Tuesday, February 10, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2015



On March 21, the antiwar movement will return to Washington, DC for a massive rally against U.S. Wars

On January 10, UNAC joined many other major antiwar organizations at a meeting in Washington, DC where we planned for several days of action around the date of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.  It is time that we are back in the streets in a big way.  Please plan to join us, organize buses and car pools and save the date.  For areas that are too far from Washington, DC, plan your own action in your area.    End all Wars at Home and Abroad!  Join us!

Here's the schedule so far:

Wednesday, March 18: Peace gathering and fellowship.

Thursday, March 19th: Lobbying on Capitol Hill, followed by a tour of the war machine: homes and offices of war criminals.

Friday, March 20th: Afternoon and evening teach-in: Ending Current Wars, Ending the Institution of War.
This event will examine ISIS and U.S. warmaking in Western Asia and elsewhere; the damage militarism does to the natural environment, economies, and civil rights; and how the war system can be replaced with a peace system.

Saturday, March 21st: Protest at the White House, followed by march.

To join the Facebook event for Spring Rising: https://www.facebook.com/events/430232700485435
For more information, click here:
http://nepajac.org/springrising.html

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Cancel the #DetroitWater Debt and Start Afresh

Sign the petition:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cancel-the-detroitwater-debt-and-start-afresh


We call on the City of Detroit and the newly-formed Great Lakes Water Authority to cancel the existing debts of Detroit Water and Sewerage customers and start afresh with simple, affordable rates: all customer past-due balances are wiped clean.

Last year, Detroit made international headlines when tens of thousands of residents lost their access to water through an aggressive shut-off program by the water department.

The city of Detroit has endured decades of economic turmoil, drastic depopulation and repeated mismanagement. The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) is over $5 billion in debt (over $4,500 per family in the metro Detroit area).To compensate, they have increased rates over 119% in the last decade.¹Residents who fall behind on their bills risk water shutoff, and in 2014 that’s exactly what happened to tens of thousands of Detroiters.

The shutoff program didn't work, and the DWSD collected less than 3% of the over $100 million currently owed.² A large number of the families who entered into payment plans last year are now defaulting on them yet again because they lack sufficient income.

In contrast, a voluntary bond tender offer initiated during the shutoffs allowed the city to renegotiate high interest rates on municipal water bonds and save over $250 million in interest fees for the city.³

The bond markets know that Detroit's water debt is junk and the city will unlikely ever be able to pay the current interest rates, which is why Default Trends proclaimed Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) its "Biggest Default of 2014".⁴

Corruption in the DWSD has been rampant, with former Department head Victor Mercado currently serving an 8-month federal corruption sentence for "conspiracy to commit extortion" by padding department contracts and rigging bids that netted his business associates millions. Although many of those contracts are now being scrutinized by the city's legal team, Detroiters are still paying dearly for the fraud of past leaders.

The overbearing Detroit water debt has a human side, too: it has pushed Detroit into an outright humanitarian crisis. Rates of infectious disease and sickness are up dramatically, leading the National Nurses union recently to declare a 'Public Health Emergency' in Detroit.⁵The water department is significantly under-staffed and water infrastructure is crumbling, leading to leaks that cost taxpayers tens of millions annually. The department is unable to address these time-sensitive issues due to lack of funding, as it currently spends 46% of its operating revenue on debt service to banks - the largest line-item by far in its budget.

We call on the City of Detroit and the newly-formed Great Lakes Water Authority to cancel the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department's existing debts and start afresh with simple, affordable rates: all customer past-due balances are wiped clean.

Detroit's existing water/sewerage rate structure is highly-regressive and unaffordable for too many families. We call on the city to implement the 2005 Water Affordability Plan to ensure that no family pays more than the EPA-recommended threshold for water, including "lifeline rates" for essential quantities of drinking/bathing water.⁶

The water department acknowledges that 90% of its operating costs are fixed⁷, meaning they don't depend upon how much water is consumed by users. Still, they charge usage-based rates that fluctuate dramatically with weather (up to 18% decrease in usage) and with broader demographic shifts in the region (2/3 of Detroit's population has left the city since 1950). Creating a progressive rate structure based at least partially upon a family's income - as is done with many public services like streetlights, schools, libraries, etc - would more equitably distribute the burden of operating a system relied upon by over 4 million people for essential drinking water.

The Detroit Water Brigade has provided emergency relief and advocacy to hundreds of families since June of 2014, including providing immediate financial assistance to families currently without water.⁸We've seen first-hand the disastrous effects of these harsh, debt-driven austerity policies.

We pledge to escalate this campaign in the coming months until we bring relief to the tens of thousands of metro Detroit families living without water today and the millions living precariously with unaffordable water rates.


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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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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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Justice for Rasmea: All out for March 12!
Letters for Leniency requested by Feb. 4.

On March 12, Rasmea is set to appear once again in the Detroit courtroom of Judge Gershwin Drain, this time for a sentencing hearing. We are seeking letters to the judge requesting leniency.

For this round of letters, we are NOT looking for a mountain of individual statements, but rather letters from prominent individuals who represent broader constituencies. We need you to work with leaders of faith-based, labor, and community organizations, as well as student governments, student organizations (national), prominent professors, and legislators in your area to draft and submit letters.

Below you will find an outline you can use to draft these letters, but it is important for the authors to write them in their own voices. Letters should be submitted by February 4 to justice4rasmea@uspcn.org.

Stay tuned! Keep sharing Rasmea’s story and organizing fundraisers. Watch for calls for your support as we prepare for sentencing and appeal. Our organizing is key to winning #Justice4Rasmea.

* * * SAMPLE LETTER TEMPLATE * * *


Honorable Judge Gershwin Drain,

I am writing to request leniency from you in the March 12 sentencing of Rasmea Odeh, who I know as .

-In November 2014, Rasmea was convicted of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization. Compassion in her sentencing will serve justice in this case. She was detained for a month immediately following the verdict, including almost 3 weeks in solitary confinement, which was extremely difficult for her.
As a survivor of torture, engagement for the betterment of her community in Chicago is critical to her emotional health; the isolation she endured while incarcerated was a great hardship and may have retriggered her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

-As a 67-year old woman, her health suffered under the cold, damp, and uncomfortable conditions in the St. Clair County Jail, as they surely would in any facility lacking medical services and accommodations to provide for senior citizens.

-If Rasmea loses her appeal, she will likely lose her citizenship and face deportation. This will end life as she knows it, cutting all her ties with family and community in Chicago. This punishment alone is so devastating, it should not be compounded by adding a prison term.

-Since there is a possibility of her conviction being overturned on appeal, keeping her out of prison would allow her to continue as a contributing and productive person, doing the work that is so critical to hundreds of immigrant and refugee women in Chicago’s Arab and Muslim community.

-Rasmea is an award-winning leader of Chicago’s immigrant community who has dedicated 50 years of her life to serving refugees wherever she has lived. In Chicago, she built the Arab Women’s Committee, with some 600 members. Because of Rasmea’s work, immigrant and refugee women who came to the US from countries facing war and political crises – like Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, and beyond – now have a place to seek support, gain empowerment and community, and call their home.

Respectfully yours,


 follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright © 2015 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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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 message has been sent to you by:
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA  •  510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org

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

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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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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

Lorenzo Speaks Concerning Prosecution's Brief:
JANUARY 1, 2015—The prosecutor has run away from (almost) every issue raised in my PCRA by begging the Court to dismiss everything as “untimely”. When they don’t do this, they suggest that me and my lawyers were “defamatory” towards either my former prosecutor Christopher Abruzzo or Detective Kevin Duffin, in our claims they withheld, misused or hid evidence of my Innocence, in order to secure an unjust conviction in this case. If I charged, a year ago, that about a dozen AGs (attorneys general) were involved in circulating porno via their office computers, people would’ve laughed at me, and seen me as crazy.

But, guess what? During 2014, we learned that this was the truth. How can it be defamatory to speak the truth? Notice the OAG (Office of Attorney General), never said the obvious: That AG Abruzzo didn’t inform the Defense about the relationship between his Motive Witness and his head detective (Victoria Doubs and Det. Duffin); that Det. Duffin doesn’t deny Doubs was his god-sister, and that she lived in his family home, or that he assisted her whenever she got into trouble.

Why not? Because it is true. How can you defame someone who defames himself? Mr. Christopher Abruzzo, Esq., when a member of the higher ranks of the OAG, sent and/or received copious amounts of porno to other attorneys general and beyond. What does this say about his sense of judgment? He thought enough about his behavior to resign from his post in the Governor’s Cabinet. If he thought that his behavior was okay, he’d still be sitting in the Governor’s cabinet, right? The OAG cannot honestly oppose anything we’ve argued, but they try by seeking to get the Court to do their dirty work, how? By denying an Evidentiary Hearing to prove every point we’ve claimed.

The prosecution is trying desperately to avoid dealing with the substance of my claims in Com. v. Lorenzo Johnson. So, they slander my Legal Team and blame them for defaming the good AG’s and Cops involved with this case. They try to do what is undeniable, to deny that they hid evidence from the Defense for years. They blamed me for daring to protest the hidden evidence of their malfeasance and other acts to sabotage the defense. They claim that they had an “Open File” policy with my trial counsel. But “Open File” is more than letting an attorney read something in their office. If it’s a search for the truth it must include what is turned over to the attorney, for how do we really know what was shown to her?

They say it is inconceivable that an attorney would read a file, beginning on page nine (9), and not ask for the preceding eight (8) pages. Yet, it is conceivable if trial counsel was ineffective for not demanding the record of the first eight pages. Pages that identify the State’s only witness as a “SUSPECT” in the murder for which her client was charged! How could such an attorney fail to recognize the relevance of such an issue, barring their sheer Ineffectiveness and frankly, Incompetence.

By seeking to avoid an evidentiary hearing, the prosecution seeks to avoid evidence of their wrongdoing being made plain, for all to see. If they believe I’m wrong, why not prove it? They can’t. So they shout I filed my appeal untimely, as if there can ever justly be a rule that precludes an innocent from proving his innocence! Not to mention the fact that the prosecution has failed to even mention the positive finger prints that ay my trial they said none existed. Don’t try to hide it with a lame argument about time. When isn’t there a time for truth? The prosecution should be ashamed of itself for taking this road. It is unworthy of an office that claims to seek justice.

After the trial verdict The Patriot-News (March 18, 1997) reported, “Deputy Attorney General Christopher Abruzzo admitted there were some serious concerns about the strength of the evidence against Johnson and praised the jury for doing a thorough job.” I guess he forgot to mention all of the evidence he left out to show Innocence.

Now, more than ever, Lorenzo Johnson needs your support.
Publicize his case; bring it to your friends, clubs, religious
and social organizations. 


SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/sign-the-petition.html

CONTRIBUTE TO LORENZO'S CAMPAIGN FOR FREEDOM!
http://www.freelorenzojohnson.org/how-can-i-help.html


Write: Lorenzo Johnson
            DF 1036
            SCI Mahanoy
            301 Morea Rd.
            Frackville, PA 17932

 Email: Lorenzo Johnson through JPAY.com code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC



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Click HERE to view in browser
http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/
       
Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

On December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge’s approval, repeatedly told the jury “you don’t need evidence to convict Mr. Pinkney.” And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV. PINKNEY TO THE ‘ALTERED’ PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney’s appeal.

Checks can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney.  Mail them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI 49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search “Pinkney”).

We urge your support to the efforts to Free Rev. Pinkney!Ramsey Clark – Former U.S. attorney general,
Cynthia McKinney – Former member of U.S. Congress,
Lynne Stewart – Former political prisoner and human rights attorney
Ralph Poynter – New Abolitionist Movement,
Abayomi Azikiwe – Editor, Pan-African News Wire<
Larry Holmes – Peoples Power Assembly,
David Sole – Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice
Sara Flounders – International Action Center

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

I am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...) ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2 days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this racist."  

New Court Date on 4 Motions for Rev. Pinkney 

TUES, FEB. 24 1pm Berrien County Court 

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an “Occupy the PGA [Professional Golfers’ Association of America]” demonstration against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment. 

The Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

Contributions for Rev. Pinkney’s defense can be sent to BANCO at Mrs Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union St., Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Or you can donate on-line at bhbanco.org.

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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!



Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
 Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) Video Analysis Suggests Egyptian Officer Shot Protester, Rights Group Says
By
FEB. 2, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/world/middleeast/video-analysis-suggests-egyptian-officer-shot-protester-rights-group-says.html?ref=world




2) Obama Has Little to Say to the Poor
By




3) Closing Education Gap Will Lift Economy, a Study Finds
"The average income of the bottom 20 percent of households sank by more than 8 percent from 1973 to 2103, while the inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 20 percent grew by about 60 percent, according to the report. The top 5 percent enjoyed an 80 percent jump. ... Only one in 20 Americans age 25 to 34 surpassed the educational level of their parents, for example. For the 20 richest member nations, that average was one in four."
By




4) Bratton Says Terrorism and Protests Will Be Handled by Separate Police Units
By





5) Coming to Mourn Tahrir Square’s Dead, and Joining Them Instead
Killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh in Cairo Angers Egyptians
By




6) Leading Egypt Activist Among 230 Sentenced to Life
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




7) U.N. Names U.S. Judge to Lead War Crimes Inquiry Into 2014 Gaza Conflict
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE




8) When Company Is Fined, Taxpayers Often Share Bill
"The rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which was accused of helping to cause the financial crisis with its inflated assessments of mortgage investments, is eligible to deduct half of the $1.37 billion settlement...The result would be a roughly $245 million reduction in its tax bill, the research group calculated. ...At least 80 percent of the more than $42 billion that BP has paid out because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico qualifies for a tax deduction...That approach may not, however, appeal to victims, whose punitive damage awards are taxed as regular income, as opposed to some other types of awards."
By




9) Man Jailed in ’92 Killings and Later Cleared Sues New York City
By





10) Lawmakers Aim to Protect Farm Animals in U.S. Research
By





11) Cuban Medics Fighting Ebola Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
By teleSUR
06 February 15
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28458-cuban-medics-fighting-ebola-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize 




12) In Los Angeles, Vintage Houses Are Giving Way To Bulldozers
By




13) The Shrinking American Labor Union
Business Day | Datapoints





14) Insured, but Not Covered
"The Affordable Care Act has ushered in an era of complex new health insurance products featuring legions of out-of-pocket coinsurance fees, high deductibles and narrow provider networks. Though commercial insurers had already begun to shift toward such policies, the health care law gave them added legitimacy and has vastly accelerated the trend, experts say. The theory behind the policies is that patients should bear more financial risk so they will be more conscious and cautious about health care spending."
By





15) History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names
By




16) Illinois Governor Acts to Curb Power of Public Sector Unions
By and




17) Oklahoma Debates Use of Nitrogen Gas for Executions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




18) Missouri Inmate Asks US Supreme Court to Stop His Execution
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




19) Justice Department Is Seeking Felony Pleas by Big Banks in Foreign Currency Inquiry
By and
February 9, 2015
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/u-s-is-seeking-felony-pleas-by-big-banks-in-foreign-currency-inquiry/










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1) Video Analysis Suggests Egyptian Officer Shot Protester, Rights Group Says
By
FEB. 2, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/world/middleeast/video-analysis-suggests-egyptian-officer-shot-protester-rights-group-says.html?ref=world

A detailed forensic analysis of video recorded in Cairo on Jan. 24 strongly suggests that an Egyptian police officer fired the shotgun pellets that killed her, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Sunday.

The rights group’s investigation of the fatal shooting of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, 32, compared the testimony of four witnesses with evidence from video and photographs recorded before, during and after the Egyptian police used force to disperse a small group of socialist activists who were marching to Tahrir Square with flowers. The march, on Jan. 24, was in memory of more than 800 protesters killed in the 2011 uprising that began with antipolice street protests that Jan. 25, national Police Day in Egypt.

According to the Human Rights Watch analysis, an examination of video posted online by the Egyptian newspaper Youm El Sabea shows Ms. Sabbagh crumpling to the pavement a split second after a masked officer fired a rifle in her direction from close range.

The very public and well-documented killing of Ms. Sabbagh, in a busy section of downtown Cairo on a Saturday afternoon, outraged Egyptians who had taken to the streets four years earlier to protest police impunity. Efforts by the Interior Ministry to pin the blame for her killing first on an unseen Islamist gunman — who would have had to fire into a street crowded with police officers without attracting attention — and then on an elderly activist standing near her as she was shot only added to the uproar.

Human Rights Watch noted that video and photographs showed that when the masked officer fired, he was standing next to a uniformed police brigadier general who was pointing at the protesters.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former military chief who took power after deposing Mohamed Morsi, the president elected after the revolution, offered his first public comment on the killing on Sunday, The Associated Press reported. After offering his condolences to Ms. Sabbagh's family, Mr. Sisi said that one “individual’s mistake should not be used to undermine an entire institution,” in an apparent reference to the nation’s police force.

According to local news media reports, in his remarks to a gathering of police and army commanders, religious leaders and politicians, the president also urged Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim to reveal “the truth behind” the protester’s death.

While Ms. Sabbagh, who left behind a young son, was relatively unknown in life, outrage over her death — and the arresting image of a colleague trying to save her — has made her into an icon of resistance to the authorities.

Last week, when female activists gathered at the site of her death to protest the shooting, they were met by counterdemonstrators chanting in favor of the police and the president.

After the female activists reportedly dispersed of their own accord, a man believed to be a plainclothes officer was photographed removing flowers left on the sidewalk where Ms. Sabbagh was shot.

Against this backdrop, Ms. Sabbagh’s husband released a video tribute in which he said his wife had been motivated by her love of Egypt to continue pressing for the original aims of the 2011 revolution: “bread, freedom and social justice.” Ms. Sabbagh and her colleagues were chanting for those things when their demonstration was attacked by the police.

 


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2) Obama Has Little to Say to the Poor
By

Who, if not he, is the president of the poor?

President Obama’s State of the Union address last month centered on what he calls “middle-class economics.” He did mention poverty, though. Once. In the section on foreign policy. In a paragraph about Africa.

If you’re swimming below the waterline of hope on the South Side of Chicago, or in eastern Kentucky, or in Fresno, Calif., you might wonder: Who, then, is my president?

One possible explanation for the omission is the belief that domestic poverty is too fringe, politically speaking. In industrialized countries, there aren’t enough poor people to reward such a focus.

The problem with that argument is facts. Here are a few: Most American public school students now qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, a new study reports. The ranks of children whose families receive food stamps have nearly doubled since the Great Recession, to 16 million — about one in five children. An estimated 65 million Americans have a criminal record, forever burdening many people’s efforts to secure work or, failing that, public aid.

So there are many Americans who may not fit either of the major parties’ prevailing political-economy narratives: for the Republicans, that anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps if only government stopped overregulating boots, straps and pulling; for the Democrats, that anyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps if only government subsidized straps and created a pullers’ tax credit.

The Republican narrative has long overlooked the poor. What’s more striking is how President Obama — the first African-American in the job, the son of a single mother, an erstwhile organizer of poor communities — neglected them in his annual address.

He spoke of “chances for everyone who makes the effort.” He praised an aptly middle-class guest, sitting with Michelle Obama in her box, because she “isn’t asking for a handout,” but rather for more ways to “get ahead.” He said, “These ideas won’t make everybody rich, or relieve every hardship. That’s not the job of government.” He kept using the same phrase to describe the people he wants to help: “working families.”

On the right, Mr. Obama is often ridiculed as a radical socialist. But what his speech suggests is that, for all the acrimony of American politics today, there is in fact a rather remarkable two-party consensus on the notion that everyone, given the removal of certain obstacles, can rise.

What if some people can’t rise? What about people doubly disqualified from being in a “working family,” because they can’t find work and then, not incidentally, fail to form a family? The percentage of adult men not in the labor force — meaning neither employed nor temporarily out of work and collecting unemployment benefits — now lurks at 30.8 percent, the highest level ever recorded. It was 13.3 percent in 1948 and has risen steadily since.

What about the street-dwelling transgender teenagers driven from home by hatred, the mentally and physically ill, the disabled, the addicts, the people surfacing from prison to closed doors? What about children born into stressful environments where the beatings are frequent and the words too few, now that we know from writers like Paul Tough that these children are largely doomed by the time they have the first flickers of agency?

There are people — millions of them — for whom the “shadow of crisis” has not passed, contrary to Mr. Obama’s opening words.

But America is becoming a return- on-investment country, in which every endeavor must justify itself in terms of accountancy rather than philosophy. From 1972 until recently, the United Negro College Fund helped 300,000 students obtain higher education, using a well-loved tag line: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

A year and a half ago, it gave in to the imperatives of the age: “What if the future of kids was a stock you could invest in?”


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3) Closing Education Gap Will Lift Economy, a Study Finds
"The average income of the bottom 20 percent of households sank by more than 8 percent from 1973 to 2103, while the inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 20 percent grew by about 60 percent, according to the report. The top 5 percent enjoyed an 80 percent jump. ... Only one in 20 Americans age 25 to 34 surpassed the educational level of their parents, for example. For the 20 richest member nations, that average was one in four."
By

Study after study has shown a yawning educational achievement gap between the poorest and wealthiest children in America. But what does this gap costs in terms of lost economic growth and tax revenue?

That’s what researchers at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth set out to discover in a new study that concluded the United States could ultimately enrich everybody by improving educational performance for the typical student.

When it comes to math and science scores, the United States lags most of the other 33 advanced industrialized countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ranking 24th, far behind Korea, Poland and Slovenia.Moving up just a few notches to 19th — so that the average American score matched the O.E.C.D. average — would add 1.7 percent to the nation’s gross domestic product over the next 35 years, according to estimates by the Washington Center, a nonpartisan, liberal-leaning research group focused on narrowing inequality. That could lead to roughly $900 billion in higher government revenue, more than making up for the cost of such an effort.

If Americans were able to match the scores reached in Canada, which ranks seventh on the O.E.C.D. scale, the United States’ gross domestic product would rise by an additional 6.7 percent, a cumulative increase of $10 trillion (after taking inflation into account) by the year 2050, the report estimated.

Robert G. Lynch, an economist who wrote the Washington Center report, explained why he took the trouble to make these what-if calculations.

“One of the main goals was to see how we could promote more widely shared and faster economic growth,” he said. In the three decades that followed the end of World War II, almost all Americans, no matter where they fell on the earnings scale, enjoyed at least a doubling of their real incomes.

But that balanced growth has evaporated. While those at the top have continued to experience robust income increases, everyone else’s income has either stalled or dropped. The average income of the bottom 20 percent of households sank by more than 8 percent from 1973 to 2103, while the inflation-adjusted incomes of the top 20 percent grew by about 60 percent, according to the report. The top 5 percent enjoyed an 80 percent jump.

One point of this exercise, Mr. Lynch explained, is to show that the added cost of improving educational achievement at the bottom would be more than made up for by the rise in economic output and tax revenue.The study used math and science scores from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, a test widely used around the world for measuring and comparing educational achievement. The average combined score for the United States is 978, while the O.E.C.D. average is 995. The Canadian average is 1,044.

Eliminating the achievement gap in America would require raising the country’s average to 1,080, so that it would rank third behind South Korea (with an average score of 1,092) and Japan (with a 1,083 average). That stunning improvement, according to the center, would raise the total output in the United States by another 10 percent. Lifetime earnings of the poorest quarter would jump by 22 percent in this event.The income gap is an outgrowth, at least in part, of the education gap. An analysis by the O.E.C.D. released last fall showed that the United States greatly lagged nearly every advanced industrial nation on measures of educational equality. Only one in 20 Americans age 25 to 34 surpassed the educational level of their parents, for example. For the 20 richest member nations, that average was one in four.

The report includes the types of changes, which include expanding early childhood education, reducing exposure to lead paint and starting school later so teenagers can get more sleep, that the center views as necessary to raise achievement scores, though it does not include specific costs in its calculations.

The report also notes how widely achievement scores vary within the United States, not only from state to state but county to county. Montgomery County, a generally affluent suburban area in Maryland just outside of Washington, for example, was able to reduce the gap and increase scores after instituting all-day kindergarten programs, reducing class size, investing in teacher development and reducing housing-based segregation in its schools. 




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4) Bratton Says Terrorism and Protests Will Be Handled by Separate Police Units
By

The New York Police Department will soon have two new groupings of officers: a heavily armed unit given the task of combating terrorism, and a mobile unit trained to handle more common events, like protests and neighborhood crime spikes.

The deployment changes that the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, outlined on Monday differed from those he presented in a speech last week. At that time, he described a single new unit, called the Strategic Response Group, “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.”

The idea of equipping officers with heavy weapons and protective gear to monitor protesters drew immediate criticism last week, and on Monday, Mr. Bratton sought to clarify his statements.

“I may have in my remarks or in your interpretation of my remarks confused you or confused the issue,” he told reporters.The plan, he said, is to have protests and antiterrorism duties handled by different types of officers, in different corners of the department.

A specially trained unit of 300 to 350 officers with heavier gear will be assigned to counterterrorism patrols currently performed by precinct officers who are temporarily detailed to high-risk areas of the city, like Times Square.

“It’s time to institutionalize, if you will, make permanent, that concept,” Mr. Bratton said, standing alongside many of his chiefs. That unit will augment the Emergency Services Unit, whose officers carry heavy weapons and whose Hercules teams are often seen at potential terrorism targets.

Separately, he said, the department would create a unit of roughly 500 patrol officers who would help with temporary issues, like a rise in crime in any precinct or large protests. Mr. Bratton said those officers would be known as the Strategic Response Group.

Mr. Bratton described the reorganization at a briefing with reporters that included topics such as a killing in Queens (a 50-year-old shot his friend visiting from Europe with an antique revolver, the police said); a Bronx drug seizure; and monthly statistics that showed an increase in murders and shootings. The number of crimes committed with guns is up across the city, he said, as are crimes committed by those recently released from jail.


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5) Coming to Mourn Tahrir Square’s Dead, and Joining Them Instead
Killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh in Cairo Angers Egyptians
By

CAIRO — Her friends wanted to lay a wreath in Tahrir Square as a memorial, but Shaimaa el-Sabbagh urged them to reconsider. She feared that the police might attack, mistaking them for supporters of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said a cousin, Sami Mohamed Ibrahim.

But how, her friends asked, could the police attack civilians who were armed only with flowers? So she kissed her 5-year-old son, Bilal, goodbye; left him in the care of a friend near her home in Alexandria; and, a day before the anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring revolt here, boarded a train for Cairo.

By midafternoon on Jan. 24, Ms. Sabbagh, 31, lay dead on a crowded street downtown, a potent symbol of the lethal force the Egyptian authorities have deployed to silence the cacophony of protest and dissent unleashed here four years ago. Human rights advocates say the cold brutality of her killing shows how far the military-backed government is willing to go to enforce a return to the old authoritarian order.Stark images of her killing resonated so widely here that in a televised appearance Sunday, even President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi offered condolences, declaring that he saw Ms. Sabbagh as “my own daughter.” At the same time, police attempts to deflect blame for her killing have been undercut by Ms. Sabbagh’s personal profile: as a mother, an accomplished poet and a left-leaning activist who supported the military ouster of the Islamist president.

Photographers and videographers captured her death moment by moment. As soon as the procession began and without any warning, masked riot police officers blasted the crowd with tear gas and birdshot from across a narrow street. A shotgun cracked. A kneeling friend held Ms. Sabbagh by the waist to keep her upright, blood streaking down her cheeks and his head against her abdomen. Then another friend carried her limp frame, cradled in his arms, through the tear gas in a vain attempt to save her.

Seldom has a needless death by police gunfire been so thoroughly and so movingly documented, rights advocates say, citing both the photographic evidence and multiple witnesses.

“A woman who went out to lay a wreath of flowers on Tahrir Square — we see her taking her last breath,” said Ghada Shahbandar, an Egyptian rights advocate. “How much more explicit can an image be?”

“It is a disgrace,” she said, lamenting the surreal attempts of the government’s supporters to pin the blame on a shadowy conspiracy as elaborate as a Hollywood thriller. “We have lost the appreciation of human life. We have lost the value of human blood, and we call for more and more killing as though we have not had enough!”

Ms. Sabbagh is just one name on a roster of thousands killed by police gunfire since the Arab Spring began in 2011. More than 800 were killed during the original 18-day uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. About 1,000 more, according to the most credible counts, were killed on one day, Aug. 14, 2013, when soldiers and police officers broke up a sit-in by supporters of the ousted President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hundreds more died in other mass shootings that summer.

Since then, the killing of protesters — mostly Islamists, but also leftists or liberals, and mostly unarmed — has become an almost weekly occurrence. Sondos Reda, a 17-year-old girl attending an Islamist rally, was killed in clashes with the police in Alexandria on the same day that Ms. Sabbagh died in Cairo. At least 20 others were killed the next day, Jan. 25, on the anniversary of the uprising. A student was killed five days later in clashes with the police at a demonstration in the province of Sharqiya, north of Cairo, and others have reportedly been killed since then in Giza.

But in “a moment of collapsing freedoms,” Ms. Sabbagh has become “a symbol of the revolution,” said Sayed Abu Elela, 31, the friend who held her by the waist in the moments after she was shot.

Ms. Sabbagh grew up in a conservative Muslim household but rebelled against its traditions, her friends said, and her father, a Muslim preacher who died a few years ago, grew resigned to her independence.

He used to tell her, “For the likes of you, wearing pants is a ‘covering,’ ” or modesty, Mr. Abu Elela recalled.

As a teenager in the late 1990s, she drifted into a circle of poets who used to meet at cafes around Alexandria, said Khaled Hegazzi, who first met her there. Her activism, he said, seemed to grow out of their cafe debates. “That is where it came from,” he said.

She became one of a small group of published Egyptian poets working in the avant-garde style of free verse but using popular, colloquial Arabic. Rejecting the grand and overtly political themes favored by the previous generations, she focused instead on the details of everyday life. Her generation “stopped doing noisy politics,” said Maged Zaher, an Egyptian-American poet who has translated some of Ms. Sabbagh’s work. “There is politics, but it is not sloganeering.”

Her poem “A Letter in My Purse” was about a lost handbag. “Anyway, she has the house keys,” Ms. Sabbagh wrote, “and I am waiting for her.”

In another poem, Ms. Sabbagh wrote as a Muslim girl who witnessed the crucifixion on a Cairo clock tower, hearing the voices of “the people who love God as they damn this moment where the creatures of God approved/Of crucifying Jesus naked in the crowded square on the clock arms as it declared one in the afternoon.”

She married a painter, Osama el-Sehely, earned a master’s degree in folklore at the Academy of Arts in Cairo and developed a passion for documenting the fading traditions of daily life in Egypt. She once spent months visiting towns across the Nile Delta to record the variations in the ways residents baked and served flatbread, said Delphine Blondet, who runs a dance school in Alexandria and recruited Ms. Sabbagh to research traditional birth celebrations for an educational project.

Ms. Sabbagh refused payment. “She just loved Egyptian people,” Ms. Blondet said. “Not the country as it is now, for sure, but really the people.”After the uprising in 2011, Ms. Sabbagh joined the Socialist Popular Alliance Party. She became a regular at almost every demonstration, and her friends in Alexandria called her “the voice of the revolution” because of her talent for leading chants. When a television interviewer in late 2012 asked her to look back at the period “after the revolution,” she rejected the question: “We are still ‘after the revolution,’ ” she said.

The Egyptian authorities quickly pledged a full investigation into her death. But several witnesses who reported the killing to the police said they had been immediately detained for questioning as suspects — including Mr. Abu Elela, who had held her in her final moments and was detained overnight.

And by the next day, an Interior Ministry spokesman made clear that the ministry had essentially ruled out police responsibility. Gen. Gamal Mokhtar of the ministry said at a gathering of international correspondents last week that it was implausible that the police would resort to such force for such a small crowd. “What is the need for the police to shoot bullets?” he asked. The photographs and videos were “no proof at all,” he said.

“There is a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood whose entire job and concern is to fabricate photos and videos that tell people that the police are assaulting protesters — that this one is bleeding, that one is injured,” he said.

Last weekend, the police detained one of Ms. Sabbagh’s fellow demonstrators, Zohdy al-Shamy, deputy chairman of her party, holding him overnight for questioning about whether he might have used a concealed weapon fired through his jacket pocket to kill his colleague.

“Madness,” said Medhat el-Za’ed, a party spokesman.

Ms. Sabbagh’s history, though, has also made it unusually difficult for the authorities to explain away the killing by accusing her of treason or violence. Last week, even the flagship state newspaper, Al Ahram, published a front-page editorial expressing rare, officially sanctioned criticism of the Egyptian police.

“Peaceful Shaimaa only dreamed of a free country,” wrote Ahmed el-Sayed al-Naggar, the chairman of the state-run news organization, but “she was killed in cold blood by the same person who killed the martyrs she was going to honor.”

In the television appearance Sunday, Mr. Sisi urged the interior minister to track down the killer, offering reassurances that even if a police officer had shot Ms. Sabbagh, the ministry itself would not bear the blame.“I don’t know, in all sincerity and truth, who is behind the killing of Shaimaa el-Sabbagh,” he insisted, a hand on his heart.

In Alexandria, a friend and her cousin said, no one has yet told Ms. Sabbagh’s son that his mother is not coming home.


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6) Leading Egypt Activist Among 230 Sentenced to Life
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO — An Egyptian court sentenced 230 people, including one of the leading activists behind the country's 2011 uprising, to life in prison after finding them guilty on Wednesday of taking part in clashes between protesters and security forces later that year.

All were tried in absentia except Ahmed Douma, a secular activist who is already serving a three-year-sentence for breaking a draconian law regulating protests. Thirty other people, all minors, were sentenced to 10 years in prison. Wednesday's ruling can be appealed.

It is the heaviest sentence yet against the secular activists who spearheaded the mass protests four years ago that forced longtime autocratic President Hosni Mubarak to step down.

After hearing the verdict, Douma clapped his hands in mock applause, bringing an angry riposte from Judge Mohammed Nagi Shehata. "Are we in Tahrir Square here or what? You are clapping to me? Show respect in the session... Don't say anything else or I'll give you three more years," he said.

"I respect myself," replied Douma, who is also serving a three-year sentence issued by the same judge for contempt of court.

The judge has courted controversy in the past by sentencing three Al-Jazeera journalists to at least seven years in jail last year and issuing a mass death sentence on Monday in connection to the killing of more than a dozen policemen in 2013.

"The harshness of the verdict is not a surprise to us, as the judge is driven by personal and political motives that shed light on the degree of impartiality of the Egyptian judiciary," said Douma's lawyer Mohammed Abdel-Aziz. "All talk about the independence of the judiciary is baseless."

Abdel-Aziz and the rest of Douma's defense team boycotted sessions after accusing Shehata of "terrorizing" them and not responding to any of their demands.

The case is connected to Cairo clashes in December 2011, during which a fire gutted parts of a library housing rare manuscripts and books.

Douma was fined 2.2 million dollars over buildings that were damaged during the protests, including parliament and other government buildings.

The nearly weeklong clashes that left some 40 people dead erupted after young activists took to the streets to protest the post-Mubarak political transition overseen by the military. The clashes caught world attention when riot police were filmed beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

The violence also laid bare the deep divisions between secular and Islamist activists, who had briefly united to topple Mubarak.

The schism eventually paved the way for the military's return to power amid massive protests against Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in 2013. After the military toppled Morsi, authorities launched a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent, killing hundreds of people in street clashes and jailing thousands, mainly Islamists but also some of the leading secular activists from 2011.

Egypt's courts are now swamped with the trials of thousands of protesters and government opponents. Judges have approved harsh and wide-ranging sentences against critics of the government while overturning earlier verdicts against Mubarak, his sons and senior security officials over the killing of protesters and corruption.

Judge Shehata gained international notoriety for sentencing three Al-Jazeera English journalists to prison after convicting them in June on charges linked to aiding the Muslim Brotherhood, which the government declared a terrorist organization following Morsi's ouster. One of the three, who has Australian citizenship, was released and deported by presidential order on Sunday.

Earlier this week, Shehata sentenced 183 alleged Morsi supporters to death over the killing of 15 police in a grisly attack on a station in 2013, which unfolded as security forces violently cleared Cairo protest camps, killing hundreds of Islamist demonstrators.

Last year, Egypt's powerful lawyers union criticized Shehata for "disparaging" and "terrorizing" Douma's defense team after the judge referred five of the team's six lawyers to prosecutors for investigation.

Shehata accused them on various occasions of disrespecting him. The defense team has subsequently withdrawn from the case and the union backed their decision, instructing all members to boycott Shehata's court.

"The judge has a clear political stance where he perceives the youth who led the uprising as a bunch of crooks and police as victims," said Abdel-Aziz.


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7) U.N. Names U.S. Judge to Lead War Crimes Inquiry Into 2014 Gaza Conflict
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE

GENEVA — The United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday picked an American judge serving on an inquiry into possible war crimes in Gaza to lead its work to completion a day after the inquiry’s chairman resigned after Israel accused him of a “blatant conflict of interest.”

The council’s president, Joachim Ruecker, picked Mary McGowan Davis, a former justice of the New York State Supreme Court and one of the two remaining panel members, to take over as chairwoman after the resignation of William Schabas, a Canadian law professor. The inquiry was set up in August to investigate the conduct of hostilities in the summer’s Gaza conflict.

Mr. Ruecker chose not to make a new appointment to replace Professor Schabas on the panel since it had largely completed gathering evidence and had already started writing the report that it is expected to present to the council in late March.

In a letter to the council last week, Israel’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva accused Professor Schabas of “a blatant conflict of interest” over a previous contractual relationship with “the Palestinian side.” Professor Schabas replied that he had provided a legal opinion for the Palestine Liberation Organization relating to accession to the International Criminal Court, for which he was paid $1,300.

Professor Schabas, speaking to the Israeli media on Tuesday, said he was stepping down to avoid becoming “an obstacle and distraction” to the work of the panel. Accepting his resignation on Tuesday, Mr. Ruecker said that “in this way, even the appearance of a conflict of interest is avoided, thus preserving the integrity of the process.”

However, Israel, which denounced the inquiry as a “kangaroo court” and refused to cooperate with its investigations, continued to challenge its legitimacy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the inquiry should be shelved, according to Israeli media reports. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman celebrated the departure of Professor Schabas as “another achievement of Israeli diplomacy” but said it would not affect the panel’s findings because of what he called its inherent bias.

Ms. McGowan Davis served as chairwoman of a panel formed to follow up on the findings of a United Nations inquiry led by William Goldstone that investigated Israel’s 2008-9 invasion of Gaza. The report she helped write found that Israel had investigated 400 allegations of misconduct in the course of the invasion, but little disciplinary action followed, and no investigation was undertaken into those who planned and managed the operation.


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8) When Company Is Fined, Taxpayers Often Share Bill
"The rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which was accused of helping to cause the financial crisis with its inflated assessments of mortgage investments, is eligible to deduct half of the $1.37 billion settlement...The result would be a roughly $245 million reduction in its tax bill, the research group calculated. ...At least 80 percent of the more than $42 billion that BP has paid out because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico qualifies for a tax deduction...That approach may not, however, appeal to victims, whose punitive damage awards are taxed as regular income, as opposed to some other types of awards."
By

When a Montana judge ordered Hyundai to pay $73 million in punitive damages last year to the families of two teenagers killed in a car crash, she found that the South Korean automaker had “recklessly” ignored scores of warnings over more than a decade about the steering defect blamed for the accident.

But even if Hyundai is eventually forced to pay the full amount of the damages, the punishment could be substantially reduced through a tax loophole that permits the company to save millions of dollars by deducting any court-ordered punitive damages as an ordinary business expense. The result, critics say, is that taxpayers are in effect subsidizing corporate misconduct.

“This tax loophole allows corporations to wreak havoc and then write it off as a cost of doing business,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who introduced a bill last month to outlaw the deductibility of punitive damages like the ones imposed on Hyundai.

“That undermines the whole point of punitive damages.”

Carmakers are far from the only companies that can exploit loopholes that allow them to lower their tax bill by deducting fines, forfeitures and other payments related to wrongdoing. Although the tax law forbids deductions for criminal fines and penalties owed to the government, other kinds of payments — to compensate victims or correct damages — are eligible for a tax deduction.

The rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which was accused of helping to cause the financial crisis with its inflated assessments of mortgage investments, is eligible to deduct half of the $1.37 billion settlement with state and federal prosecutors it agreed to this week, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer-oriented nonprofit. The result would be a roughly $245 million reduction in its tax bill, the research group calculated.

Which payments are deductible and which are not is often a mystery to the public. The overwhelming majority of cases, whether with a government agency or private individuals, are settled, enabling companies to hide just how much of the agreement’s sticker price is eligible for a write-off.

At least 80 percent of the more than $42 billion that BP has paid out because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico qualifies for a tax deduction, according to U.S. PIRG. That has saved an estimated $10 billion to $14 billion for the company. The exact amount is uncertain because of the lack of transparency, the group complained.

Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Too Big to Jail,” said that BP was “asking taxpayers, in effect, to pay for the victim compensation fund it agreed to set up.”

“Any future penalties should not permit massive hidden tax write-offs,” he said.

(The $13.7 billion in additional fines related to violations of the Clean Water Act that a judge is reviewing would not be tax-deductible.)

Many of the banks accused of shady mortgage deals and foreclosures that contributed to the financial crisis were able to deduct part of their multibillion-dollar settlements. The same day in 2013 that JPMorgan Chase announced a $13 billion deal with the Justice Department, for example, the bank’s chief financial officer emphasized that $7 billion of the total would be deductible. And $11.63 billion of Bank of America’s record $16.65 billion settlement in August is eligible for a tax break, experts said.

Senator Leahy is only the most recent in a long line of Republican and Democratic leaders and lawmakers — including Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who have tried, without success, to limit these sorts of tax breaks.

Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who has regularly railed against tax write-offs for corporate wrongdoing, said he and Senator Jack Reed, Democrat from Rhode Island, plan to reintroduce legislation to prohibit violators from deducting government-ordered settlements.

Complaints by Senator Grassley and other Republicans, including John McCain of Arizona, spurred Boeing in 2006 to forgo deducting $615 million it paid as part of a deal to avoid criminal charges arising from a contracting scandal.

Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst at U.S. PIRG, said closing the loophole was the perfect tax issue for the new Republican-controlled Congress to take on. “Both sides can see this as a way to advance their agendas,” said Mr. Baxandall, who co-wrote a 2013 report on allowing deductions for fines titled “Subsidizing Bad Behavior.”

Even the most popular tax reforms, however, have faltered in the midst of partisan feuding over the tax code as well as protests by business lobbyists.

Mr. Baxandall and other critics have pushed the government to bar tax deductions when they draw up settlements. The $1.2 billion agreement with Toyota that ended a criminal investigation into its concealing of defects specifically noted that the payment — ordinarily deductible — “shall be treated as a penalty paid to the United States government for all purposes, including all tax purposes.”For civil cases, like the Olson families’ lawsuit against Hyundai, Gregg Polsky, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, urges plaintiff lawyers to remind juries and judges that punitive damages are tax-deductible so they have the option of raising the award to offset the tax windfall.

Mr. Polsky argues that the practice would also have an impact on settlements. “It seems like a pretty common-sense idea,” he said. “When it’s deductible, you’re basically subsidizing the punishment.”

That approach may not, however, appeal to victims, whose punitive damage awards are taxed as regular income, as opposed to some other types of awards.

Companies defend the practice, pointing out that they are frequently the target of frivolous lawsuits and sometimes suffer from what they consider excessive jury awards. Settlements and damages are an inevitable cost of doing business, they say, and are, therefore, justifiable deductions.

Many supersize awards are often reduced in subsequent legal rounds. In October, a federal judge in Louisiana reduced the $9 billion in punitive damages that Takeda Pharmaceutical Company and Eli Lilly and Company were ordered to pay for failing to warn users that their diabetes drug Actos raised the risk of bladder cancer.

The new punitive damages, $36.8 million, are still “large enough to accomplish the jury’s clear aim: to send a message to the defendants that their wrongdoing must stop,” the judge said. The companies, which still face thousands of other lawsuits in state courts, can deduct that award.

In the Hyundai case, a jury blamed a defect in a steering mechanism and “actual malice” for the 2011 crash that killed three people, including Tanner Olson, 14, and Trevor Olson, 19. The jury awarded $240 million in punitive damages.

Four months later, Lake County District Judge Deborah Kim Christopher reduced the punitive damages to $73 million, while noting that Hyundai’s “reprehensibility” still justified a sizable award.

The company, which has attributed the accident to fireworks exploding in the car before the crash, has said it will appeal.

In August, federal regulators fined Hyundai $17.4 million for failing to report a different defect, one involving the brake fluid in its Genesis cars. That fine is not deductible.




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9) Man Jailed in ’92 Killings and Later Cleared Sues New York City
By

A man whose conviction for the murder of his mother, sister and a friend in 1992 was vacated last year is suing New York City.

The man, Antonio Yarbough, and a co-defendant, Sharrif Wilson, were cleared by DNA evidence and released last year after spending more than two decades in prison. Mr. Wilson died in January.

The suit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, does not ask for a specific amount.

The city is facing several claims and lawsuits by wrongly convicted men, particularly in Brooklyn, where the district attorney’s office has a unit reviewing more than 100 convictions. Kenneth P. Thompson, the district attorney, has moved to vacate 12 convictions.

People who have been cleared generally go on to sue the city for millions of dollars. The office of the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, has quickly settled some, while others have led to lengthy litigation.

Mr. Yarbough filed notice with Mr. Stringer’s office in April. A hearing was held in July, but no settlement offer was made, the suit says.

It was a summer day in 1992 when Mr. Yarbough, then 18, came home to his apartment in the Carey Gardens housing project in Coney Island, Brooklyn. His mother, his 12-year-old sister and a friend of the sister were dead, and had been “tied up, stabbed and garroted with electrical cords,” according to the lawsuit filed by Mr. Yarbough’s lawyers, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma and Philip J. Smallman.

Mr. Yarbough called the police, but he and his friend, Mr. Wilson, then 15, were soon accused of the crime. The police coerced Mr. Wilson into a videotaped confession, the lawsuit says, and had Mr. Yarbough sign his name to a written statement.

“Other than Sharrif’s false testimony and Antonio’s false confession, no evidence of any kind linked Antonio to the murders,” the lawsuit reads. It details how the police lied to the defendants, threatened them with guns and deprived them of sleep, “consistent with prevailing practices among New York City police detectives at the time.”

The police also gave Mr. Wilson confidential details about the crime so that, in his videotaped confession, he appeared to be the perpetrator because he should not have known those details otherwise, the lawsuit says.

Mr. Yarbough is gay and Mr. Wilson was gay. According to the lawsuit, the police theory for the crime was that they were dating and Mr. Yarbough’s mother disapproved. The suit contends that the young men were not dating, and that Mr. Yarbough’s mother had accepted her son’s sexual orientation.

Mr. Wilson was tried first, and testified that he was innocent and the videotaped confession was false. He was convicted of the three murders in 1994. Prosecutors then told him his potential sentence, of 27 years to life, would be reduced to nine years to life if he testified against Mr. Yarbough. He agreed.

Mr. Yarbough had two trials. The first ended in a hung jury; the second ended in a conviction. In 1994, Mr. Yarbough was sentenced to 75 years to life.

In 2010, Mr. Yarbough asked from prison for DNA testing of the evidence. Three years later, results came back with a match: DNA under the fingernails of Mr. Yarbough’s mother matched DNA found in the vagina of a woman, Migdalia Ruiz, who was raped and killed in 1999, while the co-defendants were in prison. That suspect has not been found.

The city’s Law Department said it would review the lawsuit.

Eric Sumberg, a spokesman for Mr. Stringer, said, “As all claimants are permitted to do, Mr. Yarbrough chose to file a lawsuit after the comptroller’s office conducted its examination of his claim against the city.”

Mr. Yarbough, living in Queens and working at a Hilton hotel, is dealing with the fallout from spending almost 22 years in prison, where he was assaulted multiple times. The lawsuit says he is being treated for depression.

Mr. Margulis-Ohnuma, the lawyer, said, “Nothing can ever give him back his family or those 22 years, but we expect this litigation to make even clearer the very serious police misconduct that was done at that time.”


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10) Lawmakers Aim to Protect Farm Animals in U.S. Research
By

Farm animals used in federal experiments to help the meat industry would receive new protections against mistreatment and neglect under legislation introduced on Thursday by a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both houses of Congress.

The bill aims to extend the federal Animal Welfare Act to shield cows, pigs, sheep and other animals used for agricultural research at federal facilities, including the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Clay Center, Neb., a unit of the Department of Agriculture. The act, which became law in 1966, excluded those animals, focusing largely on cats and dogs used in laboratory research.Sponsors of the new legislation, called the Aware Act, said they were prompted by a Jan. 19 article in The New York Times that raised concerns about the treatment of farm animals at the center, a 50-year-old institution that uses breeding and surgical techniques to make the animals bigger, leaner, more prolific and more profitable. Interviews and internal records showed that experiments and everyday handling there have often subjected animals to illness, pain and premature death, and that the center lacked the oversight that many universities and companies have adopted for their research on animals.

“As stewards of taxpayer dollars, we felt a responsibility to present a legislative fix that holds the U.S.D.A. to the same humane standards that countless research facilities across the country are held to,” said Representative Mike Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, who sponsored the House version of the bill with Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat. The Senate sponsors include Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who wrote on Twitter last month that the article in The Times “speaks to a level of cruelty to animals that is unacceptable.” The bill has been endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Since the article was published, Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, has ordered increased protections for farm animals used in research at the center and other agency facilities. The department named an ombudsman to hear internal concerns about animal welfare, and started a review of its research.

“We will use this opportunity to enhance and improve our agency by taking a look at our protocols, re-emphasizing our priorities, and recommitting ourselves to animal welfare in our labs and in our research,” the administrator of the department’s Agricultural Research Service, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, wrote in a Jan. 23 email to employees.

Catherine Wotecki, the department’s undersecretary for research, education and economics, said Thursday that Mr. Vilsack intended to examine practices at the Nebraska center and elsewhere so the agency could recommend changes in animal-welfare policy. “We take this issue very seriously and are taking action to ensure animals are respected and treated humanely,” Dr. Wotecki said.

Center officials have defended their work, saying they keep animal welfare in mind as they strive to better feed a growing world population.

But the center’s critics, including several veterinarians who have worked there, say the Agriculture Department has failed to heed the growing demand from consumers — and, increasingly, grocers and meat producers — that farm animals be treated more humanely. To create leaner pigs, for example, the center weaned piglets from their mothers at just 10 days old, while some retailers are phasing in standards that would require suppliers to postpone weaning to 56 days, to avoid trauma and stress on the animals.

Some of the strongest public reaction came in response to the center’s continuing effort to develop an “easy care” sheep that could cut costs by giving birth to triplets, instead of the usual single or twins, in pastures without the usual spending for shelter or labor. As many as one in three of the easy-care lambs at the center have died, mainly from starvation, exposure to cold rain and predators, records show.“The BIG problem with both this center and modern trends in livestock husbandry is that the husband is more and more scarce,” an Illinois sheep farmer commented on The Times’s website. “We want maximum food and maximum profit with minimum husbandry, and that will always mean cruelty.”

Several members of Congress, including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Louise M. Slaughter of New York, have written to Mr. Vilsack, urging him to adopt new policies for farm animals.

Still, animal research experts expressed reservations this week about the new bill’s intent to increase oversight by the Agriculture Department, which already enforces the Animal Welfare Act through its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The legislation would require inspections and close monitoring of experiments.

“One branch of a department inspecting another branch strikes me as a classic conflict of interest,” said Christian Newcomer, executive director of the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International, whose accredited organizations include a growing roster of universities and companies that conduct research on farm animals. The Nebraska center has not sought accreditation; it relies on its own scientists and staff to monitor its research.

In an interview on Wednesday, Temple Grandin, the renowned animal welfare advocate, praised livestock producers for making great strides in handling animals more humanely, but she said she has become increasingly concerned about research that is causing a “biological overload” on farm animals being developed to be more productive. “We’re making pigs that have 14 piglets, with low-birth-weight pigs that just die, and I’ve got a problem with that,” she said.

She said that researchers and producers should open their operations to full transparency, including videotaping their activities, and adopt what she called the wedding-guest standard. “Bring your wedding guests in and show them the pigs with too many piglets, and see what they would say,” she said. In other words, she said, the self-imposed test for anyone working with farm animals should be: “Would I show what I’m doing to my wedding guests?”


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11) Cuban Medics Fighting Ebola Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
By teleSUR
06 February 15
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28458-cuban-medics-fighting-ebola-nominated-for-nobel-peace-prize
 
A team of Cuban doctors and nurses specialized in disaster situations and serious epidemics currently stationed in West Africa fighting the Ebola outbreak was nominated in Norway for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The Henry Reeve Cuban Medical Brigade’s candidacy was approved unanimously by the Annual Conference of Norwegian Trade Unions in Trondheim, a meeting attended by Cuba's ambassador to Norway, Maria Esther Fiffe, Cuban press reported Thursday.

According to official figures, 461 Cuban doctors and nurses belonging to the brigade have been stationed in West Africa since October to help fight the Ebola epidemic there, which has killed 8,921 people and infected as many as 22,334, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Since the virus was first detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976, 23 outbreaks have been reported in several countries. The most recent outbreak began in Guinea, but spread to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia, which is currently the most affected country.

The Henry Reeve Brigade was created on Sept. 19, 2005, with over 1,500 members. Its first missions were in Guatemala and Pakistan, countries that faced the consequences of a hurricane and a devastating earthquake, respectively.

Cuba had also offered to dispatch the brigade to the United States to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, a move that U.S. authorities rejected.

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12) In Los Angeles, Vintage Houses Are Giving Way To Bulldozers
By

LOS ANGELES — For 50 years, the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury lived and wrote at 10265 Cheviot Drive, a bright yellow stucco home built in 1937 that is tucked away on a winding street in an eclectic and charming, affluent neighborhood on the West Side of Los Angeles.

Or rather, that was once tucked away. Early one January morning, a team of demolition workers, armed with crowbars and backed by a bulldozer, showed up to begin a methodical dismantling of this piece of history in Cheviot Hills, fending off neighbors alarmed by the racket. By the end of the month, all that was left were two chimneys and a few stucco walls.The loss of the Bradbury home was the latest in a tidal wave of teardowns that has spread across Los Angeles over the past two years. Developers, seeing the potential for high profits in this housing-starved region, have been bulldozing vintage homes in middle-class enclaves — Arts and Crafts cottages, Spanish Mission-style bungalows — to replace them with lot-filling, towering modern homes that typically sell for over $2 million.

Fights over this kind of redevelopment have broken out in communities across the nation, but the battle has become particularly pitched in Los Angeles, with its rich diversity of architectural styles, abundance of wealth and streets that look like movie sets. This is in no small part because many of the most striking neighborhoods here were built, or are lived in today, by a sizable contingent of set designers, movie producers and actors.

For builders, the teardown frenzy is a welcome sign of a recovering Los Angeles economy. They see a market response to demands of people who want bigger homes with the kinds of amenities that were not even imagined when houses were built 80 years ago — media rooms, sprawling bathrooms, elaborate kitchens.

“All of this comes down to a matter of personal choice,” said Scott Ouellette, president of the Los Angeles-Ventura chapter of the Building Industry Association of Southern California. “Some people want a neighborhood to never change; other people want larger, more modern housing. There needs to be some balance.”

But the destruction of thousands of classic homes is disrupting and dividing neighborhoods, raising alarm among civic leaders about potentially irreparable damage to handsome, historic and architecturally distinctive communities that they argue define Los Angeles as much as Hollywood or Venice.

The phenomenon has left some homeowners living under the shadow of looming block houses that push up against their property lines. Often, the first warning that a neighbor’s home is about to vanish comes from the beep-beep-beep of bulldozers that arrive overnight and can turn a home into a pile of wood and stone by lunchtime.

“At this point, we’ve reached a broad civic consensus that mansionization is harmful to the character and livability of Los Angeles,” said Shelley Wagers, head of the Beverly Grove Alliance, a neighborhood group that has fought this type of development. “The damage they do to our neighborhoods is irreversible. Our residential neighborhoods are the heart of the city’s character.”

Under rising pressure from neighborhood groups, the Los Angeles City Council is moving to toughen regulation of home construction — and destruction. A law that was passed in 2008 in response to an earlier wave of teardowns is now viewed as full of loopholes.

“This is already out of hand, but it could clearly get a lot worse,” said Paul Koretz, the City Council member pushing the legislation. “We are trying to respond to it as quickly as we can.”

But the effort has been slow, as the proposed changes are reviewed by city planners, fueling suspicion among neighborhood groups about the influence of developers on City Hall.

“This is not a complex process that should take two years,” said Dick Platkin, an urban planner who used to work for the city. “It could be done for three or four or five months if it was a high priority, which it’s not.”

The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety said it had issued 1,728 single-home demolition permits in 2014, up from 1,323 the year before. By contrast, just 709 were issued in 2010. The evidence can be seen in strolls through neighborhoods from Hollywood to Hancock Park: Large new homes dwarf smaller cottages, dusty lots stand where homes once did, and telltale green fences and Dumpsters are set in front of houses.

At a time when Los Angeles continues to struggle with homelessness and a lack of affordable housing, this subject is dominating conversations in many neighborhoods.

“It’s one of the hottest issues in the whole district,” said Teddy Davis, a Democrat running for City Council who has pledged not to take developer contributions. “I hear about it from Toluca Lake to Silver Lake, from Sherman Oaks to La Brea-Hancock. It really rattles people: They feel like here are these 100-year-old homes and they are gone in two hours. And then they have a giant aircraft carrier parked next to their homes.”Los Angeles has always been known for its tear-it-down, build-it-up ethos, to the concern of preservationists. The intensity of the current opposition has challenged the notion that this is a city with little interest in preserving its past.

“The biggest issue in this is the loss of community character,” said Adrian Scott Fine, the director of advocacy for the Los Angeles Conservancy, a historic preservation group.

Clark T. Carlton, a screenwriter who lives in North Beverly Grove, said, “The growing populist movement to save these neighborhoods of charming prewar homes is evidence that Los Angeles is finally becoming a world-class city and its people realize they do have a beautiful and interesting history to preserve.”

Still, this is a debate about both the future of neighborhoods and the rights of property owners.

“Some people like big ostentatious boxes — other people don’t,” Mr. Ouellette said. “When you live in a neighborhood and own a property, whether it’s for one year or 40 years, your rights are coequal. Neither of them really have the right to tell the other what to do.”

The opposition is far from unanimous. Many families want bigger homes, particularly in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods with large families. Some homeowners say they welcome developers who take down older, dilapidated homes and replace them with sleek, modern homes that they argue increase property values for all.

Whatever the historic resonance of the Bradbury home — people were lining up to grab chunks of the yellow stucco as mementos — it was hardly considered a work of architectural distinction. It was purchased by a well-known architect, Thom Mayne, who told the book blog Melville House that he viewed the home as banal and wanted to replace it with something architecturally distinct.

“There are two camps. There’s one camp that doesn’t want to see a historical home come down,” said David Roberts, 69, a retired businessman who lives up the street from the Bradbury home. “The other camp says it’s O.K. to build new things. We’re in the second camp.”

Mr. Roberts glanced at his wife, Sandy, and added a caveat: “Unless they build a monstrosity.”




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13) The Shrinking American Labor Union
Business Day | Datapoints

24.2%: private sector union membership rate, 1973

6.6%: private sector union membership rate, 2014

Source: Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson

A generation ago labor unions were often a familiar feature of the American workplace, but in private businesses across the country, unions have been shrinking. Today fewer than one in 15 private sector workers belongs to a union, compared with almost one in four back in 1973.

But dwindling union participation in the private sector stands in stark contrast with union membership among public sector workers, which rose sharply in the 1970s and has been relatively steady since 1980 at around 35 percent. Overall union membership has fallen by about a half since 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, driven entirely by the decline in the private sector.

The causes of falling union participation are hard to pinpoint but may be attributed to several factors, including the pressures of global trade, technological change, the shift away from domestic manufacturing and a tougher stance against unions from government and corporate leaders.

It is probably no accident that the drop in union membership has occurred as the incomes of many working Americans have stagnated. “The decline in unions is a huge factor explaining what’s happened to middle-class wages,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. He calculated it could account for one-third of the growth in wage inequality for men and one-fifth of that for women from 1973 to 2007.

Shrinking union participation affects the broader work force, since unions tend to provide spillover benefits to nonunion members. According to an article written by Mr. Mishel and David Cooper, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, employee compensation declined most in states like Michigan and Ohio where collective bargaining also declined sharply.

“When collective bargaining is strong in an industry, what you find is that it raises nonunion employee wages too,” Mr. Mishel said.
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14) Insured, but Not Covered
"The Affordable Care Act has ushered in an era of complex new health insurance products featuring legions of out-of-pocket coinsurance fees, high deductibles and narrow provider networks. Though commercial insurers had already begun to shift toward such policies, the health care law gave them added legitimacy and has vastly accelerated the trend, experts say. The theory behind the policies is that patients should bear more financial risk so they will be more conscious and cautious about health care spending."

By

WHEN Karen Pineman of Manhattan received notice that her longtime health insurance policy didn’t comply with the Affordable Care Act’s requirements, she gamely set about shopping for a new policy through the public marketplace. After all, she’d supported President Obama and the act as a matter of principle.

Ms. Pineman, who is self-employed, accepted that she’d have to pay higher premiums for a plan with a narrower provider network and no out-of-network coverage. She accepted that she’d have to pay out of pocket to see her primary care physician, who didn’t participate. She even accepted having co-pays of nearly $1,800 to have a cast put on her ankle in an emergency room after she broke it while playing tennis.

But her frustration bubbled over when she tried to arrange a follow-up visit with an orthopedist in her Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield network: The nearest doctor available who treated ankle problems was in Stamford, Conn. When she called to protest, her insurer said that Stamford was 14 miles from her home and 15 was considered a reasonable travel distance. “It was ridiculous — didn’t they notice it was in another state?” said Ms. Pineman, 46, who was on crutches.

She instead paid $350 to see a nearby orthopedist and bought a boot on Amazon as he suggested. She has since forked over hundreds of dollars more for a physical therapist that insurance didn’t cover, even though that provider was in-network.

The Affordable Care Act has ushered in an era of complex new health insurance products featuring legions of out-of-pocket coinsurance fees, high deductibles and narrow provider networks. Though commercial insurers had already begun to shift toward such policies, the health care law gave them added legitimacy and has vastly accelerated the trend, experts say.

The theory behind the policies is that patients should bear more financial risk so they will be more conscious and cautious about health care spending. But some experts say the new policies have also left many Americans scrambling to track expenses from a multitude of sources — such as separate deductibles for network and non-network care, or payments for drugs on an insurer’s ever-changing list of drugs that require high co-pays or are not covered at all.For some, like Ms. Pineman, narrow networks can necessitate footing bills privately. For others, the constant changes in policy guidelines — annual shifts in what’s covered and what’s not, monthly shifts in which doctors are in and out of network — can produce surprise bills for services they assumed would be covered. For still others, the new fees are so confusing and unsupportable that they just avoid seeing doctors.

It is true that the Affordable Care Act has erased some of the more egregious practices of the American health insurance system that left patients bankrupt or losing homes to pay bills. Insurers can no longer deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, for example. And the new policies cap out-of-pocket spending so long as the patient receives care within the plan. Most important, the act has offered health insurance to an estimated 10 million Americans who did not have any, often by expanding Medicaid or providing subsidies.

But by endorsing and expanding the complex new policies promoted by the health care industry, the law may in some ways be undermining its signature promise: health care that is accessible and affordable for all.

“I’m always curious when I read this ‘good news’ that health costs are moderating, because my health care costs go up significantly each year, and I think that’s a common experience,” said Mark Rukavina, president of Community Health Advisors in Massachusetts.

While much of the focus in the past has been on keeping premiums manageable, “premiums now tell only a part of the story,” Mr. Rukavina said, adding: “A big part of the way they’ve kept premiums down is to shift costs to patients in the form of co-pays and deductibles and other types of out-of-pocket expenses. And that can leave patients very vulnerable.”

Such policies desperately need improvement, patients and professionals like Mr. Rukavina say. But with the Republicans attacking the Affordable Care Act at all turns, even political supporters seem reluctant to acknowledge that it has some flaws. The narrative has been cast in black or white: It’s working, or it’s a failure. The reality, of course, is gray.

AT this point, we don’t have a good definition of “affordable” — or how to measure it fully and fairly. Many studies show that national health costs, while still rising, are not growing as fast as they once were. But what does that mean for individual patients? So far the research has yielded mixed results.

A study by the Commonwealth Fund this month found that the rise in health insurance premiums in employer-based plans had slowed in 31 states since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (good news, right?). But premiums were still rising faster than median incomes (hmm). More important, perhaps, the researchers found that patients were paying more in health care expenses than ever before, during a time of stagnant wages (not so great). In fact, nearly 10 percent of median household income now goes to pay premiums and deductibles, the study found. And that does not include other kinds of health payments that patients now encounter, such as co-pays and uncovered drugs or services.

A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 46 percent of Americans said they had trouble affording health care, up 10 percentage points in just one year. Some of the cost problems may ease as patients — now known as health care consumers — learn what to expect and how to choose and navigate their plans.

But other problems may be related to the process by which the plans are created. Under the Affordable Care Act each state was asked to select a benchmark plan as its standard. It had to cover certain “essential health benefits” like maternity care and prescription drugs; it had to have a defined actuarial value depending on the level of plan. Silver plans, for example, had to cover 70 percent of charges, leaving consumers with 30 percent. But within those parameters, competing insurers had leeway to set premiums, co-payments and deductibles, and to create networks by negotiating with doctors and hospitals. Naturally, they created policies that met the core criteria while minimizing their financial risk.

Suddenly there were hundreds of new insurance products that had never been tested in real time. Their shortcomings are now playing out in various ways.

Alison Chavez, 36, who is self-employed, signed up for a marketplace plan in October 2013 that she hoped would be an improvement on her previous plan. She had recently been given a diagnosis of breast cancer and was just beginning therapy, so she was careful to choose a policy on the Covered California marketplace that included her physicians.

But in March, while in the middle of treatment, she was notified that several of her doctors and the hospital were leaving the plan’s network. She was forced to postpone a surgery as she scrambled to buy a new commercial policy that included her doctors. “I’ve been through hell and back, but I came out alive and kicking (just broke),” she wrote in an email.Dr. Alexis Gersten, a dentist in East Quogue, N.Y., switched her family and 11 employees to a new Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for 2014, after a previous small-business group plan was canceled. She bought the plan through a broker, and says she was unaware that it was an Affordable Care Act plan. When her son needed an ear, nose and throat specialist, the nearest was in Albany, five hours away. Though her cardiologist was on the network list, he said he did not take the plan. She ended up driving an hour to see a new one. A dispute with the insurer about how to count deductibles left her with a $457 pediatrician’s bill. This year she has chosen a new policy.

“People may have a checklist when they buy insurance: First, premiums, then the deductible — and those are pretty easy to understand because they’re set dollar amounts,” said Lynn Quincy, associate director of health reform policy at Consumers Union. But new policies demand different and more difficult kinds of calculations, she said: “The terms are unfamiliar, and figuring out networks is especially murky.”

Compounding the problem is the lack of basic information to shop effectively. When Andrea Greenberg, a New York lawyer, called the help line of Health Republic to clarify the difference between two plans, she found herself speaking to someone reading off a script in the Philippines. “I was really outraged,” she said. “This is an important decision with potentially dire consequences. It’s not like you’re choosing a sweater.”

Likewise, it took many phone calls for Aviva Starkman Williams, a California computer engineer with insurance through her employer, to determine whether the pediatrician doing her son’s 2-year-old checkup was in-network for 2015. Only three of the pediatricians in her doctor’s six-person group were listed in her plan’s online directory, and since her deductible had tripled from the previous year’s, she wanted to limit her out-of-pocket payments.

The practice’s office manager couldn’t tell her for sure. The insurer’s representative said he didn’t know because doctors came in and out of network all the time, likening the situation to players’ switching teams in the National Basketball Association. “If you don’t have updated information, who does?” she asked. “Isn’t it your job to know?”

Ms. Quincy said regulators needed to do a much better job setting requirements and policing plan practices and offerings, particularly provider networks. Few states have clear standards and many rely on consumer complaints to ferret out problems.

Last month, the California insurance commissioner, Dave Jones, announced new emergency regulations concerning networks, noting: “Health insurers’ medical provider directories have been inaccurate, misleading consumers into signing up with a health insurer for access to a doctor, specialist or hospital, only to learn that these medical providers are not actually a part of the health insurer’s network.”

But for now, patients are most often left to fend for themselves. When Amy Moses, a tech entrepreneur in New York City, went online to select a plan, she paid a relatively pricey $650 per month for a United Healthcare plan to make sure her network included a longtime physician. One month into the year, the doctor’s practice was bought by a hospital, which then dropped the plan, so her doctor did as well. (A year later the doctor was still listed in the network directory.)

She discovered the change only when she contacted the physician for a referral for an urgent outpatient procedure costing thousands of dollars that had been recommended by an in-network surgeon. (Both the referring doctor and the surgeon had to be in-network for coverage.) “I literally had three days to find a new in-network internist and score an appointment to get a referral, or cancel my procedure,” she said. “I was stuck in insurance purgatory.”

For a continuing conversation about health care costs and pricing in the United States, please join our Facebook group, Paying Till It Hurts.


Elisabeth Rosenthal is a New York Times correspondent who is writing a book about the health care system.



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15) History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names
By

DALLAS — A block from the tourist-swarmed headquarters of the former Texas School Book Depository sits the old county courthouse, now a museum. In 1910, a group of men rushed into the courthouse, threw a rope around the neck of a black man accused of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old white girl, and threw the other end of the rope out a window. A mob outside yanked the man, Allen Brooks, to the ground and strung him up at a ceremonial arch a few blocks down Main Street.

South of the city, past the Trinity River bottoms, a black man named W. R. Taylor was hanged by a mob in 1889. Farther south still is the community of Streetman, where 25-year-old George Gay was hanged from a tree and shot hundreds of times in 1922.

And just beyond that is Kirvin, where three black men, two of them almost certainly innocent, were accused of killing a white woman and, under the gaze of hundreds of soda-drinking spectators, were castrated, stabbed, beaten, tied to a plow and set afire in the spring of 1922.

The killing of Mr. Brooks is noted in the museum. The sites of the other killings, like those of nearly every lynching in the United States, are not marked. Bryan Stevenson believes this should change.

On Tuesday, the organization he founded and runs, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., released a report on the history of lynchings in the United States, the result of five years of research and 160 visits to sites around the South. The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.

Next comes the process of selecting lynching sites where the organization plans to erect markers and memorials, which will involve significant fund-raising, negotiations with distrustful landowners and, almost undoubtedly, intense controversy.

The process is intended, Mr. Stevenson said, to force people to reckon with the narrative through-line of the country’s vicious racial history, rather than thinking of that history in a short-range, piecemeal way.

“Lynching and the terror era shaped the geography, politics, economics and social characteristics of being black in America during the 20th century,” Mr. Stevenson said, arguing that many participants in the great migration from the South should be thought of as refugees fleeing terrorism rather than people simply seeking work.

The lynching report is part of a longer project Mr. Stevenson began several years ago. One phase involved the erection of historical markers about the extensive slave markets in Montgomery. The city and state governments were not welcoming of the markers, despite the abundance of Civil War and civil rights movement memorials in Montgomery, but Mr. Stevenson is planning to do the same thing elsewhere.

Around the country, there are only a few markers noting the sites of lynchings. In several of those places, like Newnan, Ga., attempts to erect markers were met with local resistance. But in most places, no one has tried to put up a marker.

Efforts to count the number of lynchings in the country go back at least to 1882, when The Chicago Tribune began publishing each January a list of all executions and lynchings in the previous year. The Tuskegee Institute began releasing a list in 1912, and in 1919, the N.A.A.C.P. published what its researchers said was a comprehensive list of lynchings in the previous three decades. In 1995, the sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck researched the existing lists, eliminated errors and duplicates, and compiled what many consider the most accurate inventory to that time.

The report released Tuesday says that the new inventory has 700 names that are not on any of these previous lists, many of which Mr. Stevenson said were discovered during the compilation of the report.

Professor Beck, who teaches at the University of Georgia, has not reviewed the new list. But he pointed out that, with racial violence so extensive and carried out in so many different ways, compilers of lists may differ on what constitutes a lynching; the new list, as opposed to some previous ones, includes one-time massacres of large numbers of African-Americans, such as occurred in Arkansas in 1919 and in Louisiana in 1887.

“If you’re trying to make a point that the amount of racial violence is underestimated, well then, there’s no doubt about it,” Professor Beck said. “What people don’t realize here is just how many there were, and how close. Places they drive by every day.”

Among Professor Beck’s findings were that the number of lynchings did not rise or fall in proportion to the number of state-sanctioned executions, underscoring what Mr. Stevenson said was a crucial point: that these brutal deaths were not about administering popular justice, but terrorizing a community.

“Many of these lynchings were not executing people for crimes but executing people for violating the racial hierarchy,” he said, meaning offenses such as bumping up against a white woman or wearing an Army uniform.

But, he continued, even when a major crime was alleged, the refusal to grant a black man a trial — despite the justice system’s near certain outcome — and the public extravagance of a lynching were clearly intended as a message to other African-Americans.

The bloody history of Paris, Tex., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, is well known if rarely brought up, said Thelma Dangerfield, the treasurer of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. Thousands of people came in 1893 to see Henry Smith, a black teenager accused of murder, carried around town on a float, then tortured and burned to death on a scaffold.

Until recently, some longtime residents still remembered when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire at the city fairgrounds in 1920.

“There were two or three blacks who were actually around during that time, but you couldn’t get them to talk about it,” Ms. Dangerfield said.

She helped set up an exhibit in the county historical museum, the only commemoration of the lynchings she knows of in a town with prominent public memorials to the Confederacy. The prospect of a permanent marker had not occurred to her.

“It would be a fight,” she said. “Someone is going to have some resistance to it. But you know, I think it wouldn’t hurt to try it.”





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16) Illinois Governor Acts to Curb Power of Public Sector Unions
By and

CHICAGO — Gov. Bruce Rauner, the newly elected Republican who has often criticized public sector unions, took his first step toward curbing their power on Monday by announcing an executive order that would bar unions from requiring all state workers to pay the equivalent of dues.

Mr. Rauner, who faces a Democratic-controlled legislature with strong ties to labor, took the unilateral step saying that he believed those fees violate the United States Constitution.

“Forced union dues are a critical cog in the corrupt bargain that is crushing taxpayers,” Mr. Rauner said. “An employee who is forced to pay unfair share dues is being forced to fund political activity with which they disagree. That is a clear violation of First Amendment rights — and something that, as governor, I am duty bound to correct.”Mr. Rauner, a former private equity manager who became the state’s first Republican governor in more than a decade, is following other Republican governors in the Midwest who have aggressively taken on public sector unions in recent years.

Those include Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who ended collective bargaining by state workers by executive order; Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who led efforts to cut collective bargaining rights for most public employees; and Rick Snyder of Michigan, who signed legislation ending the requirement that all workers in unionized workplaces pay union dues.

The governor’s executive order affects about 6,500 of the state employees who are not in unions but currently pay fees in lieu of union dues. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said that about 42,000 state employees are represented by unions.

But labor leaders say Mr. Rauner’s intent is far broader, aimed at shrinking union membership in the future and diminishing labor’s power in Illinois. Union leaders have described the fees, often called “fair share” payments, as reasonable contributions from workers who, while choosing not to be union members, still benefit from collective bargaining agreements.

The order does not affect private sector unions or state employees who choose to be in unions. A spokesman for the governor said that the executive order would take effect immediately but that the money from the union fees would be placed in escrow in case the order was challenged in the courts.

Last week, in his first State of the State address, Mr. Rauner called for the state to ban political contributions by public employee unions to “the public officials they are lobbying, and sitting across the bargaining table” from, as well as allow local governments to enact “right to work” laws. Those laws typically abolish the practice of making both union membership and dues-paying automatic in unionized workplaces and have often led to declines in union ranks.

“Bruce Rauner’s scheme to strip the rights of state workers and weaken their unions by executive order is a blatantly illegal abuse of power,” said Roberta Lynch, executive director of Afscme Council 31. “Perhaps as a private equity C.E.O., Rauner was accustomed to ignoring legal and ethical standards, but Illinois is still a democracy and its laws have meaning.”

“It is crystal clear by this action,” she continued, “that the governor’s supposed concern for balancing the state budget is a paper-thin excuse that can’t hide his real agenda: silencing working people and their unions who stand up for the middle class.”

Afscme, which is set to negotiate a contract with the state this year, is one of many unions that backed Mr. Rauner’s Democratic opponent in last year’s election.Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee, said Monday’s action could be seen as a natural progression from recent victories in nearby states. “There will inevitably be a union battle on this,” he said, “but we’re excited this is bringing this issue to the forefront.”

Still, the order covers only state employees, he said, and an expansion of the policy to both public and private sector workplaces would be difficult.

“We’d like to see Illinois become a right-to-work state,” he said. “Obviously, you need more than just the governor to get that done.”

Some critics of the governor said it was clear why he had chosen to make an executive order rather than offer a legislative proposal. The state’s legislative chambers are controlled by Democrats, many of whom have received union support over the years. On Monday evening, the reaction from legislative leaders seemed surprisingly tempered.

“Our legal staff is reviewing the governor’s executive order regarding fair share,” said the Senate president, John Cullerton, a Democrat. “At the same time, I look forward to hearing the governor’s budget as we search for common ground to address our fiscal challenges.”

Bob Bruno, director of the labor education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the governor’s action was an aggression against public unions in a state where organized labor’s influence runs deep. That said, he questioned the legal justification for the measure and its practical effect, noting that most eligible state employees are union members.

“In principle, it’s a pretty serious assault. In terms of impact, it remains to be seen because it’s a relatively small percentage of the population that’s chosen fair share,” Mr. Bruno said. “This is an assault on the institutional existence of the union in the public sector, and these sorts of fights are historic fights and have big impact.”


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17) Oklahoma Debates Use of Nitrogen Gas for Executions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OKLAHOMA CITY — With executions in Oklahoma on hold amid a constitutional review of its lethal injection formula, Republican legislators are pushing to make Oklahoma the first state to allow the use of nitrogen gas in executions.

Two bills scheduled for hearings this week in legislative committees would make death by “nitrogen hypoxia” a backup method. Representative Mike Christian, an Oklahoma City Republican, said: “You wouldn’t need a medical doctor to do it. It’s a lot more practical. It’s efficient.”

The United States Supreme Court is reviewing Oklahoma’s three-drug method in a challenge sparked by a botched lethal injection last spring in which an inmate groaned and writhed on the gurney before a problem was discovered with an intravenous line.The case centers on whether the sedative midazolam properly renders an inmate unconscious before the second and third drugs are administered. Three scheduled lethal injections in Oklahoma have been delayed pending the high court’s review.

Oklahoma officials concede midazolam is not the preferred drug for executions, but death penalty states have been forced to explore alternatives as manufacturers of more effective drugs refuse to sell them for use in lethal injections.


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18) Missouri Inmate Asks US Supreme Court to Stop His Execution
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. LOUIS — A Missouri inmate just hours away from execution is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step in, arguing that lethal drug could cause unconstitutional pain and suffering.

The appeal was filed Tuesday on behalf of Walter Timothy Storey. He is scheduled for lethal injection at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday for killing a female neighbor in 1990.

Missouri prison officials refuse to disclose details about how or if its execution drug, pentobarbital, is tested. Storey's attorneys argue that the secrecy makes it impossible to know if the drug will quickly work or cause an unconstitutionally painful death.

The Missouri Attorney General's office says 12 executions performed with the same drug have been "rapid and painless."

If the court doesn't step in, Storey's execution will be the state's first in 2015.


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19) Justice Department Is Seeking Felony Pleas by Big Banks in Foreign Currency Inquiry
By and
February 9, 2015
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/u-s-is-seeking-felony-pleas-by-big-banks-in-foreign-currency-inquiry/

The Justice Department is pushing some of the biggest banks on Wall Street — including, for the first time in decades, American institutions — to plead guilty to criminal charges that they manipulated the prices of foreign currencies.

In the final stages of a long-running investigation into corruption in the world’s largest financial market, federal prosecutors have recently informed Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Citigroup that they must enter guilty pleas to settle the cases, according to lawyers briefed on the matter. The pleas would be likely to carry a symbolic stigma, if limited actual fallout, in handing felony convictions to some of the world’s biggest banks.

Yet even as those cases head toward negotiations over potential plea deals — a development that has not been previously reported — additional currency misconduct has surfaced in a New York state investigation, confidential documents show. The documents, excerpts from online chat rooms reviewed by The New York Times, suggest that banks designed electronic trading platforms that effectively drove up the price of currencies sold to clients. In the chats, replete with expletives and industry jargon, employees described and even joked about how the platform would cancel trades that ceased to be profitable for the bank.

New York’s financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, initially focused on platforms at Barclays and Deutsche Bank, but he has since subpoenaed four other banks: Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas and Société Générale. None of the banks have been accused of wrongdoing, and they are cooperating with the investigation.

The Justice Department’s plea deals, if ultimately reached, would not cover any wrongdoing that surfaces from Mr. Lawsky’s investigation. Negotiations with the Justice Department are likely to center on which entity will plead guilty: the bank’s parent company, or a subsidiary that housed the misconduct. The banks, which have argued that the wrongdoing was isolated to midlevel employees, prefer that a subsidiary take the fall.

The currency case is expected to ensnare traders but not top-level executives. As a result, it may add fuel to the criticism that prosecutors have not charged one top executive on Wall Street. Without charges to mollify the public anger over the financial crisis, the recent cases have presented little more than a pyrrhic victory for the Justice Department.

Still, the developments underscore a broader reality on Wall Street of late: One investigation begets another. With each settlement for money laundering, manipulating interest rates or aiding tax fraud, new cases crop up, often unearthed in the course of the previous investigation.

The currency investigation would expand on those cases, which produced guilty pleas only from foreign banks. In pursuing cases last year against those foreign banks, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas, prosecutors confronted the popular belief that banks had grown so important to the economy that they could not be charged.

After those deals set off few if any practical repercussions — the stocks of the banks actually jumped following the news — prosecutors in the currency case are now demanding pleas from JPMorgan and Citigroup, the lawyers said, in addition to Barclays of Britain and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The banks, before entering a guilty plea for any entity, will likely seek assurances that the charges would not prompt a revocation of their licenses or cost them any major business lines. If the banks resist, the Justice Department has warned that an indictment and ultimately a trial await.

For the Justice Department, the currency case represents a last opportunity to shape the white-collar legacy of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who has announced plans to step down once his replacement is confirmed. Blamed for the lack of criminal cases against Wall Street executives, Mr. Holder has emphasized that “no financial institution, at home or abroad, is too powerful to be held accountable for wrongdoing.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did all of the banks under investigation. The lawyers briefed on the investigations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private settlement talks.

The Justice Department and the banks, the lawyers said, will most likely take weeks or even months to negotiate a settlement. The deals could be announced in close succession, if not on the same day.

The currency investigation began in earnest two years ago with the suspicion that traders across Wall Street manipulated the foreign exchange market, pushing prices up and down to suit their own holdings. Although foreign exchange is an enormous global market, with more than $5 trillion changing hands each day, it is one of the least regulated.

Banks eventually fired dozens of traders implicated in the scheme. Authorities around the globe scrambled to stake a claim to the investigation.

In November, six banks sought to close the first chapter of the case, agreeing to pay a combined $4.25 billion to settle with financial regulators in Washington and Britain. The settlement, which included JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, the Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS and HSBC, exposed the way banks colluded to manipulate currencies through emails and online chat rooms.

“He’s sat back in his chair… feet on desk… announcing to desk… that’s why I got the bonus pool,” one trader remarked to a rival after they colluded on a rate, earning, according to regulators, a profit of $513,000 on the trade. Traders who collaborated to rig the market called themselves “the Players” and “the Three Musketeers.”

On the eve of the settlement, Barclays withdrew from the deal over concerns that it would not completely resolve its liabilities. The bank had hoped that Mr. Lawsky’s agency would join the pact.

Now that the Justice Department has opened settlement talks in the case, demanding guilty pleas for antitrust and fraud charges, Mr. Lawsky is likely to join. Each agency will assess its own fines, the lawyers briefed on the matter said.

The Justice Department might also pursue its own investigation into the electronic trading platforms under scrutiny by Mr. Lawsky, the lawyers said. Unlike the original currency investigation, which centered on the behavior of individual traders who altered currency prices to benefit their own positions, Mr. Lawsky’s inquiry suspects a more systematic gaming of the currency markets through electronic trading platforms.

Over the last decade, many banks began to trade currencies through electronic platforms. Not all such platforms were meant to benefit the banks at the client’s expense.

But late last year, Mr. Lawsky’s agency began to scrutinize the platforms at Deutsche Bank and Barclays, as Bloomberg News reported in December.

In the confidential documents reviewed by The Times, it appeared that at least one bank steered certain clients to its platform, which provided the bank a moment to weigh its options in an otherwise high-speed environment.

For example, once a client agreed to buy euros at a certain price from a bank, the platform would detect whether the market had suddenly moved in a way that made the trade less profitable for the bank. The platform would then allow the bank to cancel the trade, possibly setting up a chance for the bank to eventually process the trade at a higher price.

In the online chat rooms, bank employees mocked their clients for not detecting the setup. And in some cases, when clients inquired about the cancellation, the banks falsely blamed a technical glitch.




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