Monday, December 01, 2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 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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Benefit Concert

at El Rio Bar

with important update on

MARISSA ALEXANDER'S CASE

(3158 Mission St., at Precita St.)

Tues., December 2nd, 8-11pm

 Who is Marissa Alexander?
On August 1, 2010, just nine days after giving birth to her daughter, Marissa Alexander was attacked by her abusive, estranged husband, at their shared home. As Marissa explained, “In an unprovoked jealous rage, my husband violently confronted me while using the restroom. He assaulted me, shoving, strangling and holding me against my will, preventing me from fleeing all while I begged for him to leave.” Marissa retrieved her lawfully registered gun and fired a warning shot upwards into a wall to prevent him from beating her. No one was injured by her warning shot.

Even though Marissa was acting in self-defense, she was arrested by Jacksonville police and charged with aggravated assault. She rejected a three year plea bargain in order to maintain her innocence and the right to defend her life. After only 12 minutes of deliberation, a jury of six convicted Marissa of three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with no intent to harm. Her sentence was set at 20 years.

Recent plea deal.

On Monday, Nov. 25, Marissa Alexander accepted a plea deal in Florida court that will allow her to return home after serving 65 more days, in addition to a period of monitoring at home after her release. She will be freed from prison in January 2015.

We in WORD and Marissa's supporters in Florida and across the U.S. have demanded her complete exoneration. She was acting in self-defense but the Florida prosecutor Angela Corey was aggressively pursuing up to a 60-year sentence if Marissa were to be found guilty in a new trial.

Given the possibility of an unjust conviction and lengthy sentence, Marissa's choice to accept a plea bargain is completely understandable. Most importantly, we stand with our sister and her decision that will allow her to return to her life and family.

Get involved. The struggle continues!

And yet, her case is not over. There is still the possibility the judge could impose a 5-year sentence for a second charge of aggravated assault.

All along this struggle for justice, it has taken the mobilizations, education and legal fight on Marissa Alexander's behalf that overturned her original conviction, won her a new trial and allowed her to accept a much lower sentence, even if unfair.

Let's not stop here! Come to the El Rio fundraiser and help us raise funds to send to Marissa Alexander's support campaign in Florida. She will need our solidarity until she is home free.

El Rio bar is at 3158 Mission. We'll enjoy the music of Heart of Orion, Vixen Noir, and Rebel Allianz  as we socialize and raise a glass to Marissa Alexander and WORD's work!

See you there!

WORD SF
Women Organized to Resist and Defend

Follow us on Facebook    Follow us on Twitter
www.DefendWomensRights.org
info@DefendWomensRights.org

Chicago: 773-828-9205 or chicago@defendwomensrights.org
Connecticut: 203-787-8232 or ct@defendwomensrights.org
Los Angeles: 323-394-3611 or la@DefendWomensRights.org
New York: 347-292-WORD (9673) or nyc@defendwomensrights.org
San Francisco: 415-375-9502 or sf@DefendWomensRights.org

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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!

Speakers and
Film: “Manufacturing Guilt”

7 pm Friday December 5th 2014
Theater at
La Pena Cultural Center
3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley
(just below Ashby Avenue)
$5 - $10 sliding scale at the door
(no one turned away)

Join the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio and Oakland Teachers For Mumia to hear how police are targeting political enemies with attempts to restrict free speech.

•  Keith Cook, brother of Mumia Abu-Jamal,

•  Cephus “Uncle Bobby” Johnson, uncle of Oscar Grant,

•  Eliot Grossman, former lawyer for Mumia, and

•  Spokespersons for Prison Radio, Oakland Teachers for Mumia, and the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

•  Film: “Manufacturing Guilt” — This riveting documentary makes it clear how cops and prosecutors framed Mumia Abu-Jamal for a murder he didn’t commit.
Join us!  We will discuss:


• 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

See you on December 5th!

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.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

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! < < <


War resister Sara Beining court martial set for Dec. 9 at Fort Carson, Colorado

sara beiningClick here to contribute to Sara Beining’s legal defense and prison fund
November 11, 2014. Courage to Resist and the Nuclear Resister
Facing a lengthy prison sentence, Army war resister Sara Beining is scheduled to be court martialed at Fort Carson, Colorado at 9am, December 9th, on two counts of desertion.
Supporters are encouraged to attend the trial, contribute to her legal and prison fund, and send her letters letter of support to: Sara Beining, A0305918 / Criminal Justice Center / 2739 E. Las Vegas St / Colorado Springs, CO 80906
Sara is a single mother and Iraq war veteran. She is being held in the civilian county jail prior to her military trial. Sara went AWOL a second time last summer after a nearly year-long delay in resolving the original charge that resulted when she left her unit at Ft. Hood in January, 2007.
Just over one year ago, September 14, 2013, Beining was stopped for a traffic offense and held on an outstanding military warrant, more than six years after she and her newlywed husband had together walked away from war service. She was briefly jailed, then given a plane ticket and orders to report back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where, she said, “I tried for another year to play the game” and be quietly processed out of the army as many other recent military refusers have been. But in her absence without leave, Beining had given birth to a daughter in September, 2008 and become an outspoken opponent of war.


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

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Update on the legal fight to #FreeRasmeaNow
Rasmea Defense Committee November 28, 2014

Ever since her unjust conviction on November 10th, Rasmea has been detained in St. Clair County Jail in Port Huron, Michigan. Three days later, her attorneys filed a motion calling on Judge Gershwin Drain to release her pending sentencing scheduled for March 10, 2015. Since our most recent update, the prosecution has filed a response to the motion, Rasmea’s lawyers have answered that filing, the National Lawyers Guild has filed its own friend of the court brief supporting Rasmea’s freedom, and hundreds of individuals and organizations from across the country have sent letters to the judge urging him to send Rasmea home.

We expect that Judge Drain will be deciding if Rasmea will be freed very soon, but are still calling on supporters to keep up the fight to #FreeRasmeaNow!

What you can do:

-- Many of you have already submitted letters urging the judge to release Rasmea. We are still collecting individual and organizational letters to him. Use the sample letter and send your letters to justice4rasmea@uspcn.org right away.

-- You have also sent letters to Rasmea, and this continues to be important. She has called her Chicago colleagues from jail a number of times, written letters, and has received a few visitors as well. Her spirits are high and she is looking forward to the next step in the fight for justice in her case. We encourage you to continue to send letters of support to Rasmea. (Please remember that prison authorities will read all of your letters.)
Rasmieh Odeh #144979
St. Clair County Jail
1170 Michigan
Port Huron, MI. 48060

-- Fundraise and contribute to Rasmea’s commissary fund and to her ongoing defense. Donate at www.stopfbi.net/donate. Commissary funds allow Rasmea to purchase food, blankets, writing materials, and other items to make her more comfortable in the jail. Expenses continue to mount for Rasmea’s legal defense and ongoing community organizing. We will file an appeal of this unjust verdict, and that will take resources.

-- Spread the word! When publicizing on social media, use the hashtags #Justice4Rasmea and #FreeRasmeaNow.

www.uspcn.org and www.stopfbi.net
Donate to Rasmea! today

http://www.stopfbi.net/events/11-10-14/be-detroit-nov-10-rasmea-odeh-and-final-verdict

 follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright © 2014 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414


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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) Greeks Go On Strike Over New Austerity Measures
By NIKI KITSANTONIS




2) At Macy’s Parade, Bands, Balloons and, This Thanksgiving, Protesters
By




3) Egyptian Judges Drop All Charges Against Mubarak
By and MERNA THOMAS




4) Protesters United Against Ferguson Decision, but Challenged in Unity
By




5) In New York Public Housing, Policing Broken Lights
By





6) Where Do We Go After Ferguson?
By MICHAEL ERIC DYSON




7) When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5





8) Egyptian Activists Protest Mubarak Verdict Online and Outside in a Sealed Tahrir Square
By





9) Crime and Punishment
By




10) Women Who Work
By




11) West Virginia Coal Country Sees New Era as Donald Blankenship Is Indicted
By




12) Churches Urge Healing, but Also Activism, After Stormy Week in Ferguson
By , and











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1) Greeks Go On Strike Over New Austerity Measures
By NIKI KITSANTONIS

ATHENS — Thousands of Greeks walked off the job on Thursday in a general strike to protest further austerity measures, while government officials wrangled with the country’s international creditors over economic policy and whether to extend Greece’s financial bailout.

The 24-hour walkout, the first general strike since April, shut down public services, forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and disrupted public transportation across the country.

At issue are proposed civil service layoffs and pension-system changes that the international creditors, known as the troika, have demanded. The European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have bailed Greece out financially twice since 2010, providing a total of 240 billion euros ($300 billion) in loans to help the country cope with its immense debts. In return, they have insisted that Greece impose strict fiscal discipline, including deep spending cuts and tax increases.Household incomes have since fallen by one-third and unemployment is running at 26 percent, while the country’s debt burden remains proportionally the highest of any country using the euro currency.

When Greece unveiled a draft 2015 budget last month that included proposals to ease the economic pain and stimulate the economy with a range of tax cuts, the government appeared to be riding a wave of popular opposition to austerity, which Germany has championed for all of Europe’s struggling economies. Popular protests against austerity policies have been seen in France, Italy, Spain and other countries, and government leaders have begun to push back against the European Union’s fiscal rules.

But as the international lenders took a hard line in recent talks with Athens, a sense has grown among Greeks that their country is being punished, and that Greece is being held to tight restrictions while countries like France and Italy were allowed to adopt 2015 budgets that bend or break the rules.

The European part of Greece’s bailout program is currently set to expire Dec. 31, and the monetary fund’s part in March 2016. At the Greek government’s request, face-to-face negotiations between Greek officials and the creditors over economic policy and a possible extension to the program resumed in Paris on Tuesday after a six-week hiatus. But the talks ended on Wednesday without an agreement.

To meet the creditors’ demands, Athens would have to modify some legal protections for workers and overhaul pensions as well as raising more tax revenue and suspending a program that helps financially struggling Greeks with their tax debts.

For its part, the Greek government maintains that the 2015 budget it has presented is already nearly balanced, for the first time in decades, and that further cuts are unnecessary. It bases its view in part on a forecast that the economy will grow by a solid 2.9 percent next year. A parliamentary vote on the budget is scheduled for Dec. 7.

Tensions between Greece and its creditors appeared to peak on Thursday. The country’s finance minister, Gikas Hardouvelis, told members of Parliament that the International Monetary Fund “appears indifferent to the political climate in Greece.”

He was apparently referring to growing antagonism between Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s coalition government and the leftist Syriza party. Syriza opposes any more austerity, and said it would block a scheduled presidential election in February, a move that would almost certainly lead to an early general election that recent polls indicate the leftists would win.

The leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, speaking at a protest rally in Athens on Thursday, said the crisis with the creditors “confirms in the most dramatic way that the strategy of submission and servitude to the irrational demands and desires of the troika is a dead end.”

Evangelos Venizelos, the deputy prime minister, said on Thursday that Greece’s exit from the European part of the bailout program might be delayed by “a few days or weeks” due to “technical reasons.” But he insisted that there would be “no new European program,” and that if necessary Greece could continue to draw on the monetary fund’s assistance.


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2) At Macy’s Parade, Bands, Balloons and, This Thanksgiving, Protesters
By

The usual helium-filled characters, like Snoopy and the pudgy Pillsbury Doughboy, were out in force at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday. But this year, the parade had an edge: Pockets of protesters marched intermittently along the route, seeking to call attention to a grand jury’s decision on Monday not to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., in August.

By midafternoon, as the balloons were deflated on Seventh Avenue, seven demonstrators had been arrested, some zip-tied by police officers as they tried to swarm a barricade into the parade route.

But the marching bands and bobbling balloons continued apace. While some people on social media were calling for an effort to halt the parade in response to the grand jury’s action, an issue that has set off demonstrations and marches across the country, for the most part the event was festive. Raw weather that seemed unable to decide whether to rain or snow seemed the most pervasive dampener, chilling the teenage “Spirit of America” dancers who rubbed their arms against the cold even as they boogied down Avenue of the Americas.

The wintry mix did not bother the four members of the Montfort family, visitors from Miami, as they bundled out of the Affinia Manhattan hotel in Midtown, eager to see their favorite float, Greg Heffley from “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”

“We wanted to see that weather; we came for that,” Stephane Montfort, 42, said. “In Miami, you don’t have this feeling of Christmas. You only see it in Home Depot.”

Tiffany White, 22, had braved the weather, traveling from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, to see the parade with eight members of her extended family — nine, she corrected, pointing to Harry the Yorkshire terrier, whose head was poking out of a pocketbook. Afterward, the whole family was going ice skating at Rockefeller Center. Harry, too. “We wanted him to enjoy the festivities,” Ms. White said.

As the snow came down on the corner of Avenue of the Americas and 34th Street, cheerleaders threw padded mats onto the pavement, setting up formations of burly men who threw ponytailed girls into the air in unison. Behind them, the band Kiss tootled down the street on a black float, in its trademark makeup.

At points, the musician Gene Simmons, known for his extraordinarily long tongue and tendency to waggle it, did so at the crowd. So too did Kalu Zuniga, 3, sitting atop his father’s shoulders as the float trudged by. But he was catching snowflakes, Kalu said.

As Papa Smurf deflated at the parade’s terminus on Seventh Avenue and spectators straggled home, about two dozen protesters threaded through the crowd, followed by six police officers on motorcycles. They carried signs in honor of Michael Brown and chanted his name.

The parade was over but the protesters did not seem ready to stop, even if it meant missing Thanksgiving dinner, said a protester who gave his name as Nkozi Weusi Shakur, 30. “Mike Brown’s not at Thanksgiving dinner,” he said.


Kenneth Rosen and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.


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3) Egyptian Judges Drop All Charges Against Mubarak
By and MERNA THOMAS

CAIRO — An Egyptian court dropped all remaining charges against former President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday, raising the possibility that he could go free for the first time since being removed from office in the 2011 uprising that defined the Arab Spring revolt.

The court dismissed murder charges against Mr. Mubarak and his widely reviled security chief in the killing of protesters challenging his rule — charges that once inspired crowds to hang the former president’s effigy from the lampposts of Tahrir Square in Cairo and captivated the region.

The court also acquitted the former president on corruption charges, along with his sons and a wealthy business associate, figures who had come to personify the rampant self-dealing of Mr. Mubarak’s 30-year-rule as much as the president himself.Coming five months after the inauguration of a new military-backed strongman, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, the decision amounted to the most sweeping repudiation yet of the claims of the Jan. 25, 2011, uprising that forced Mr. Mubarak from power with calls for democratic and accountable government.

“Today’s verdict indicates a very deliberate decision by the regime to continue on the path of rewriting the history that led to Mubarak’s ouster and closing the file on the Jan. 25 revolution,” said Hossam Bahgat, a journalist and human rights advocate who cheered on that revolt.

The council of generals who took power from Mr. Mubarak had feared a public backlash too much to ever allow the former president’s potential release, but Mr. Sisi’s government feels no such compunction, Mr. Bahgat said. “They are not afraid,” he said. “They are perfectly capable of letting him walk free and they feel no pressure to hold him accountable.”

Mr. Mubarak, 86, who has been held at a military hospital because of frail health, appeared in court on a stretcher in sunglasses, a blue necktie and sweater. He remained stone-faced as the chief judge, Mahmoud Kamel al-Rashidi, read the verdict, and only at the end did he allow himself a smile as his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, hugged and kissed him in celebration.

A short time later, Mr. Mubarak was photographed waving to admirers from a hospital balcony, and in a telephone interview with a supportive, pro-government talk show host the former president scoffed at an earlier court verdict that had been handed down against him. “I laughed when I heard the first verdict,” he said, and suggested that some conspiracy had been behind the 2011 uprising.

“They turned on us,” he said, and when asked if he meant “the Americans,” he replied that he could not explain over the phone. “I can’t tell you if it’s the Americans or who.”

Judge Rashidi, who led a panel of three judges, did not elaborate from the bench on their reasoning, pointing instead to a 280-page summary of their 1,340-page explanation of the case.

He insisted that the ruling “has nothing to do with politics.” He acknowledged the “feebleness” and corruption of Mr. Mubarak’s later years in power, and he lauded the rallying cry of the 2011 revolution — bread, freedom, and social justice.

But at times he sounded sympathetic to the former president as well. “To rule for or against him after he has become old will be left to history and the Judge of Judges,” he said.

He did not explain from the bench why he had dismissed the most serious charges, of responsibility for the killing of demonstrators. He acquitted Mr. Mubarak and his friend, the businessman Hussein Salem, of corruption charges involving allegations that they had conspired to sell Egyptian natural gas to Israel at below-market prices. And he acquitted Mr. Mubarak and his sons of charges that they were given vacation homes on the Red Sea as kickbacks in a land deal.

In May, Mr. Mubarak was sentenced to three years in prison in a separate corruption case, involving lavish, government-funded improvements to his and his sons’ personal homes. But he has now spent more than three years in custody on various charges, and under Egyptian law he has thus served the requisite time and could be released.

The prosecutor has the right to appeal the decision Saturday.

The first sessions of Mr. Mubarak’s trial were often rowdy and loud, with a courtroom full of human rights lawyers demanding retribution for decades of brutal autocracy as well as the dead demonstrators.

But the changed context was evident from the start. Judge Rashidi warned the courtroom that anyone who interrupted his reading of the decision would be sentenced to a year in jail, and the room stayed obediently quiet.

And instead of human rights lawyers, the courtroom was packed with Mubarak supporters, and as soon as the judge finished the room erupted in jubilation.

Commentators in the state-run and pro-government media suggested that it was time to move on from the difficult period of the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. “We have to turn this page, and the long state of argument that has lasted for years,” Dalia Ziada, director of the Liberal Democracy Institute and a supporter of Mr. Sisi, said in an interview.

But with Mr. Mubarak no longer on trial, she also suggested that it might be time to explore some of the theories of Mubarak supporters that the demonstrators had been shot by Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood dominated Egypt’s free elections but has been outlawed and suppressed under Mr. Sisi, and the pro-government media has sometimes floated improbable scenarios in which the Brotherhood was both participating in the demonstrations and shooting at the demonstrators.

“Who killed the protesters?,” she asked, suggesting that investigators examine “all sides accused, even those that were maybe not present in today’s case — for example, the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Legal experts said the ultimate outcome of the case had been increasingly clear, in part because of a flawed prosecution. Prosecutors originally appointed by Mr. Mubarak had rushed the charges to court in the months after his ouster Sto appease ferocious public demands for retribution.

But the murder charges were difficult to prove because of the many layers in the Egyptian military’s chain of command and the broad latitude for self-defense often given to the police. Lawyers for victims often complained that security forces were withholding evidence or refusing to cooperate.

The corruption charges appeared to have been thrown together hastily, without a thorough review of the many other allegations related to Mr. Mubarak’s rule.

Mr. Mubarak first faced the same charges in a trial that ended in 2012, while the transitional council of military generals was still in power. Evidently bowing to political pressure, that judge sentenced Mr. Mubarak to life in prison for the killings of the protesters but simultaneously acknowledged a lack of evidence. He acquitted everyone below Mr. Mubarak in the chain of command within the security forces, and threw out the corruption charges on technical grounds.

An appellate court threw out the verdict and ordered the retrial that resulted in Saturday’s verdict.

“The judges were basically collaborating with Mubarak from the first scene,” said Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential candidate. “It was not a trial, just a game they are playing with the people, to relieve them and then enslave them again.”

The political climate now, however, is starkly different. Some portion of the public may be nostalgic for the relative stability of the Mubarak era after three years of tumult, and those who disagree have far less room for public dissent.

Mr. Sisi, the former general who last year led the military takeover that ousted Egypt’s elected Islamist government, has consolidated power and surrounded himself with former Mubarak advisers.

State-run and pro-government media now routinely denounce the pro-democracy activists who led the 2011 uprising as a “fifth column” out to undermine the state. Some of the most prominent activists are in prison, and the Islamists who dominated the elections are now jailed as terrorists.

Mohamed Morsi, the deposed president and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now facing several trials in the same courtroom on various charges, some of which could carry the death penalty.

Many of the most widely despised figures of the Mubarak era, such as Ahmed Ezz, the ruling party power broker and business tycoon, have already been released from incarceration on charges brought against them in 2011 in the heat of the uprising.



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4) Protesters United Against Ferguson Decision, but Challenged in Unity
By

FERGUSON, Mo. — Demonstrators forced the temporary closing of the St. Louis Galleria mall after staging a mass “die-in” on Friday afternoon, lying on the floor for four and a half minutes of silence to represent the hours that Michael Brown was left on the street after a police officer shot him dead.

In Oakland, Calif., a group of people protesting a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer chained themselves to a train at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station, forcing officials to close the station and causing delays across the system.

And in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Seattle, hundreds of demonstrators flocked to the streets and retail locations with chants like, “If we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no profits,” to disrupt Black Friday shopping in the hopes of highlighting issues of race, class and law enforcement that they believe the Brown case laid bare.Waves of protests have popped up across the country after it was announced this week that a grand jury would not charge Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Mr. Brown, who was 18 and unarmed. But it is far from clear whether such actions will build into anything that brings a sustained social movement.

Groups are divided by aim and by geography, with goals of justice for Mr. Brown or an end to lethal police force against minorities, but the path for achieving them is neither clear nor easy.

Certainly there is an array of new coalitions with names like Lost Voices and Tribe X, and across the country this week there were calls to hold police departments accountable and increase social media organizing campaigns. Many of the demonstrations had a distinctly local flavor.

In Durham, N.C., for example, protesters gathered in a plaza where in September 2013 the police shot and killed Derek Walker, 26, a black man who was publicly brandishing a gun, apparently intending to use it on himself after losing a custody fight.

“The last time I was standing in this square, every one of us was tear gassed, including my daughter,” Serena Sebring, a field organizer with the activist group Southerners on New Ground told the crowd, to shouts of affirmation. She called on those attending to take the fight to city government, including running for five soon-to-be-vacant seats on a police civilian review board.

But here in Ferguson, where Mr. Brown’s killing sparked a broad outcry, the challenges of creating a movement out of students and anarchists, established civil rights leaders and digital networkers, and the angry and dispossessed were clear. Groups had planned for weeks how to maintain what they called militant but nonviolent protests if Officer Wilson was not indicted.

Yet the demonstrations quickly turned destructive, with stores set aflame and looted on the night of the grand jury’s decision not to indict him was announced.

The violence fulfilled the worst fears of Patricia Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman here. Until recently, she was one of the people standing between the police line and the protesters, urging calm on both sides. After the August shooting, she used to try to broker deals for the demonstrators on the front lines. She has since pulled back, saying that lawless actors have hurt the peaceful movement.

She became turned off, she said, several weeks ago after she called out several activists at a protest planning meeting who she said attacked a young man they accused of live-streaming the private session. At a protest a few days later, several members of the group she had criticized surrounded her and threatened her, she said. Only four people came to her defense when they circled her, she said.

“If we can’t stand up to the punks and the hoodlums who are giving the protest a bad name, you’re not ready to stand up to the police,” said Ms. Bynes, 35. “You throw a rock and hide behind a peaceful crowd, you’re a coward.”

Ms. Bynes has urged peaceful protesters to avoid the evening demonstrations because they became too dangerous, and to instead focus on other ways to effect change. She has started a petition for a performance audit of the City of Ferguson. She said she planned to be active in campaigning for the next Ferguson municipal elections next year. And she hoped to push more people to become active in their city and county councils.

“If they’ve been doing the same tactics for 100 days and absolutely nothing has changed, you’ve got to change the tactics,” she said, reflecting on the near nightly protests that have taken place here since Mr. Brown was killed on Aug. 9.

Part of the challenge for activists here and across the country is whether they can or want to agree on a concrete agenda, whether it be civilian review boards for police, or special prosecutors, or a push for more minority police officers.

Getting there will also require bridging generational and tactical divides, activists said.

On the one hand, a new crop of young activist groups has brought energy and attention since Mr. Brown’s killing. On the other hand, it is the older, more established civil rights leadership that has the resources and knowledge of how to push concrete measures. Yet some of the younger activists remain skeptical of their older counterparts and of participating in traditional politics. There also remain questions of how militant or peaceful the groups want to be.

“It’s been a little disjointed,” said Alisha Sonnier, 19, the president of Tribe X, a youth activist group in the St. Louis region that formed after Mr. Brown’s death. “At the end of the day all of us are dealing with similar feelings and similar emotions. There’s a disjointment in how we feel we should go about it.”

On Friday afternoon, Ms. Sonnier’s organization led about 100 protesters through the Galleria in suburban Richmond Heights. They chanted and sang for about an hour, adjusting their slogans and lyrics to fit the moment (“Hands up! Don’t shop!” for instance, and “No true bill set our soul on fire,” sung to the tune of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” from “The Christmas Song.”) Dozens of police and security personnel trailed the protesters but did not make any arrests. Several stores closed before the management eventually closed the entire mall. Similar protests led to closings at two other area malls later Friday.“One of the few ways to be heard and have people listen to you is to have an economic impact,” Ms. Sonnier said. “If you want to really affect people, especially those who are in power, you got to hit their pocket. We as a people cannot allow people to keep making money and a business to go on, and we can’t even get justice when our people die.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was planning to start a countdown to a decision by the grand jury in New York that is looking into the case of Eric Garner, 43, who died after being placed in a chokehold while the police attempted to arrest him for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally on July 17, said he had learned a lesson from the Trayvon Martin case.

After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of the unarmed Florida teenager, Mr. Sharpton said, his organization left it to local groups to fight to overturn the state’s so-called Stand Your Ground self-defense law. But those efforts faded.

“We’re working with a lot of the young groups in Ferguson,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We’re not letting it now just dissipate into groups that will not be there in 30, 90 days. It has to be connected to a broader agenda.”

Mr. Sharpton said groups would be pushing for the creation of national guidelines by the Justice Department for investigating officers when they use deadly force, which would be a mechanism to take investigations of police shootings out of the hands of local prosecutors who are close to the departments.

The N.A.A.C.P. was planning to start a 120-mile seven-day march from Ferguson to the Missouri capital, Jefferson City, on Saturday.

But so far the nighttime protests in Ferguson have mostly been spontaneous, angry standoffs in front of the police station, with demonstrators shouting at the officers.

Older leaders needed to give the young ones room to vent and be angry, and carefully go about supporting their cause in a way that does not lecture them, said Michael McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition and executive director of Veterans for Peace.

“It’s a matter of supporting what they’re doing, instead of trying to mold it,” he said.


Mitch Smith contributed reporting from Richmond Heights, Mo., and Jonathan M. Katz from Durham, N.C.




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5) In New York Public Housing, Policing Broken Lights
By

Four days before a grand jury refused to indict the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown during an encounter in Ferguson, Mo., in August, Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old man, died as a result of a law-enforcement bullet in the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York, in Brooklyn.

Mr. Gurley, followed by his girlfriend, was heading down the stairs, having given up on an interminably slow elevator, when he fell into the path of Peter Liang, a rookie police officer of roughly the same age. Mr. Liang was conducting what is known in Police Department vernacular as a “vertical,” a descending check of rooftops, stairwells and halls in public housing to ensure that criminals aren’t conspiring there.Though Police Commissioner William J. Bratton was quick to call the shooting an accident — and quick to acknowledge the victim as “a total innocent” — it will be left to an investigation to reveal precisely what happened. What we do know is that when the two men entered it, the stairway was pitch black; a light meant to illuminate it had long been inoperative.

Tragedies resulting from the impulsive miscalculations and failures of preventive policing — the death of Eric Garner, suspected of selling cigarettes illegally, from a chokehold on Staten Island is another recent and horrific example — often lead to criticisms and reassessments of the “broken windows” theory, the idea that small-scale disorder must be combated to foreclose the possibility of greater menace and disruption.

One of the issues raised by Mr. Gurley’s death isn’t necessarily that “broken windows” has gone too far, the common refrain, but rather that in certain instances its most literal message has been fatally misunderstood or ignored.

We have come to think of “broken windows” in terms of the need to make arrests for minor offenses, the imperative to get rid of squeegee men and other avatars of nuisance. But at the heart of the philosophy is the notion that ruined things — broken windows, cracked sidewalks, littered pathways and so on — must get fixed. If glass is left shattered, for instance, rather than quickly replaced, vandals will break more of it. Broadly speaking, physical decay begets the moral kind; appearances must be maintained for civility to cohere.

Ironically, over the past two decades, civic leaders most in thrall to the theory have been those least eager to prioritize the problem of deterioration in the urban public housing system. In the five-year period through 2013, as New York City’s crime rate further declined or remained stable, the crime rate in public housing rose 22.5 percent. That period coincided with a long reign of neglect of the buildings of the New York City Housing Authority. In January of last year, as the end of his term approached, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg vowed to expedite repairs, and he did, but a backlog of 420,000 had accrued.

About that time, I met a woman named Mabel Spence, a longtime resident of the Tilden Houses in Brooklyn, who told me that several years earlier, she had taken to sitting on the toilet with an umbrella because the leaks in her bathroom had become so severe. She had to go to court to ultimately get the Housing Authority to fix the damage. It was not uncommon for residents to call with problems and be told the fixes could not be made for 12 months or more.

Earlier this year, the Community Service Society, a nonprofit organization that studies poverty, released a report detailing the financial and physical decline of the city’s public housing system. Analyzing data from the Housing Vacancy Survey on complaints about leaks, cracked walls, pestilence and other issues from low-income households across the city, researchers found a pattern of escalating degeneration in public housing. In both public and private rental units, the proportion of households that reported four or more problems from 2002 to 2008 stood at 12 percent. From 2008 to 2011, however, the number of reports of what the study called “multiple deficiencies” nearly doubled in apartments belonging to the Housing Authority.In July, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an initiative to reduce violent crime in the city’s public housing developments; his plan made a point of connecting safety to physical improvements. Although the overall crime rate in public housing is down by 5 percent during the first year of the mayor’s term, shootings have increased 16 percent. Of the $210 million committed to the initiative, which focuses on the 15 developments responsible for 20 percent of all violent crime in public housing, $122 million will be put toward maintenance and repairs, and more than $51 million toward security-enhancement measures like exterior lighting.

Bureaucracies are not known for producing 100 percent efficiency, but the de Blasio administration seems to recognize that the debate around crime-solving should not focus solely on the value of different policing styles.

Mr. Gurley’s death has renewed discussion about the efficacy of vertical patrols, a practice law enforcement finds essential and critics of aggressive policing have found problematic. As it happens, the number of these patrols conducted in public housing has decreased 20 percent this year. Some lives might ultimately be saved by the mere effort of getting on a ladder and fixing the lights.


Email: bigcity@nytimes.com



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6) Where Do We Go After Ferguson?
By MICHAEL ERIC DYSON


WASHINGTON — WHEN Ferguson flared up this week after a grand jury failed to indict the white police officer Darren Wilson for killing the unarmed black youth Michael Brown, two realities were illuminated: Black and white people rarely view race in the same way or agree about how to resolve racial conflicts, and black people have furious moral debates among ourselves out of white earshot.

These colliding worlds of racial perception are why many Americans view the world so differently, and why recent comments by President Obama and the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani cut to the quick of black identity in America.

From the start, most African-Americans were convinced that Michael Brown’s death wouldn’t be fairly considered by Ferguson’s criminal justice system. There were doubts that the prosecution and defense were really on different teams. The prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, looked as if he were coaching an intramural scrimmage with the goal of keeping Officer Wilson from being tackled by indictment.

The trove of documents released after the grand jury’s decision included Officer Wilson’s four-hour testimony, in which the 6-foot-4-inch, 210-pound cop said that his encounter with the 6-foot-4-inch, 292-pound teenager left him feeling like “a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” He used the impersonal pronoun “it” when he said that Michael Brown looked like a “demon” rushing him. To the police officer and to many whites, Michael Brown was the black menace writ large, the terrorizing phantom that stalks the white imagination.

These clashing perceptions underscore the physics of race, in which an observer effect operates: The instrument through which one perceives race — one’s culture, one’s experiences, one’s fears and fantasies — alters in crucial ways what it measures.

The novelist Ann Petry vividly captured this observer effect in her 1946 novel “The Street,” in which the African-American protagonist, Lutie Johnson, remarks that racial perceptions of blacks “depended on where you sat.” She explains that if “you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what any Negro looked like,” because “the Negro was never an individual” but “a threat, or an animal, or a curse.”After a black man is killed in a failed robbery, she notes that a reporter “saw a dead Negro who had attempted to hold up a store, and so he couldn’t really see what the man lying on the sidewalk looked like.” Instead, he saw “the picture he already had in his mind: a huge, brawny, blustering, ignorant, criminally disposed black man.”

Our American culture’s fearful dehumanizing of black men materialized once again when Officer Wilson saw Michael Brown as a demonic force who had to be vanquished in a hail of bullets.

IT is nearly impossible to convey the fear that strikes at the heart of black Americans every time a cop car pulls up. When I was 17, my brother and I and a childhood friend were pulled over by four Detroit cops in an unmarked police vehicle. This was in the mid-70s, in the shadow of the infamous Detroit Police Department task force called Stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), which was initiated after the 1967 riots. The unit lived up to its name and routinely targeted black people.

As we assumed the position against the car, I announced to one of the plainclothes officers that I was reaching into my back pocket to fish the car’s registration from my wallet. He brought the butt of his gun sharply across my back and knocked me to the ground, promising, with a racial epithet, that he’d put a bullet through my head if I moved again. When I rose to my feet, cowering, showing complete deference, the officer permitted me to show the car’s registration. When the cops ran the tags, they concluded what we already knew: The car wasn’t stolen and we weren’t thieves. They sent us on without a hint of an apology.My recent dust-up with Mr. Giuliani on national television tapped a deep vein of racially charged perception. In a discussion on “Meet the Press” of Ferguson and its racial fallout, Mr. Giuliani steered the conversation down the path of a conservative shibboleth: that the real problem facing black communities is not brutality at the hands of white cops but brutality in the grips of black thugs. He cited the fact that 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black people; I argued that these murderers often go to jail, unlike the white cops who kill blacks with the backing of the government. What I didn’t have time to say was that 84 percent of white homicide victims are killed by white people, and yet no language of condemnation exists to frame a white-on-white malady that begs relief by violent policing.

This doesn’t mean that black people aren’t weary of death ravaging our communities. I witnessed it personally as I sat in a Detroit courtroom 25 years ago during the trial of my brother Everett for second-degree murder, and though I believe to this day that he is innocent, I watched him convicted by an all-black jury and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.

Many whites who point to blacks killing blacks are moved less by concern for black communities than by a desire to fend off criticism of unjust white cops. They have the earnest belief that they are offering new ideas to black folk about the peril we foment in our own neighborhoods. This idea has also found a champion in Bill Cosby, who for the past decade has levied moral charges against the black poor with an ugly intensity endorsed by white critics as tough love and accepted by most black journalists as homegrown conservatism.

But Mr. Cosby’s put-downs are more pernicious than that. How could one ever defend his misogynistic indictment of black women’s lax morals and poor parenting skills? “Five, six children, same woman, eight, 10 different husbands or whatever,” he liked to recite. “Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this is; might be your grandmother.”

Journalistic mea culpas are now accompanying Mr. Cosby’s Shakespearean fall from grace. He has been recast as a leering king who is more sinner than sinned against as the allegations of drugging and raping women pile up. But these writers avoid mentioning the sexist blinders that kept them from seeing how hateful Mr. Cosby was toward black women long before he was accused of abusing mostly white women.

Bill Cosby didn’t invent the politics of respectability — the belief that good behavior and stern chiding will cure black ills and uplift black people and convince white people that we’re human and worthy of respect. But he certainly gave it a vernacular swagger that has since been polished by Barack Obama. The president has lectured black folk about our moral shortcomings before cheering audiences at college commencements and civil rights conventions. And yet his themes are shopworn and mix the innocuous and the insidious: pull your pants up, stop making racial excuses for failure, stop complaining about racism, turn off the television and the video games and study, don’t feed your kids fried chicken for breakfast, be a good father.

As big a fan as he is of respectability politics, Mr. Obama is the most eloquent reminder that they don’t work, that no matter how smart, sophisticated or upstanding one is, and no matter how much chastising black people pleases white ears, the suspicions about black identity persist. Despite his accomplishments and charisma, he is for millions the unalterable “other” of national life, the opposite of what they mean when they think of America.Barack Obama, like Michael Brown, is changed before our eyes into a monstrous thing that lacks humanity: a monkey, a cipher, a black hole that kills light. One might expect the ultimate target of this black otherness to have sympathy for its lesser targets, who also have lesser standing and lesser protection, like the people in Ferguson, in Ohio, in New York, in Florida, and all around the country, who can’t keep their unarmed children from being cut down in the street by callous cops who leave their bodies to stiffen into rigor mortis in the presence of horrified onlookers.

President Obama’s clinical approach to race was cemented after the 2009 Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident — in which the Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him for breaking into his own house were invited to the White House to commune over a beer — convinced him that he should talk race only when his hand was forced.

He has employed a twin strategy: the “heroic explicit,” in which he deliberately and clearly assails black moral failure and poor cultural habits, and the “noble implicit,” in which he avoids linking whites to social distress or pathology and speaks in the broadest terms possible, in grammar both tentative and tortured, about the problems we all confront. It’s an effort that hinges on false equivalencies between black and white and the mistaken identification of effect for cause.

MR. OBAMA spoke twice in the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision. He spoke Monday night about America as a nation of laws and said that we must respect the jury’s conclusion, even if we don’t agree with it, and make progress by working together — not by throwing bottles, smashing car windows or using anger as an excuse to vandalize property or hurt anyone.

On Tuesday, the president doubled down on his indictment of “criminal acts” and declared, “I do not have any sympathy” for those who destroy “your own communities.” While he avoided saying so, it was clear that his remarks were directed at the black people who looted and rioted in Ferguson. But their criminal activity is the effect of going unrecognized by the state for decades, a crime in itself. As for the plague of white cops who kill unarmed black youth, the facts of which are tediously and sickeningly repetitive and impose a psychological tariff on black minds, the president was vague, halting and sincerely noncommittal.

Instead, he lauded the racial progress that he said he had witnessed “in my own life,” substituting his life for ours, and signaled again how his story of advancement was ours, suggesting, sadly, that the sum of our political fortunes in his presidency may be lesser than the parts of our persistent suffering. Even when he sidled up to the truth and nudged it gently — “these are real issues,” the president acknowledged — he slipped back into an emotional blandness that underplayed the searing divide, saying there was “an impression that folks have” about unjust policing and “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.”

Whose impression is it, though that word hardly captures the fierce facts of the case? Who feels it? Who is the subject? Who is the recipient of the action? Mr. Obama’s treacherous balancing act between white and black, left and right, obscures who has held the power for the longest amount of time to make things the way they are. This is something, of course, he can never admit, but which nevertheless strains his words and turns an often eloquent word artist into a faltering, fumbling linguist. President Obama said that our nation was built on the rule of law. That is true, but incomplete. His life, and his career, too, are the product of broken laws: His parents would have committed a crime in most states at the time of their interracial union, and without Martin Luther King Jr. breaking what he deemed to be unjust laws, Mr. Obama wouldn’t be president today. He is the ultimate paradox: the product of a churning assault on the realm of power that he now represents.

No wonder he turns to his own body and story and life to narrate our bodies, our stories and our lives. The problem is that the ordinary black person possesses neither his protections against peril nor his triumphant trajectory that will continue long after he leaves office.

More than 45 years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded that we still lived in two societies, one white, one black, separate and still unequal. President Lyndon B. Johnson convened that commission while the flames that engulfed my native Detroit in the riot of 1967 still burned. If our president and our nation now don’t show the will and courage to speak the truth and remake the destinies of millions of beleaguered citizens, then we are doomed to watch the same sparks reignite, whenever and wherever injustice meets desperation.

Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown and the author of a forthcoming book on President Obama and race.


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7) When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5


WE Americans are a nation divided.

We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America.

The model should be the 9/11 commission or the Warren Commission on President Kennedy’s assassination, and it should hold televised hearings and issue a report to help us understand ourselves. Perhaps it could be led by the likes of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey.

We as a nation need to grapple with race because the evidence is overwhelming that racial bias remains deeply embedded in American life. Two economists, Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers, found that white N.B.A. referees disproportionally call fouls on black players, while black refs call more fouls on white players. “These biases are sufficiently large that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games,” Price and Wolfers wrote.If such racial bias exists among professional referees monitored by huge television audiences, imagine what unfolds when an employer privately weighs whom to hire, or a principal decides whether to expel a disruptive student, or a policeman considers whether to pull over a driver.

This “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series is a call for soul-searching. It’s very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human. Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, according to one study, so we are often clueless.

What we whites notice is blacks who have “made it” — including President Obama — so we focus on progress and are oblivious to the daily humiliations that African-Americans endure when treated as second-class citizens.

“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” a 23-year-old black man wrote in May 1992. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall, they follow me.”

He described an incident when he was stopped by six police officers who detained him, with guns at the ready, and treated him for 30 minutes as a dangerous suspect.

That young man was future Senator Cory Booker, who had been a senior class president at Stanford University and was a newly selected Rhodes Scholar. Yet our law enforcement system reduced him to a stereotype — so young Booker sat trembling and praying that he wouldn’t be shot by the police.

My sense is that part of the problem is well-meaning Americans who disapprove of racism yet inadvertently help perpetuate it. We aren’t racists, yet we buttress a system that acts in racist ways. It’s “racism without racists,” in the words of Eduardo Bonillo-Silva, a Duke University sociologist.

This occurs partly because of deeply embedded stereotypes that trick us, even when we want to be fair. Researchers once showed people sketches of a white man with a knife confronting an unarmed black man in the subway. In one version of the experiment, 59 percent of research subjects later reported that it had been the black man who held the knife.

I don’t know what unfolded in Ferguson between Michael Brown, a black teenager, and Darren Wilson, a white police officer. But there is a pattern: a ProPublica investigation found that young black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men.If you’re white, your interactions with police are more likely to have been professional and respectful, leaving you trustful. If you’re black, your encounters with cops may leave you dubious and distrustful. That’s why a Huffington Post/YouGov poll found that 64 percent of African-Americans believe that Officer Wilson should be punished, while only 22 percent of whites think so.

That’s the gulf that an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help bridge just a little. In 1922, a Chicago Commission on Race Relations (composed of six whites and six blacks) examined the Chicago race riots of 1919. More recently, President Clinton used an executive order to impanel an advisory board on race that focused on how to nurture “one America.”

A new commission could jump-start an overdue national conversation and also recommend evidence-based solutions to boost educational outcomes, improve family cohesion and connect people to jobs.

White Americans may protest that our racial problems are not like South Africa’s. No, but the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.

Most troubling, America’s racial wealth gap, pay gap and college education gap have all widened in the last few decades.

There are no easy solutions. But let’s talk.



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8) Egyptian Activists Protest Mubarak Verdict Online and Outside in a Sealed Tahrir Square
By

In the hours after an Egyptian court dropped all remaining charges against former President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday, activists who supported the uprising that drove him from power in 2011 jeered the ruling online and in the streets near Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which was closed by the security forces.

After a judge acquitted Mr. Mubarak of corruption and dismissed murder charges against him for the killing of hundreds of protesters, relatives of those killed by the security forces in 2011 were outraged, but dozens of the former president’s supporters applauded in the courtroom and others cheered his return to the military hospital where he has been held.

As journalists and bloggers shared bitter comments posted on social networks by despairing revolutionaries, small numbers of protesters, including relatives of those killed in clashes with the security forces in 2011, gathered in front of armored vehicles outside the square, to chant against military rule.

Activists and reporters documented the demonstration near Tahrir, which grew until the protesters were dispersed with tear gas and shotgun pellets fired by the police after dark.

Video streamed to Bambuser from the phones of activists over the course of the evening, and uploaded to YouTube by news sites, showed the swelling crowd outside the Egyptian Museum at Tahrir’s edge chanting “Freedom!” and “The People Want to Topple the Regime!” before the authorities moved to disperse the demonstration.

While some Egyptians, like the rights activist Hossam Bahgat, parsed the legal basis for the ruling in Mr. Mubarak’s favor, others, including the blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy, suggested that the outcome was entirely expected from a judiciary that remained intact after the revolution.

Among those celebrating on Saturday was Mona al-Beheiri, a supporter of the old guard who achieved Internet fame earlier this year for lecturing President Obama about his supposed interference in Egyptian affairs by working with the president elected to succeed Mr. Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi.

Some activists, like the writer Ahdaf Soueif, pledged to continue the struggle for the 2011 revolution’s aims, in honor of the hundreds of protesters killed that year.

Watching from afar, the Syrian blogger who writes as Edward Dark called the ruling in favor of Mr. Mubarak, who was toppled in an uprising that began on Jan. 25, 2011, a clear sign that the wave of uprisings across the Arab world had failed.


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9) Crime and Punishment
By

One thing the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo., has sent back to the surface is just how difficult it is to have cross-racial discussions about crime and punishment in this country. That is largely because, perceptually and experientially, we live in vastly different worlds, worlds in which phrases like “bad choices,” “personal responsibility” and “tailspin of culture” must battle for primacy with “structural inequity,” “systemic bias” and “culture of oppression.”

Let’s begin to unpack this by pointing to what the data say about our distortions of perception when it comes to crime.

A September report by the Sentencing Project found that “white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color, and associate people of color with criminality.” For some crimes, the overestimation was “by 20-30 percent.”

This is particularly significant in light of the fact that Americans overestimate the presence of crime in general. As a Gallup report pointed out recently: “For more than a decade, Gallup has found the majority of Americans believing crime is up, although actual crime statistics have largely shown the crime rate continuing to come down from the highs in the 1990s and earlier.”

If we continue to think that crime is up, data be damned, and we associate people of color with that crime, of course our concepts of guilt, innocence, veracity and compassion in encounters between police and people of color will be affected.

This is not to say that statistics don’t tell us that crime rates are disproportionately high in minority neighborhoods, but rather than ascribe that to some racial pathology — and doing so is racist on its face — we must consider the intersection of race and concentrated poverty, which is attended by everything from poorer-performing schools to fewer job opportunities.

And these areas of concentrated poverty are growing, according to a July Brookings report: “As poverty increased and spread during the 2000s, the number of distressed neighborhoods in the United States — defined as census tracts with poverty rates of 40 percent or more — climbed by nearly three-quarters.”

The report continued: “The population living in such neighborhoods grew by similar margins (76 percent, or 5 million people) to reach 11.6 million by 2008-2012.”

Are people of color simply choosing to live in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods, or have these residential patterns been imposed by generations of discriminatory housing and employment practices, and been exacerbated by the Great Recession, which was disproportionately brutal for black people?

For instance, as a 2011 report of the Center for Responsible Lending said:

“African-American and Latino borrowers are almost twice as likely to have been impacted by the crisis. Approximately one-quarter of all Latino and African-American borrowers have lost their home to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent, compared to just under 12 percent for white borrowers.”

When the police and justice systems become involved, more bias is introduced.First of all, as The Washington Post reported, “more than three-quarters of cities on which the Census Bureau has collected data have a police presence that’s disproportionately white relative to the local population.” This is the case even though 46 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks in an August New York Times/CBS New poll thought that “the racial makeup of a community’s police department should be similar to the racial makeup of that community as a whole.”

This continues, in part, because of a cycle of mistrust and abuse of power. As the International Business Times put it in August: “Law enforcement agencies, therefore, are often hard pressed to find black applicants. Recruiters want to fill their ranks with officers of all backgrounds, experts say, but cultural biases put them at a disadvantage.”

Would you want to join a force that you saw as oppressive and discriminatory toward your community? For some, the answer may be yes, to effect change or just because they are so drawn to the profession. But obviously for many the answer is no.

The Times/CBS poll found that 45 percent of African-Americans, compared with just 7 percent of whites, believed they had experienced a specific instance of discrimination by the police because of their race. Thirty-one percent of whites even acknowledge that police in most neighborhoods are more likely to use deadly force against a black person.

This is not unfounded. Young blacks are significantly more likely than young whites to be arrested for things like drug usage although their usage is roughly the same as whites.

This conversation is hard because we are yelling across a canyon of disparity. Maybe the first thing to do is to work on filling the canyon, leveling the field — that will help bridge the gap.


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10) Women Who Work
By

If Peggy Young, who was a driver for United Parcel Service, had had an accident that limited her ability to lift heavy packages, or even lost her license because of driving while intoxicated, U.P.S. would have allowed her to go on “light duty” or assigned her another type of work. But Ms. Young got pregnant. When her doctors told her not to lift packages over 20 pounds to avoid jeopardizing the pregnancy, U.P.S. refused to accommodate her and effectively compelled her to go on unpaid medical leave.

Her case, which has implications for millions of American women and their families, will be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. It is an opportunity for the court to strike a blow against discriminatory treatment and the resulting economic harm that are too often imposed on women who get pregnant — as the vast majority of women entering the work force eventually do.

Although many women can work through an entire pregnancy without job modifications, some — especially those in low-wage jobs requiring long hours, prolonged standing and heavy lifting — may require temporary help to safeguard their own health and their pregnancies.

U.P.S. claims it has a legal right to deny pregnant workers who have temporary physical limitations the flexibility it shows workers with other conditions that similarly affect the tasks they are able to perform. It said its collective bargaining agreement limited work modifications to only three categories: those with injuries that occur on the job; people covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act; and those who lose their Department of Transportation certification because of a legal impediment, like a license revoked for driving while intoxicated. Sorry, pregnancy is not included.

Ms. Young argued in her lawsuit that the policy violated the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the 1978 law that requires employers to give women affected by pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions the same accommodations it gives other employees who are “similar in their ability or inability to work.”

The language is plain and clear, as is the statute’s history, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected Ms. Young’s complaint. It said that respecting the act’s “unambiguous” text would create “anomalous consequences,” allegedly giving pregnant women preferential treatment. That is preposterous. To avoid systematically forcing pregnant workers out of their jobs, the law merely requires employers to treat them as they would treat employees eligible for a change in duty for other reasons.workers as a matter of “corporate discretion,” but claims the policy was legal and denies any liability for damages. It is good that, beginning on Jan. 1, pregnant U.P.S. employees will be treated better. But the notion that the better treatment is optional should not be allowed to stand.

U.P.S. said it was merely following the same pregnancy policy observed by the United States Postal Service and defended in the past by the Justice Department. But, in a brief supporting Ms. Young’s claim, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. renounced the Justice Department’s stance and said the Postal Service was reviewing its policy. Someone in the Obama administration needs to check how many other parts of the federal government have been following the same unfair policy for pregnant workers and put a stop to it.

Under a plain reading of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and also as a matter of fairness, pregnant workers should be treated no worse than employees who are injured on the job, and the Supreme Court should use the Young case to say so.


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11) West Virginia Coal Country Sees New Era as Donald Blankenship Is Indicted
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WHITESVILLE, W.Va. — On a memorial to West Virginia’s most recent mining disaster, the silhouettes of 29 figures are etched into black granite, men posed with arms around each another like teammates.

On the back of the solemn slab, the disaster is put in the context of the state’s long history of coal tragedies, including a 1968 explosion that killed scores, and a dozen other deadly events earlier in the century.

In not one of those cases did a coal mine owner face criminal charges for the loss of life. That history ended in November, with the indictment of Donald L. Blankenship, the chief executive whose company owned the Upper Big Branch mine near here, where an explosion of methane gas in 2010 spread like a fireball through more than two miles of tunnels, feeding on illegally high levels of coal dust.“Those responsible for managing mines in a way that caused multiple deaths were never held responsible,” said Patrick McGinley, a law professor at West Virginia University. “It shocks the conscience.”

The Charleston Gazette, a newspaper with a history of reporting on coal’s costs to the state, said simply, “This indictment is momentous.”

Neither Mr. Blankenship nor his attorney, William W. Taylor III, responded to requests for comments. But in a statement after the indictment, Mr. Taylor defended Mr. Blankenship: “His outspoken criticism of powerful bureaucrats has earned this indictment. He will not yield to their effort to silence him.”

Mr. Blankenship, who was raised in a trailer in one of the state’s poorest counties, rose to the top of Massey Energy, the largest coal producer in Appalachia. He was accused by federal prosecutors of trampling on health and safety laws to maximize profits, conspiring to hide the violations from inspectors and lying on securities filings. He faces up to 31 years in prison.

He has denied wrongdoing, arguing in a blog he set up to rebut his critics that he always promoted worker safety. “If they put me behind bars,” he wrote last year, “it will be political.”

Paradoxically, Mr. Blankenship’s own political influence has played out on an epic scale. His manipulation of West Virginia’s highest court in a civil case against him was rebuked by the United States Supreme Court in 2009, and inspired the John Grisham novel “The Appeal.”

Many family members of Upper Big Branch victims feared, in the nearly five years since the explosion, that Mr. Blankenship would never be held accountable because of his power and money.

As the United States attorney pursuing the case, R. Booth Goodwin II, won convictions of four lower-ranking Massey executives, miners’ families and others saw them as scapegoats. “Don Blankenship is a very powerful person; he won’t see a day in prison, I promise you that,” Jonathan Hughart, the son of David Hughart, a Blankenship lieutenant convicted last year, said at the time.

But all along, prosecutors were pressuring top executives to cooperate and establishing a paper trail tying Mr. Blankenship to daily decisions at Upper Big Branch. It is meant to refute any claim that he was too senior to have been involved in the disaster, which a state investigation traced to a corporate “culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation was the norm.”

The 43-page grand jury indictment paints a portrait of Mr. Blankenship, 64, as a mine boss out of Dickens. He demanded a report every 30 minutes — including by fax to his home on nights and weekends — tallying up coal production in a section of Upper Big Branch that was one of the most profitable, producing $600,000 of coal a day.

Mr. Blankenship overrode managers who sought to strengthen roofs to prevent cave-ins or install ventilation systems to prevent explosions, ordering them to ignore “construction jobs” and instead to “run coal.”

After a passageway flooded four feet deep and a federal inspector shut it down, fearing miners might drown, Mr. Blankenship ordered mining to continue, scolding the mine’s president for “letting M.S.H.A. run” the mine, referring to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

When Upper Big Branch did not make its quotas or cut costs deeply enough, Mr. Blankenship threatened the mine president. “You have a kid to feed. Do your job,” he wrote. In another note scolding the executive for not producing enough coal, he wrote: “I could Khrushchev you. Do you understand?”

Early in his career, Mr. Blankenship became famous for breaking the grip of unions at Massey mines. Investigations described a climate of intimidation at Upper Big Branch in which miners were afraid to report unsafe practices, and two sets of books were kept to conceal hazards from inspectors.

Levels of coal dust were so high — a threat to human health as well as a fire accelerant — that autopsies of the dead men found 71 percent had black lung disease, compared with an industry average of 3.2 percent.

“That is beyond belief,” said Mr. McGinley, the law professor, who contributed to a 2011 state report.

The report also traced the disaster to the failure of West Virginia politicians, Democrats and Republicans, to stand up to companies like Massey, which “used the leverage of the jobs it provided to attempt to control West Virginia’s political system.”A prime example was the $3 million that Mr. Blankenship contributed to defeat a justice on the state’s Supreme Court in 2004, replacing him with one sympathetic to Massey at a time when the company was appealing a $50 million judgment against it.

The court overturned the $50 million jury award by a vote of 3 to 2. The majority included the justice Mr. Blankenship helped elect, as well as the chief justice, who was photographed vacationing with Mr. Blankenship four months earlier on the French Riviera. The United States Supreme Court reversed that ruling, criticizing the state court for an “extreme” conflict of interest.

Two years before the Upper Big Branch explosion, federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against Mr. Blankenship in an accident with similar circumstances at a mine in Logan County, over the objections of the widows of two men killed.

The case was taken as a lesson by the incoming United States attorney, Mr. Goodwin, who took over just after the Upper Big Branch disaster, according to a federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because a judge had ordered all parties to the case, including relatives of the miners, not to talk about it publicly.

On the fourth anniversary of the explosion, in an expensive public relations push, Mr. Blankenship paid for a 51-minute video casting himself as a champion of miners’ safety. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who appeared on camera, later said he had been tricked and called the video “propaganda.”

Mr. Blankenship argues that the deadly explosion, on April 5, 2010, was caused by a natural “inundation” of methane gas. State investigators found no evidence for this theory.

On Nov. 21, he pleaded not guilty in federal court in Beckley, W.Va. A trial date was set for Jan. 26. Mr. Blankenship, who retired from Massey shortly before it was acquired in 2011 by Alpha Natural Resources, was ordered to remain in southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky.

Although Mr. Blankenship now lives in Las Vegas, his primary residence was once in Mingo County, where he grew up and built a mansion with a helipad in one of West Virginia’s poorest communities. He piped in clean drinking water to his home even as neighbors sued Massey for poisoning the local wells.

Bruce Stanley, a lawyer who grew up in Mingo County and has squared off against Massey in court, said there was a flaw in Mr. Blankenship’s creed of economic survival of the fittest. “Here’s a guy who did indeed pull himself up by his bootstraps,” he said. “You ask yourself, at what expense? Don’s the very guy who put his neighbors out of work, who’s driven his local community into the bottom of the bottom of the livability standards of the Western Hemisphere.”

In Whitesville, Jerry Mollohan, 64, a retired miner, called the indictment “long overdue.” He said that after a former security director from the mine, Hughie Elbert Stover, was sentenced to jail last year, he feared that would be as far as prosecutors reached. Mr. Blankenship was “more like a dictator than a manager,” he said. “I hope his political power won’t get him off.”

People in town sometimes refer to the explosion as “the incident,” and avoid mentioning the former Massey boss. The memorial to the tragedy is hard against the Big Coal River, easy to speed past on Route 3. The closest building is a library. Last week, LaDonna Foster, the librarian, called Mr. Blankenship “the man whose name we don’t speak.”






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12) Churches Urge Healing, but Also Activism, After Stormy Week in Ferguson
By , and

ST. LOUIS — At worship services around this region, clergy on Sunday called for recovery and healing after a week that began with an announcement that a grand jury would not indict a white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson and that then careened through looting, fires, and tense standoffs with the police and National Guard soldiers.

Yet in many of the messages, there were also calls to continue a movement raising questions about race and police behavior that followed the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. That momentum and those concerns, some clergy members said, should not be allowed to fade away or be forgotten.

“I’m tired of living a certain way in our city,” the Rev. Shaun Ellison Jones, the assistant pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church-Christian Complex here, told the mostly black congregation in a simple room with tile floors. “I’m tired of some unjust laws.”“As Christians, our church encourages us to be engaged in the life of the city, the life of our community,” Mr. Jones said. He urged congregants to ride a chartered bus to Jefferson City, the state capital, on the first day of the legislative session in January to make their views known.

The problems exposed by Mr. Brown’s death, he added, stretch across the St. Louis region, with its patchwork of towns and police departments.

“Ferguson,” Mr. Jones said, “is not just in one ZIP code.”

The White House disclosed Sunday that President Obama was planning a day of meetings at the White House on Monday to respond to the unrest in Ferguson and racially tinged anger across the country. And in Ferguson, city leaders announced Sunday that the police officer who shot Mr. Brown on Aug. 9, Darren Wilson, was no longer a city employee. Having submitted his resignation letter after only three years of service, before he was fully vested, he will receive no pension, severance package or other benefits, they said.

Officer Wilson, 28, who had been on paid administrative leave and largely out of sight since the shooting, resigned after discussions with city leaders over a period of weeks. He has been a focus of protests in Ferguson, and he cited the safety of other police officers and the community among his reasons for stepping down.

In announcing Officer Wilson’s departure, Mayor James Knowles III said he saw an opportunity to chart the next steps for Ferguson, which was battered last week by the looting and fires that followed the grand jury’s decision, and where daily protests have continued.

“Now is the time for the city of Ferguson to begin its healing process, with the citizens of Ferguson and the Police Department,” Mr. Knowles said. “We truly understand that the past few months have been very difficult for everyone involved.”

While some political leaders have pressed privately for broader changes, including the departure of the police chief and perhaps even the dissolution of the city police force, Ferguson’s leaders gave no sense on Sunday that such steps were being seriously considered. Chief Thomas Jackson said he had no intention of resigning, and city officials cited plans to recruit more black police officers and give larger stipends to officers who live in the city.

Chief Jackson said he had spoken with Officer Wilson recently for the first time since the shooting. At the time, the chief said, he had not heard any specific outside threats concerning Officer Wilson’s return to the force. But, Chief Jackson said, “it’s been a threatening environment all along.”

“Everybody knows that,” he added.

At Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church here, where Mr. Brown’s funeral was held in August, the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke on Sunday to urge continued support of the cause inspired by Mr. Brown’s death, invoking the struggles of the civil rights era.“Ferguson is to this battle what there was in Selma to the voting battle,” Mr. Sharpton said. “Every generation must face its battle, and none of it is easy.”

Mr. Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, and father, Michael Brown Sr., alternately hung their heads and clapped in approval.

“Somehow, God’s going to use Michael to make this nation deal with police accountability,” Mr. Sharpton said. “Somehow, God’s going to use this situation to heal the land.”

Before the St. Louis Rams’ football game here on Sunday, five Rams players appeared on the Edward Jones Dome field with arms raised in the hands-up motion that has become the symbol of this case. Outside the stadium, a group of protesters gathered, yelling chants like “No justice, no football” as the police stood watch.

Even as some school districts in the area were preparing to reopen schools on Monday for the first time since the grand jury’s decision was announced last Monday, more protests were planned. They included a walkout at schools and offices at 12:01 p.m., the time of day when Mr. Brown was shot.

At the Episcopal cathedral in downtown St. Louis on Sunday morning, the Rev. Michael D. Kinman did not immediately begin a sermon, but instead led his congregation in a song from South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. “Oh, yes, I know, freedom is coming,” the mostly white parishioners sang along with him.

“This past Monday night, for the second time this year, we watched parts of our beloved city burn on live television,” Mr. Kinman said. “For nearly four months, we have heard powerful, young, nonviolent demonstrators cry out that black lives matter. We have heard terrible stories of the treatment of people of color at the hands of the police, which many of us have had to hold in painful tension with the relationships we have with beloved friends and family who are those police.”

Like many members of the clergy, Mr. Kinman has been active in the protests. He participated in a march that prompted an upscale suburban shopping mall to close temporarily over the weekend, and he stood outside the Ferguson Police Department for two nights after the grand jury announcement.

At least for this Sunday, services of the Flood Christian Church in nearby Country Club Hills were held beneath a white tent in a parking lot of a TitleMax office. A few paces away, the faint smell of smoke still drifted from the church, which was declared a total loss after a fire on Monday night during the unrest.

“We pray now for the ones who did this to the Flood Christian Church,” Carlton Lee, the church’s pastor, said. “We pray first off, God, that you would forgive them. Secondarily, God, we pray that you will save them. Thirdly, we pray that you will deliver them, and, fourthly, God, we pray that you teach us how to love the hell out of them.”

The authorities are investigating the fire, and police cars idled nearby during the service on an overcast afternoon.

Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Country Club Hills, Mo., and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Washington.


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