Friday, December 19, 2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2014

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL



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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



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Cops vs Free Speech
How police are threatening Mumia, convicts, teachers, and all of us with censorship as well as bullets!


• The New “gag” law in Pennsylvania that seeks to silence prisoners. This law, cobbled together in days following Mumia’s recorded presentation to a commencement ceremony at Goddard College, was explicitly designed to “shut him up.” The targets of this blatantly unconstitutional law, however, include all prisoners convicted of violent crimes!

• A Law Suit has been filed to stop the “gag” law from being implemented!  Support for this effort is critical. Donations will go toward the fight against the “gag” law.

• The  suppression of the “Urban Dreams” web site by the Oakland School Board. This teacher-created site of voluntary curriculum ideas included one comparing the suppression of Mumia’s commentaries with censorship of Martin Luther King’s later writings. While the Superintendent of Schools has now promised to restore the site, we must remain vigilant!

• Both of these measures—the “gag” law in Pennsylvania, and the suppression of the Urban Dreams website—were taken at the behest of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)!  The FOP is a highly politicized organization which seeks to silence social critics such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and dictate the curricula in schools! The FOP and Democrat/Republican politicians will continue their attempts at intimidation and suppression, unless we act!

• Ferguson shows that black and Latino youth particularly are threatened by militarized and politicized police who shoot first and ask questions later, and frame their targets for crimes they didn’t commit. Chief targets have included Native American Activists like Leonard Peltier, militant working-class activists, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Black Panthers and Martin Luther King. Mumia is currently a top target to silence.  But anyone and everyone can be on their enemies list, and in their cross-hairs!  Fight back now!

Donate Now
to fight the “gag” law!
go to:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA  •  510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org

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Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

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Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,” which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment, unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508) to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives, analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers, or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact information at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne  (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams  (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi  (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf


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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/

New Action- write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
mchugh_md
Secretary of the Army John McHugh
President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning’s clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.
Please write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks’ whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning’s release from military prison.
It is important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in Manning’s outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this stage.
Take action TODAY – Write letters supporting Chelsea’s clemency petition to the following DoD authorities:
Secretary of the Army John McHugh
101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101
The Judge Advocate General
2200 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-2200
Army Clemency and Parole Board
251 18th St, Suite 385
Arlington, VA 22202-3532
Directorate of Inmate Administration
Attn: Boards Branch
U.S. Disciplinary Barracks
1301 N. Warehouse Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027-2304
Suggestions for letters send to DoD officials:
  • The letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning’s sentence is reduced.  The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be unlikely to help
  • A suggested message: “Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the course of being true to her conscience.  I urge you to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning’s sentence to time served.”  Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.
  • Consider composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).
  • A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above
This clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming appeal before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning’s new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the prosecution’s—and the trial judge’s—misconduct during last year’s trial at Ft. Meade, Maryland.
Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea’s legal fees at this critical stage!
> > > Please donate today! < < <



Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
 Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) U.S. and Cuba, in Breakthrough, Will Resume Diplomatic Relations
By




2) End Solitary Confinement for Teenagers
By IAN M. KYSEL




3) U.S. Wealth Gap Is Widest in at Least 30 Years, Study Finds
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/business/economy/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-at-least-30-years-pew-study-says.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news




4) Panel to Set Terms to End Abusive Reign at Los Angeles County Jail System
By





5) As Havana Celebrates Historic Shift, Economic and Political Hopes Rise
By , and VICTORIA BURNETT




6) How the High Cost of Medical Care Is Affecting Americans
By




7) South Carolina Judge Vacates Conviction of George Stinney in 1944 Execution
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/us/judge-vacates-conviction-in-1944-execution.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below




8) Snow Is Down and Heat Is Up in the Arctic, Report Says
By




9) U.S. Frees Last of the ‘Cuban Five,’ Part of a 1990s Spy Ring
By and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS




10) Judge Sits Out Decision on Eric Garner Transcripts
By





11) Why Are Our Schools Still Segregated?
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES




12)  Contesting Traffic Fines, Missouri Sues 13 Suburbs of St. Louis
By ELI YOKLEY and





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1) U.S. and Cuba, in Breakthrough, Will Resume Diplomatic Relations
By

WASHINGTON — The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century after the release of an American contractor held in prison for five years, American officials said Wednesday.

In a deal negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, who hosted a final meeting at the Vatican, President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba agreed in a telephone call to put aside decades of hostility to find a new relationship between the United States and the island nation just 90 miles off the American coast.

“We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal will “begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a “rigid policy that’s rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

The contractor, Alan P. Gross, traveled on an American government plane to the United States late Wednesday morning, and the United States sent back three Cuban spies who had been in an American prison since 2001. American officials said the Cuban spies were swapped for a United States intelligence agent who had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years, and said Mr. Gross was not technically part of the swap, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds.”

In addition, the United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking relations, and Cuba will release 53 Cuban prisoners identified as political prisoners by the United States government. Although the decades-old American embargo on Cuba will remain in place for now, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about lifting” it.

“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time for a new approach.”

Addressing critics of his new approach, he said he shares their commitment to freedom. “The question is how do we uphold that commitment,” he said. “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.”

Mr. Gross’s sister, Bonnie Rubinstein, was “beyond ecstatic” at the news of his release, according to her husband, Harold. “We are extremely grateful that he’s on his way home,” Mr. Rubinstein said by telephone from Dallas. “It’s been a long ordeal.”

Mr. Obama spoke with Mr. Castro by telephone on Tuesday to finalize the agreement in a call that lasted more than 45 minutes, the first direct contact between the leaders of the two countries in more than 50 years, American officials said.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba were severed in January 1961 after the rise of Fidel Castro and his Communist government. Mr. Obama has instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to immediately initiate discussions with Cuba about re-establishing diplomatic relations and to begin the process of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, which it has been on since 1982, the White House said.

Officials said they would re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out high-level exchanges and visits between the two governments within months. Mr. Obama will send an assistant secretary of state to Havana next month to lead an American delegation to the next round of talks on Cuban-American migration. The United States will also begin working with Cuba on issues like counternarcotics, environmental protection and human trafficking.

The United States will also ease travel restrictions across all 12 categories currently envisioned under limited circumstances in American law, including family visits, official visits and journalistic, professional, educational and religious activities, public performances, officials said. Ordinary tourism, however, will remain prohibited.

Mr. Obama will also allow greater banking ties and raise the level of remittances allowed to be sent to Cuban nationals to $2,000 every three months from the current limit of $500. Intermediaries forwarding remittances will no longer require a specific license from the government. American travelers will also be allowed to import up to $400 worth of goods from Cuba, including up to $100 in tobacco and alcohol products.

“This is being done because we believe the policy of the past has not worked and we believe the best way to bring democracy and prosperity to Cuba is through a different kind of policy,” a senior administration official told reporters on a conference call under White House ground rules that did not permit the official to be identified.

But the official said the shift would not diminish the American focus on human rights in Cuba. “Our emphasis on human rights will be just as strong and we believe more effective under this policy,” the official said. “We will engage directly with the Cuban government on human rights.”

Mr. Gross’s health has been failing. He has reportedly lost more than 100 pounds in prison and is losing vision in his right eye. He went on a nine-day hunger strike in April. After turning 65 in May, he told relatives that he might try to kill himself if not released soon.

Three members of Congress were on the plane that picked up Mr. Gross in Cuba on Wednesday and accompanied him back to the United States, officials said: Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, and Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

Other Democratic and Republican lawmakers were sharply critical of the deal. “Let’s be clear, this was not a ‘humanitarian’ act by the Castro regime. It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American,” said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “President Obama’s actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, considered a prospect for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, told The Associated Press: “This is going to do absolutely nothing to further human rights and democracy in Cuba. But it potentially goes a long way in providing the economic lift that the Castro regime needs to become permanent fixtures in Cuba for generations to come.”

Mr. Gross was in Cuba to deliver satellite telephone equipment that was capable of cloaking connections to the Internet when he was arrested in 2009. The Cuban authorities, who tightly control access to the Internet in their country, initially said he was a spy, and a court there convicted him of bringing in the devices without a permit as part of a subversive plot to “destroy the revolution.”

Mr. Gross’s case drew increasing attention as his health deteriorated. He grew despondent and talked of suicide, and his wife, Judy Gross, and other supporters made urgent pleas for his release, but off-and-on diplomatic talks seemed to go nowhere.

Cuba has often raised the case of three of its spies serving federal prison time in Florida, saying they had been prosecuted unjustly and urging that they be released on humanitarian grounds. State Department officials insisted that the cases were not comparable and that Mr. Gross was not an intelligence agent.

Mr. Gross worked for Development Alternatives, of Bethesda, Md., and had traveled to more than 50 countries as an international development worker. The company had a $6 million contract with the United States Agency for International Development to distribute equipment that could get around Cuba’s Internet blockade, and Mr. Gross had made four previous trips to Cuba in 2009.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the former New Mexico governor and cabinet secretary Bill Richardson and several members of Congress appealed for Mr. Gross’s release, along with Jewish advocacy groups in the United States.

After visiting Mr. Gross in November, Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona and a longtime advocate of loosening the 50-year-old American trade embargo with Cuba, said he was optimistic that the case would be resolved.

American lawmakers who have drawn attention to Mr. Gross’s case celebrated his departure from Cuba. “Today, news of Alan’s release brings great relief to his loved ones and to every American who has called for his freedom,” said Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas. “I admire Alan’s strength and that of his wife Judy, who has worked tirelessly for years to free Alan and reunite her family.”

The American government has spent $264 million over the last 18 years, much of it through the development agency, in an effort to spur democratic change in Cuba. The agency said in November that it would cease the kinds of operations that Mr. Gross was involved in when he was arrested, as well as those, disclosed by The Associated Press, that allowed a contractor to set up a Twitter-like social network that hid its ties to the United States government.

Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.


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2) End Solitary Confinement for Teenagers
By IAN M. KYSEL

SOLITARY confinement can be psychologically damaging for any inmate, but it is especially perverse when it is used to discipline children and teenagers. At juvenile detention centers and adult prisons and jails across the country, minors are locked in isolated cells for 22 hours or more a day. Solitary confinement is used to punish misbehavior, to protect vulnerable detainees or to isolate someone who may be violent or suicidal. But this practice does more harm than good. It should end.A major study by the Department of Justice in 2003 showed that more than 15 percent of young people in juvenile facilities, some as young as 10, had been held in solitary. My own research, for Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, suggested that the practice of putting teenagers in solitary was more widespread in adult jails and prisons. A recent Justice Department investigation found that at any given time in 2013 as many as a quarter of adolescents held at New York City’s Rikers Island were in solitary confinement. Dozens had been sentenced to more than three months in solitary. Still others were held longer, for more than six months.

Only six states have laws on the books that prohibit certain forms of isolation in juvenile facilities. No state — nor the federal government — has banned the solitary confinement of teens in adult jails and prisons.

I have interviewed scores of young people about being in solitary. Their stories haunt me. I spoke with girls who told me that the experience brought back traumatic memories of rape and abuse. Other kids talked about losing control of themselves, of banging their heads against the walls of their cell. Many teens spoke in disturbing detail about suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. One girl who spent four months in solitary confinement in a county jail at 16, ostensibly to be protected from adults there, told me that solitary was “a dark place.” Though there were lights in her cell, she said, “It is like being sunk in a hole.” A boy who had been alone for months in a county jail at 15 told me that isolation turned his thoughts to “the death-oriented side of life.”

A recent Justice Department review of suicides in juvenile facilities found that more than half of the minors who had killed themselves had done so in isolation. And in adult jails, department data released this fall identified more than 40 teenagers who had committed suicide since 2000; the suicide rate for minors in adult prisons was twice as high as that for older inmates. A recent study at Rikers Island found that adolescents there were significantly more likely to harm themselves.

A vast majority of children subjected to solitary confinement are in state facilities (where tens of thousands of children are held) and it will be up to each state to initiate reform. States should remove all minors from adult jails and prisons and ban solitary confinement. New York has led the way on the latter by pledging to end solitary for 16- and 17-year-olds held as adults in its prisons and in jail at Rikers Island.

The federal government should also set an example. There are only 65 juveniles currently held by the Department of Justice in facilities across the country, but there are indications that conditions there are also poor. Last year, following a visit to one juvenile prison with a federal contract, the A.C.L.U. of Montana reported that, when disciplined, the juvenile prisoners were put into isolated gray and white cells “with frosted windows and doors without windows,” where “they receive one hour of outdoor recreation seven days per week, but their ability to participate in out-of-cell education or other programming ceases.” The A.C.L.U. found that juvenile prisoners were sometimes kept in disciplinary isolation for up to 90 days.Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. should immediately direct the Bureau of Prisons to outlaw the solitary confinement of juveniles. The federal government already prohibits the detention of juveniles with adults in federal prisons (a rule that states should emulate). Mr. Holder could also direct the bureau to develop new policies to strictly regulate any use of even short periods of isolation.

Mr. Holder could then direct the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to promote these policies as model practices, much like the national guidelines on education in juvenile facilities that Mr. Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced last week.

Young inmates should be managed in a way that promotes their healthy growth and development. Their fundamental rights must be protected. The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently revised its inspection standards, calling for isolation to be used only for children who posed an immediate risk to themselves or others; after other techniques had failed; only for as long as it took for a child to regain control of himself (it should be measured in minutes, not hours or days); and never for longer than four hours or as a punishment. These standards echo statements by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

That the practice is widespread remains a disturbing indicator of how poorly we treat the hundreds of thousands of minors arrested each year in the United States. They are still maturing into adulthood. Solitary confinement can sabotage both their rehabilitation and their growth. It should be banned.

Ian M. Kysel is an adjunct professor and a fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.


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3) U.S. Wealth Gap Is Widest in at Least 30 Years, Study Finds
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/business/economy/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-at-least-30-years-pew-study-says.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The wealthy are getting wealthier. As for everyone else, no such luck.

A report released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that the wealth gap between the country’s top earners and the rest of America had stretched to its widest point in at least three decades.

Last year, the median net worth of upper-income families reached $639,400, nearly seven times as much of those in the middle, and nearly 70 times the level of those at the bottom of the income ladder.

There has been growing attention to the issue of income inequality, particularly the plight of those earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.Although income and wealth are related (the more you make, the more you can save), the wealth gap zeros in on a different aspect of financial well-being: how much money and other assets you have accumulated over time, including the value of your home and car plus any stocks and bonds. Think of it as “a measure of the family ‘nest egg,'” as Pew calls it — a hoard that can sustain a household during an emergency, like the loss of a job, and in the long run can see someone through retirement.

While those at the top have managed to recoup some of the wealth lost during the financial crisis, middle-income families have not made any gains.

“The Great Recession destroyed a significant amount of middle-income and lower-income families’ wealth, and the economic ‘recovery’ has yet to be felt for them,” the report concluded.

Pew, which used data from the Federal Reserve, defined middle income as $44,000 a year for a family of four, while a yearly income of $132,000 for the same-size family pushed a household into the upper ranks. About one in five families qualifies for that higher status, while 46 percent occupy the middle range.

The median household net worth last year for those in the middle was $96,500, only slightly above the $94,300 mark it hit in 1983 (after being adjusted for inflation). A poor household actually had a higher median net worth 30 years ago ($11,400 in 1983) than it counted last year ($9,300).

Compare those results with the top fifth of income earners. In 1983, when the Fed began collecting the data, that group had a median wealth of $318,000; in 2013 it owned more than twice that.

Other economists have traced the growing wealth gap to a much narrower slice of the population. In a working paper recently released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman argued, “The rise in wealth inequality is almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0.1 percent wealth share, from 7 percent in 1979 to 22 percent in 2012.” The share of wealth controlled by the bottom 90 percent of Americans, they concluded, has steadily declined since the mid-1980s.

The report on Wednesday is the second in a week from Pew detailing how different groups of Americans are faring financially more than five years after the recession ended. The earlier study found a growing racial and ethnic wealth gap, with whites registering a median wealth of nearly $142,000, 13 times the net worth of blacks and 10 times that of Hispanics.

The latest report highlights how the fortunes of the middle class have eroded. And the results, the report said, “could help explain why, by other measures, the majority of Americans are not feeling the impact of the economic recovery, despite an improvement in the unemployment rate, stock market and housing prices.”

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4) Panel to Set Terms to End Abusive Reign at Los Angeles County Jail System
By

The Los Angeles County jail system, the nation’s largest, agreed Tuesday to impose sweeping changes, a year after guards were charged with regularly beating prisoners and supervisors in the Sheriff’s Department were accused of seeking to thwart a federal investigation into corruption and violence in the jails.

Under the agreement, dozens of new policies will be implemented by a panel that will hold wide sway over the administration of the jails. The three-person panel, appointed by a federal court, will be responsible for curbing a decades-old culture of violence administered by sheriff’s deputies who act as guards in the 15,000-inmate system.

During the past year, disclosures about corruption and brutality inside the jails have led to the conviction of seven sheriff’s lieutenants, sergeants and deputies on federal charges, the federal indictment of others, and a number of lawsuits won by inmates.One of the claims in the class action lawsuit that led to Tuesday’s agreement said that a group of deputies, acting as a de facto gang in the county’s jails, wore tattoos on the back of their necks and awarded one another points for breaking prisoners’ bones. That lawsuit was settled on Tuesday when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to enter into a federal consent decree; the agreement involved neither financial damages nor an admission of wrongdoing by the Sheriff’s Department.

Lee Baca, a former sheriff, who oversaw the jails but denied that the system had widespread problems, resigned abruptly in January. He said his decision to step down before completing his fourth four-year term was unrelated to the jail scandal.

The current sheriff, Jim McDonnell, who was elected in November, has pledged to reform the department and the jail system. He served on the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence that in 2012 issued a scathing report, finding that jail guards resorted to force against inmates far too often. The group, made up of former federal judges and prosecutors, also concluded that Sheriff Baca had failed to monitor or control the use of force in jails.

Though the county’s jails have for decades had a reputation for violence by sheriff’s deputies, most of the complaints had come from current or former inmates, whose credibility was challenged by the Sheriff’s Department. But a 2011 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, in which a prison chaplain and others described violence at the hands of deputies, led to the appointment of the civilian commission by the Board of Supervisors.

Tuesday’s agreement gave the federal panel the authority to develop a corrective plan and to monitor compliance. Its members, who will visit county jails regularly, were chosen by lawyers for Los Angeles County and representatives of inmates and former inmates.

Under the panel’s recommendations, put into effect after the Board of Supervisors’ vote, jail guards will undergo extensive retraining. Those found to have used excessive force will be fired — or will need a written explanation from the Sheriff’s Department explaining why they were not. Each county jail will be required to establish a unit to compile and document inmate grievances and requests.

Also on Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors approved a $350,000 payment to Derek Griscavage, a former inmate who said he had been knocked unconscious during a beating by four or five deputies on Christmas Day in 2010.

Lawsuits and various reports by watchdog groups into conditions inside the county jails paint a picture of extreme cruelty by guards and a lack of concern by their superiors.

Guards, according to the A.C.L.U. report, routinely abused handcuffed or otherwise non-resisting inmates with Tasers or pepper spray, employed chokeholds, punched and kicked prisoners and slammed their heads into walls.

Deputies also sought to provoke racial tensions to their advantage, using racial slurs against African-American inmates and encouraging gang members to assault rivals. In one case, guards punished an inmate by calling him gay and forcing him to walk naked down a jail hallway in full view of other prisoners, according to the A.C.L.U. report. The deputies then placed him in a cell with two gang members who beat him and sexually assaulted him for hours, sticking his head into a toilet while they raped him.

As the F.B.I. investigated a potential cover-up of abuses inside the jails, two sheriff’s sergeants went to the home of an F.B.I. agent and tried to intimidate her into providing them with details about the inquiry. The sergeants, Scott Craig, 50, and Maricela Long, 46, were sentenced to 33 months and 24 months, respectively, in federal prison for their part in the attempted cover-up.

Rebecca Fairley Raney contributed reporting.

 



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5) As Havana Celebrates Historic Shift, Economic and Political Hopes Rise
By , and VICTORIA BURNETT

HAVANA — They crowded around old, battered televisions in Havana and erupted in tears and applause at a spectacle they could scarcely imagine, let alone believe: President Raúl Castro, followed by President Obama, heralding a new era of relations between Cuba and the United States.

But for Armando Gutiérrez, who operates a small inn in Havana, what it really comes down to is beds. He needs better ones, and the usual scramble to find them and other supplies often comes up empty.

Now, Mr. Gutiérrez hopes the salvation of his business is at hand.

“It will be step by step for sure, but we are super happy, all of us without words really to express this history,” Mr. Gutiérrez said by phone — a phone he plans to replace with a better one if the United States makes good on its pledge to send more telecommunications equipment.As politically charged as Mr. Obama’s new stance may be in the United States, the sweeping changes he outlined on Wednesday will have a much more profound impact on Cuba — where isolation by the United States has fundamentally shaped the island’s economy, its politics and even its sense of national identity.

For decades, the American embargo of Cuba has been the political sword and shield of the Castros, held responsible for stifling their nation’s development, depriving their people of the most basic needs, and justifying their tight control over all aspects of society.

Now their powerful rival is promising significant expansions in travel, exports and remittances to Cuba, the biggest erosion of the embargo since it was imposed more than 50 years ago.

Experts say it will bring a flood of new money to the island, potentially injecting new life into the economy and, coupled with restored diplomatic ties, transforming relations between the two countries in ways not seen since a bearded rebel named Fidel came down from the Cuban mountains.

“This changes it all,” Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat who is close to the Castros, said from the island.

The question is whether the increased exchange will simply prop up Cuba’s moribund economy and government, or breed truly democratic change on the island, something current American policy has not achieved.

“For Cuba, this is an opportunity to speed up the processes of economic reform, political liberalization and openness,” said Arturo Lopez-Levy, a former Cuban intelligence analyst now at New York University.

Others were more skeptical, having seen previous thaws that did not produce dramatic change. They noted the 1996 American law known as Helms-Burton that prevents widespread commerce, and questioned Cuba’s willingness to open up as well.

“The regime will do everything in its power to have maximum control over foreign investment, forms of employment, high taxes, which have always been a great obstacle for economic and social development,” said José Daniel Ferrer, who coordinates dissident groups in Cuba. “Most of these resources will still be used to maintain a repressive apparatus.”

For many Cubans living through the incremental steps toward private enterprise that Mr. Castro set in motion, the changes announced by Washington and Havana are welcomed as much for their practical worth as for the historic sea change between governments.

The Cuban economy is wobbly, and it may only worsen as its chief patron, Venezuela, slides further into economic and political difficulties. Cuba’s economy grew only 1.4 percent this year, by the government’s own generally rosy statistics, despite significant changes, including allowing the buying and selling of property and cars.

More than 300,000 people have gone into business, and private farming has grown. The government recently said it would convert state-owned restaurants into private cooperatives, and it announced a plan last year to do away with a dual currency system that makes tourism and other goods expensive.

The hope among Cubans is that the new easing of tension with the United States will accelerate the halting steps toward a market economy, while still maintaining the social ideals of free education and health care embedded in what Mr. Castro described on Wednesday as a “prosperous and sustainable socialism.”

But in order for the changes Mr. Obama envisions to work, Cuba will have to loosen up in significant ways. The island’s vows to allow more private enterprise and foreign investment have been far more limited than many Cuban and international entrepreneurs have hoped for, with many saying it is almost impossible for them to participate.

“We have incredible problems,” said Nidialys Acosta, who set up a classic car services business with about 20 associates. “We have to jump through so many hoops.”

The survival of her business depends on two American exports: spare parts for her cars and visitors to ride in them. From now on, she hopes that both will be easier to come by. “I am jumping up and down for joy,” said Ms. Acosta from her home in El Cerro, a Havana neighborhood. “This is my Christmas gift.”

But while the Cuban government has called the expansion of private enterprise essential to reducing the inflated public sector that is burdening the economy, it does not recognize Ms. Acosta’s business or many others. Getting parts like headlamps, mirrors and tires for a 1959 Chevrolet Impala and paying for them is extremely difficult and expensive because they cannot be ordered from the United States, but have to be brought in person by people traveling between Miami and Cuba, she said. Doing financial transactions in Cuba is difficult, she said, because her business does not officially exist.

“The regulations make it almost impossible to thrive,” she said, adding that the government needed “to be more flexible.”

Mr. Obama’s potential willingness to remove Cuba from the State Department list of states that sponsor terrorism could have a big impact, according to Phil Peters, director of the Cuba Research Center in Alexandria, Va. He said the designation has severely complicated Cuba’s ability to do business with international banks, and Mr. Obama said Wednesday that the designation would be reviewed.

“It dramatically raises the cost of doing business” for Cuba, Mr. Peters said. “When Cuba does business internationally, they have to use banks and payment channels that have nothing to do with the United States.”

The Cuban economy has a long list of ailments, including a shortage of cash, brain drain, anemic foreign investment and a scarcity of food production, with nearly 80 percent of its food imported, said Ted Henken, a professor of Latin American studies at Baruch College in New York.

“Without the U.S. to blame,” he said, “the shortcomings of the Cuban government will be much more transparent. The Cuban government will no longer be able to blame the United States for the obstacles that entrepreneurs face. The government will have to be able to explain why it’s so hard to get a loan from a bank, get a cellphone, get access to broadband.”

“That’s going to be revealed for what it is,” he added. “This thing is going to cause rising expectations both outside and inside of Cuba.”

Many Cuban entrepreneurs said they welcomed the change, regardless of the bumps ahead. Niuris Higueras Martínez, founder and owner of popular Atelier, one of the private restaurants known as paladars, said “this news will bring what we need the most, market stability, affordable goods.”

The ability of Americans to use credit cards and debit cards — a specific point Mr. Obama made on Wednesday — would be a big boost, she said, though it would require some adjustment in a country where cash is king.

“All small-business owners like myself would need to learn a banking and credit culture that does not exist yet,” she said. “We will evolve, little by little. I don’t expect all of this to happen quickly, but we are definitely all ready to integrate ourselves in a new market economy.”

Damien Cave reported from Havana, and Randal C. Archibold and Victoria Burnett from Mexico City. Elisabeth Malkin and Paulina Villegas contributed reporting from Mexico City.




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6) How the High Cost of Medical Care Is Affecting Americans
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  • •A bill of over $40,000 for the 20 minutes it took a doctor to stitch a cut.
  • • An ambulance ride of only 200 feet that cost $3,421.
  • • A healthy, insured couple “slowly going under” because their premiums, co-pays and deductibles are now twice as high as their mortgage and food costs.
Over the past two years, the New York Times series Paying Till It Hurts has examined the high costs of ordinary medical care in the United States, exposing the reasons and chronicling the human fallout behind the nation’s extraordinary $2.9 trillion medical bill. In response, more than 10,000 readers shared individual experiences like the ones above.

But how does a collection of often heartbreaking, often startling tales reflect national experiences and attitudes? The available data did not answer all of my questions. So, using reader comments as a starting point, The Times designed a questionnaire with CBS News and conducted a national poll this month.

Here is a snapshot of the American experience with the cost of medical care.

Affording medical care is more of a hardship.

Reader comments and emails told of the increasing burden of health care costs on many Americans. T.R. Ellis, a freelancer in New York who has two healthy teenage daughters, wrote that the relentless rise of premiums has forced the family into a high-deductible plan, adding “For the first time, I will be paying medical bills by borrowing against our home.”.

The poll bore out readers’ experiences: Nearly half of respondents described the affordability of basic medical care as a hardship for them and their family, up 10 points from a year ago. While the Affordable Care Act has expanded insurance to millions of Americans, including those with existing conditions, it does not directly address cost. And cost is becoming increasingly problematic.

Out-of-pocket expenses have gone up.

Many readers, even those with good insurance coverage, were surprised by rising out-of-pocket expenses. Tina H. relayed how having her son’s broken arm set in a temporary splint in an emergency room this year “cost us $3,500 out-of-pocket, even with decent insurance.” The poll found that just more than half of Americans say the amount of money they and their family have paid out of pocket for health care and prescription drugs has gone up over the past few years, and about a third of Americans said they have gone up a lot.

Why? Partly because newer insurance plans — including policies under the Affordable Care Act — are designed to make sure patients have “more skin in the game,” so they will be more discriminating users of health care. Fixed co-pays, say $20 for a visit to a doctor, are being replaced by requirements that patients contribute a percentage of charges, which often ends up costing them far more.

Some Americans are less likely to get treatment because of cost.

Many readers wrote that they were avoiding attending to medical conditions or symptoms because they could not afford treatment or were worried about potential costs, even if they had insurance. “My employer-paid plan has a $5K deductible, so I don’t get medical services if I can help it,” said Ed, 61, from Winston-Salem, N.C. “I forgo blood pressure meds and colonoscopy,” he continued, even though his last test found polyps that should be monitored. While the Affordable Care Act mandates the coverage of certain screening services at no cost to patients, any resulting treatment means money out of pocket.

Americans wish their doctors would discuss costs.

Although doctors in many other countries post price lists in their offices, talking about money upfront is traditionally taboo in American health care, and many readers complained about being unable to discuss the issue with their doctors. Physicians say they are unprepared for the discussion and do not know how much treatments cost anyway, in part because of the uncertainties of insurance reimbursement.

But many patients say they need the information in order to manage health expenses. Here is what one reader from Atchison, Kan., had to say: “Even when I have asked a straightforward question like, ‘What is your standard cost for an initial office visit?' doctor’s offices have simply refused to comment. It is completely impossible for a medical consumer in this country to have any information at all until the bill is received.”

Insurance paperwork is a problem for many Americans.

As I interviewed patients for the series and requested bills and insurance statements, the burdens created by America’s medical billing system came up again and again. One patient, an attorney, said he had to take three days off from work to navigate bills after a two-day hospital stay. Visiting patients in their homes, I saw shelves containing binders brimming with bills and payment plans after only minor illnesses.

One reader, Aaron Bassett of Laconia, N.H., relayed his tradition during his wife’s pregnancy: “Once a week I have to spread out all the bills we’ve received on the dining room table and try to cross reference them with the health insurance paperwork” to determine which ones to pay.

Americans are eager for relief.

There seems to be widespread agreement that medical prices are burdensome for American patients, and new solutions are needed. But will the answer be a market-based approach involving greater price transparency? More regulation, focusing on price? A government-sponsored single-payer health system, like that in Canada? Or allowing younger people to join Medicare, the popular health insurance program for seniors? Many readers surprised me by saying they could not wait to turn 65. As one reader from Texas said: “I bought medicine in Mexico for 23 years before I became eligible for the promised land of Medicare.”


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7) South Carolina Judge Vacates Conviction of George Stinney in 1944 Execution
By
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/us/judge-vacates-conviction-in-1944-execution.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below

Calling it a “great and fundamental injustice,” a South Carolina judge on Wednesday vacated the 1944 murder conviction of 14-year-old George J. Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States in the last century.

Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule that the conviction of Mr. Stinney for the murder of two white girls in the town of Alcolu was wrong on the merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had failed in numerous ways to safeguard the constitutional rights of Mr. Stinney, who was black, from the time he was taken into custody until his death by electrocution.

The all-white jury could not be considered a jury of the teenager’s peers, Judge Mullen ruled, and his court-appointed attorney did “little to nothing” to defend him. His confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, she added, “due to the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.”

The order was a rare application of coram nobis, a legal remedy that can be used only when a conviction was based on an error of fact or unfairly obtained in a fundamental way and when all other remedies have been exhausted.

“I am not aware of any case where someone who was convicted has had the trial conviction and sentence vacated after they’d been executed,” said Miller W. Shealy Jr., a professor at the Charleston School of Law and one of the lawyers who worked on behalf of the Stinney family to have the conviction thrown out.

Ernest A. Finney III, the solicitor who had opposed the request on the state’s behalf — and a son of the first black State Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction — had argued in a two-day hearing in January that the conviction was valid under the legal system in place at the time. He did not return calls for comment.

At the hearing, in Sumter, Mr. Stinney’s two sisters testified, and a videotaped deposition from his brother was played. They spoke of the morning in March 1944 when the two girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, were seen riding bicycles by the pastures in rural Alcolu. The girls’ bodies were found the next morning in a ditch, their skulls crushed. Mr. Stinney was taken into custody within hours, and confessed to the murders that day.Two white men who had helped search for the girls also testified, and a cellmate of Mr. Stinney’s recounted conversations in which Mr. Stinney said he was innocent and had been made to confess. Less than three months passed between the murder and the execution; the trial and sentencing took less than a day.

Some of the problems of due process highlighted in the ruling were not rare in the Jim Crow South. Still, Mr. Shealy cautioned that this case was exceptional, due in part to Mr. Stinney’s age. Judge Mullen also emphasized that it should not become a standard resort for families grieving over decades-old injustices.

“The extraordinary circumstances discussed herein simply do not apply in most cases,” she wrote.

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8) Snow Is Down and Heat Is Up in the Arctic, Report Says
By

SAN FRANCISCO — The Arctic continues to warm faster than the rest of the globe, and with greater repercussions, scientists are reporting.

The new findings appear in the Arctic Report Card, first published in 2006 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and updated annually. The report card catalogs the wide-ranging changes caused by the rising temperatures, in large part driven by emissions of greenhouse gases.

Snow cover, measured since 1967, was below average and set a record low in April in the Eurasian region of the Arctic. Sea surface temperatures are rising, particularly in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of Alaska, where the waters are warming at a rate of almost one degree Fahrenheit per decade.

The extent of Arctic sea ice, which retreats in summer, did not hit a record low in 2014. But it was the sixth lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, and the scientists noted that the eight smallest extents have occurred in the last eight years.

“We can’t expect records every year,” Martin Jeffries of the Office of Naval Research, who edited this year’s report, said at a news conference here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “It need not be spectacular for the Arctic to continue to be changing.”

With less sea ice and more open water, sunlight entered more of the ocean, leading to a bloom of tiny marine plants. On land, the greenness of the tundra continues to increase, the report said, indicating fewer snow-covered areas.

The decline in sea ice also diminished the number of polar bears in western Hudson Bay in Canada from 1987 to 2011, but populations appeared to be stable elsewhere. Polar bears rely on sea ice to travel and hunt.

In Greenland, scientists observed that melting occurred on almost 40 percent of the ice sheet during the summer, and in August, the ice sheet reflected less of the sunlight than at any time since the beginning of satellite observations in 2000. In a separate news conference, scientists reported that NASA satellite measurements have confirmed that a darker, less reflective Arctic absorbs more heat and accelerates melting.

The mass of the Greenland ice sheet, however, remained steady from 2013 to 2014, compared with major losses two years ago. The report card also noted the unusual jet-stream wind pattern last winter, often labeled the polar vortex, that led to frigid weather across much of the United States but balmy temperatures in Alaska.The NASA reflectivity measurements found that since 2000, the amount of absorbed solar radiation in the Arctic during the summer months rose 5 percent. No significant change was seen for the rest of the planet. The Arctic areas with the greatest increases corresponded to the areas of declining sea ice. The change is equivalent to a 10-watt light bulb shining over every square meter, or 10.76 square feet, of the Arctic Ocean. In areas of greater warming, like the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, the increase is 50 watts per square meter.

Many scientists expect the Arctic to become ice-free in summer by the end of the century, with some predicting that it could happen much sooner.

“I think the important point about the models is not to dwell on the fact that they differ, but it is to dwell on the similarities,” Dr. Jeffries said. “They all point in the same direction.” The decline of ice will continue to affect life in the Arctic. It will also open up shipping lanes and the possibility of oil drilling. “You don’t have to go to zero for these to become a big deal,” Dr. Jeffries said.

Year-to-year variability also remains large, so much so that it is not certain that the extent of sea ice will shrink in the near future.

“If someone asked me if sea ice is going to go up or down in a decade, I’d flip a coin,” said Jennifer Kay, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado. But she also had no doubts about the long-term trend toward a warmer Arctic with less ice.

“If it’s 30 or 40 years out,” she said, “I have no need to flip a coin.”


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9) U.S. Frees Last of the ‘Cuban Five,’ Part of a 1990s Spy Ring
By and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

MIAMI — They were known as the Cuban Five, members of a spy ring that descended on South Florida in the 1990s and infiltrated exile groups and military installations.

They, along with other members of the ring, tried to make themselves indispensable to the exile groups whose secrets they stole. One of the operatives worked at the Naval Air Station in Key West, while another worked undercover in Tampa.

“They were very good,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez, the founder of the Movimiento Democracia, one of the exile organizations that was infiltrated. “When you trust somebody who you honestly believe is struggling for the good of your people, and suddenly you see that person was actually an agent of the oppressor against your struggle, of course you feel betrayed.”

Another operative, who managed to avoid being one of the Cuban Five by fleeing back to Cuba, had even married a local woman from church.Once their cover was blown in 1998 and federal agents smashed the ring, several of its members pleaded guilty to various charges, but the Cuban Five instead went to trial. They were convicted in 2001 and sentenced to long prison terms.

In Cuba, they were known as the Five Heroes. Their photographs were displayed on billboards throughout the country and their case became a cause célèbre at home. As the years passed and courts in the United States reduced the sentences of some of the men, Cuban officials clamored for their return, arguing that the infiltrations had been necessary to monitor potential terrorist actions planned against Cuba from Florida.

Various activists in the United States and abroad also began advocating their release. After two of the men served their terms and went back to Cuba, those efforts concentrated on the remaining three.

On Wednesday, those men — Gerardo Hernández, 49; Antonio Guerrero, 56, an American citizen; and Ramón Labañino, 51 — were released and flown to Cuba as part of the sweeping and extraordinary shift in the relations between Washington and Havana.

As part of that shift, Alan P. Gross, the American contractor detained in Cuba in December 2009 on accusations of being a spy, also returned home on Wednesday, landing at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

“I’m free,” he told his two adult daughters in telephone calls from the plane, shortly before speaking with President Obama.

It had been just hours since Mr. Gross, who spent most of the last five years locked in a cramped cell at a military hospital in Havana for at least 23 hours a day, had received word from his lawyer that he was to be released. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Mr. Gross, 65, had said.

Also released on Wednesday, according to a senior American official, was Rolando Sarraf Trujillo, a Cuban who had provided information that helped lead to the breakup of the spy ring and other Cuban espionage operations in the United States. His release was first reported by Newsweek.com.

Multiple news accounts in recent years have identified Mr. Trujillo as a former Cuban intelligence officer who has been in prison in Cuba on espionage charges since 1995. The accounts named him as a possible candidate to be freed if the United States and Cuba were ever to agree to a spy swap.

The news of the Cuban prisoners’ release was most significant in the case of Mr. Hernández, who had been serving two life sentences and was the only one of the group charged with conspiracy to commit murder. American investigators accused him of having previous knowledge of the Castro government’s plans to shoot down two exile organization planes that regularly flew missions near Cuba. The planes were shot down in 1996, killing four anti-Castro volunteers.

“They did not have to give up Gerardo Hernández,” said Maggie Alejandre Khuly, whose brother, Armando Alejandre Jr., was one of the volunteers who was killed. “It’s very poor negotiations when something is stolen from you — Alan Gross — and to regain stolen property, you have to give up more in return. Cuba is getting everything. It doesn’t make sense.”

Richard C. Klugh, a Miami lawyer who represented the five spies, said that two of his clients, Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Guerrero, were suddenly transferred last week.

“Gerardo was moved from an extremely violent, terrible prison to Butner, N.C., so there was some hope that was something going on,” Mr. Klugh said. “Gerardo is the one for whom this is the most emotional. He and his wife were essentially newlyweds and have been separated for 16 years, and it’s extremely emotional.”

Mr. Guerrero, 56, who was born in South Florida and studied engineering in Ukraine, was scheduled to be released in 2017. Mr. Labañino, 51, is a native of Havana who studied economics at the University of Havana. Originally sentenced to life plus 18 years, he was resentenced to 30 years, and was expecting to be released in 2024.

“I just spoke to them on the phone, and you cannot imagine the emotion,” Dimitri Dimis, a member of an international committee dedicated to obtaining the release of the men, said by telephone from Havana. “It’s amazing! We were just at the White House protesting in June. We had another one planned for 2015, and we will happily no longer have to plan any more protests.”

In 2009, Mr. Gross lived in Potomac, Md., and traveled to Cuba on a contract with the United States Agency for International Development for a project to improve Internet access for the Jewish community there. He took with him cellphones, wireless devices, computers and network equipment. On the final night of his fifth visit there that year, Mr. Gross was arrested and told he was being investigated for smuggling contraband.

On Wednesday, he called Mr. Obama’s surprise announcement that the United States would restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba “a game-changer, which I fully support.”

For Mr. Gross, a New York native who trained as a social worker and then traveled the world as an international development specialist, his release was the end of an ordeal that at times seemed hopeless.

“It’s good to be home,” he said at a news conference in Washington, appearing gaunt but cheerful in khakis and a blue shirt. “It’s the best Hanukkah I’ll be celebrating in a long time.”

In captivity, Mr. Gross lost more than 100 pounds, five teeth and most of the sight in his right eye, as well as some mobility, after being confined to an 8-and-a-half-by-11-foot cell. He contemplated suicide, telling recent visitors that he would not celebrate his birthday next year in Cuba.

Frances Robles reported from Miami, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Washington.





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10) Judge Sits Out Decision on Eric Garner Transcripts
By

The judge who oversaw the grand jury investigating the death of Eric Garner has recused himself from considering a request to release transcripts of the proceedings, citing the potential appearance of a conflict of interest involving his wife, officials said on Wednesday.

The judge, Justice Stephen J. Rooney of State Supreme Court on Staten Island, was to hear arguments on Friday on whether to release transcripts from the grand jury that decided this month not to bring criminal charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who placed Mr. Garner into a chokehold during an arrest that led to his death in July.

On Wednesday, the judge met with the parties seeking the transcripts — including the city’s public advocate and the New York Civil Liberties Union — and told them of the conflict: His wife, Kathryn K. Rooney, is a board chairwoman of the hospital, Richmond University Medical Center, whose emergency medical workers responded after Mr. Garner was fatally injured.With Justice Rooney’s recusal, the hearing was postponed until a new judge can be assigned and a hearing date set, probably in January.

The grand jury’s decision set off nationwide protests and brought immediate calls for the release of the full testimony.

The potential appearance of a conflict did not arise earlier for Justice Rooney, said David Bookstaver, the spokesman for the New York State court system, because judges do little more than swear in the jurors during a grand jury proceeding, “The conflict doesn’t arise until there is a request for the minutes themselves,” Mr. Bookstaver said.

Immediately after the grand jury’s decision, the Staten Island district attorney, Daniel M. Donovan Jr., requested that Justice Rooney release limited information; he did not request the transcripts. The judge did not recuse himself at that point, Mr. Bookstaver said, because of the limited nature of that request.

Justice Rooney, 66, in his response to Mr. Donovan, allowed for limited disclosures, among them that the grand jury had heard from 50 witnesses, including emergency medical personnel and doctors.

Reached by phone on Wednesday at his home, Justice Rooney declined to discuss the case, his recusal or its timing, but said he had never recused himself from a case before. “I don’t think I ever have,” he said. “This is the first time.”


Al Baker and Benjamin Mueller contributed reporting.


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11) Why Are Our Schools Still Segregated?
By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES

ON Aug. 1, five students in satiny green-and-red robes and mortarboards waited in an elementary school classroom to hear their names called as graduates of Normandy High School. This ceremony, held months after the official graduation, was mostly for students who had been short of credits in May.

One of those new graduates was Michael Brown. He was 18, his mother’s oldest son. He had been planning to start college in September.

Eight days later, he was dead, killed in the streets of nearby Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer in a shooting that ignited angry protests and a painful national debate about race, policing and often elusive justice. Many news reports after Mr. Brown’s death noted his graduation and his college plans. The implication was that these scholarly achievements magnified the sorrow.

But if Michael Brown’s educational experience was a success story, it was a damning one.

The Normandy school district is among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri. It ranks last in overall academic performance. Its rating on an annual state assessment was so dismal that by the time Mr. Brown graduated the district had lost its state accreditation.

About half of black male students at Normandy High never graduate. Just one in four graduates makes it to a four-year college. The college where Mr. Brown was headed is a for-profit trade school that recruits those it once described in internal documents as “Unemployed, Underpaid, Unsatisfied, Unskilled, Unprepared, Unsupported, Unmotivated, Unhappy, Underserved!”

Just five miles down the road from Normandy lies Clayton, the wealthy county seat where a grand jury recently deliberated the fate of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Mr. Brown. Success there looks very different. The Clayton public schools are predominantly white, with almost no poverty to speak of. The district is regularly ranked in the top 10 percent in the state. More than 96 percent of its students graduate. Eighty-four percent head to four-year universities.

Decades of public and private housing discrimination made St. Louis one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. A network of school district boundaries has, to this day, divided students in racially separate schools as effectively as any Jim Crow law.

Michael Brown’s education was not exceptional, then, but all too typical, and it illustrates the vast disparity in resources and expectations for black children in America’s stubbornly segregated educational system.

As hundreds of school districts across the nation have been released from court-enforced integration over the past 15 years, the number of what researchers call “apartheid schools” — in which the white population is 1 percent or less — has shot up. The achievement gap, narrowed during the height of school integration, has widened.

According to data compiled by the Department of Education, black and Latino children nationwide are the least likely to be taught by a qualified, experienced teacher; to be offered courses such as chemistry and calculus; or to have access to technology.

“American schools are disturbingly racially segregated — period,” Catherine Lhamon, head of the Education Department’s civil rights office, said in a speech in October.

Since Aug. 9, the day Mr. Brown’s lifeless body lay for hours under a hot summer sun, St. Louis County has come to illustrate the country’s racial fault lines in police conduct and the criminalization of black youth. But most black youth will not die at the hands of the police.

They share the fate that was already Michael Brown’s.

IN 1954, when the United States Supreme Court rejected the notion of separate but equal schools in its Brown v. Board of Education decision, St. Louis ran the second-largest segregated school district in the country.

After the ruling, school officials promised to integrate voluntarily. But the acceleration of white flight and the redrawing of school district lines around black and white neighborhoods allowed metropolitan St. Louis to preserve its racial divide. Nearly 30 years later, 90 percent of black children in St. Louis still attended predominantly black schools.

In 1983, a federal judge ordered a desegregation plan for the entire metropolitan area. At its peak, some 15,000 St. Louis public school students a year attended 16 heavily white suburban districts. Another 1,300 white students headed in the opposite direction to 27 new magnet schools in St. Louis.

The program left another 15,000 of St. Louis’s black students in segregated, inferior schools. But for the transfer students who rode buses out of the city, the plan successfully broke the deeply entrenched connection between race, ZIP code and opportunity. Test scores for eighth- and 10th-grade transfer students rose. The transfer students were more likely to graduate and go on to college. In surveys, white students overwhelmingly said they had benefited from the opportunity to be educated alongside black students. The St. Louis model was heralded as the nation’s most successful metropolitan desegregation program.

But from the moment it started, the St. Louis desegregation plan was under assault. The cost would eventually reach $1.7 billion. In 1999 the program was made entirely voluntary. Today, about 5,000 students get to escape the troubles of the St. Louis public schools — a small fraction of the number who apply for the privilege of doing so.

Incorporated in 1945 and covering fewer than two square miles, Normandy became a destination for St. Louis’s fleeing white working class.

Nedra Martin’s family was among the black strivers who began to make their way to Normandy in the 1970s. Ms. Martin, who still lives in Normandy and works in human resources at Walmart, said her parents settled in the town in 1975. They both worked in government jobs — her dad was a welder for the city, her mom an aide in a state group home. But as black families like the Martins moved in, “For Sale” signs went up and whites fled to new exurbs.

After 1970, black enrollment in the Normandy schools exploded, more than doubling within eight years to 6,200. By 1978, only St. Louis itself enrolled more black students than Normandy.

For years, Normandy’s schools struggled to meet minimum state requirements for student achievement. Then, in 2009, the state decided that the Normandy school district would absorb the ailing Wellston school district.

Wellston was also high-poverty, and held the distinction of being Missouri’s only 100 percent black school system. State officials had called conditions in Wellston’s schools “deplorable” and “academically abusive.”

But one thing was clear: Its students were not going to be absorbed into the high-performing, mostly white districts nearby. Michael Jones, a state board of education official, was blunt about the reason: “You’d have had a civil war.”

BY the time Michael Brown was a high school junior, he had spent most of his educational career in racially segregated and financially disadvantaged schools. Behind in credits, he entered Normandy High in the spring of 2013.

The state’s most recent assessment of Normandy’s schools was spectacularly bleak: Out of Missouri’s 520 school districts, Normandy, among the state’s poorest and 98 percent black, was marooned at the very bottom.

But last year, the Normandy district was thrown an unlikely lifeline. Its schools had failed so badly that the state had formally stripped it of its accreditation. And the Missouri State Supreme Court had just upheld a state law allowing students in unaccredited districts to transfer to accredited ones.

For Nedra Martin, who had a daughter stuck in Normandy’s failing schools, this was the miracle she had prayed for. Just like that, the state’s decision erased the invisible, impenetrable lines of segregation that had trapped her child. “I was elated,” Ms. Martin said. “Just elated.”

Parents in the school district that would have to take Normandy’s students were not. Normandy chose to provide transportation for its transfer students to attend schools in Francis Howell, an 85 percent white district 26 miles away. Officials there held a public forum to address community concerns. More than 2,500 parents packed into the high school gymnasium.Would the district install metal detectors? What about the violence their children would be subjected to, an elementary school parent asked. Wouldn’t test scores plummet? The issue wasn’t about race, one parent said, “but trash.”

Mah’Ria Pruitt-Martin, a rising eighth grader, was sitting in the audience that night with her mother. Hers was one of the few brown faces there, and the girl said she wiped away tears.

“It made me heartbroken because they were putting us in a box,” Mah’Ria said. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘Would you want some other parents talking about your kid that way?’ ”

In the fall of 2013, nearly 1,000 Normandy students — about a quarter of the district’s enrollment — switched to schools in accredited districts. More than 400 headed to Francis Howell.

Mah’Ria said that she was, in fact, welcomed into her new middle school by students and teachers. Despite the fears, recently released state data show that with the exception of one district, test scores in the transfer schools did not drop.

But there was a cruel twist. The state required any failing district whose students were allowed to transfer to pay the costs of their education in the adjoining districts. The payments drained Normandy’s finances. Normandy closed a school and laid off 40 percent of its staff.

“In order to save the district, they killed the district,” said John Wright, a longtime St. Louis educator who had spent stints as superintendent in both St. Louis and Normandy.

The state then announced that it was taking over the Normandy Public Schools district and reconstituting it as the Normandy Schools Collaborative. As a new educational entity, the district got a clean slate. It no longer was unaccredited, but operated as a “state oversight district.” The transfer law, the state claimed, no longer applied. One by one, transfer districts announced that Normandy children were no longer welcome.

Ms. Martin and other parents sued, asserting that the state had no legal authority to reconstitute the district to change its accreditation status. On Aug. 15, after the school year had begun in some districts, a state judge granted a temporary injunction allowing the plaintiffs to enroll their children in the transfer districts.

“Every day a student attends an unaccredited school,” the judge wrote, the child “could suffer harm that cannot be repaired.” The state is fighting the ruling, but most school districts have reopened their doors to the transfer students.

When asked whether black children in Missouri were receiving an equal education, Commissioner Chris Nicastro, the state’s top education official, paused, then inhaled deeply. “Do I think black children in Missouri are getting in all cases the same education as their white counterparts?” Ms. Nicastro said. “I’d have to say no.”

STUDENTS who spend their careers in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins, according to a 2014 study on the long-term impacts of school desegregation by Rucker C. Johnson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. They are more likely to be poor. They are more likely to go to jail. They are less likely to graduate from high school, to go to college, or to finish if they go. They are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods as adults. Their children are more likely to attend segregated schools, repeating the cycle.

“You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate?” Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, cried on the August day he died. “You know how many black men graduate? Not many.”

Michael Brown was buried in the old St. Peter’s Cemetery.

It lies next to Normandy High School.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is reporter at ProPublica. This is an excerpt from a longer article published by ProPublica.


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12)  Contesting Traffic Fines, Missouri Sues 13 Suburbs of St. Louis
By ELI YOKLEY and

ST. LOUIS — Missouri’s attorney general announced lawsuits against 13 of this city’s suburbs on Thursday, accusing them of ignoring a law that sets limits on revenue derived from traffic fines. The move comes after widespread allegations of harassment and profiteering by small municipal governments against the poor and minorities.

The attorney general, Chris Koster, a Democrat, spoke in downtown St. Louis and suggested that more sweeping changes could be needed to bring municipalities into line.

Since the racially charged protests over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in nearby Ferguson in August, demonstrators have frequently complained about a perceived hypervigilance to minor traffic violations in St. Louis County’s patchwork of 90 municipalities. Many of those cities have their own courts and police departments, but some are only a few square blocks in size and have populations smaller than some high schools.

“When traffic ticketing is used to promote public safety, that’s appropriate,” Mr. Koster said. “When traffic tickets are used to promote revenue, that’s inappropriate.” Such practices, he said, are “predatory.”

Ferguson, with roughly 20,000 residents, was not among the suburbs sued by Mr. Koster, and is large compared with many nearby cities in the northern part of the county, where many of the suburbs sued by Mr. Koster are situated.

State law requires towns to report the percentage of general operating revenue that comes from fines for traffic violations, and limits their potential to profit by requiring that proceeds beyond 30 percent be turned over to the state.

In Normandy, a city near Ferguson, 38 percent of the revenue came from fines and court costs. Mr. Koster sued five St. Louis municipalities that he said failed to file any report, four that filed a report without calculating a percentage, and four, including Normandy, that had revenue over the limit.

At its meeting here this week, the state-appointed Ferguson Commission discussed possible changes to municipal courts. The 16-member commission was asked by Gov. Jay Nixon to listen to residents and propose ideas for lasting social and political changes around St. Louis. The commission’s leaders appeared with Mr. Koster at Thursday’s announcement.

Many say young black men, who are pulled over at a higher rate than whites in some St. Louis County towns, are particularly affected by police officers’ enforcement of traffic laws and municipal judges who impose fines. If defendants do not pay their fines, they are sometimes jailed.

“We have heard across the board, there’s broad agreement, that the municipal courts create challenges for us,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, a Ferguson Commission chairman. “Municipal courts are a focal point between policing on the streets and community relations there and municipal fragmentation.”

Mr. Koster said he had not reviewed Ferguson’s records on traffic ticket revenue because the suburb’s report for the last fiscal year is not yet due.

Mayor Francis G. Slay of St. Louis, in a separate news conference Thursday, said that his city’s municipal judges could now take into account someone’s financial means when setting up payment schedules. Mr. Slay suggested that the region’s other courts, where some defendants also struggle to pay, could look into similar changes. But he cautioned that widespread implementation outside St. Louis city limits might be a challenge.

“If you want to get something done in the city, you know where to go,” Mr. Slay said. “In the suburbs, there’s a lot of municipalities.”

Though protests have continued on an almost daily basis, there are signs that St. Louis is returning to some level of normality. Governor Nixon allowed a monthlong state of emergency to expire on Wednesday, resulting in the withdrawal of the Missouri National Guard.

But even with the Guard gone, conversation continues about perceived racial inequities around St. Louis. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the Ferguson-Florissant School District, arguing that the district’s method of electing school board members dilutes the influence of African-American voters. Only one of seven board members is black, though African-Americans constitute a majority of the student body.


Eli Yokley reported from St. Louis, and Mitch Smith from Chicago.




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