no presumptions about the outcomes. "We want to make sure that everyone's voice is heard," Mr. Zinke said at a news conference in May during a visit to Bear's Ears.

Most of the deliberations took place behind closed doors. The internal Interior Department emails — more than 25,000 pages in total — were obtained by The New York Times after it sued the agency in federal court with the assistance of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale University Law School. The lawsuit cited the agency's failure to respond to an open records request in August asking for internal records related to the deliberations.

The bulk of the documents made public by the Interior Department — about 20,000 pages of them — detail the yearslong effort during the Obama administration to create new monuments, including input from environmental groups, Indian tribes, state officials and members of Congress. President Barack Obama created or expanded 29 national monuments during his tenure, representing a total of about 553 million acres, more than any of his predecessors.

The remaining pages, a total of approximately 4,500 files, relate to the Trump administration's reconsideration of these actions by Mr. Obama and other presidents.

Heather Swift, the Interior Department spokeswoman, said in a statement that no uranium mine or milling operations were located within the boundaries of either the original or modified Bears Ears National Monument.

In reviewing monuments, Ms. Swift said, "The Secretary took into consideration the views of a variety of interested parties, such as members of congress, governors, state and tribal leaders, and the public, including the views of those parties as to possible revised monument boundaries. One such organization that weighed in was the State of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) which is responsible for funding so the children of Utah receive a quality education."

Matthew Whitlock, a spokesman for Senator Hatch, said that the senator has been involved in discussions around Bears Ears for years. He emphasized that some of the land had long been designated to help fund local schools, and that Senator Hatch's interest was to protect the school funding.

The internal Interior Department emails and memos also show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.

Mr. Zinke's staff developed a series of estimates on the value of coal that could potentially be mined from a section of Grand Staircase called the Kaiparowits plateau. As a result of Mr. Trump's action, major parts the area are no longer a part of the national monument.

"The Kaiparowits plateau, located within the monument, contains one of the largest coal deposits in the United States," an Interior Department memo, issued in the spring of 2017, said. About 11.36 billion tons are "technologically recoverable," it projected.

From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing, and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.

One memo, for example, asked Interior staff to prepare a report on each national monument, with a yellow highlighter on the documents emphasizing the need to examine in detail "annual production of coal, oil, gas and renewables (if any) on site; amount of energy transmission infrastructure on site (if any)." It was followed up by a reminder to staff in June to also look at how the decision to create new National Monuments in Utah might have hurt area mines.

"Sorry about this, but this came from DOI late yesterday," Timothy Fisher, the leader of the National Monuments and Conservation Areas program at Interior wrote to his colleagues, referring to the Department of Interior headquarters in Washington. "Are there mines or processing facilities near or adjacent to a National Monument?" he wrote. He also asked how the protection of the federal lands may have affected mining.

In another email exchange, in May, two Bureau of Land Management officials said that Mr. Zinke's chief of staff for policy, Downey Magallanes, had phoned to ask for information on a uranium mill in or near the Bears Ears monument. The request sought "economic data to the extent available," as well as grazing and hunting maps.

And on July 17, Ms. Magallanes and Mr. Zinke's counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, met with representatives of a uranium mining company. The company, Energy Fuels Resources Inc., said its representatives hoped to discuss its White Mesa uranium mill as well as the Daneros uranium mine, both adjacent to the Bears Ears monument.

In addition to Paul Goranson, a top executive at Energy Fuels Resources, the meeting included Mary Bono, a former Republican congresswoman from California; and Andrew Wheeler, then a lobbyist at the firm Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting and now awaiting confirmation to be deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The debate over oil and gas reserves below the ground in Bears Ears had started during the Obama administration, the documents show, with officials from Utah State Board of Education writing to the Interior Department objecting to the plan to designate the property a national monument.

Before Utah became a state, in 1896, the federal government granted so-called trust lands to support state institutions, like the public schools, given that nearly 70 percent of the state is federally controlled land.

The state has generated more than $1.7 billion in revenue from the trust lands to support public schools, mostly by selling off mineral rights allowing private companies to extract oil or gas. The Bears Ears National Monument created by President Obama in 2016 included about 110,000 acres of these trust lands, eliminating the potential for resource sales, the state said.

John Andrews, associate director of the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which oversees the lands designated for school funding, acknowledged that the new Bears Ears boundaries approved by Mr. Trump, which reduced the land removed from the trust's management to about 22,000 acres, reflected his group's request to exclude its trust lands.

But he noted that Mr. Trump ultimately reduced the monument by a much larger amount than his organization had sought.

"Obviously they were looking at facts other than the ones we had raised, we assume," he said.

Mr. Whitlock, the spokesman for Mr. Hatch, said, "Senator Hatch is grateful these emails have been released because they make very clear that his priority in addressing the Bears Ears situation was looking out for the people of Utah.

Julie Turkewitz in Denver and Nadja Popovich in New York contributed reporting.

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2) We Will Stay!' West Virginia Teachers Vote to Occupy State Capitol Until Demands Met
By Jake Johnson, March 2, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/02/we-will-stay-west-virginia-teachers-vote-occupy-state-capitol-until-demands-met?

As the demonstrations raged on in the state capitol, West Virginia lawmakers voted against bringing a teacher pay raise bill to the Senate floor for immediate consideration, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported on Friday. (Photo: Jacobin/Twitter)

Though you may not know it from the corporate media's coverage—or lack thereof—West Virginia teachers are still striking in an effort to win both a pay raise and a permanent fix to their soaring health insurance premiums, and on Friday they voted to occupy the state capitol until their demands are met.

Watch teachers chant "We will stay!" shortly following the vote:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/02/we-will-stay-west-virginia-teachers-vote-occupy-state-capitol-until-demands-met?

Earlier this week, West Virginia's Republican Gov. Jim Justice and the state's education union leaders reached an agreement on a bill that would raise teacher pay by 5 percent—meeting, at least in word, one of the teachers' core demands.

However, the compromise did not offer a permanent fix to the state's Public Employee Insurance Agency amid rising premiums, so teachers decided to continue striking.

"This has been a huge issue, causing problems for years. They've been cutting our health insurance over and over, making it really expensive to survive," Jay O'Neal, a middle-school teacher and union activist in Charleston, said in an interview with Jacobin on Thursday.

On Friday, the mass walkout—which has left schools in all of West Virginia's 55 counties closed—entered its seventh day.

While some have called the West Virginia teachers' collective struggle for justice "the most important story in the country right now," many mainstream media outlets—including so-called liberal networks like MSNBC—have either neglected the strike or almost completely ignored it.

"Save for one two-minute throwaway report from daytime show 'Velshi and Ruhle,' MSNBC hasn't dedicated a single segment to the strike—despite the strike's unprecedented size and scope," media analyst Adam Johnson observed in a piece for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) on Friday. "The most glaring omission is from the three highly paid primetime hosts: Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, and former In These Times and Nation writer Chris Hayes. None of the three big hosts have tweeted about it, much less mentioned the subject on air."

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3) Philando Castile Charity Pays Off Lunch Debt for Hundreds of Students
By MATTHEW HAAG MARCH 5, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/us/philando-castile-student-lunch.html?rref=
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A memorial for Philando Castile at the Minnesota governor's residence in July 2016. Mr. Castile was known to pay for needy students' lunches at the school where he worked. Jim Mone/Associated Press

Before Philando Castile became a household name in July 2016, when his deadly encounter with a Minnesota police officer was streamed live on Facebook, students at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School knew him simply as Mr. Phil. He was the school nutrition worker who often swooped in to pay for their lunches when they could not afford them.

Now, a year and a half after his death, a fund-raiser created in Mr. Castile's memory is continuing his legacy. Last week, the creator of the charity, Philando Feeds the Children, delivered a $35,000 check to St. Paul Public Schools — enough to finish paying off the debt owed by every student enrolled in the National School Lunch Program at the district's 56 schools, including Mr. Castile's former campus.

"We are merely trying to continue Mr. Phil's kind spirit," said Pamela Fergus, a psychology instructor at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul who started the fund-raiser. "He loved those kids."

Ms. Fergus created the charity last fall as a class project with her students in Psychology 212. It had a more modest goal then: to raise several thousand dollars to cover students' cafeteria debts at J.J. Hill. But the donations came rushing in, easily surpassing their expectations and raising tens of thousands of dollars in a few months.

In October, Ms. Fergus delivered the first check, a $10,000 payment to St. Paul Public Schools, the district said. Combined with the $35,000 donation last week, Philando Feeds the Children has covered the debts of at least 1,788 students, the district said on Sunday night.

"This fund-raiser demonstrates the kind and generous spirit our community members hold in their heart for the students of S.P.P.S.," Toya Stewart Downey, a school district spokeswoman, said in an email.

Mr. Castile knew firsthand the hardships many students face. In 2002, at 19, he joined the nutrition services department of St. Paul Public Schools. He became a supervisor in 2014 and had been working at J.J. Hill for several years at the time of his death. On Sunday, his mother, Valerie Castile, shared a news article about the charity's work on her Facebook page.

"GOD Gave US Your Spirit Of Love And Kindness," wrote Ms. Castile, who did not return a call seeking comment on Sunday. "Your Legacy Will Live Forever!!"

In the school district, about 70 percent of the roughly 37,000 students are enrolled in free or reduced-price lunch, a federal program that pays for a student's entire meal or a large part of it. Students whose families are part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, automatically receive free lunches at school. Others are eligible based on income: A student in a family of three would qualify for free lunch if the household made less than $26,546 a year.

Every St. Paul student who goes through the cafeteria line receives a meal, and those who are charged a full or reduced price have the amount withdrawn from a personal account. If that account is insufficiently funded, a debt accrues. But the school district, not the families, is ultimately responsible for the bill. If an account balance is never paid, the district relies on donations or digs elsewhere into its budget to cover the cost.

Although the donations from Philando Feeds the Children have covered the debts of students enrolled in the federal program, the district still has $100,000 in lunch debt, said Stacy Koppen, its director of nutrition services. Additional students could qualify but have not turned in their applications, and others just miss the financial cutoff for eligibility.

"Our goal is to enroll them in the lunch program if we can," Ms. Koppen said in an email on Sunday. "Donations are used to cover unpaid meal charges, but that amount of money is finite."

Six months after the fund-raiser started, people have donated more than $148,000, according to its website. The organizer's ambitions have grown, too: Ms. Fergus wrote on the site that she now hoped to collect $999,999, raising enough to pay lunch debts in schools across Minnesota.

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4) Too Old to Be Executed? Supreme Court Considers an Aging Death Row

By ADAM LIPTAK MARCH 5, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/us/politics/old-death-row-executions-supreme-court.html?rref=

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Ohio tried to execute Alva Campbell, 69, in November but could not find a suitable vein into which to pump lethal chemicals.Ohio Department of Rehabilitation, via Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The nation's death rows are starting to look like geriatric wards. Condemned inmates in many states are more likely to die of natural causes than to be executed. The rare ones who are put to death often first spend decades behind bars, waiting.

It turns out that executing old men is not easy. In November, Ohio called off an attempt to executeAlva Campbell, 69, after the execution team could not find a suitable vein into which to pump lethal chemicals. The state announced that it would try again in June 2019, by which time he would have been 71.

But Mr. Campbell suffered from what one judge called an "extraordinary list of ailments." He used a walker, could barely breathe and relied on a colostomy bag. He was found lifeless in his cell on Saturday, having died in the usual way, without government assistance.

In Alabama last month, state officials called off the execution of Doyle Lee Hamm, 61, also because they could not find a suitable vein. Mr. Hamm has at least two kinds of cancer, cranial and lymphatic, and he may not have long to live with or without the state's efforts.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of another Alabama inmate, Vernon Madison, a 67-year-old man who suffers from dementia and cannot remember the crime that sent him to death row. The court, which has barred the execution of juvenile offenders and the intellectually disabled, is now turning its attention to old people.

In 1985, Mr. Madison killed a police officer, Julius Schulte, who had been trying to keep the peace between Mr. Madison and his ex-girlfriend, Cheryl Greene, as she sought to eject him from what had been their shared home. Mr. Madison shot Ms. Greene, too, wounding her.

Mr. Madison remembers none of this. He has suffered at least two severe strokes, and he is blind and incontinent. His speech is slurred, and what he says does not always make sense.

He has asked that his mother be told of his strokes, but his mother is dead. He soils himself, saying "no one will let me out to use the bathroom," though there is a toilet in his cell. He says he plans to move to Florida. He can recite the alphabet, but only to the letter G.

Mr. Madison also insists that he "never went around killing folks."

A court-appointed psychologist found that Mr. Madison had "significant body and cognitive decline as a result of strokes." But the psychologist testified that Mr. Madison understood what he was accused of and how the state planned to punish him. According to Steve Marshall, Alabama's attorney general, that is enough.

The Supreme Court's precedents bar the execution of people who lack a "rational understanding" of the reason they are to be put to death.

Mr. Marshall told the justices that Mr. Madison satisfied that standard. "The ability to form a rational understanding of an event," he wrote in January in a brief urging the justices to stay out of the case, "has very limited relation to whether a person remembers that event."

Mr. Madison's case, which has been bouncing around the court system for more than 30 years, has taken some unusual turns.

His first conviction was reversed because prosecutors violated the Constitution by excluding all seven potential jurors who were black. His second conviction was thrown outafter prosecutors committed misconduct by using expert testimony to tell the jury about evidence never properly introduced.

At Mr. Madison's third trial, the jury voted to sentence him to life in prison. But Judge Ferrill D. McRae, of Mobile County Circuit Court, overrode that verdict and sentenced Mr. Madison to death.

I interviewed Judge McRae in 2011, not long before he died. I had sought him out because he had achieved a rare distinction. He had overridden six jury verdicts calling for life sentences, a state record, while never rejecting a jury's recommendation of death.

Alabama juries are not notably squeamish about the death penalty, but Judge McRae said they needed to be corrected when they were seized by an impulse toward mercy. "If you didn't have something like that," he said of judicial overrides, "a jury with no experience in other cases would be making the ultimate decision, based on nothing."

Alabama abolished judicial overrides last year.

In 2016, Mr. Madison came very close to being put to death. A deadlocked eight-member Supreme Court refused to vacate a stay of execution issued by a federal appeals court, with the court's four conservative members saying they would have let the execution proceed. Justice Antonin Scalia had died a few months before, leaving the Supreme Court short-handed. Had Justice Scalia lived, Mr. Madison would almost certainly be dead by now.

The case took some additional procedural twists, and Mr. Madison returned to the Supreme Court in January after a state court again ruled against him. The Supreme Court stayed his execution, though the court's three most conservative members — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have let it go forward.

The case, Madison v. Alabama, No. 17-7505, will be argued in the fall, and it will give the court a chance to consider some profound questions.

"Mr. Madison is one among a growing number of aging prisoners who remain on death row in this country for ever longer periods of time," Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in a concurring opinion when the court considered an earlier appeal. "Given this trend, we may face ever more instances of state efforts to execute prisoners suffering the diseases and infirmities of old age."

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5) Frail, Old and Dying, but Their Only Way Out of Prison Is a Coffin
By CHRISTIE THOMPSON MARCH 7, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/us/prisons-compassionate-release-.html?rref=
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Kevin Zeich died shortly after his request for compassionate release was granted by the federal Bureau of Prisons. Only his belongings — and his ashes — made it to the home of his daughter, Kimberly Heraldez, in Bakersfield, Calif. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

Kevin Zeich had three and a half years to go on his prison sentence, but his doctors told him he had less than half that long to live. Nearly blind, battling cancer and virtually unable to eat, he requested "compassionate release," a special provision for inmates who are very sick or old.

His warden approved the request, but officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons turned him down, saying his "life expectancy is currently indeterminate."

Congress created compassionate release as a way to free certain inmates, such as the terminally ill, when it becomes "inequitable" to keep them in prison any longer. Supporters view the program as a humanitarian measure and a sensible way to reduce health care costs for ailing, elderly inmates who pose little risk to public safety. But despite urging from lawmakers of both parties, numerous advocacy groups and even the Bureau of Prisons' own watchdog, prison officials use it only sparingly.

Officials deny or delay the vast majority of requests, including that of one of the oldest federal prisoners, who was 94, according to new federal data analyzed by The Marshall Project and The New York Times. From 2013 to 2017, the Bureau of Prisons approved 6 percent of the 5,400 applications received, while 266 inmates who requested compassionate release died in custody. The bureau's denials, a review of dozens of cases shows, often override the opinions of those closest to the prisoners, like their doctors and wardens.

Advocates for the program say the bureau, which oversees 183,000 inmates, denies thousands of deserving applicants. Roughly half of those who died after applying were convicted of nonviolent fraud or drug crimes.

"It makes sense to release prisoners who present very little danger to society. It's the humane thing to do, and it's the fiscally responsible thing to do," said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat. "The Bureau of Prisons has the theoretical authority to do this, but they basically do none of it."

Case files show that prison officials reject many prisoners' applications on the grounds that they pose a risk to public safety or that their crime was too serious to justify early release. In 2013, an inspector general reported that nearly 60 percent of inmates were denied based on the severity of their offense or criminal history. The United States Sentencing Commission has said that such considerations are better left to judges — but judges can rule on compassionate release requests only if the Bureau of Prisons approves them first.

Late last month, Mr. Schatz introduced legislation — co-sponsored with Senators Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat — that would let prisoners petition the courts directly if the bureau denies or delays their requests.

Many are turned down for not meeting medical requirements. Mr. Zeich, who was serving 27 years for dealing methamphetamine, requested compassionate release three times, but was repeatedly told he was not sick enough. On his fourth try, his daughter, Kimberly Heraldez, finally received a phone call in March 2016 saying her father would soon be on a plane, headed to her home in California.

Early the next morning, she was awakened by another call. Her father had died.

Mr. Zeich's ashes now sit in a container in her closet alongside the splitting cardboard box of the possessions he had in prison: an insulin pump, glasses, stacks of medical records, and an album filled with photos of Ms. Heraldez and her three children.

"We brought him home," Ms. Heraldez said, "but not the way we wanted to."

'I Begged Them'

When Anthony Bell applied for compassionate release in October 2014, he had served all but one of a 16-year sentence for selling cocaine.

Prison doctors treating his lupus and liver failure estimated that he had less than six months to live. It took about that long for the bureau to hand down its response: Denied.

After reading Mr. Bell's medical records, officials concluded that he had more than 18 months to live. Two days later, he died.

"I begged them to please get him home," said Mr. Bell's sister, Denise Littleford, of Gaithersburg, Md. "And while the blood was still warm in his body, instead of sending him home in a body bag."

Compassionate release dates back to an overhaul of federal sentencing laws in the 1980s. While abolishing federal parole, Congress supplied a safety valve, giving judges the power to retroactively cut sentences short in "extraordinary and compelling" circumstances. But a court could do so only if the Bureau of Prisons filed a motion on an inmate's behalf.

For years, the agency approved only prisoners who were near death or completely debilitated. While nonmedical releases were permitted, an inspector general report found in 2013, not a single one was approved over a six-year period.

The report said the program should be expanded beyond terminal illness cases and used more frequently as a low-risk way to reduce overcrowding and health care spending. The Bureau of Prisons widenedthe criteria to explicitly include inmates over 65 and those who are the sole possible caregiver for a family member. Then Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. promoted the changes as part of his "Smart on Crime" initiative to "use our limited resources to house those who pose the greatest threat."

But the bureau, which is part of the Justice Department, has yet to fully embrace those changes. Of those inmates who have applied for nonmedical reasons, 2 percent (50 cases) have been approved since 2013, according to an analysis of federal prison data. And although overall approval numbers increased slightly between 2013 and 2015, they have since fallen.

At a 2016 sentencing commission hearing, Bureau of Prisons officials said they believed the program should not be used to reduce overcrowding. And even the principal deputy assistant to Mr. Holder, Jonathan Wroblewski, said the program was not an "appropriate vehicle for a broad reduction" in the prison population. "Every administration has taken the position that part of our responsibility is to ensure that public safety is not undermined," he said.

After the hearing, the commission released new guidelines encouraging prison officials to determine only whether inmates fit the criteria for release — that is, if they are old enough, sick or disabled enough, or if they are the sole possible caregiver for someone on the outside. Whether the prisoner poses a risk to the public should be left to a judge to decide, the commission said.

Mark Inch, who was appointed director of the Bureau of Prisons by Attorney General Jeff Sessions last August, has made no public statements about the program. The bureau declined to make Mr. Inch available for an interview and did not respond to emailed questions.

Dying in Shackles

The inmates who meet the criteria for compassionate release tend to be among the oldest and frailest in the federal prison system, whose population is getting older and more expensive. The Bureau of Prisons spent $1.3 billion on health care in fiscal year 2016. Roughly 12 percent of prisoners are 55 or older, and of those, many will spend their final years behind bars. Some are dying in shackles.

When Andrew Schiff arrived at a medical facility for inmates to say his goodbyes, his dying 87-year-old father was unconscious and on a respirator. Yet he was cuffed to his hospital bed and under 24-hour watch by an armed guard, according to Mr. Schiff. "There's no humanity in there," he said.

His father, Irwin Schiff, had less than two years left on his sentence for tax fraud. He had tried and failed for two years to win compassionate release.

To win approval, an inmate must get the blessing of the prison warden, and must have an acceptable home waiting. Doctors at the facility assess whether the applicant meets the medical criteria, such as being completely disabled or having fewer than 18 months to live.

If the warden signs off, the application gets passed on to the Bureau of Prisons' central office, which has its own medical director review the records. Even after the central office approves, the deputy attorney general may object. If approved, the request is passed on to a judge, who makes the ultimate decision. An analysis of federal prison data shows that it takes over six months on average for an inmate to receive an answer from the bureau. Almost 400 of the applications the bureau received between 2013 and 2017 are still awaiting a decision.

Pushing for Change

Most state prison systems have some version of compassionate release, sometimes known as medical parole. Nationally, prisons are facing an explosion in elderly inmates, but officials can still be wary of the idea of letting them out early. Recently, a Senate committee in South Dakota turned down the prison system's request to establish a similar program, citing concern over releasing violent offenders.

In recent months, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called on the Bureau of Prisons to speed up the federal process and grant more requests. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, a Republican, pressed the bureau for details on how it was improving the process in a report he submitted with the 2018 appropriations bill. A bipartisan group of senators, led by Mr. Schatz of Hawaii, wrote a letter last August saying they were "deeply concerned" that the bureau was failing to carry out its duties under the program.

The Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs issued a responsein January, citing approval rates that were slightly higher than those reflected in the data provided by the Bureau of Prisons to The Marshall Project and The New York Times. The bureau did not explain this discrepancy.

The January letter stated that cases were most commonly denied because inmates did not meet the criteria or lacked a stable place to live if they were released. But in 2016, officials turned down one of the oldest federal prisoners, 94-year-old Carlos Tapia-Ponce, on the grounds that his crime, a role in a large-scale cocaine trafficking operation, was too serious. He died the following month.

Tommy Leftwich died in prison last September. He had been serving 12 years for making meth when he was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. The bureau said in October 2016 that his early release would "minimize the severity of his offense and pose a risk to the community," noting a history of drug offenses and impaired driving.

Wayne "Akbar" Pray, 69, who has served nearly 30 years of a life sentence for running a New Jersey cocaine operation in the 1980s, first applied for compassionate release under the elderly inmate provision in 2013. His supporters included his warden, the current and former mayors of Newark, the local N.A.A.C.P., and several former members of Newark law enforcement.

In January, the bureau denied his request, pointing to the severity of his crime and his conduct in prison.

According to his disciplinary history, Mr. Pray's last violation was 20 years ago, for "improperly storing property and failure to follow sanitation procedures."

Anna Flagg contributed reporting.

Christie Thompson is a staff writer and Anna Flagg is an interactive reporter for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.

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6) West Virginia Walkouts a Lesson in the Power of a Crowd-Sourced Strike
By JESS BIDGOOD and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON MARCH 8, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/us/west-virginia-teachers-strike.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=
package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Teachers and students from Monongalia County schools held up signs in support of the teachers' strike in Morgantown, W.Va., on Tuesday. Ty Wright for The New York Times

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Heather DeLuca-Nestor, a county teachers' association leader, was driving back to Morgantown, W.Va., from the state capital on Feb. 28 hoping that she and other teachers were about to return to work. The governor had promised 5 percent pay raises to settle a statewide strike, and union leaders had agreed.

But as she made the winding drive, she said, her phone exploded with angry calls: "What are we doing?" ''We can't go back to school." "Our union sold us out!"

That evening, many of the 150 teachers who had gathered in a deserted shopping mall told her in impassioned terms that promises and handshakes in the Capitol were not good enough. No matter what union leaders said, they were staying out until they had what they wanted, and in writing.

Ms. DeLuca-Nestor, the president of the Monongalia County Education Association, walked away in tears to phone the county superintendent. "I had to ask him to turn around and call school off," she said.

It was a crucial turning point, and a telling one. With no collective bargaining rights, no contract, and no legal right to strike, the teachers had managed to mount a statewide work stoppage anyway, and make their demands heard, marshal public support, and stick together until they won. And the rank and file, not union leaders, came to call the shots.

Experts say the West Virginia teachers may foreshadow the future of organized labor, especially in the public sector, at a time when its power has been eroded in much of the country by anti-union legislation and by court challenges like the Janus case, now before the Supreme Court,which threatens the financial viability of collective bargaining.

Public employees in other states have taken notice. Teachers in Oklahoma have been talking about mounting a West Virginia-style statewide walkout in early April if the Legislature does not raise their pay by then. In Kentucky, a pending bill to reduce pensions for retired teachers has prompted protests and talk of strikes.

"Unions have tended throughout most of their histories to be forces that seek stability, not unrest," said Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. "When they are weakened, we're more likely to see the re-emergence of instability and militancy, and the kind of model that we're seeing happen in West Virginia."

That model, driven by grass-roots anger, can flummox politicians. Mitch Carmichael, the Republican president of the West Virginia Senate, opposes collective bargaining for public employees, but he acknowledged that the decentralized aspects of the strike made it difficult to reach a settlement that would satisfy the teachers.

"You're not negotiating with a particular, a unique set of participants," Mr. Carmichael said. "There's just this organic sort of — I don't know what to call it. More like an uprising."

National union leaders said the situation in West Virginia revealed the pitfalls of government policies intended to hobble them.

"If the right wing gets what it wants and tries to eliminate collective bargaining in the public sector, then politics — this kind of political activism at the ballot box, in the State House — will be the only avenue," said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers' union.

The West Virginia teachers found ways to organize and act outside the usual parameters of traditional unionism. Teachers and service workers across the state aired their frustrations in an enormous Facebook group, and their walkout ultimately included members of three different unions and many people who did not belong to any union. When they defied union leaders' calls to end the strike on March 1, the strikers redoubled the pressure on lawmakers to deliver on their pay raise.

The lesson, experts said, is that undermining public sector unions, as the Janus case seeks to do, will not guarantee labor peace.

"What it does show is that this Janus decision will force workers to look at other strategies," said Ken Fones-Wolf, a professor of history at West Virginia University. "Without this institutional voice, it does make it harder to sort of organize this kind of thing. But when conditions do get bad enough, workers will take action without an organization."

Indeed, some teachers who went to the meeting at the mall in Morgantown said their lack of collective bargaining rights left them no choice but to continue their strike.

"It we can't negotiate with the people that we're supposed to negotiate with, then we're really just sticking out our necks and saying, this is what we're fighting for," said Lindsay Smalls, a sixth-grade science teacher. "We're just going to stick up for ourselves."

Wildcat strikes led by rank-and-file workers are rare these days, but they recall the big miners' strikes that racked West Virginia's coal country in the early part of the 20th century. That pattern of labor activism changed with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, sometimes called the Wagner Act, giving most workers a federally protected right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.

The Wagner Act does not cover public employees, though, and some states, like West Virginia, do not give public employees the right to bargain collectively. For that reason, the state's two teachers' unions, the West Virginia Education Association and the state branch of the American Federation of Teachers, do not function as those in other states might, although they do lobby for teachers and help with grievances. Membership is voluntary and far from universal.

Even so, they were quick to respond as frustration built over rising health insurance costs and other issues earlier this year. It was the unions that started the long walkout by conducting a vote and calling for the statewide work stoppage, which began on Feb. 22.

"It started off with the membership following their state leaders," said Gary Price, the superintendent of schools in Marion County, who, like his colleagues around the state, kept schools closed during the walkout. "But when the state leaders made a decision that the employees didn't like, they took it in a different direction."

At that point, the course of the strike was in the hands of teachers in each of the state's 55 counties making their own separate decisions about what to do, though they monitored the mood elsewhere over social media. In Mr. Price's county, teachers gathered for a heated meeting at a high school, where people stood up and cried out every time they heard that another county's schools would be closed the next day.

"Once they started to all fall, we were going to fall in line with the rest of our state," said Allyson Perry, president of the Marion County Education Association. "That's been the theme of this the whole time."

Earlier in the day, teachers and bus drivers from Boone County had huddled informally at the Capitol to make their decision. "None of our union reps were over there," Robin Muncy, a bus driver, said afterward. "We just did it as a whole, because we felt we were being lied to."

Will Lawrence, 53, a cook at an elementary school in Charleston who is not a member of any union, said, "We had to drag our leaders kicking and screaming — that's why it seems so disorganized."

And in Morgantown, it was Anna Simmons, 26, who called the meeting at the mall, intending to talk over the idea of defying the union leadership and staying out with some of her colleagues at the elementary school where she works as a counselor. She was stunned when so many teachers from other schools showed up.

"I think our reps realized change needed to happen," Ms. Simmons said. "They ended up with a forest fire, and once it was lit, they didn't know how to contain it."

West Virginia's strike is over now, but the problems and the activism that drove it are not. In Oklahoma on Wednesday, the state's largest teachers' union announced it was accelerating its timeline for a statewide walkout, catching up with the fast-moving plans of activist teachers who had already been organizing a work stoppage in protest of low pay — on average, the lowest in the nation.

"We have proven this was long overdue," said Larry Cagle, an English teacher in Tulsa who has been one of the main grass-roots organizers of a walkout. "The union, they don't know how to do this."

Jess Bidgood reported from Charleston, W.Va., and Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh.

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7) In Britain's Playgrounds, 'Bringing in Risk' to Build Resilience
"American families must "find someone to blame to cover the cost" of medical care, unlike their counterparts in European countries, which have socialized health care, said Ellen Beate Hansen Sanseter, a Norwegian professor of education."
By ELLEN BARRY MARCH 10, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/world/europe/britain-playgrounds-risk.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=
rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

A boy about to send a pile of bricks flying at the risk-enhanced playground at the Richmond Avenue Primary and Nursery School in Shoeburyness, England. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

SHOEBURYNESS, England — Educators in Britain, after decades spent in a collective effort to minimize risk, are now, cautiously, getting into the business of providing it.

Four years ago, for instance, teachers at the Richmond Avenue Primary and Nursery School looked critically around their campus and set about, as one of them put it, "bringing in risk."

Out went the plastic playhouses and in came the dicey stuff: stacks of two-by-fours, crates and loose bricks. The schoolyard got a mud pit, a tire swing, log stumps and workbenches with hammers and saws.

"We thought, how can we bring that element of risk into your everyday environment?" said Leah Morris, who manages the early years program at the school in Shoeburyness in southeast Britain. "We were looking at, O.K., so we've got a sand pit, what can we add to the sand pit to make it more risky?"

Now, Ms. Morris says proudly, "we have fires, we use knives, saws, different tools," all used under adult supervision. Indoors, scissors abound, and so do sharp-edged tape dispensers ("they normally only cut themselves once," she says).

Limited risks are increasingly cast by experts as an experience essential to childhood development, useful in building resilience and grit.

Outside the Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens in London, which attracts more than a million visitors a year, a placard informs parents that risks have been "intentionally provided, so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world."

This view is tinged with nostalgia for an earlier Britain, in which children were tougher and more self-reliant. It resonates both with right-wing tabloids, which see it as a corrective to the cosseting of a liberal nanny state; and with progressives, drawn to a freer and more natural childhood. It is also supported by a growing list of government officials, among them Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of Ofsted, the powerful agency that inspects British schools.

Ms. Spielman has poked fun at schools for what she considers excessive risk aversion, describing as "simply barmy" measures like sending schoolchildren out on city field trips in high-visibility jackets. Late last year, she announced that her agency's inspectors would undergo training that will encompass the positive, as well as the negative, side of risk.

"Inspections will creep into being a bit more risk-averse unless we explicitly train them to get a more sophisticated understanding of the balance between benefits and risk, and stand back, and say 'It's O.K. to have some risk of children falling over and bashing into things,'" she said. "That's not the same as being reckless and sending a 2-year-old to walk on the edge of a 200-foot cliff unaccompanied."

Britain is one of a number of countries where educators and regulators say a litigious, protective culture has gone too far, leaching healthy risksout of childhood. Guidelines on play from the government agency that oversees health and safety issues in Britain state that "the goal is not to eliminate risk."

Australia last fall introduced new standards for playground equipment, instructing operators to consider the benefits, not just the risks, of activities that could result in injuries. Cities and school districts in Canada and Sweden are following suit.

(In the United States, a country with far higher litigation costs, government agencies overseeing play safety are not known to have made any such changes.)

The shift to seeing some benefit in risk, advocates say, signals the end of a decades-long drift toward overprotecting children.

Beginning in the late 1970s, parents were buffeted by warnings about hidden dangers on playgrounds and predators lurking in suburban neighborhoods. Behavior changed: In England, the percentage of schoolchildren who went to school unaccompanied dropped from around 85 percent of 9-year-olds in 1971 to around 25 percent in 1990, a team of British researchers found.

Play spaces also changed: Plank swings and steel merry-go-grounds disappeared, while impact-absorbent rubber surfacing spread over so-called drop zones, driving up the cost of new playgrounds. A market appeared for lab-tested, safety-certified fiberglass boulders. The result has been a gradual sterilization of play, said Meghan Talarowski, an American landscape designer who has compared British and American playgrounds.

"It's a rubber floor, a little structure surrounded by a fence, it's like a little play jail," she said of playgrounds in the United States. "As a grown-up, you're sitting there on your phone, waiting for them to be done."

Ms. Talarowski, who was struck by how much more adventurous playgrounds were when she moved on London in 2015, threw herself into gathering data. Using a quantitative tool developed by the RAND Corporation, a research center, she used video to track the behavior of 18,000 visitors to London playgrounds, then compared it with similar data on visitors to American parks.

The findings suggested that exciting equipment had a pronounced effect: The British playgrounds had 55 percent more visitors over all, and children and teenagers were 16 to 18 percent more active. The features that held visitors' attention the longest — sand, grass, high swings and climbing structures — were elements American park managers use sparingly, because of high maintenance costs and the risk of falls, Ms. Talarowski said.

In Britain, though, risk has become something to (carefully) brag about.

"It's about exploring controlled risk, risk that we've carefully designed," said Chris Moran, manager of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, as he led guests through Tumbling Bay playground, built in 2014 at a cost of more than $1.5 million. "We've got the gorse bushes, which are quite spiky," he said. "The child will touch it and learn it is a spiky bush."

Aspects of Tumbling Bay, with its tall tree houses and wobbly bridges, would make an American park manager blanch. Its 20-foot climbing towers, with natural, gnarled boughs lashed together with willow wands, were made by hand, not in a factory (which would share legal liability in case of an accident). Waving prairie grasses stand higher than the head of an adult (which could block sight lines.) There are expanses of sand (could contain animal feces or sharp objects) and boulders (no manufacturer, no shared legal liability.)

The park requires an intensive safety inspection regime — half of it has been barricaded off since November so that rotten boughs can be replaced — but, so far, any injuries have been minor ones, Mr. Moran said. "We've always won the argument," he said.

Underlying the difference in play is a difference in law. The United States uses the jury system for personal injury cases, and liability costs, as a percentage of gross domestic product, are more than double those of most eurozone economies.

In addition, American families must "find someone to blame to cover the cost" of medical care, unlike their counterparts in European countries, which have socialized health care, said Ellen Beate Hansen Sanseter, a Norwegian professor of education.

"In Norway, the society has already paid for it," she said.

Support for freer, riskier play in Britain has built to the point where even prominent safety advocates endorse the idea. But change on the ground is patchy.

Tim Gill, whose 2007 book "No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society" became a handbook for the movement, ascribes this to bureaucratic inertia, and to a sharp drop-off in government investment in play that occurred in 2010, when the Conservative government introduced austerity measures.

And society recoils every time a child is seriously hurt on a playground. Playground deaths are extremely rare — they occur once every three or four years in the Britain — but they tap into a parent's worst fear, and are amplified by widespread reporting.

In 2015, Vida Kwotuah was sitting on a bench in a park in London a few yards away when a tree trunk supporting a swing toppled and crushed her 5-year-old daughter, Alexia. Ms. Kwotuah ran to Alexia, but the child's body had already begun to swell. A few seconds later, she said, "it was like every single blood from her system came out." The base of the tree trunk, she observed, was "powdery."

More than two years later, investigators reported that back in 2011 a contractor, known in the transcript as "Individual A," had unwittingly purchased the trunk of a poplar, which decays rapidly when placed in the ground, mistaking it for oak, a harder wood. Ms. Kwotuah received a financial settlement from her borough council, and parks throughout Tower Hamlets, her neighborhood in East London, underwent strict safety audits.

One such audit found that a popular climbing structure, open since the early 1980s, presented "a medium to high risk potential for severe to fatal injuries," leading to its closure, said Andy Bate, a spokesman for Tower Hamlets, which manages the playgrounds.

Such re-evaluations occur regularly after playground tragedies, even if they are statistically insignificant, said David Yearley, of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. "As a society, it's difficult to say, 'We need to accept a one in 60 million chance of death," he said.

Ask the teachers at the Richmond Avenue Primary School, though, and they will tell you that exposing children to limited risks now, while they are young, will help them survive.

In 1903, when the school opened, its purpose was straightforward: to provide the children of fishermen and farmers with basic literacy and math, enough to take over their parents' vocation, said Debbie Hughes, the school's head teacher.

"There used to be very traditional jobs — blue-collar worker, white-collar worker, you're going to be the electricians and plumbers, you're going to the typist pool," she said. Schools of that era, she said, were designed to turn out rule followers.

"We're very proper, aren't we?" she said. "We have always done as we were told."

But rule followers are unlikely to be rewarded in the future, said Ms. Hughes, whose twin 19-year-old children have just entered the work force. As she thought through these changes, a towheaded kindergartner nearby had fashioned a catapult, stacking seven bricks on one end of a wooden plank and jumping solidly onto the other end, sending the bricks flying into the air, over the heads of his playmates.

"You've got to get out there and find your position in the world," Ms. Hughes said. "If you don't give those children those creative skills, that risk, that take a chance. If they don't have all that risk out there when the child is four, the adult isn't going to do that."

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8) Frida Kahlo Is a Barbie Doll Now. (Signature Unibrow Not Included.)
By COLIN MOYNIHAN MARCH 9, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/arts/design/frida-kahlo-barbie-mattel.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

The Inspiring Women series' Frida Kahlo Barbie doll from Mattel, left, and the Mexican artist, circa 1950.From left: Barbie, via Associated Press; Getty Images

Over the years the name and likeness of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, a fierce feminist and ardent communist, have been associated with a number of unlikely products.

Sneakers. Lipstick. Beer.

But Barbie doll?

Yes, Mattel, which manufactures Barbie, included a Kahlo doll in an inaugural series meant to coincide with International Women's Day.

She is part of the line of "Inspiring Women" dolls that includes the aviator Amelia Earhart and the NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose life was featured in the movie "Hidden Figures."

Kahlo, whom Mattel described as "a celebrated artist, activist and symbol of strength" and who died at the age of 44 in 1954, was known for self-portraits and other works that the Surrealist leader André Breton described as "a ribbon around a bomb." She may not have approved of being cast as a variety of Barbie, the best-selling doll whose image Mattel has updated so as to address criticism that in body type and lifestyle it had perpetuated damaging stereotypes about women.

Certainly one family member took exception to Mattel's depiction of the artist, which eliminated her signature unibrow, a long single eyebrow that one commentator found emblematic of "her striking and beautiful refusal to give in to certain sexist societal pressures."

"I would have liked the doll to have traits more like Frida's, not this doll with light-colored eyes," Mara Romeo, who said she was Kahlo's great-niece, told Agence France-Presse. "It should be a doll that represents everything my aunt represented, her strength."

A lawyer for Ms. Romeo added that Mattel did not have the rights to use Kahlo's image, according to the news agency.

Mattel said in a statement that it had "secured permission and worked in close partnership with the Frida Kahlo Corporation, the owner of all rights related to Frida Kahlo, to make this doll."

Beatriz Alvarado, a spokeswoman for the Frida Kahlo Corporation, said by telephone on Friday that the company had been formed by people who secured rights to market Kahlo's name and likeness after paying a fee in 2005 to Isolda Pineda Kahlo, one of the artist's nieces.

Kahlo, whose works are owned by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and whose legacy has recently experienced a cultural resurgence, has been honored in various ways. In 2001 she was featured on a United States Postal Service stamp. In 2010 the Bank of Mexico said it would issue a 500-peso bill featuring the faces of Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.

A Mexican website La Neta Noticias this week said that social media users had suggested who the doll really looks like — another cultural figure. The Mexican singer and actress Bibi Gaytán.

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9) President Trump Calls for Potential Execution of Drug Dealers
By The Daily Beast, March 12, 2018
https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/48914-president-trump-calls-for-potential-execution-of-drug-dealers

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is pictured, left, on Oct. 26, 2016, in Tokyo; U.S. President Donald Trump is pictured, right, April 29, 2017, in Washington. (photo: Eugene Hoshiko/Pablo Martinez M/AP)

resident Donald Trump publicly praised countries that execute drug dealers during a campaign rally for an Republican candidate for the House of Representatives on Saturday evening, telling the crowd that “I think it’s a discussion we have to start thinking about.” Citing Singapore as an example nation where drug offenses can result in capital punishment, Trump summed up the policies as: “We catch a drug dealer, death penalty. That’s it.” The president had reportedly been privately pushing for the study of such a position in recent weeks, although his appearance on behalf of Republican candidate Rick Saccone in Moon Township, Pennsylvania was the first public statement of support for such a policy. “I don’t know if that’s popular,” Trump said, “but these people are killing our kids and they’re killing our families, and we have to do something.” Trump had previously praised the actions of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for his crackdown on alleged drug dealers, which has led to the extrajudicial killings of thousands of Philippine citizens.

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10) Can Eating More Kale, Eggs, And Carrots Make You Smarter And Happier?

BY MAX LUGAVERE

https://www.fastcompany.com/40541439/can-eating-more-kale-eggs-and-carrots-make-you-smarter-and-happier?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=4&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=03122018

What you heard endlessly growing up was right: You really should eat your vegetables–but perhaps for more reasons than your nagging parents knew. Kale, carrots, and spinach are packed with a naturally occurring substance that researchers are beginning to link with cognitive performance and even mental health. Here’s the latest science behind the brain-boosting compound that could be as easy to harness as eating more salad.

YOUR PLASTIC BRAIN

Lutein is a carotenoid–basically, a fancy term for a natural pigment–that’s known for giving fruits and vegetables their red and yellow hues. It’s also found in leafy greens and it’s what gives pastured egg yolks their rich orange appearance. In the human body, we’ve long known that lutein is concentrated in the macula, an area in the retina of the eye, where it protects against potentially damaging wavelengths of light. But only fairly recently have scientists begun to understand how a lutein-rich diet can potentially impact the brain as well.

Researchers discovered in the mid-’90s that the brain retains its “plasticity”–or ability to change and adapt, both chemically and structurally–until death, a finding that put an end to the days of “neurological nihilism,” as the neuroscientist Norman Doidge memorably put it. This opened up the possibility that we may be able to harness our diets and environments for cognitive benefit.

This is good news because today brain fog, anxiety, and depression are common occurrences, to say nothing of the millions of people who suffer from brain injury, dementia, or are tagged with the ever-more-frequent diagnosis of ADHD. According to recent estimates, one in seven young people complain of memory problems, and one in six adults is currently taking a psychiatric drug. But with academic institutions hot on the trail of the connections between food and brain function, there is now growing evidence that simple diet and lifestyle changes can add up to big gains.

CAN SPINACH MAKE YOU SMARTER, NOT JUST STRONGER?

One such example comes from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory, where in 2016 researchers linked the consumption of foods rich in lutein to greater “crystalized intelligence,” which is the ability to use the skills and knowledge one has acquired over a lifetime, a capacity that otherwise tends to deteriorate with age.

Since our bodies don’t naturally produce carotenoids, our brains’ lutein supply comes directly from the lutein we consume in foods. Lutein is the most concentrated carotenoid in the brain, and a person’s lutein levels have been linked to their overall cognitive performance over a lifetime (which includes but isn’t limited to crystalized intelligence). All this begs the question: can ingesting more lutein improve the way your brain works?

A randomized controlled trial at the University of Georgia in 2015 found that when healthy college-age adults regularly took lutein supplements (along with zeaxanthin, a related carotenoid) as part of their ordinary diets for four months, their average visual-processing speed jumped 20%. Visual processing speed tends to correlate with better sports performance, reading speed, and executive function (i.e. your ability to get stuff done), while reduced processing speed is a key early feature of cognitive decline.

The researchers were stunned by the positive effect. “[This] is significant since young, healthy subjects are typically considered to be at peak efficiency and might be expected to be most resistant to change,” they wrote. “It can be generally remarked that improving diet is not simply to prevent acquired or deficiency disease, but rather to optimize function throughout life.” Although perhaps this conclusion isn’t so surprising after all: Lutein is most abundant in dark leafy greens like kale and spinach, the very same foods that are already associated with reduced cognitive aging.

THE HAPPINESS FACTOR

While diet may play a role in helping our brains work faster, can the foods we eat make us happier, too? There is already evidence that poor diet is related to increased risk of depression, but most of the available findings are correlations, leaving causality a big question mark; when we’re depressed, after all, we tend to reach for lower-quality comfort foods.

But in a study published in 2017, Australian researcher Felice Jacka sought to investigate whether improving one’s diet would improve mental health. After three months, her group of 31 patients assigned to consume diets rich in fresh vegetables, fish, extra-virgin olive oil, and higher-quality meats saw their scores on a major depression scale improve on average by about 11 points. In fact, roughly a third of them had scores so low that they no longer met the clinical criteria for depression at all. Meanwhile, the 25 people in the group that received social support but no dietary modification improved their scores by only about four points, and just two of them (or 8%) achieved remission.

Of course, Dr. Jacka’s study examined very small sample sizes, and researchers like her are first to admit that we’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the role that food plays in mood and cognitive performance. And to be sure, everyone’s brain and body will process the same diet a little bit differently. Still, the next few years promise to bring more data to light on the interrelationships of our mental health, cognition, and diet.

In the meantime, eat your spinach.

Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and the author ofGenius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, available everywhere on March 20, 2018. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram.

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11) After West Virginia, Teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, Rise Against Low Wages
By teleSUR, March 11, 2018
https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/48905-after-west-virginia-teachers-in-oklahoma-arizona-rise-against-low-wages

The Oklahoma state capitol building. (photo: Getty Images)

n Arizona, thousands of teachers showed up wearing red to schools in solidarity to show their frustration with the government and lack of labor laws.

fter the mass mobilization of teachers in West Virginia that moved the lawmakers to action for the overdue pay raise, teachers in Arizona and Oklahoma are rising up to address the issue of low wages and underfunded schools.

Oklahoma Public Employees Association board of directors said the if the lawmakers won't approve over US$213 million in state employee pay raises, the teachers will walk-out, according to the Hill. Oklahoma state employees on Saturday said they would join the planned teachers strike scheduled for April 2.

Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, a professional collective representing nearly 35,000 educators in the state, told Vox, "Everything we have tried has failed ... What [happened] in West Virginia is giving teachers hope, myself included, that we can be change agents."

The Oklahoma Public Employees Association's communications director, Tom Dunning, said: "We are going to have to design different plans for different types of (a state agency) work sites, and that's what we are going to be doing over the next week," the Hill reported.

The Oklahoma teachers' collective petitioned and created a Facebook group to mobilize teachers in the state. The Facebook group “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout – The Time Is Now!" has, so far, garnered a little over 50,000 members.

In an online petition, the Oklahoma educators demanded better and higher pay to retain current teachers. "Teachers in Oklahoma need a raise of $10,000 per year to be competitive regionally. Our neighbor states are paying much more and luring away our best talent. Current compensation levels eliminate new college graduates entering the profession," the petition read.

"Frustration levels are high, so a strike is not a touchy word anymore," Molly Jaynes, an Oklahoma City teacher told KTUL, a local Oklahoma news channel. "I think we have surpassed the point of conversations, and I don't think that there's anything the legislators have provided us recently to give us any sort of hope that they're going to take actual actions this time."

In Arizona, thousands of teachers showed up wearing red to schools in solidarity to show their frustration with the government and lack of labor laws. "West Virginia teachers walked out — and they make more than us," a teacher said at a school board meeting on February 28 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Vox reported.

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12) Who Profits from Nuclear War?

By Andrea Germanos, March 7, 2018

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/07/trump-threats-stir-global-arms-race-new-report-details-nuclear-war-profiteers

The new report "names those that are still okay with trying to make a profit from producing nuclear weapons." (Photo: ippnw Deutschland/flickr/cc)

A new report offers a comprehensive look at who’s profiting from the new nuclear arms race.

“If you have been wondering who benefits from Donald Trump’s threats of nuclear war, this report has that answer,” said Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

ICAN, along with Netherlands-based peace group Pax, released the report, entitled, “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,“ on Wednesday, March 7, 2018. It shows that 329 financial institutions in 24 countries invested $525 billion into the top 20 companies involved in the production, maintenance, and modernization of nuclear weapons from January 2014 through October 2017

The good news is that the number of investors marks 30 fewer institutions than in last year’s report. Yet despite the shorter list, the institutions are investing about $81 billion more in these companies that make weapons of mass destruction. The increased funds, added with the fact that the nuclear-armed states are “modernizing” their arsenals as well as bellicose rhetoric from world leaders like Trump, make clear the need for the global public to campaign for divestment, the groups argue.

The report’s “Hall of Shame” shows the top ten financial institutions with the biggest investments in nuclear weapons manufacturing—all U.S. firms—are: BlackRock, Capital Group, Vanguard, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Evercore, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs.

These institutions accounted for nearly half ($253 billion) of the total investments made.

The top three nuclear weapons producers, by investments, are also all based in the U.S.: Boeing, Honeywell International, and Lockheed Martin.

Those corporations, and the 17 others that are most heavily involved in nuclear weapons making, stated Fihn, “are the companies that stand to profit from indiscriminate mass murder of civilians. We grow less safe while they cash in on chaos by banking on Armageddon.”

The report offers more than doom-and-gloom, however, as it describes the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as being a catalyst for positive change. Since its adoption last year, ABP, the fifth largest pension fund, and the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, globally the second largest pension fund, announced they would no longer put their assets into nuclear weapons-making companies.

Another sign of hope, the report states, are the 22 institutions listed on the “Hall of Fame” that have policies preventing investments in nuclear weapon producers. The list includes for the first time a U.S.-based institution called Green Century, a sustainability-geared investment firm that has roughly $525 million in assets under management. All the other hall-of-famers are based in Europe.

According to report author Susi Snyder, the “Nuclear Ban Treaty has sparked momentum towards divestment, shown by ten percent fewer investors in nuclear weapon producers, and an increase in financial institutions comprehensively prohibiting any investment. Investments are not neutral, these companies should be congratulated for standing on the side of humanity.”

The big picture from all the data, the report says, is this: “By divesting from nuclear weapon producers, we can make it harder for those that profit from weapons of mass destruction and encourage them to cut the production of nuclear weapons from their business strategies. Producing, possessing, and modernizing nuclear weapons is not something to be proud of and ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb’ names those that are still okay with trying to make a profit from producing nuclear weapons, our job is to shame them.”

The report urges the public to take action, whether by just raising public awareness of financial institutions’ role in abetting nuclear arms production or by organizing protests.

“When the world is closer to nuclear war than ever, “ Fihn writes, “we need to make sure that no one should profit from this terror.”

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13) Trump Picks 'Actual Torturer' Gina Haspel as Next CIA Director
By Jessica Corbett, March 13, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/13/trump-picks-actual-torturer-gina-haspel-next-cia-director

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump nominated Gina Haspel, deputy director the of Central Intelligence Agency, to take over for Mike Pompeo, who will now serve as Secretary of State. (Photo: Speak Freely/ACLU)

Human rights advocates are expressing outrage on Tuesday after President Donald Trump nominated deputy director Gina Haspel—"an actual torturer"—to be the next CIA director despite her leading role in running an agency black site where detainees were systematically and gruesomely abused.

Haspel is slated to replace current CIA director Mike Pompeo, who Trump has tapped to be the next Secretary of State now that Rex Tillerson has been fired.

"This appointment should be a warning to allies of the U.S. in the U.K., Europe, and around the world," declared Maya Foa, director of the London-based Reprieve. "Haspel was one of President Bush's torturers-in-chief and she is simply not fit to hold an office that requires, at its very heart, a commitment to uphold the values of the Constitution. This is another example of Donald Trump's backward-looking reliance on people and methods that have failed."

Several critics pointed to a profile published by the New Yorker last year—after Trump appointed her as deputy director—which detailed how, in the early 2000s, "Haspel was a senior official overseeing a top-secret CIA program that subjected dozens of suspected terrorists to savage interrogations, which included depriving them of sleep, squeezing them into coffins, and forcing water down their throats."

In Thailand, Haspel oversaw the "brutal interrogations" of at least two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. "Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls, and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide," the New York Times reports.

A ProPublica investigation published last year detailed how Haspel "was more deeply involved in the torture of Abu Zubaydah than has been publicly understood, according to newly available records and accounts by participants." In one exchange described in a book written by an interrogator, Haspel accused Zubaydah of "faking symptoms of physical distress and psychological breakdown," and supposedly said to him: "Good job! I like the way you're drooling; it adds realism. I'm almost buying it. You wouldn't think a grown man would do that."

Haspel also played a role in the destruction of video evidence that depicted U.S. agents torturing detainees at the CIA's secret prisons. In 2005, as the Times notes, "Haspel was serving at CIA headquarters, and it was her name that was on the cable carrying the destruction orders."

Some critics who weighed in on the appointment noted that last year, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights filed a legal intervention with German authorities, hoping to obtain an arrest warrant for Haspel, based on her role in facilitating and attempting to conceal torture at CIA black sites.

The president, meanwhile, expressed excitement over his nomination of Haspel.

"Gina, by the way, who I know very well, who I've worked very closely with, will be the first woman director of the CIA," Trump said Tuesday. "She's an outstanding person."

To officially take over the agency, Haspel will need to undergo a confirmation hearing with the U.S. Senate, where she'll likely face some tough questions. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who was critical of Haspel's appointment as deputy director, released a statement opposing her new appointment on Tuesday:

"Ms. Haspel's background makes her unsuitable to serve as CIA director. Her nomination must include total transparency about this background, which I called for more than a year ago when she was appointed deputy director. If Ms. Haspel seeks to serve at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, the government can no longer cover up disturbing facts from her past."

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14) Having a Torturer Lead the C.I.A.
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDMARCH 13, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/opinion/cia-torture-gina-haspel.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

President Trump has displayed enthusiasm for brutality over the past year. He has told the police to treat suspects roughly, praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for murdering people suspected of drug ties and called for the execution of drug dealers.

But one of his most unsettling beliefs is still his acceptance of the value of torture. “In my opinion, it works,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News early last year.

Previously, anyone alarmed by Mr. Trump’s cavalier embrace of government-sanctioned cruelty was reassured by his vow to accept the advice of his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who opposes torture and promised at his Senate confirmation hearing that he would uphold American and international laws against it.

Now we have reason to be uneasy yet again.

When it comes to torture, no American officials have been more practiced in those heinous dark arts than the agents and employees of the Central Intelligence Agency who applied it to terrorism suspects after 9/11. Few American officials were so directly involved in that frenzy of abuse, which began under President George W. Bush and was ended by President Barack Obama, as Gina Haspel.

On Tuesday, in announcing that he had dismissed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and was replacing him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Pompeo’s successor would be his deputy, Ms. Haspel.

As an undercover C.I.A. officer, Ms. Haspel played a direct role in the agency’s “extraordinary rendition program,” under which suspected militants were remanded to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.

Ms. Haspel ran the first detention site in Thailand and oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Mr. Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in a single month; his C.I.A. torturers bashed his head into walls and subjected him to other unspeakable brutalities. This cruelty stopped when investigators decided he had nothing useful to tell them.

The sessions were videotaped and the recordings stored in a safe at the C.I.A. station in Thailand until they were ordered destroyed in 2005. And who did that? By then, Ms. Haspel was at C.I.A. headquarters, and while the agency said the decision to destroy evidence was made by her boss at the time, Jose Rodriguez, Ms. Haspel’s name was on the cable with the destruction orders.

In 2013, these activities were of such concern that Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blocked Ms. Haspel’s promotion to be head of the agency’s clandestine service. Since then the two have spent time together, leading Ms. Feinstein on Tuesday to describe Ms. Haspel as a “good deputy” and to say she would wait until the confirmation hearing to make a judgment on the appointment.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a former prisoner of war, insisted that during the confirmation process, Ms. Haspel must “explain the nature and extent of her involvement” in the interrogation program. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said her roles overseeing the waterboarding of detainees and the destruction of tapes were troubling. He and the American Civil Liberties Union called for Ms. Haspel’s C .I.A. records to be declassified as part of her nomination.

The use of torture and secret foreign prisons — think of the deeply disgraceful events at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — was a boon to terrorist groups, helping their propaganda and recruitment efforts. Such activities were also an irritant to key allies and even put American forces and personnel at risk of legal liability and being subjected to harsh treatment when they are detained.

Ms. Haspel is reportedly respected by many C.I.A. agents. But she effectively ran an illegal program, and her promotion to such a top administration position, unless she forcefully renounces the use of torture during her confirmation hearing, would send an undeniable signal to the agency, and the country, that Mr. Trump is indifferent to this brutality, regardless of what Secretary Mattis believes. Members of Congress and public interest groups need to stand up and make clear that, otherwise, the appointment is wrong.

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15) We Stand With the Students

By The Editorial Board

March 13, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/opinion/students-walkout-gun-protest.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

Adults are supposed to take care of children — not only keep them safe, but make them feel safe. Schools are essentially an extension of the home, in that sense, providing sanctuaries of learning, of nurturing and care. But after years of attacks by people with weapons of war, students cannot feel safe and are demanding that adults end years of complaisance and act. They are not asking for their schools to become armed garrisons. Rather, they want those weapons to be brought under control. And unlike too many adults, the young people leading Wednesday’s walkout at schools around the country — inspired by angry, motivated students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed by a former student with an assault weapon — have had the courage to take on the industry responsible for blocking every reasonable measure to limit access to guns, including those that make it all too easy to commit mass murder.

As Stoneman Douglas junior Florence Yared said in front of the Florida State Capitol late last month, “You adults have failed us by not creating a safer place for your children to go to school. So we, the next generation, will not fail our own kids. We will make this change happen. If not today, then tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, next year. Take it from us. You created a mess for us, but we will make this world safer for our children.”

With Wednesday’s demonstration, and their March for Our Lives movement on March 24 in Washington, young voices are being heard. How will the nation’s adults respond? Hopefully, by amplifying their demand: Never again.

“No kid should be afraid to go to school, no kid should be afraid to walk outside, and no kid should have to worry about being shot. Now that’s why I’m marching.”

— Alfonso Calderón, Junior

“The ‘children’ you pissed off will not forget this in the voting booth. Don’t doubt the power of the younger generation, because we are a force to be reckoned with.”

—Aly Sheehy, Senior

“Maybe the adults have gotten used to saying ‘it is what it is,’ but if us students have learned anything, it’s that if you don’t study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it’s time to start doing something. We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we’re going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because...we are going to be the last mass shooting.”

— Emma González, Senior

“High schools shouldn’t be hashtags every other day”

—Jaclyn Corin, Junior

“More prayer, Jesus, god, and compassion won’t bring back the victims that sadly lost their lives. It won’t bring back the sense of security that my fellow peers and I lost. The only way to get that back is through gun control starting now.”

—Jose Iglesias, Senior

“The children will become leaders as the leaders have become children.”

—Madison Leal, Junior

“We march for Parkland, Newtown, Chicago, St. Louis, Columbine, and every other town in America affected by gun violence.”

—Nikhita Nookala, Senior

“On March 24th, #IWillMarch so no child ever has to worry about texting their parents a final “I love you.’”

—Alex Wind, Junior

“Our trauma isn’t going away, but neither are we. We will fight everyday because we have to, because change is the only thing that makes any of this bearable.”

—Leonor Munoz, Senior

“The fact that some of the students at Stoneman Douglas high school ... are showing more maturity and political action than many of our elected officials is a testament to how disgusting and broken our political system is right now in America. But we’re trying to fix that.”

—David Hogg, Senior

“Our nation’s leaders are baffled and surprised that a bunch of 17 year olds are planning a nationwide movement but haven’t even blinked that we’ll also be able to purchase weapons of war in the same year.”

—Adam Alhanti, Junior

“The faces you see all over the media are not the only members of this movement. If you are willing to help to make a change, you are also a member. Simple as that.”

—Morgan Williams, Junior

“We may be young but our voices are louder than you can imagine.”

—Sarah Chadwick, Junior

“I blame the government for what happened and the people that are sending prayers and condolences but aren’t doing anything. It’s just heartbreaking to know that the people that are representing you are failing you.”

—Lina Crisostomo, Junior

“This isn’t red versus blue. This is life or death. And we refuse to ever allow any other student or human being to endure what we endured.”

—Liz Stout, Senior

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16) Stephen Hawking Dies at 76; His Mind Roamed the Cosmos

By Dennis Overbye, March 14, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/stephen-hawking-dead.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Dr. Hawking pushed the limits in his professional and personal life. In 2007, when he was 65, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727. Zero Gravity Corp., via Associated Press

Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University.

“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview.

Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything,” was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.

Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.

What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only a few years to live.

The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.

He went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.

That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Dr. Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Dr. Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.

Nobody, including Dr. Hawking, believed it at first — that particles could be coming out of a black hole. “I wasn’t looking for them at all,” he recalled in an interview in 1978. “I merely tripped over them. I was rather annoyed.”

That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title “Black Hole Explosions?,” is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.

The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers — and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.

“You can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,” Dr. Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don’t think he will survive it.

“On the other hand,” he added, “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”

Dennis W. Sciama, a cosmologist and Dr. Hawking’s thesis adviser at Cambridge, called Hawking’s thesis in Nature “the most beautiful paper in the history of physics.”

Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: “Trying to understand Hawking’s discovery better has been a source of much fresh thinking for almost 40 years now, and we are probably still far from fully coming to grips with it. It still feels new.”

In 2002, Dr. Hawking said he wanted the formula for Hawking radiation to be engraved on his tombstone.

He was a man who pushed the limits — in his intellectual life, to be sure, but also in his professional and personal lives. He traveled the globe to scientific meetings, visiting every continent, including Antarctica; wrote best-selling books about his work; married twice; fathered three children; and was not above appearing on “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or “The Big Bang Theory.”

He celebrated his 60th birthday by going up in a hot-air balloon. The same week, he also crashed his electric-powered wheelchair while speeding around a corner in Cambridge, breaking his leg.

In April 2007, a few months after his 65th birthday, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce fleeting periods of weightlessness. It was a prelude to a hoped-for trip to space with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company aboard SpaceShipTwo.

Asked why he took such risks, Dr. Hawking said, “I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit.”

His own spirit left many in awe.

“What a triumph his life has been,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal of England and Dr. Hawking’s longtime colleague. “His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds — a manifestation of amazing willpower and determination.”

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day, he liked to point out, after the death of Galileo, who had begun the study of gravity. His mother, the former Isobel Walker, had gone to Oxford to avoid the bombs that fell nightly during the Blitz of London. His father, Frank Hawking, was a prominent research biologist.

The oldest of four children, Stephen was a mediocre student at St. Albans School in London, though his innate brilliance was recognized by some classmates and teachers.

Later, at University College, Oxford, he found his studies in mathematics and physics so easy that he rarely consulted a book or took notes. He got by with a thousand hours of work in three years, or one hour a day, he estimated. “Nothing seemed worth making an effort for,” he said.

The only subject he found exciting was cosmology because, he said, it dealt with “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”

Upon graduation, he moved to Cambridge. Before he could begin his research, however, he was stricken by what his research adviser, Dr. Sciama, came to call “that terrible thing.”

The young Hawking had been experiencing occasional weakness and falling spells for several years. Shortly after his 21st birthday, in 1963, doctors told him that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They gave him less than three years to live.

His first response was severe depression. He dreamed he was going to be executed, he said. Then, against all odds, the disease appeared to stabilize. Though he was slowly losing control of his muscles, he was still able to walk short distances and perform simple tasks, though laboriously, like dressing and undressing. He felt a new sense of purpose.

“When you are faced with the possibility of an early death,” he recalled, “it makes you realize that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to do.”

In 1965, he married Jane Wilde, a student of linguistics. Now, by his own account, he not only had “something to live for”; he also had to find a job, which gave him an incentive to work seriously toward his doctorate.

His illness, however, had robbed him of the ability to write down the long chains of equations that are the tools of the cosmologist’s trade. Characteristically, he turned this handicap into a strength, gathering his energies for daring leaps of thought, which, in his later years, he often left for others to codify in proper mathematical language.

“People have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,” Dr. Hawking said. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of mathematics.”

By necessity, he concentrated on problems that could be attacked through “pictures and diagrams,” adopting geometric techniques that had been devised in the early 1960s by the mathematician Roger Penrose and a fellow Cambridge colleague, Brandon Carter, to study general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Black holes are a natural prediction of that theory, which explains how mass and energy “curve” space, the way a sleeping person causes a mattress to sag. Light rays will bend as they traverse a gravitational field, just as a marble rolling on the sagging mattress will follow an arc around the sleeper.

Too much mass or energy in one spot could cause space to sag without end; an object that was dense enough, like a massive collapsing star, could wrap space around itself like a magician’s cloak and disappear, shrinking inside to a point of infinite density called a singularity, a cosmic dead end, where the known laws of physics would break down: a black hole.

Einstein himself thought this was absurd when the possibility was pointed out to him.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and other sophisticated tools of observation and analysis, however, astronomers have identified hundreds of objects that are too massive and dark to be anything but black holes, including a supermassive one at the center of the Milky Way. According to current theory, the universe should contain billions more.

As part of his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, Dr. Hawking showed that when you ran the film of the expanding universe backward, you would find that such a singularity had to have existed sometime in cosmic history; space and time, that is, must have had a beginning. He, Dr. Penrose and a rotating cast of colleagues went on to publish a series of theorems about the behavior of black holes and the dire fate of anything caught in them.

Dr. Hawking’s signature breakthrough resulted from a feud with the Israeli theoretical physicist Jacob Bekenstein, then a Princeton graduate student, about whether black holes could be said to have entropy, a thermodynamic measure of disorder. Dr. Bekenstein said they could, pointing out a close analogy between the laws that Dr. Hawking and his colleagues had derived for black holes and the laws of thermodynamics.

Dr. Hawking said no. To have entropy, a black hole would have to have a temperature. But warm objects, from a forehead to a star, radiate a mixture of electromagnetic radiation, depending on their exact temperatures. Nothing could escape a black hole, and so its temperature had to be zero. “I was very down on Bekenstein,” Dr. Hawking recalled.

To settle the question, Dr. Hawking decided to investigate the properties of atom-size black holes. This, however, required adding quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules of the atomic and subatomic world, to gravity, a feat that had never been accomplished. Friends turned the pages of quantum theory textbooks as Dr. Hawking sat motionless staring at them for months. They wondered if he was finally in over his head.

When he eventually succeeded in doing the calculation in his head, it indicated to his surprise that particles and radiation were spewing out of black holes. Dr. Hawking became convinced that his calculation was correct when he realized that the outgoing radiation would have a thermal spectrum characteristic of the heat radiated by any warm body, from a star to a fevered forehead. Dr. Bekenstein had been right.

Dr. Hawking even figured out a way to explain how particles might escape a black hole. According to quantum principles, the space near a black hole would be teeming with “virtual” particles that would flash into existence in matched particle-and-antiparticle pairs — like electrons and their evil twin opposites, positrons — out of energy borrowed from the hole’s intense gravitational field.

They would then meet and annihilate each other in a flash of energy, repaying the debt for their brief existence. But if one of the pair fell into the black hole, the other one would be free to wander away and become real. It would appear to be coming from the black hole and taking energy away from it.

But those, he cautioned, were just words. The truth was in the math.

“The most important thing about Hawking radiation is that it shows that the black hole is not cut off from the rest of the universe,” Dr. Hawking said.

It also meant that black holes had a temperature and had entropy. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of wasted heat. But it is also a measure of the amount of information — the number of bits — needed to describe what is in a black hole. Curiously, the number of bits is proportional to the black hole’s surface area, not its volume, meaning that the amount of information you could stuff into a black hole is limited by its area, not, as one might naïvely think, its volume.

That result has become a litmus test for string theory and other pretenders to a theory of quantum gravity. It has also led to speculations that we live in a holographic universe, in which three-dimensional space is some kind of illusion.

Andrew Strominger, a Harvard string theorist, said of the holographic theory, “If it’s really true, it’s a deep and beautiful property of our universe — but not an obvious one.”

The discovery of black hole radiation also led to a 30-year controversy over the fate of things that had fallen into a black hole.

Dr. Hawking initially said that detailed information about whatever had fallen in would be lost forever because the particles coming out would be completely random, erasing whatever patterns had been present when they first fell in. Paraphrasing Einstein’s complaint about the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics, Dr. Hawking said, “God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

Many particle physicists protested that this violated a tenet of quantum physics, which says that knowledge is always preserved and can be retrieved. Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who carried on the argument for decades, said, “Stephen correctly understood that if this was true, it would lead to the downfall of much of 20th-century physics.”

On another occasion, he characterized Dr. Hawking to his face as “one of the most obstinate people in the world; no, he is the most infuriating person in the universe.” Dr. Hawking grinned.

Dr. Hawking admitted defeat in 2004. Whatever information goes into a black hole will come back out when it explodes. One consequence, he noted sadly, was that one could not use black holes to escape to another universe. “I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans,” he said.

Despite his concession, however, the information paradox, as it is known, has become one of the hottest and deepest topics in theoretical physics. Physicists say they still do not know how information gets in or out of black holes.

Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Dr. Hawking’s, said the present debate had raised “by another few notches” his estimation of the “stupendous magnitude” of Dr. Hawking’s original discovery.

In 1974, Dr. Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific organization; in 1979, he was appointed to the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton. “They say it’s Newton’s chair, but obviously it’s been changed,” he liked to quip.

Dr. Hawking also made yearly visits to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which became like a second home. In 2008, he joined the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, as a visiting researcher.

Having conquered black holes, Dr. Hawking set his sights on the origin of the universe and on eliminating that pesky singularity at the beginning of time from models of cosmology. If the laws of physics could break down there, they could break down everywhere.

In a meeting at the Vatican in 1982, he suggested that in the final theory there should be no place or time when the laws broke down, even at the beginning. He called the notion the “no boundary” proposal.

With James Hartle of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., Dr. Hawking envisioned the history of the universe as a sphere like the Earth. Cosmic time corresponds to latitude, starting with zero at the North Pole and progressing southward.

Although time started there, the North Pole was nothing special; the same laws applied there as everywhere else. Asking what happened before the Big Bang, Dr. Hawking said, was like asking what was a mile north of the North Pole — it was not any place, or any time.

By then string theory, which claimed finally to explain both gravity and the other forces and particles of nature as tiny microscopically vibrating strings, like notes on a violin, was the leading candidate for a “theory of everything.”

In “A Brief History of Time,” Dr. Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a complete theory” of the universe, “it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.”

He added, “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist.”

“If we find the answer to that,” he continued, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

Until 1974, Dr. Hawking was still able to feed himself and to get in and out of bed. At Jane’s insistence, he would drag himself, hand over hand, up the stairs to the bedroom in his Cambridge home every night, in an effort to preserve his remaining muscle tone. After 1980, care was supplemented by nurses.

Dr. Hawking retained some control over his speech up to 1985. But on a trip to Switzerland, he came down with pneumonia. The doctors asked Jane if she wanted his life support turned off, but she said no. To save his life, doctors inserted a breathing tube. He survived, but his voice was permanently silenced.

It appeared for a time that he would be able to communicate only by pointing at individual letters on an alphabet board. But when a computer expert, Walter Woltosz, heard about Dr. Hawking’s condition, he offered him a program he had written called Equalizer. By clicking a switch with his still-functioning fingers, Dr. Hawking was able to browse through menus that contained all the letters and more than 2,500 words.

Word by word — and when necessary, letter by letter — he could build up sentences on the computer screen and send them to a speech synthesizer that vocalized for him. The entire apparatus was fitted to his motorized wheelchair.

Even when too weak to move a finger, he communicated through the computer by way of an infrared beam, which he activated by twitching his right cheek or blinking his eye. The system was expanded to allow him to open and close the doors in his office and to use the telephone and internet without aid.

Although he averaged fewer than 15 words per minute, Dr. Hawking found he could speak through the computer better than he had before losing his voice. His only complaint, he confided, was that the speech synthesizer, manufactured in California, had given him an American accent.

His decision to write “A Brief History of Time” was prompted, he said, by a desire to share his excitement about “the discoveries that have been made about the universe” with “the public that paid for the research.” He wanted to make the ideas so accessible that the book would be sold in airports.

He also hoped to earn enough money to pay for his children’s education. He did. The book’s extraordinary success made him wealthy, a hero to disabled people everywhere and even more famous.

The news media followed his movements and activities over the years, from visiting the White House to meeting the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and reported his opinions on everything from national health care (socialized medicine in England had kept him alive) to communicating with extraterrestrials (maybe not a good idea, he said), as if he were a rolling Delphic Oracle.

Asked by New Scientist magazine what he thought about most, Dr. Hawking answered: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”

n 1990, Dr. Hawking and his wife separated after 25 years of marriage; Jane Hawking wrote about their years together in two books, “Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen Hawking” and “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen.” The latter became the basis of the 2014 movie “The Theory of Everything.”

In 1995, he married Elaine Mason, a nurse who had cared for him since his bout of pneumonia. She had been married to David Mason, the engineer who had attached Dr. Hawking’s speech synthesizer to his wheelchair.

In 2004, British newspapers reported that the Cambridge police were investigating allegations that Elaine had abused Dr. Hawking, but no charges were filed, and Dr. Hawking denied the accusations. They agreed to divorce in 2006.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available, but on Wednesday morning, his children, Robert, Lucy and Tim, released the following statement:

“We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him forever.”

Among his many honors, Dr. Hawking was named a commander of the British Empire in 1982. In the summer of 2012, he had a star role in the opening of the Paralympics Games in London. The only thing lacking was the Nobel Prize, and his explanation for this was characteristically pithy: “The Nobel is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on.”

Dr. Hawking was a strong advocate of space exploration, saying it was essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of,” he told an audience in Hong Kong in 2007.

Nothing raised as much furor, however, as his increasingly scathing remarks about religion. One attraction of the no-boundary proposal for Dr. Hawking was that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began.

In “A Brief History of Time,” he had referred to the “mind of God,” but in “The Grand Design,” a 2011 book he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, he was more bleak about religion. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set the universe going.”

He went further in an interview that year in The Guardian, saying: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Having spent the best part of his life grappling with black holes and cosmic doom, Dr. Hawking had no fear of the dark.

“They’re named black holes because they are related to human fears of being destroyed or gobbled up,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t have fears of being thrown into them. I understand them. I feel in a sense that I am their master.”

Matthew Haag, Matt Stevens and Gerald Jonas contributed reporting.

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DROP LWOP Town Hall
Date	Saturday March 24
Time	5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Import this event into your personal calendar.
Location Details
Red Bay Coffee Roastery, Bar & Garden, 3098 E 10th St, Oakland (Near Fruitvale Bart)
Event Type	Teach-In
Organizer/Author	California Coalition for Women Prisoners
Email	info [at] womenprisoners.org
Phone	415-255-7036 x 4
Drop LWOP Town Hall will feature a panel of formerly incarcerated women describing the injustice of the Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP) sentence which condemns over 5,000 people in California prisons to a living death sentence. With food from Mamacitas Cafe, a raffle, and items for sale made by people living inside women's prisons. Donations Requested: $5-20. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2018

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Cindy Sheehan and the Women’s March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

Different wings of the same warbird

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Tell the Feds: End Draft Registration

Courage to Resist Podcast: The Future of Draft Registration in the United States

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Free Leonard Peltier!

On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

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GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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'I Begged Them'

Dying in Shackles

Pushing for Change

YOUR PLASTIC BRAIN

CAN SPINACH MAKE YOU SMARTER, NOT JUST STRONGER?

THE HAPPINESS FACTOR

“No kid should be afraid to go to school, no kid should be afraid to walk outside, and no kid should have to worry about being shot. Now that’s why I’m marching.”

“The ‘children’ you pissed off will not forget this in the voting booth. Don’t doubt the power of the younger generation, because we are a force to be reckoned with.”

“High schools shouldn’t be hashtags every other day”

“More prayer, Jesus, god, and compassion won’t bring back the victims that sadly lost their lives. It won’t bring back the sense of security that my fellow peers and I lost. The only way to get that back is through gun control starting now.”

“The children will become leaders as the leaders have become children.”

“We march for Parkland, Newtown, Chicago, St. Louis, Columbine, and every other town in America affected by gun violence.”

“On March 24th, #IWillMarch so no child ever has to worry about texting their parents a final “I love you.’”

“Our trauma isn’t going away, but neither are we. We will fight everyday because we have to, because change is the only thing that makes any of this bearable.”

“The fact that some of the students at Stoneman Douglas high school ... are showing more maturity and political action than many of our elected officials is a testament to how disgusting and broken our political system is right now in America. But we’re trying to fix that.”

“Our nation’s leaders are baffled and surprised that a bunch of 17 year olds are planning a nationwide movement but haven’t even blinked that we’ll also be able to purchase weapons of war in the same year.”

“The faces you see all over the media are not the only members of this movement. If you are willing to help to make a change, you are also a member. Simple as that.”

“We may be young but our voices are louder than you can imagine.”

“I blame the government for what happened and the people that are sending prayers and condolences but aren’t doing anything. It’s just heartbreaking to know that the people that are representing you are failing you.”

“This isn’t red versus blue. This is life or death. And we refuse to ever allow any other student or human being to endure what we endured.”

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