Saturday, January 10, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2015

Petitioning San Francisco Planning Department
This petition will be delivered to:
San Francisco Planning Department

Refuse Lennar Urban Developers a Permit to Demolish Candlestick Stadium Through Implosion.

https://www.change.org/p/san-francisco-planning-department-refuse-lennar-urban-developers-a-permit-to-demolish-candlestick-stadium-through-implosion

Shirley Moore
San Francisco, CA
 Imploding Candlestick Park will further exaserbate the environmental health problems of this community. Extensive medical research backs up the connection between particulate matter exposure and many of the diseases Bayview Hunters Point residents already suffer from at the highest rates in this city - asthma and ischemic heart disease. Medical literature says particulate matter is also associated with risks of premature deaths, especially in the elderly and people with pre-existing cardiopulmonary disease. In children particulate matter exposre means reduced lung function, a condition that may plague them for the rest of their lives.
Also, concerns exist about brief exposure to implosion dust clouds as far as 6 to 12 miles from the implosion site, potentially affecting over two million lives.
To prevent further endangering this community with the dust from an implosion, we are demanding that Lenar is held to the mechanical dismantling that they put forward in their initial  EIR application in 2010 that was approved by all city agencies and the community.
This is a disenfranchised Bayview neighborhood in San Francisco. Similar work has been done all over the city during the last twelve months in more affluent neighborhoods and numerus buildings have been deconstructed using mechanical dismantling. It is only in this Southeast corner of the city that politicians and developers feel they can act with impunity towards the health and safety of the community.
Our community has been left out of the conversation, permits have been applied for without the knowledge of promninent community organizations. This is why we're asking for your help. We need to get our voices heard. We need the city to know that our lives matter.
Letter to
San Francisco Planning Department
Refuse Lennar Urban Developers a Permit to Demolish Candlestick Stadium Through Implosion.


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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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Protest "Walk for Life" abortion rights opponents!

Defend a woman's right to choose!

Saturday, Jan. 24, at 1pm
(Steuart and Market right near Embarcadero)

(chanting and picket signs on the sidewalk when they march down Market Street from Civic Center)


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SHUT DOWN CREECH!

Mass Mobilization to Stop Drone Wars!

A Convergence For Peace in the Nevada Desert

Join us March 4-6, 2015 at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs, Nevada, for a national mobilization of nonviolent resistance to shut down killer drone operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan,Yemen, Somalia, and everywhere. Sponsored by CODEPINK: Women for Peace, Nevada Desert Experience , Veterans For Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. CODEPINK will also hold vigils daily on March 2nd and 3rd, prior to the official beginning of this Creech Convergence For Peace, and welcomes everyone to join them.


In 2005, Creech Air Force Base secretly became the first U.S. base in the country to carry out illegal, remotely controlled assassinations using the MQ-1 Predator drones, and in 2006, the more advanced Reaper drones were added to its arsenal.  Creech drone personnel sit behind computers in the desert north of Las Vegas and kill "suspects" thousands of miles away.  Recent independent research indicates that the identity of only one out of 28 victims of U.S. drone strikes is known beforehand. Though officials deny it, the majority of those killed by drones are civilians. In 2014, it was leaked that the CIA's criminal drone assassination program, officially a separate operation from the Air Force's, has been piloted all along by Creech's super-secret Squadron 17. 


Since 2009 dozens of activists have been arrested for allegedly trespassing at Creech, in attempts to stop the indiscriminate killing and burning of innocent people by drones.  At the trial of the "Creech 14," the first Americans prosecuted for trespass at a drone base, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified that "to have a baby burn to death because of a 'no trespass'  sign would be poor public policy, to put it mildly."  In a time of burning children, the "no trespass" signs attached to the fences that protect the crimes perpetrated with drones are not legitimate, and they do not command our obedience.  After all, it is the U.S. military that is guilty of lethal trespassing.


The US drone program is rapidly proliferating as air bases are being converted to drone bases across the U.S. and abroad, but Creech remains the primary air base in U.S. state-sponsored global terrorism. Creech is where the killer drone program started--it is where we shall end it.


We must put an end to this desecration of our Mother Earth and all creatures who inhabit it.

We must put an end to the dehumanization of lives from Ferguson to Palestine to Pakistan.

We must close all foreign U.S. military bases.  Money for human needs. 

We must put an end to drone warfare, drone surveillance, and global militarization.

We must...
SHUT CREECH DOWN! 
More details to come soon!

Sign up on facebook https://www.facebook.com/events/1525740921010540/?context=create&previousaction=create&source=49&sid_create=3742154553#

Or contact:

Toby Blomé of Code Pink, 510-215-5974 (h)

Brian Terrell of VCNV and NDE,   773-853-1886

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Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015


UNAC is the major national antiwar coalition in the U.S. today.  The existence of a United National Antiwar Coalition is vital and we need your financial support to continue our work and to expand.

With U.S. wars today accelerating and expanding globally in various forms – from drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan, never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, support to neo-fascists in Ukraine, and proliferating Africom forces to threats of war for regime change in Syria – we have an obligation to do whatever is possible to educate the public and to take action to stop the carnage.

The wars abroad are connected to global warming with most wars fought over energy resources with the U.S. war machine as the largest polluter.

At home, we see hugely growing income inequality, a militarized and racist police force, mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, and a massive police state apparatus that includes global surveillance and laws to quell dissent.

In spite of the trillions spent by the U.S. corporate war government and its controlled media propaganda machine to keep us in check, the people are fighting back.  We’ve been inspired and strengthened by the hundreds of thousands of new activists taking to the streets of this country to stop police brutality, to build Occupy encampments, to fight for decent wages, to demand full rights for immigrants, to win marriage equality, to end global warming, to demonstrate solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza, and to protest unending U.S. wars.

UNAC has played an active, often leadership role, in all of the antiwar and social justice movements of our time.  While most activists are focused on their particular issues, the most vital role we can play is to connect the issues to their source.  All of the injustices and crimes we protest, stem from the imperialist insatiable drive for expanding profit and control – and the U.S. is the largest imperialist power militarily and economically.  When there should be plenty for all, only the obscenely wealthy benefit while the rest of the 99% struggle just to survive.

Some of our recent major accomplishments:
·       Initiated protest against NATO and 15,000 marched in Chicago in 2012.
·        Called for immediate actions against threats of war and coups directed at Libya, Iran, No. Korea, Africa, Latin America,    Ukraine, and maintaining the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
·        Organized a national tour for Afghan leader Malalai Joya.
·        Sent representatives to international NATO protests and conferences.
·        Serve on the Board of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms to act against Islamophobia , racist attacks on Muslims, and attacks on our civil liberties.
·        Participated in national efforts to organize anti-drone actions.
·        Campaigned to defend victims of government repression who speak out and expose Washington’s crimes, including Rasmea Odeh, Mumia abu Jamal, Lynne Stewart, Chelsea Manning, and the Midwest activists targeted by the FBI.
·        Produced national educational conference calls featuring experts on topics such as U.S. intervention in Africa, the destruction of Libya, the developing wars in Syria, and others.
·        Built an antiwar contingent in the massive New York City Climate Change march and built Climate Change action in other cities around the country.
·        Helped organize protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza
·        Helped organize protests against the murder of Blacks by white police and the militarization of the police forces in the U.S.

UNAC has a history of bringing hundreds of activists together at large national conferences to learn about the issues of the day, to discuss the way forward and to vote on an Action Program for the coming period.

The UNAC conference next May will bring activists from all the movements in motion to cross-fertilize these struggles.  We are particularly dedicated to bringing young activists together to support and learn from each other.  For this, we need your help to offer subsidies to leaders from Ferguson, from the border wars in the southwest, from the Native Americans who are fighting against the pipelines ruining their lands, from the Students for Justice in Palestine, and many others.

Please give generously so that we can continue our work to bring harmony and justice to the peoples of this earth.

You can send a check to UNAC at PO Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054 or click the button below to contribute on-line with your credit or debit card.

 https://www.unacpeace.org/

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On Behalf of Wadiya Jamal and
Mumia Abu-Jamal,
A Contribution Request

The message following is a forward from:
Rachel Wolkenstein
Sister, Advocate and Friend of the Extended Family

Samiya “Goldii” Abdullah, a daughter of Wadiya Jamal and Mumia Abu-Jamal died on December 17, 2014 after years of battle with breast cancer. Samiya would have been 37 this January 9 and is survived by two young daughters, Aiyanah and Aaiyah, affectionately known as Dolly and Puddy, ages eleven and four.

Samiya was a remarkable woman. She was accomplished as a musician, an activist and rapper on social justice, particularly in the struggle for Mumia’s freedom. She devoured books and education. During her long, often debilitating illness, Samiya finished her Masters Degree in School and Mental Health Counseling from the University of Pennsylvania with honors. She was dedicated to her young daughters and wanted them to grow up loving each other as much as she did her brothers and sisters. And she wanted her daughters to see Mumia (called “Pop Pop” by them) walk out of prison and home with their grandmother, Wadiya.

Samiya's active fight for Mumia's freedom, began at the young age of four. Mumia wrote about this in “The Visit” printed in Live from Death Row in 1994. This was recreated in the movie "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary."

"My father is still considered to be a dangerous individual … his mind is what they fear, there is over- whelming evidence that would exonerate him of his conviction.
"He is an innocent man and the commonwealth has always known this, but being too Black, too smart, and too strong … The government will silence anyone that possesses the power to open the minds of the people."   
                     —Goldii

Samiya’s strength, character and spirit were nurtured by Wadiya and Mumia and are being passed on to her daughters.

On behalf of Wadiya Jamal and Mumia Abu-Jamal, this is a request for funds to assist Wadiya for care of her granddaughters, Dolly and Puddy.

A financial contribution of any amount will be greatly appreciated.

Please send checks or money orders, made payable to Wadiya Jamal:

Wadiya Jamal
P.O. Box 19404
Kingsessing Postal Station
Philadelphia, PA 19143-9998

In loving memory of Samiya and in tribute to her fierce fight for life,

Rachel Wolkenstein
Sister, Advocate and Friend of the Extended Family


Hear Mumia’s Words (and Song) played before the Janazah for Samiya on December 20, 2014: “Samiya Abdullah Makes Transition”:

http://prisonradio.org/sites/default/files/audio/uploads/SamiyaAbdullahMakesTransition12-19-2.mp3?download=1

 - This fwd message is from:
The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610. www.laboractionmumia.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!


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

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

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

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$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



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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/

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

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



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

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) As Police Go Idle, So Do New York City Courts
By and




2) Texas Abortion Clinic Rules Tested in Appeals Court
By




3) A Bus Takes a Local Route to Fighting Mexican Corruption
By PAULINA VILLEGAS




4) Two Mississippi Men Plead Guilty to Hate Crimes
By RICHARD FAUSSET




5)  Health Premiums Rise More Slowly, but Workers Shoulder More of Cost
By





6) Killing Michael Brown has made Darren Wilson a Millionaire
Posted by on Monday, December 1, 2014 · 34 Comments  
Only in America could a police officer get rich by killing an unarmed black man
http://quietmike.org/2014/12/01/darren-wilson-a-millionaire/




7) December Caps a Strong Year for Jobs, but Wages Dip
By




8) Police Gave Boy No Aid After Shooting in Cleveland
By




9) New York to Settle Suit on Policing in Public Housing
By BENJAMIN MUELLER and





10)  Storm Adds to Misery of Gaza’s Most Vulnerable
By MAJD AL WAHEIDI and




11) Wrongly Convicted Man Was His Own Best Advocate
By




12) Four Oklahoma Inmates Seek Delay in Executions
By




13) George Zimmerman Arrested on Aggravated Assault Charge
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
































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1) As Police Go Idle, So Do New York City Courts
By and

One arraignment courtroom instead of two. Clerks watching “Batman” on their computer screens and playing with their cellphones as they wait for something to happen. And Manhattan’s night court shutting down an hour early because there are no more cases to call.

Those were scenes from the city’s arraignment courts in the third week of a precipitous drop in arrests by the New York Police Department. The usual chaotic bustle of the courts — the odd mix of transgressors, from murderers to fare-beaters — has given way to unusual scenes of tranquil inactivity.

“It’s slow, crazy slow,” Marcy Seckler, a veteran Legal Aid lawyer, remarked with a smile, as night court started in Manhattan on Tuesday.Things did not pick up: Over the course of the night, only 30 defendants came before Judge Abraham Clott, who often rubbed his eyes and yawned. On a typical night, he would see 60 to 90 defendants. No more than 12 people sat in the courtroom at any time, and court officers checked their watches and wandered away from their posts.

At 12:15 a.m. Wednesday, the judge looked out into the gallery and its nine rows of benches, which were all empty. There were no prostitutes, no one accused of publicly drinking or urinating — and there had not been any all night.

Judge Clott declared the session over — 45 minutes early.

For the last two weeks, New York City police officers have sharply curtailed making arrests and issuing summonses. Only 347 criminal summonses were written in the seven days through Sunday, down from 4,077 in the same period a year ago.

The sharp downturn magnifies a continuing divide between the rank-and-file and Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose standing had fallen so low among uniformed officers that some turned their backs to him at the funerals of two slain officers.

Police union leaders met for two hours on Wednesday with the city’s police commissioner, William J. Bratton. Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said afterward that the parties had a “frank discussion” in which union leaders expressed concern over their members’ safety and how that might affect public safety overall.

He stressed that his “members are doing their job,” adding that solutions “will come from the leaders here.”

“We wish there was a leader in City Hall,” Mr. Lynch said.

The drop in arrests is particularly striking for low-level misdemeanors and so-called quality of life violations, like riding a bike on the sidewalk. Arrests for offenses that a few weeks ago were common — loitering, turnstile jumping, lying down on subway benches — are suddenly rare.

The number of cases handled by the arraignment courts fell 36 percent in December compared with the same month last year, and most of the drop came in the last two weeks of the month, court officials said.

Just in the last two and a half weeks, arraignments for misdemeanors have fallen about 60 percent, to 2,581, from 6,395. The drop was more pronounced for people arrested for violations, like disorderly conduct: a 91 percent decline to 97 cases, compared with 1,157 over the same period a year ago.

There have been similar declines in the past, but they have come after natural disasters and other emergencies, court administrators said. The last one occurred during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Another slow period followed the terrorist attacks in September 2001.

Few managers in the court system expect the current downturn to last. Many public defenders, however, said they hope the steep decline in minor arrests will become permanent. They noted felonies did not rise over the last three weeks as arrests for low-level crimes plummeted.

“This proves to us is what we all knew as defenders: You can end broken-windows policing without ending public safety,” said Justine M. Luongo, the deputy attorney-in-charge of criminal practice for the Legal Aid Society.

Legal Aid lawyers and veteran clerks in the courts said the police appeared to be bringing in only people who they must have taken into custody: shoplifters caught by store owners, drunken drivers, people accused of assaulting their spouses or others accused of violent crimes. Felony arraignments did decline but not nearly as precipitously as misdemeanors, decreasing 25 percent to 1,026.

“There has been a big difference,” said Steven Chavez, a Legal Aid supervisor in Manhattan. “The cops say, ‘We are going to stop making arrests unless we absolutely have to.' ”

Brooklyn Criminal Court is usually so busy that although each arraignment lasts only a few minutes, two courtrooms are occupied day and night, one for felonies and one for misdemeanors.

Now, just one courtroom handles all the traffic. That led to a strange mix of cases on Tuesday. Offenders, whether they were accused of felonies or whether they were given desk-appearance tickets weeks ago, passed through a single courtroom. Tuesday’s cases included an armed robbery, shoplifters and traffic offenders.

Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday night was so quiet that the sound of court officers’ fingernails tapping on phone screens could be heard.

The night’s most common charge was assault, followed by grand larceny, robbery and weapons possession. There was one case of turnstile jumping, one of selling fake Billy Joel tickets, and one of advocating on Facebook to kill police, which earned the defendant glares from courtroom officers.

Eliza M. Orlins, another staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society, finished with her clients at 11 p.m. “As a public defender, we’re constantly overbooked,” she said. “So I can’t really complain about being less busy than usual.”

Those arrested for relatively minor offenses now stand out. On Wednesday morning in Manhattan, William Talen, 64, who calls himself Reverend Billy, awaited arraignment. He had been arrested on Tuesday afternoon as he gave a sermon in Grand Central Terminal — protesting police brutality.
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2) Texas Abortion Clinic Rules Tested in Appeals Court
By

NEW ORLEANS — Lawyers for abortion clinics squared off with Texas state attorneys in a federal appeals court here on Wednesday, arguing over the constitutionality of stringent abortion clinic rules that would force more than half the remaining abortion providers in Texas to close.

But more is at stake than whether large portions of South and West Texas will be left with no abortion clinics, forcing some women to drive hundreds of miles for an abortion, for safety reasons that doctors and clinic owners call a pretense.

The case argued here — along with others arising from the hundreds of abortion restrictions adopted by more than half of the states in recent years — poses issues that are likely to end up before the Supreme Court in the next year or two, many legal experts say, with the potential for significant effects on the ability of women to obtain abortions in much of the country.The core question raised by the Texas case and others is where the constitutional boundaries lie, as anti-abortion forces, unable to ban the procedure outright, seek to use clinic regulations to raise costs and limit access. Supreme Court rulings (stemming from Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision) have held that women have a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable, usually around 22 weeks after conception. But the court has allowed states to impose restrictions on abortion provided that they do not present an “undue burden.”

The case argued here before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit involves the most far-reaching provision of the anti-abortion law adopted by Texas in 2013, a requirement that all facilities, even those performing simpler, early-stage abortions and nonsurgical medicinal abortions, meet the costly construction, equipment and staffing standards of ambulatory surgery centers. No waivers were granted for longstanding clinics with good safety records. Obstacles to abortion, if the law takes effect, would fall particularly on Hispanic and low-income women, the clinic owners say.

“How many clinics do you have to close before the court says, ‘Enough’?” asked B. Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who is not involved in the case. “Can you leave a state the size of Texas with only seven clinics?

“Would that be an undue burden?” she asked, referring to the ill-defined limit on abortion regulations set by the Supreme Court in 1992, and at the center of several court cases.

In a spirited hearing that went past its allotted time, a panel of three judges, including two who upheld Texas abortion restrictions in previous actions, questioned whether many of the new requirements would improve patient care.

But they also criticized a lower court for voiding the entire surgery-center law, rather than specifying which parts were justified and which were not.

From the questioning, it appeared possible that the appeals court would send the case back to the district court in Texas that blocked the surgery-center requirement last fall, requiring it to parse the rules more finely rather than voiding the law wholesale.

If, on the other hand, the appeals court, which is known as conservative, upholds the law, the clinic owners are almost certain to appeal to the Supreme Court. Clashing court decisions on other issues — such as mandatory ultrasounds and counseling messages, and requirements for doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals — could also reach the Supreme Court, experts say.

As the constitutional issues percolate in courts across the country, anti-abortion groups, buoyed by Republican gains in the November elections, say they will pursue more restrictions in dozens of states this year.

If high-impact measures like the Texas surgery-center rule are ultimately declared legal, then state disparities in the availability of abortion could widen even more. On the other side, advocates for abortion rights have won some important legal battles in the last year, including a decision by the Fifth Circuit preventing the closing of Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

“It’s an ongoing national question, whether women will have meaningful access to abortion across the country, or only in a subset of states,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School.

The Texas surgery-center rule has already taken a dizzying path through the courts.

Last August, Judge Lee Yeakel of the Federal District Court in Austin blocked the measure, saying it would affect some women drastically and would not bring significant medical benefits. He also partly lifted another disputed requirement, that doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals, for two clinics in isolated locations, McAllen and El Paso.

The state appealed to the Fifth Circuit, arguing, as it did again Wednesday, that the Legislature should decide whether a law protected health, that abortion providers could choose to build more surgery centers and that since at least 83 percent of the population would still live within 150 miles of a clinic, the undue burden standard had not been violated.

On Oct. 2, the appeals court lifted Judge Yeakel’s stay of the law, causing all but eight abortion centers, none of them west of San Antonio, to close. (An earlier appeals court ruling, upholding the state’s requirement that doctors have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, had already helped cause the number of abortion clinics to decline to fewer than 20, from 41.)

But then on Oct. 14, the Supreme Court reinstated the injunction against the law, allowing clinics to reopen pending the further consideration that started with Wednesday’s hearing.

The panel hearing the case Wednesday, picked by lottery, included Jennifer W. Elrod and Catharina Haynes, appointees of President George W. Bush who previously voted to uphold parts of the Texas abortion law, and Edward C. Prado, who was also appointed by Mr. Bush. To the surprise of many in the courtroom, the two conservative female judges aggressively challenged the Texas solicitor general, Jonathan F. Mitchell, asking whether many of the new building requirements made medical sense and whether it might be dangerous to force women to drive hundreds of miles home after an abortion.

“It seems like we’ll have women driving a long way and suddenly have a bleeding episode,” Judge Haynes said. “Isn’t this the antithesis of what the state is trying to achieve?”

The judges also pressed the lawyer for the clinics, Stephanie Toti of the Center for Reproductive Rights. She argued that there was “no rational basis” for the new regulations because “they will actually increase the risks that women face.”

But the judges said that the clinics had failed to show that a “large fraction” of abortion facilities would close and asked why the courts should not demand more limited changes in the law.

One way or another, many legal experts say, a major new abortion case is likely to reach the Supreme Court in the next year or two, most likely involving a single state law and issue.

Beyond the case argued Wednesday, which provides a stark test of the undue burden standard, several other abortion cases are in the judicial pipeline, including some with directly clashing decisions from federal appeals courts.

Last month, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., struck down a North Carolina law that required women to undergo ultrasounds as the doctor described the fetus — whether the patients wanted to hear it or not — and offered scientifically disputed advice on the safety of abortions.

The North Carolina attorney general has promised to appeal the decision because it contradicts, he argues, a 2012 decision by the Fifth Circuit, upholding a similar ultrasound and patient counseling law in Texas.

State requirements that abortion clinic doctors have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals are also percolating in the courts, and federal appeals courts have issued divergent rulings on state laws restricting the use of medication abortions.

“Ultrasound, admitting privileges, ambulatory surgery centers — I think that by next term at least one of these issues will be before the Supreme Court,” said Ms. Goldberg, of Columbia Law.

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3) A Bus Takes a Local Route to Fighting Mexican Corruption
By PAULINA VILLEGAS

MONTERREY, Mexico — Inside a large, open-air bus, a corrupt politician quarrels over the loudspeakers with a fed-up citizen who tells the passengers about the millions of pesos lost in a series of corruption scandals.

As the scripted recording plays, three security guards sitting on a bench watch in awe at the passing bus before cracking up in laughter, pointing at the bright red and yellow insignia on its side: the “Corruptour.”

The broadside includes caricaturized faces of the state’s former and current governors. Both grin at passers-by, drawing stares at each of the 11 “corruption landmarks” that the bus tour aims to spotlight, including the casino where gunmen started a fire that killed 52 people.

“We have failed to place the issue of corruption at the center of political debate,” said Miguel Treviño, the head of the Corruptour project and founding member of Via Ciudadana, one of many local groups pushing to raise political and social awareness here in Mexico’s richest city.

“We need to make it tangible and understandable to people, and to explain its direct implications on our everyday lives so they will want to fight it,” he said.

Born through a mix of frustration, satire and savvy, the Corruptour is a free one-hour ride led by young activists hoping to stir a political awakening with five trips per weekend. After a hiatus for the holidays, the tours are to resume next week.

In this industrial city of 1.1 million people, the quirky bit of political tourism is the latest creative attempt to agitate for what Mexicans widely say they sorely need: a less corrupt, more efficient government.

The systematic violence that defined this place as recently as 2012 has declined. The private and public sectors came together to tackle the issue by creating a new state police force, known as Fuerza Civil, which has been recruiting and training more than 4,000 polygraphed, in theory, more trustworthy police officers.

But broad government corruption here, and in Mexico at large, remains a largely untreated illness. Mexicans are enraged over the disappearance and presumed murder of 43 college students (one has been confirmed dead) in the southern state of Guerrero last fall, and the government has been plagued with questions over the purchase of homes by the country’s first lady and finance minister from a company that has won numerous government construction contracts.

For decades, corruption and impunity have inspired apathy and anger, and both were again on display in the past months when President Enrique Peña Nieto, during a television interview, described corruption as largely a “cultural problem.”

It was a remark that many interpreted as a feeble attempt to excuse public theft, rather than trying to stamp it out.

“If the matter of corruption is cultural, then it means there is no salvation for this country,” said Denisse Dresser, a political analyst, during a radio show after the president’s remarks.

Other experts agree that there may be an acceptance of Mexico’s long-lasting tradition of corruption, but they disagree with the inexorability of it — pointing to this city as an example.

“Monterrey is a perfect example of how the balance of powers can be overturned,” said Carlos Elizondo, a scholar at the Center for Economic Research in Mexico City, referring to the blossoming of civil groups and businesses demanding better governance here in recent years.

The leaders of the Corruptour are hoping for more change — the kind of voter engagement that would generate higher political costs for public officials embroiled in corruption scandals and planning to run for office in this year’s midterm elections.

“This is not about just complaining, it is about understanding what is our role in history,” says Lorenia Canavati, a member of Via Ciudadana.

It was no coincidence that on one recent weekend afternoon, the tour started off at the government palace, a 20th-century brownstone building and office to the sitting governor of the state of Nuevo León, Rodrigo Medina. The omniscient voice of the bus tour guide — the activist — warned passengers about the state’s public debt, which has risen to almost 73.6 billion pesos ($5 billion), making it Mexico’s second largest. The governor’s office had no response.

The Corruptour continued on to the Administrative Tower, an impressive 36-story pearl-white skyscraper, a monument to a city that embraces opulence and modernity. The building, which holds government offices, was not only finished late — it also still carries a public debt of around $88 million, according to Via Ciudadana.

For the roughly 25 passengers, including some crime victims, the bus trip was at once educational and highly politicized, entertaining and cathartic. At a red light near downtown, the activist and his amplified voice asked in a recording: “You know what politicians — from any given party — fear the most?”

“A budget cutback?” The cynical official chimed in, chuckling in response.

“What they fear the most is a group of informed citizens united and organized to do something on their own, without asking for permission,” the activist replied. “They feed and live from our insolence and from our leniency — from our general conformity.”

The crowd on the bus smiled and nodded.

As the corruption bus steered past the decaying remains of Casino Royale — the gambling parlor set ablaze in August 2011 by people suspected of being cartel hit, killing 52 people — one local resident on the bus, Edmundo Jiménez, glared in silence. His said his wife died that day in the fire, trapped in a bathroom, despite his efforts to break down the window from the outside.

At the time, there were questions about whether corruption was part of the cause. The brother of Monterrey’s mayor had been caught on video collecting a huge wad of cash from another casino. He was initially detained, then his lawyer said the money was for cheese from Oaxaca. Two months later, he was released.

The investigation did reveal that government safety inspectors, suspected of taking bribes, had failed to do their jobs; there were several building code violations inside, including blocked emergency exits.

“It is time to wake up, or this country will sink,” Mr. Jiménez said. He looked away, and the ride continued.

 


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4) Two Mississippi Men Plead Guilty to Hate Crimes
By RICHARD FAUSSET

The two remaining defendants among a group of young white Mississippians charged with carrying out racially motivated attacks on African-Americans in Jackson in 2011 pleaded guilty Wednesday to violations of the federal hate-crime law, with one of them admitting his role in the killing of a 47-year-old man.

John L. Blalack, 20, and Robert H. Rice, 24, are the last of 10 defendants who have pleaded guilty in the attacks, closing a chapter on the kind of gruesome Mississippi story that many had hoped the state, long mired in racial violence, had outgrown.

“Justice has been served,” said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in a statement released Wednesday. “The hate crimes to which these defendants have pleaded guilty were as shocking as they were reprehensible — targeting innocent people for racially motivated acts of violence that inflicted grievous harm and even claimed a life.”

Prosecutors said that the 10 defendants, most of whom were from suburban Rankin County, amused themselves by driving into Jackson, seeking out what were often homeless or inebriated blacks, and assaulting them.

Some of the victims were attacked with beer bottles or metal ball bearings hurled from a slingshot. Others were beaten.

In the early morning of June 26, 2011, seven of the 10, including Mr. Blalack, confronted James C. Anderson, a 47-year-old auto factory worker, in a motel parking lot. Two of the defendants, Deryl Dedmon and John A. Rice — the brother of Robert Rice — beat Mr. Anderson. Then Mr. Dedmon fatally struck Mr. Anderson with his pickup truck.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Dedmon and one other assailant yelled “White Power!” before Mr. Dedmon ran Mr. Anderson down.

Mr. Blalack pleaded guilty to one hate-crime count for his role in that episode, and to another count for his role in an episode in which he and others threw beer bottles and shot ball bearings at black pedestrians from a moving vehicle.

Mr. Dedmon pleaded guilty to murder in 2012, and was sentenced to two concurrent life terms after Mr. Anderson’s family, which opposes capital punishment on religious grounds, pleaded that he be spared the death penalty.

Robert Rice was not present during the assault on Mr. Anderson. He pleaded guilty to one hate-crime count for a prior episode in which he, Mr. Blalack and others went looking for a black man to beat up.

Prosecutors said they found their man walking near a Jackson golf course. Three of the attackers, not including Mr. Rice, beat the unidentified victim “to the point that he begged for his life,” according to a Justice Department news release.

The federal statute that Mr. Blalack and Mr. Rice violated, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was signed into law by President Obama in October 2009. Each violation carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. Both men are scheduled to be sentenced in April.

 


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5)  Health Premiums Rise More Slowly, but Workers Shoulder More of Cost
By

When Charlotte Alger, 25, was working at a Home Depot just outside Boston last year, she said she earned $10.75 an hour working on the sales floor in the woodworking department. She chose one of the more comprehensive health insurance plans offered, but it came with a whopping $3,000 deductible.

Paying for such a large share of her costs upfront was burdensome, particularly because Ms. Alger, who recently went back to college, regularly sees a psychologist for depression and anxiety. “I felt sort of ripped off,” she said, adding that none of her previous doctors were included in the plan’s network. “I see a mental health care professional, and it’s not the kind of doctor you want to switch.”

She ultimately decided to switch employers, largely in an effort to find better benefits. She recently started working as an accounting clerk with a more affordable plan.

Although the rise in premiums has slowed since passage of the Affordable Care Act, workers who receive health insurance through their employers are shouldering more health care expenses at a time when wages are stagnant, according to a new report from the Commonwealth Fund that analyzed costs across the states.

These costs are particularly high — relative to median income — for workers in the South and south central states, where income is below the national average, the report found, even though the growth of premiums had slowed in several states in those regions.

“Without growth in income, rising out-of-pocket costs means less affordable care,” said Cathy Schoen, executive director of the Commonwealth Fund’s Council of Economic Advisors.

Insurance premiums have risen faster than median incomes for workers under 65 in all states in the decade from 2003 to 2013. Average annual premiums — including what both employers and employees contribute — represent 20 percent or more of the median income in 37 states. That was the case in only two states in 2003.

While employers are trying various strategies to contain health care costs, shifting more expenses to employees is one of the main tools. “Increasing cost-sharing is the tried and true way to keep their premiums down,” said Drew Altman, president of Kaiser Family Foundation. “We’re seeing a steady, slow increase in cost-sharing every year.”

According to Commonwealth, out-of-pocket costs — including workers’ premium contributions and deductibles — accounted for 9.6 percent of median household income in 2013, on average, up from 5.3 percent in 2003. (That does not include items like co-payments or co-insurance, which would have increased these costs further.)

That is the case even though the growth of overall premium increases has slowed.

In the three years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, premiums rose about 4.1 percent annually, down from a national average of about 5.1 percent from 2003 to 2010, according to the report.

In 31 states and the District of Columbia, premiums increased more slowly from 2010 to 2013 than in previous years, particularly in several southern and western states. But in 10 other states, annual premium growth rates remained high during the same period, at least 6 percent on average.

The average premium for a family was $16,000 in 2013 — including the portions paid by both employer and employee — and ranged from $13,477 to $14,382 in the states with the lowest costs, which include Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi and Hawaii. In the most expensive states — New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York and Alaska — premiums were more than $17,000 to nearly $21,000.

“The steady increase in premium growth means health insurance is expensive no matter where you live,” Ms. Schoen said.

The burden of out-of-pocket costs causes Elizabeth Price, a 40-year-old administrative assistant with a rare genetic disorder, to avoid the emergency room, which costs $175 each visit. “High co-pays that do not count towards my out-of-pocket maximum definitely make me think twice before going,” said Ms. Price, who works for a small college in Chicago. “And that’s just the co-pay — once I’m in the hospital there are more costs, and I can never be sure that all the treatment I’m receiving is ‘in network’ and preapproved, so it might not be covered.”

At less than $80 a month, her premiums are reasonable, she said. But since she is prone to kidney stones, she said she could expect to visit an emergency room two to four times a year. She said she had to weigh the pain level and possible complications from delaying treatment.

Given her health condition, Ms. Price said her job choices had been limited; she needs to work for an employer that offers policies with reasonable out-of-pocket maximums because she knows she will reach them.

To contain costs, many large corporate employers are offering high-deductible plans, also known as consumer-directed plans. At about one-third of large companies, it is the only option available, according to the National Business Group on Health. The plans require employees to pay for a greater share of their medical costs upfront, before the plan starts making payments. The goal is to make employees comparison-shop for medical services, something not always easy to do, particularly in emergency situations.

“It’s quite shocking when you see the range of costs for the same services in a market,” said Brian Marcotte, president and chief executive of the National Business Group on Health. “But employers are also trying to get employees to play a greater role in managing their care.”

In 2013, 81 percent of workers were enrolled in a health plan with a deductible, according to Commonwealth Fund, compared with 52 percent in 2003. The average per-person deductible has more than doubled over that period, rising 146 percent on average. In 2013, the average per-person deductible exceeded $1,000 in most states, and exceeded $1,500, on average, in seven states.

Reed Abelson contributed reporting.




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6) Killing Michael Brown has made Darren Wilson a Millionaire
Posted by on Monday, December 1, 2014 · 34 Comments  
Only in America could a police officer get rich by killing an unarmed black man
http://quietmike.org/2014/12/01/darren-wilson-a-millionaire/

Darren Wilson resigned from the Ferguson Police Force over the weekend following the grand jury decision not to indict him for killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Wilson cited security concerns for his decision and will stop getting paid immediately. The poor guy will also not receive a severance package.

All is not lost for Darren Wilson of course, this is America, a land where you can capitalize on the smallest of triumphs and the greatest of tragedies. Wilson won’t be able to work as a cop in Ferguson anymore (or anywhere else I hope), but where a door is closed, a palace gate is opened. By the time the dust settles, America will have made him a millionaire.

Almost immediately after Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, donations started pouring in from across the country for his defence, a defence that is no longer needed. The amount far surpasses the money that was raised for Michael Brown’s family.

With Facebook pages like “We Are Darren Wilson,” “I Support Officer Wilson” and “Support Darren Wilson,” Wilson’s backers have raised over $500,000 for the now former police officer. According to the anonymous woman who reportedly started these pro-Darren Wilson Facebook pages, $500,000 was just a “conservative” estimate. She also told the Daily Mail that when all is said and done, that number may easily jump into the seven figures.

A former GoFundMe account backed by Wilson supporters raised more than $235,000 before closing its donations in early September, likely due to complaints. A separate fundraising page on GoFundMe, was run by the police charity organization “Shield of Hope” and had raised nearly $200,000 before being shut sown.

As if the fundraising wasn’t enough, Darren Wilson reportedly received a hefty payout for his interview on ABC news. According to the website “Got News”, ABC and NBC were entangled in a bidding war over the interview, but ABC won out because of the enormous price they were was willing to pay.

Got News reported that Wilson received a “mid-to-high” six-figure fee for the interview. In other words, another $500,000 give or take. The dollar amount is still unconfirmed, but knowing the media in this country, it seems likely.

The interview by the way, which was carried out by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, was widely criticized for asking Wilson soft ball questions and for not pressuring his side of the story. The soft interview was no doubt part of the deal.

If you add it all up (don’t forget to include the full salary he received while on leave), it appears that Darren Wilson can retire tomorrow. I doubt any of this was in Wilson’s mind on that fateful night in August, it’s just a by-product of a racist/capitalist America, a sold-out media and a rigged justice system.

This is also just the beginning. Just wait for the book deals and movie rights to come rolling in. Darren Wilson may have escaped justice for now and gotten rich doing it, but I doubt there will come a day when he finds peace, whether from the public or in his mind.



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7) December Caps a Strong Year for Jobs, but Wages Dip
By

Capping the best year for job growth since 1999, employers added 252,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported Friday, and unemployment fell to 5.6 percent.

The number of new people put on payrolls last month was above what economists had forecast, consistent with the view that the recovery was finally gaining traction after years of only modest growth. In addition, the number of jobs created in November was revised upward to 353,000, from 321,000. That month, the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent.

The pace of overall job growth averaged 246,000 a month last year, up from 194,000 a month in 2013.

But the good news on job creation was tempered by a poor showing in average hourly earnings, which fell 0.2 percent in December after rising 0.4 percent in November. Many economists had thought the increase signaled the start of a trend that wages were finally improving.“The job market is tightening, but it is not tight, at least not to the point that it is resulting in stronger wage growth,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.


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8) Police Gave Boy No Aid After Shooting in Cleveland
[This link contains the video of the horrifying murder...bw]
By


The two Cleveland police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun, stood by without rendering medical aid as the boy lay wounded next to their patrol car, a newly released extended surveillance video shows.

Then, about a minute and a half after one officer had shot Tamir, the other officer tackled the boy’s 14-year-old sister as she tried to reach her brother. Tamir was shot Nov. 22 after someone called 911 to report “a guy” who had been pointing a “probably fake” pistol outside a community recreation center on Cleveland’s west side.

The video, obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group, provided fresh detail about a shooting that roiled Cleveland and quickly became the latest shooting to be absorbed into a broader national narrative about police violence in African-American communities.The surveillance tape also seemed to clarify an issue in the shooting investigation: that the officers provided no immediate medical assistance to Tamir, who was not pronounced dead until more than nine hours later at a Cleveland hospital. An autopsy by the Cuyahoga County medical examiner later found that Tamir died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. In addition, it confirmed the account that Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, gave in the weeks after the shooting, that the police had tackled and detained her daughter as she rushed out of the recreation center, trying to reach her brother’s side.

After the second Cleveland officer, Frank Garmback, subdued Tamir’s sister — he pushed her to the ground back-first, tumbling on top of her in the process — the girl was handcuffed and put in the back of the police cruiser, a few feet from her brother.

The officers stood by without tending to Tamir, the extended video showed. It was not until four minutes after the shooting, the video showed, that Tamir received medical assistance when another man was seen bent down next to him. According to Benjamin Crump, the Rice family’s lawyer, the man who provided the first medical assistance was an F.B.I. agent who was in the neighborhood. Paramedics arrived eight minutes after the shooting, and Tamir was taken away on a stretcher about five minutes later, the video shows.

A shorter surveillance video released earlier showed Tamir being shot by a rookie Cleveland officer, Timothy Loehmann, seconds after the police cruiser arrived and skidded to a stop next to the boy at a gazebo outside the recreation center. The black pistol that Tamir had, which looked like a real handgun, was an imitation. His mother later said it had been given to Tamir to play with by a friend that afternoon.

The police said Tamir was told to raise his hands but instead reached to his waistband for the gun, though the previously released surveillance video showed that the shooting happened so fast, it was hard to know whether the officer issued any warnings or whether Tamir could have understood them if he did.

The killing, which occurred two weeks before a Justice Department report concluded that the Cleveland police had a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force,” angered many residents of the city, which has a black majority. On Thursday, the city’s media relations director, Dan Williams, said the extended video was released once it was clear that it would not interfere with the investigation. “My intent was to get it out so the public could see all of the tape,” Mr. Williams said.

A Cleveland police spokeswoman said they could not comment because the shooting was under investigation. Officials from Cleveland’s main police union did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview, Mr. Crump called the events on the video “outrageous and inhumane.”

“How inhumane to put her in handcuffs and sit her in the car about four feet from where her brother lay dying,” Mr. Crump said of Tamir’s sister, “and she has to watch that. And they rendered no aid to this kid.”

Family members thought it was important, Mr. Crump said, for “people see this video as they continue to fight for justice and see whether the grand jury will hold the police officer accountable.” Mr. Crump said an audio recording from a phone of someone at the recreation center indicated Tamir was alive when the officers were detaining his sister. The recording, he said, reveals that a teenager had tried to calm Tamir’s sister as she rushed to the shooting, saying: “He’s not dead. He’s still moving.”

Officer Loehmann, 26, who fired the fatal shot, had quit a suburban police force after his supervisors determined two years ago that he had had a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to cope with stresses of the job. The Cleveland police acknowledged that they had never reviewed the previous police personnel file of Officer Loehmann.

Both officers have been placed on restricted duty.


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9) New York to Settle Suit on Policing in Public Housing
By BENJAMIN MUELLER and

New York City reached a preliminary settlement in a federal class-action lawsuit over the Police Department’s trespassing-enforcement tactics in public housing developments, according to court papers filed this week.

Under the proposed settlement, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, the city agreed to alter the way the police patrol inside public housing buildings, acceding to many of the demands of the plaintiffs, who argued that basic behavior in public housing had become subject to aggressive scrutiny and unwarranted trespassing arrests.

The decision to settle the case is the latest step in an effort by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration to conclude lawsuits involving police conduct that were pending from earlier years.

The settlement is subject to approval by Judge Shira A. Scheindlin. If the settlement is approved, it is expected to become part of a federal monitoring process ordered in a parallel case decided by Judge Scheindlin in 2013 over the department’s stop-and-frisk policies.

The Police Department would revise its patrol guide to curb practices that officers have long relied upon, forcing them to fill out new forms when they make arrests for trespassing, and clarifying when officers should simply leave residents alone.

The lawsuit, filed in January 2010, charged that residents of public housing and their visitors faced police scrutiny and unwarranted stops for mundane activities like talking in the hallways or dropping off children.

These mostly came from officers engaged in so-called vertical patrols, when officers sweep buildings floor by floor.

For decades, in addition to looking for crime, police officers patrolling public housing developments have also been told to watch for violations of the New York City Housing Authority’s rules of conduct.

Rather than fight the plaintiffs’ claims in court, as the Bloomberg administration often had, the city decided to revise tactics that the Police Department had long leaned on to stop and question tenants in public housing.

The plaintiffs had been in settlement negotiations with the city since the summer, said Seymour James, attorney-in-chief of the Legal Aid Society, which filed the suit with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

“They’ve been treating people like criminals in their own homes, or the homes of their friends and loved ones,” Mr. James said.

He added that the revisions to police tactics could help repair relations between the police and minority communities that have frayed in recent months over the deaths of unarmed black men, including Akai Gurley, who was shot in the stairwell of the Lewis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn by an officer conducting a vertical patrol.

In a statement, a spokesman for the city’s Law Department said the settlement “appropriately balances the need to maximize public safety while respecting the constitutional rights” of Housing Authority residents and their guests.

One practice that came under particular scrutiny in the federal case was the way officers used a prohibition on “lingering” in the lobbies and stairwells of public housing buildings to make stops and, sometimes, arrests for trespassing.

An analysis by the plaintiffs found that “lingering” was often used as a basis for the initial interaction that resulted in an arrest, even though alone it would not provide a constitutional basis for a stop. (Lingering differs from the penal law violation of loitering, which applies only in a public place, though officers and residents often use the terms interchangeably.)

As part of the preliminary settlement, the Housing Authority amended its rules to include a lengthy definition of “lingering.”

“Lingering occurs,” the proposed new rules state, when a person is inside a Housing Authority building “for an unreasonable period of time in light of the area’s intended purpose.” Officers would now be told explicitly that it does not include checking the mail or “waiting for food deliveries,” and that a person cannot be subjected to a stop or an arrest for mere lingering.

Officers would be instructed not to arrest someone for trespassing in restricted areas like the building’s roof “in the absence of conspicuously posted rules,” unless they have reason to believe the person is knowingly flouting them. Instead of making an arrest, officers would simply be instructed to ask the person to leave.


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10)  Storm Adds to Misery of Gaza’s Most Vulnerable
By MAJD AL WAHEIDI and

GAZA — As a winter storm continued to pound the Middle East, thousands of Gaza residents whose homes were destroyed or damaged in last summer’s war with Israel struggled with the harsh weather for a third day, and a 4-month-old baby from the southern part of the territory died on Friday from complications caused by the bitter cold, Palestinian health officials and relatives said.

The baby, Rahaf Abu Assi, the youngest of 10 children, had been sick all winter, living in a house in Al Zanna, near Khan Younis, that lacked doors, windows or toilets, according to her uncle. He said the house had been hit by Israeli bombs and shells.

Ashraf al-Qedra, a spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry, said Rahaf was taken to a hospital on Thursday with clogged bronchial tubes, and died at dawn on Friday.

“Our life is tragic,” the uncle, Yousri Abu Assi, said in a telephone interview. He said the family covered the window openings with plastic sheets and sometimes burned “paper and coal inside the destroyed house to bring some warmth.”

“The cold stole Rahaf from her mother,” he added. “Her heart is broken.”

The storm has wrought death and misery among the most vulnerable, with high winds, heavy rain and snowfall across a region where snow is rare.

A spokesman for the Jordanian Interior Ministry said that a Syrian woman and her 12-year-old grandson, who had recently left the Zaatari refugee camp, died on Friday after inhaling fumes from a gas heater in their apartment, and that three other members of their family were hospitalized in critical condition.

Three Syrians, including an 8-year-old boy, died on Wednesday while trying to cross into Lebanon. Al Jazeera broadcast a video of twin babies who died from the cold in Douma, a besieged area in the Damascus suburbs held by insurgents. The babies were being buried in a cardboard box.

Aid workers in Lebanon and Jordan scrambled to distribute thousands of blankets, clothes, heaters and other supplies to Syrian refugees and others living in tents and makeshift shelters.

In Gaza, hundreds of Palestinians had to evacuate flooded homes in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, according to Ma’an, an independent news agency. Seven people were injured on Thursday by roof collapses in the area, and two more were hurt when high winds toppled a water tank into their home.

Scores of families in the destroyed village of Khuza’a packed sandbags around the leaky caravans where they have been living for months as they wait for stalled reconstruction efforts to resume.

“We woke up to find our blankets full of water,” one caravan resident, Abu Bassam Najjar, said in a telephone interview Friday. “These caravans are useless. Our officials launch wars and then leave us outdoors. While we are dying slowly, our officials are sitting inside their homes in front of fireplaces.”

Raed al-Dahshan, the director of civil defense operations in Gaza, said his crews were working “around the clock,” but lacked the equipment and fuel required to respond to the emergency.

“I can say we don’t even have any infrastructure — the latest war destroyed everything,” Mr. Dahshan said in an interview. “The world gets happy when rain falls. But in Gaza, rain means misery for people and more humanitarian crises.”

Majd Al Waheidi reported from Gaza, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem. Ranya Kadri contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan, and Hwaida Saad and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon.



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11) Wrongly Convicted Man Was His Own Best Advocate
By

They would meet every week in the law library, researching legal databases, discussing United States Supreme Court decisions and reviewing copies of Justice Denied, a magazine for the wrongfully convicted.

They called themselves the “actual innocence team,” jotting down notes on yellow pads as they served their sentences at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York, hoping to build cases and motions that might lead to their freedom.

One of those self-taught jailhouse lawyers, Derrick Hamilton, stood in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Friday as his 1991 murder conviction was vacated. The hearing capped more than two decades of his filing motions, sending letters and securing affidavits arguing his innocence.

“Mr. Hamilton never for one second doubted his own ability to convince a court of law he was innocent,” one of the defense lawyers who has worked on his case, Scott Brettschneider, said in court. “His capacity to turn out legal work was astounding.”The Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which revisited Mr. Hamilton’s case through its Conviction Review Unit, said that medical and scientific evidence, like the path of the bullets and where the victim’s bleeding occurred, undercut the sole eyewitness’s testimony and that the eyewitness was not credible.

Mr. Hamilton, 49, who was paroled in 2011, was one of the first to notice that there were troubling similarities in convictions involving a former police detective, Louis Scarcella. Mr. Hamilton discovered that Mr. Scarcella would often use the same eyewitness and produce confessions that defendants said were coerced or false.

Mr. Hamilton was just out of prison for manslaughter in 1991 when he was charged with shooting a man, Nathaniel Cash, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Jewel Smith, Mr. Cash’s girlfriend, claimed she was the lone eyewitness to the shooting, but her version of what happened was inconsistent.

She told the first detective who interviewed her that she had not seen the shooting. But according to Mr. Scarcella, who interviewed her later, Ms. Smith said she had seen the murder and implicated Mr. Hamilton. In a post-trial hearing, Ms. Smith said she had been pressured by Mr. Scarcella to name Mr. Hamilton as the killer, according to a defense filing.

The Conviction Review Unit revisited the crime scene and interviewed Ms. Smith in North Carolina, and found she was “unreliable, incredible and for the most part untruthful,” a prosecutor, Mark Hale, said in court. “They had to depend upon her credibility to convict Mr. Hamilton,” and as a result, “his due process rights were violated.”

Prosecutors did not mention Mr. Scarcella’s name on Friday, but defense lawyers did, to the point that Justice Raymond Guzman cautioned them to stop. “Detective Scarcella is not on trial here,” he said, adding that he understood the defense’s position that “Detective Scarcella was instrumental in this wrongful conviction.”

In a statement, Mr. Scarcella’s lawyers, Alan M. Abramson and Joel S. Cohen, said, “To date, there has been no finding by any judge, nor has there been a statement by any prosecutor to sustain the sensational claims that have appeared in the press that Detective Scarcella contributed to any person’s wrongful conviction.”

From the spectator section, Mr. Hamilton’s daughter, Maia, 2, placed her doll next to her on the wooden bench. Also watching were men who are fighting their convictions or who have had their convictions vacated, holding “Wrongfully Convicted” caps that Mr. Hamilton had made up: Sundhe Moses, Jonathan Fleming and Kevin Smith.

“If there was no law books in prison, I probably would’ve been in an insane asylum,” Mr. Hamilton said before the hearing.

To learn about the law, Mr. Hamilton took a paralegal course from prison and began researching his case, both on his own and with outside lawyers’ help. “I just couldn’t do anything else,” he said in an interview. “I wasn’t a guy that worked out because I didn’t have time to work out. I made motion after motion after motion after motion.”

At Auburn, he got a job at the law library, where he joined a group of men also working on their convictions.

Daniel Rincon, convicted of a 1991 quadruple murder in Manhattan, was the letter writer; he would summarize cases in neat narratives and send letters to journalists and lawyers. Shabaka Shakur, convicted of a 1998 double murder in Brooklyn that Mr. Scarcella worked on, was the researcher, looking up case law and helping hone arguments. Nelson Cruz — whose 1998 Brooklyn murder conviction came in part because of the work of Mr. Scarcella’s longtime partner, Stephen W. Chmil — would sketch out crime scenes, illustrating where witnesses and victims stood.

Once a week, in the afternoon, they would write their names on the law library sign-in sheet and take their seats at tables with a security officer stationed above them. Mr. Hamilton would put up a chalkboard and distribute handouts about whatever they would be working on that day.

Some days, they would dive into a recent ruling, like the Supreme Court’s decision on actual innocence in the 2009 Troy Davis case. Some days, they would analyze a recent article in The New York Law Journal. They received instruction on how to use the legal-research service Westlaw. And at just about every meeting, they would work on one of their members’ legal motions or letters or responses or arguments.

At the 2011 hearing where Mr. Hamilton was granted parole, a commissioner, Christina Hernandez, noted his legal work. “You are very legally astute,” she said. “You spend a lot of time in the law library. It’s pretty apparent to us. You have been very active with your defense.”

Mr. Hamilton also wanted to get the word out about wrongful convictions. Around 2010, he contacted Lonnie Soury, who had publicized wrongful-conviction cases.

“I told him that I really couldn’t help him and I just needed to get paid for my work,” Mr. Soury said, assuming he would not hear from Mr. Hamilton again. Two weeks later, he said, he got a check made out on the prison commissary account for $500.

That led to rallies on the steps of City Hall with convicts’ families. And once Mr. Hamilton was released on parole, he helped persuade others, like Mr. Moses and Mr. Smith, who had also been paroled, to make this a public cause.

“He said: ‘Listen, you staying dormant. You got to get back involved,’” Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Hamilton has been a regular presence at hearings about innocence claims since then and is helping prisoners and former prisoners with legal aspects of their cases. Other members of the “actual innocence team,” including Mr. Rincon, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Shakur, are all still fighting their convictions from prison.

“I sit there to watch the proceedings because when I see things, I’m going to talk about them; I’m not going to be quiet,” Mr. Hamilton said. Seeing the injustice at his own trial, he said, “taught me that I have to be involved.”


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12) Four Oklahoma Inmates Seek Delay in Executions
By

Lawyers for four Oklahoma inmates who are scheduled for lethal injection this winter filed an emergency request for a delay with a federal appeals court on Friday, claiming that a sedative the state plans to use cannot reliably induce the deep coma needed for a humane execution and that its use “constitutes human experimentation.”

If no stay is granted, the execution set for Thursday of one of the inmates, Charles F. Warner, will be the state’s first since the bungled killing last April of Clayton D. Lockett, who gasped and struggled against his restraints before dying 43 minutes into the procedure.

Mr. Warner had been scheduled to die the same night, but after the Lockett episode, the state temporarily halted executions in order to improve training and procedures. Mr. Warner was condemned for the rape and murder of an 11-month-old girl in 1997.

A state inquiry determined that in Mr. Lockett’s case, a doctor failed to properly insert an intravenous needle through the prisoner’s groin, causing the sedative, and then the paralytic and heart-stopping agents, to diffuse in surrounding tissue. Officials have developed new procedures that they say will prevent such an error. But they also decided to double the dose of the same sedative, midazolam, in future executions.

Last month, a Federal District Court judge in Oklahoma ruled against a similar appeal for a delay, saying that courts “should not sit as a board of inquiry as to best practices” and asserting that midazolam had been used without a problem in about a dozen executions elsewhere.

The same drug was also involved in prolonged executions last year in Ohio and Arizona, and many medical experts say its effects at high doses are too unknown and unpredictable to justify its use.

Medical experts testifying on behalf of the four prisoners before the Federal District Court said no scientific evidence existed that the higher dose would reliably induce a coma and they challenged the credentials of the physician who testified in favor of the state’s plan.

In medical procedures, midazolam is often used in low doses to relax patients, but it is normally followed with a powerful anesthetic agent. Midazolam “is not approved for use — nor is it ever used — as general anesthesia for surgical procedures,” said Friday’s emergency request, to the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver.

Because there has been no research or clinical experience with the high doses being tried in executions, many experts say, there is no way to reliably predict the effects. “It is experimentation,” Dr. David Waisel, associate professor of anesthesiology at Harvard University, said in an interview.

Oklahoma is one of several states trying new drug combinations as barbiturates traditionally used in lethal injections have become scarce.

Florida has executed several prisoners using midazolam at the higher dose now adopted by Oklahoma, followed, in a similar sequence, by a muscle relaxant that impedes breathing and potassium chloride, a caustic agent that stops the heart but will cause excruciating pain if the inmate is not unconscious.

While the Florida executions appeared to go smoothly, Dr. Waisel said, any failure of the sedative could have gone undetected. “Once you paralyze an inmate so they cannot move, you have no way of knowing if they are feeling pain,” he said.

Ohio has had a moratorium on executions since last January when a prisoner, sedated with midazolam followed by a narcotic, gasped and clenched his fists for more than 20 minutes. On Thursday, state officials said they would stop using the drugs and delay executions until they can find a source for the traditional anesthetics.


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13) George Zimmerman Arrested on Aggravated Assault Charge
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SANFORD, Fla. — Florida authorities say George Zimmerman, whose acquittal of murdering an unarmed black teen sparked a national debate on race and self-defense laws, has been arrested on an aggravated assault charge.

The Seminole County Sheriff's Office says the 31-year-old Zimmerman was arrested in Lake Mary about 10 p.m. Friday and is being held at the John E. Polk Correctional Facility. The facility's website says Zimmerman is scheduled for a court appearance at 9 a.m. Saturday.

No further details were released. A message seeking further information was left Saturday morning by The Associated Press with Seminole County Sheriff officials.

Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013 of a second-degree murder charge for shooting an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin.

Since his acquittal, Zimmerman has had several brushes with the law:

— He was arrested on charges of aggravated assault, battery and criminal mischief after his then-girlfriend said he pointed a gun at her face during an argument, smashed her coffee table and pushed her out of the house they shared. Samantha Scheibe decided not to cooperate with detectives and prosecutors didn't pursue the case.

— Zimmerman was accused by his estranged wife of smashing an iPad during an argument at the home they had shared. Shellie Zimmerman initially told a dispatcher her husband had a gun, though she later said he was unarmed. No charges were ever filed because of a lack of evidence. The dispute occurred days after Shellie Zimmerman filed divorce papers.

— Zimmerman has also been pulled over three times for traffic violations since his acquittal.


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