Tuesday, March 31, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2015





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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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PLEASE SHARE WIDELY

Iraq: Where Are We, and Where Are We Going?
Into the 12th year of the U.S. War in Iraq

Iraq Veterans Against the War, American Friends Service Committee,
& the Friends Committee on National Legislation
present a discussion on the U.S. in Iraq after twelve years of war.

Sunday March 29, 2015 at 6 pm

San Francisco. 65 9th Street between Mission and Market Streets, two blocks from Civic Center BART/Muni
Please enter through the North Door, closest to Market Street.

The Friends Meetinghouse is accessible.

Speakers:

Raed Jarrar, Policy Impact Coordinator. Office of Public Policy and Advocacy, American Friends Service Committee.  Raed Jarrar serves as AFSC's Policy Impact Coordinator at the Office of Public Policy and Advocacy in Washington, D.C. Since his immigration to the U.S. in 2005, he has worked on political and cultural issues pertaining to U.S. engagement in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Born in Baghdad to an Iraqi mother and a Palestinian father, Raed Jarrar grew up in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq. He received his bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Baghdad, and his master's degree in architecture, with a specialty in post-war reconstruction in Iraq, from the University of Jordan.  Raed has appeared in numerous media outlets, including MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, Foreign Policy in Focus, and Alternet. His opinion pieces have been published in the Chicago Tribune and Common Dreams.

Wardah Khalid is a Scoville Fellow at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, focusing on research, development and presentation of non-violent policy solutions to counter the self-described Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as highlighting why U.S. militarism is undermining locally-led peacebuilding approaches in these countries and throughout the region.  Prior to joining FCNL, Wardah worked as a CVE consultant in Houston, focusing on creating a community plan to counter violent extremism in the local Muslim American community. She is also the author of the "Young American Muslim" blog for the Houston Chronicle.   See "Bombs Are Not the Answer: Five Non-Military Ways to Stop the Islamic State Group" in US News & World Report at http://www.usnews.com/topics/author/wardah-khalid

Discussion will follow the presentation. Raed will be joining us by video conference. there will be snacks.

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Fight for $15

HISTORIC RALLIES ON APRIL 15

Boosting pay for working moms and dads helps ALL of us – not just the rich. It's time for $15.


BIG NEWS: On April 15, fast food cooks and cashiers will be STRIKING across the country – and thousands and thousands of Americans will be rallying alongside them.

In just two years, the Fight for $15 has grown from a few dozen striking fast food workers in New York City to a historic international movement.

Thousands of people working in a TON of new industries have joined the fight – from home care workers to gas station attendants, Wal-Mart workers to airport employees.

And now I'm asking: Will you join, too?

YES! I believe every working American deserves fair pay and I pledge to show up at the Fight for $15 rally on April 15.

This is your chance to stand with the striking low wage workers fighting for $15 an hour and union rights at MASSIVE national rallies across the country.

Big companies like McDonald's are making billions – while middle class and working Americans struggle to pay our rent and support our families. Frankly, it's wrong.

That's why, in just two weeks, we're standing up for fair pay for all.

Sign up here to join the rallies for $15 an hour on April 15. Together, we can make history.
When we come together, we win. It's that simple.

Dozens of cities and states across the country have raised the minimum wage since this fight began. In fact, more than 9 million workers have higher wages today – thanks to voter action, collective bargaining and direct public pressure on companies like Wal-Mart.

It's time for McDonald's and poverty-pay companies across the country to guarantee good pay for every hard-working employee. Help send the message loud and clear on April 15.

Thanks for joining the fight.
Beth Schaffer
McDonald's Employee, Charleston, SC
Fight for $15

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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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Mumia in the hospital! Call prison to demand that his family see him!!

At 1 PM today, Mumia Abu-Jamal had a medical emergency and was taken to Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, PA. He is in the ICU. Mumia's spouse is not being allowed to see him. The only information we are receiving now is that he's receiving an insulin drip for his diabetes. 

YOUR HELP IS URGENTLY NEEDED NOW! 


Call these numbers now to demand hospital visitation rights for Mumia's family, including his brother Keith:


Richard Ellers

Director, PA Department of Corrections Health Care Services
rellers@cor.pa.gov 
(717) 728-5311 

John Wetzel
Secretary, PA Department of Corrections
(717) 728-4109
 

Schuylkill Medical Center
420 S Jackson St, Pottsville, PA 
(570) 621-4000


SCI Mahanoy
Superindendent John Kerestes
(570) 773-2158 x8102

Say you are calling about prisoner WESLEY COOK, #AM8335.
More alerts will follow as we receive them.

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For Immediate Release: March 30, 2015

Attn: News Desk

Prisoners and Advocacy Groups Win Right to a Trial On Constitutionality of the Silencing Act (PA SB508)

This morning, Chief Judge for the federal court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Christopher Conner, will hear the cases Abu-Jamal v. Kane and Prison Legal News v. Kane in a trial that willl determine the constitutionality of PA SB508 "the Silencing Act".  Defendant PA Attorney General Kane will be hard pressed to argue the constitutionality of the Silencing Act, a censorship law targeted at Mumia Abu-Jamal and other currently and formerly incarcerated people.

Defendant Seth Williams was dismissed from the case based on his explicit disavowal of enforcing the act until a court of competent jurisdiction rules on the constitutionality of the statute. His dismissal does not hinder Plaintiffs ability to obtain the relief of invalidating this law, as a favorable ruling on the First Amendment issue against Defendant Kane will achieve the same result. Williams' disavowal of enforcement is a far cry from his political grandstanding in support of this bill's passage in the fall.

The judge has ordered that this trial will include Plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction merged with a trial on the merits, meaning that if we win we will be granted a permanent injunction against the statute, and the statue will be invalidated.

“Silencing prisoners is one more way of dehumanizing them,” said Amistad Law Project Policy Director Nikki Grant. “We need the voices of the marginalized to shed light on injustice.”

The trial is set for this morning March 30 in Harrisburg, PA approximately 5 months since former Governor Corbett signed this ill-fated bill into law.

 The Abolitionist Law Center, Amistad Law Project, and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law filed the lawsuit on Nov. 10th to stop enforcement of the law. The law firms represent Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio, Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall, Robert L. Holbrook, Donnell Palmer, Anthony Chance, and Human Rights Coalition.

The Silencing Act, also known as 18 P.S. § 11.1304, allows the Attorney General, county District Attorneys, and victims of personal injury crimes to bring a lawsuit in civil court against the person convicted of the personal injury crime to enjoin conduct that “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim”. The actions that could prompt a lawsuit include “conduct which causes a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish.”

“This law is unconstitutional,” said David Shapiro of MacArthur Justice Center. “The facts are on our side and the law is on our side. The Silencing Act targets a huge amount of constitutionally protected speech based on who is speaking.”

After a prerecorded commencement speech by journalist and prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was played for graduates at Goddard College in Vermont, the Pennsylvania legislature passed and outgoing Governor Corbett signed into law the Silencing Act on October 21st, 16 days after the commencement speech.

Abu-Jamal has spent 33 years in prison, 29 of which were in solitary confinement on death row after being convicted at a 1982 trial that Amnesty International said “failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings.”

Robert L. Holbrook, who is serving a death by incarceration, life without parole, sentence he received as a child, had this to say about the law: “there are people in prison who will stop writing, stop publishing, stop speaking out because of this law.”

Bret Grote       bretgrote@abolitionistlawcenter.org    412-654-9070
Ashley Henderson ashley@amistadlaw.org          215-310-0424
Noelle Hanrahan info@prisonradio.org         415-706-5222
David Shapiro david.shapiro@law.northwestern.edu        312-503-0711

Amistad Law Project is a West Philadelphia-based public interest law center.
Our mission is to fight for the human rights of all people by providing
legal services to people incarcerated in Pennsylvania’s prisons.
www.amistadlaw.org | @amistadlaw | 267-225-5884

The Abolitionist Law Center is a public interest law firm inspired by the struggle of political and politicized prisoners, and organized for the purpose of abolishing class and race based mass incarceration in the United States.   412-654-9070

Prison Radio has recorded Mumia and other political prisoners for over 25 years, and we are pulling out all the stops to keep these voices on the air.   415-706-5222

Please donate today to amplify prisoners' voices far and wide beyond the bars:
     Support Prison Radio: prisonradio.org/donate
     Defeat SB 508: bit.ly/defendfreespeech

Copyright © Prison Radio
www,prisonradio.org 415-706-5222
Our mailing address is:
Prison Radio PO Box 411074, SF CA 94141

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=247585f092e945ff55b9a1bb2&id=e113d0b6d0&e=0107d76ccd

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

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
couragetoresist.org

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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1)  Out of Debtors’ Prison, With Law as the Key
"We have a two-tier system: The rich pay fines. The poor go to jail."
By






2) Deputies Said to Taunt Prisoners
By LIAM STACK




3) Study Finds Older Workers Often Missing From Rising Job Rate
By Elizabeth Olsen





4) In Brazil, Some Inmates Get Therapy With Hallucinogenic Tea
By




5) Catholics on Left and Right Find Common Ground Opposing Death Penalty
By MARK OPPENHEIMER 





6) Income Inequality: It’s Also Bad for Your Health
By




7) Steep Costs of Inmate Phone Calls Are Under Scrutiny
By





8) Witnesses, Who Say Police Killed Activist, Are to Be Charged in Egypt
By




9) California: Policy Adopted Against Execution Drugs
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




10) Movement to Increase McDonald’s Minimum Wage Broadens Its Tactics
By




11) Study Reveals Sad Link Between Poverty And Children's Brain Development
By
March 30, 2015
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/30/brain-development-poverty_n_6968758.html?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067
 
 
 
 
12) Prosecutors Scrutinize Minority Borrowers’ Auto Loans
By and




13) 'Heart Over Hard': Thousands Protest Austerity in Brussels
Demonstrators call for Belgian government to tackle fraud and enact higher taxes on the rich
by Deirdre Fulton
Monday, March 30, 2015
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/03/30/heart-over-hard-thousands-protest-austerity-brussels

 








































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1)  Out of Debtors’ Prison, With Law as the Key
"We have a two-tier system: The rich pay fines. The poor go to jail."
By



When Jack Dawley returned in 2007 to his hometown, Norwalk, Ohio, after eight years in prison and on parole in Wisconsin, he knew getting by would be difficult. He had a felony conviction and a history of past drug and alcohol abuse, although he’d been sober since 1999. He was unprepared for another obstacle, however: A few years later, he would keep landing in debtors’ prison.

Dawley did all right at first. For four years, he worked construction jobs and paid down the $1,400 in fines and court fees he owed the municipal court in Norwalk for domestic violence and D.U.I. convictions during his drunken years. But in 2012, he injured his back, lost his job and missed a payment on his court debt.

He was arrested and sentenced to jail for 10 days. When he got out, he had 90 days to make a payment. He failed, and went back to jail. A cycle was beginning: jail every 90 days.

Later in 2012, he took a job as a cashier. He was on his way to cash his first paycheck when he was pulled over and arrested, again for an infraction stemming from his debt. Back in jail, he missed eight days of work. When he got out, his job was gone. He stayed out of jail, but was homeless for the next two years.

Although the United States outlawed debtors’ prison two centuries ago, that, in effect, is where Dawley kept going.

It is crowded there. The most infamous example today is Ferguson, Mo. There, the recent Department of Justice investigation of the police and courts portrays a system designed to jail the poor for their poverty.

The purpose of law enforcement in Ferguson, said the Justice Department, is not public safety, but revenue generation. The city’s second-largest source of income is fines and fees paid by citizens, the vast majority stemming from parking, traffic or other very minor infractions. The police find any excuse to arrest black residents and charge them with multiple violations. The courts then extract exorbitant fines and fees. Those who cannot pay are threatened with jail, and many go.

Ferguson may be an extreme — or it may not — but across America, courts levy fines and fees totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars on misdemeanor offenders, and jail them when they cannot pay.

You don’t go to jail for walking your dog without a leash, making an illegal left turn or burning leaves without a permit, but in many states you will go to jail if you can’t pay the resulting fees and fines. We have a two-tier system: The rich pay fines. The poor go to jail.

The rise of debtor’s prisons has been well documented in the last few years in reports by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union(pdf) and by news investigations. (A series by NPR’s Joseph Shapiro and a New Yorker article by Sarah Stillman are particularly good.) In the past two years, though, attention to this issue has started to produce change.

First, some background: Courts didn’t always charge defendants fees, but now they do in every state. In the 1980s and 1990s, as prison and jail populations rose alongside anti-tax fever, legislators began shifting the burden of paying for justice from the taxpayer to the offender. They raised fines for misdemeanors and imposed dozens of fees and surcharges.

In most states, you pay to be arrested, pay for a public defender, and pay for your own probation. In some, you emerge from jail owing room and board or are billed for a jury trial. Fines and fees have become important sources of city income, giving legislators and judges an incentive to assess large sums for minor offenses — and to compel payment by jailing those who don’t pay, no matter what their economic situation.

The injustices are compounded when governments contract with private companies to manage probation, as they do in 13 states, according to Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. These companies offer their services free to a city — and then charge offenders fees sometimes as large as or larger than their debt, with jail the penalty for nonpayment. In many cases, debt collection is the only service they perform. Human Rights Watch has said that most states that use private probation ”do not currently subject probation companies to any meaningful oversight or regulation at all.”

Debtors’ prison is both senseless and illegal. Jailing defendants often costs far more than they owe, and makes it very difficult for them to pay. Going to jail each time a payment is missed isn’t conducive to holding down a job. And in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that courts must inquire about a defendant’s ability to pay fines and can jail only those who can pay but won’t. Nonpayment of court fees can be punished by garnishment, but not jail.

Yet defendants don’t know this. They don’t know they can ask for a hearing on their ability to pay, with counsel. Courts routinely fail to suggest a hearing or ask any questions about ability to pay.

Ohio has been a leader in reforming debtors’ prison. The impetus came from the A.C.L.U.’s Ohio chapter, which, in 2013, issued a report that told stories of affected people (including Dawley), and calculated how much money the state was losing by jailing people for debt.

The report found that in many municipal courts and mayors’ courts, indigent offenders were jailed without hearings about their ability to pay. Ohio law said that people jailed for nonpayment (which should not happen if they are indigent) should get a $50 credit against their debt for each day in jail. But courts routinely ignored this.

The A.C.L.U. sent its findings to state officials, including Maureen O’Connor, Ohio’s chief justice, who asked immediately for a meeting.

O’Connor assembled a committee of judges to draft a memo called a bench card (pdf), which she issued to every municipal court judge. The card sets out the law — most important, the requirement to determine ability to pay. It lists the steps for doing so, and acceptable and unacceptable ways to collect fines and fees. O’Connor asked the A.C.L.U. to let her know of new complaints.

“Since the bench card, complaints have fallen precipitously,” said Mike Brickner, senior policy director of the A.C.L.U. Ohio. “When we have substantiated claims, we have alerted the Ohio Supreme Court and they have intervened — and that has changed things.” People jailed also received retroactive credit for their jail time.

One beneficiary is Dawley. He stayed out of jail after 2012 by borrowing small sums from friends to make his payments. He eventually got a job in a produce warehouse, where he rose to quality control inspector. Now he works as a paint finish master, reconditioning trucks. No longer homeless, he’s been in his own apartment for a year. And, aided by credits for time served, he’s finished paying his debt.

Serious problems remain in Ohio; there will always be abuses in a system funded by offender fines and fees. But the use of debtors’ prison has been greatly reduced. Why so easily? O’Connor said all that was needed was to correct misperceptions. “I don’t think judges were intentionally not following the law,” she said. “It wasn’t: ‘I don’t care what the law is and I’m going to do it my way.’ This was clearly an area they needed to brush up on.”

Brickner believes that once judges realized that their cities were losing money by jailing the indigent, the practice became less attractive. Another possible reason is that most people can imagine themselves affected. “Anyone can get a traffic ticket,” said Sarah Geraghty, a senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, who represents plaintiffs in debt cases.

Since Ohio’s bench card, legislatures or courts in several other states have issued rulings protecting offenders from debtors’ prison. In Washington and, yes, Missouri, state supreme courts have ruled that courts must determine an offender’s ability to pay, to set fees and fines accordingly, and to jail only those who can pay but willfully refuse. (Class action lawsuits against Ferguson and the neighboring city of Jennings have just been filed in federal court.) Colorado passed a similar law last year.

The most remarkable example is emerging now in Georgia. That state started using private probation in 1991, and became the state most dependent on it. About 80 percent of Georgians on misdemeanor probation — 175,000 people at a time — are supervised by for-profit companies that, according to Human Rights Watch, earn about $40 million a year from offenders.

The A.C.L.U. and the Southern Center sued, and last week won a settlement that will produce an Ohio-style bench card in DeKalb County. Meanwhile, Georgia’s government is instituting reforms. Just after his election in 2011, Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, established a bipartisan council to propose changes in the criminal justice system. Last year, he asked the council to follow up on a state audit’s finding that the ways courts oversaw misdemeanor probation were leading to abuses.

The council’s recommendations (pdf, page 21) include better oversight and transparency, and caps on fees to private companies that oversee pay-only probation. Judges must determine an offender’s ability to pay, and waive or modify fees and penalties for the indigent. These reforms are included in a bill that passed the Georgia House and is expected to pass in the Senate.

It’s a remarkable example of bipartisan compromise. Probation reforms are endorsed by the advocacy groups and the probation companies too. “As with any industry, you have good actors and bad actors,” said W. Thomas Worthy, a former legal aide to the governor who was co-chairman of the council, and now is director of governmental affairs at the state bar. “The good ones knew major reforms were coming, and came to the table.”

John Bozeman, a lobbyist for the Community Corrections Association of Georgia, said the consequences could have been much more onerous for the companies. “They could have written a bill where our guys could not have functionally operated. Instead, it was: How can we solve the problem?”

Last year, the legislature passed a very different bill that shielded companies in secrecy (Governor Deal vetoed it). That only a year later they felt the need to compromise shows that public outrage can, occasionally, accomplish something.

“People who had minor interaction with the criminal justice system were sucked further in for no good reason other than to enrich a private company,” said Geraghty. “We’ve reached a point in this state where the abuses by many of these private companies have been so flagrant and so frequent that people in power, the governor and others, agree that the time has come for significant reform.”





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2) Deputies Said to Taunt Prisoners
By LIAM STACK

San Francisco’s public defender called on Thursday for an independent investigation into the Sheriff’s Department after accusations that four deputies forced prisoners to engage in “gladiator-style fights” for their own amusement.

Jeff Adachi, the public defender, said at a news conference that the deputies forced the smallest prisoner, Rico Palikiko Garcia, who weighs 150 pounds, to fight the largest prisoner, Stanly Harris, who weighs 350 pounds.

They also “appeared to delight” in taunting Mr. Harris with jokes about his weight, the public defender’s office said in a statement, and forced him to participate in “boot camp-style exercises.”

“It was a sadistic pleasure,” Mr. Adachi said in a telephone interview. “This was like something right out of ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”

The prisoners were told they would be rewarded with a hamburger if they won, but would be sprayed with Mace, severely beaten and transferred to dangerous housing quarters if they refused to fight at all, he said. Both men were injured in the fights but were told they would be beaten if they sought medical attention.

Mr. Garcia, the smaller inmate, suffered fractured ribs, Mr. Adachi said.

All four deputies were transferred to other prisons on Thursday morning before the public defender’s office made its accusations against them, Mr. Adachi said. Both Mr. Garcia and Mr. Harris were also moved to new prisons.

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi could not be reached for comment, and the San Francisco Police Officers Association did not respond to a request for comment.


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3) Study Finds Older Workers Often Missing From Rising Job Rate
By Elizabeth Olsen

Thomas R. Collins, 66, a former sheriff’s deputy, takes little comfort in the lower national unemployment rate because, like many older workers, he has had a long spell of joblessness since he retired in 2010.

A former lieutenant in the Cook County sheriff’s department in Illinois, Mr. Collins receives a pension, which, he said, is a “nice cushion,” but he needed to cover other expenses. He continued a part-time job in security for the retail clothing discounter Syms, in Niles, Ill., but the company went out of business the following year, in 2011, and the position disappeared.

Since then, he has been looking for a job as he worries about the future of his pension in light of the debate swirling in Illinois over how to offset its huge state budget shortfall. One proposal is to make serious cutbacks in the public employee pension system.“I don’t live high,” said Mr. Collins of Algonquin, Ill. “But even trying to get part-time work is discouraging. Employers can hire someone younger and for a lot less, and they would hire 80 percent of the people ahead of me before they would hire me.”

Despite some indications here and there that the baby boom generation is working longer, few workers were hurt as badly as those over 50 in the years following the economic crisis that began unfolding in 2008. Many were forced to take jobs at lower pay, with fewer hours and less generous benefits — or no job at all.

To gauge the toll the recession took on older workers, the AARP Public Policy Institute questioned 2,492 people who had been jobless in the previous five years and will release the report, “The Long Road Back: Struggling to Find Work After Unemployment,” on Monday.

Long-term unemployment among older workers has been a major concern. On average, 45 percent of job seekers age 55 and older like Mr. Collins have been looking long term, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which defines long term as 27 or more weeks without work. To address the reluctance of employers to consider such workers, the Obama administration last year started an initiative to encourage private and public companies to hire the long-term unemployed.

“Although the general unemployment rate is falling, that can be misleading for people who are 55 and older who are long-term unemployed,” said Gary Koenig, who wrote the AARP report with Lori Trawinski and Sara Rix. The survey was conducted in October 2014 and included people from 45 to 70 years old.

Mr. Koenig, an economist, said that the study’s results were “a mixed bag. You have about half who remain unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force, and the other half who have been able to find new employment, but conditions of that employment vary.”

The occupations growing the fastest, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are personal care and home health aides. Other growing job areas, which require specialized training, are nearly all in the health field and include occupational and physical therapy assistants, physician assistants and genetic counselors.

For those who speak foreign languages, labor experts also project that there will be a rising need for interpreters and translators in courtrooms and other settings. But finding any of this work is harder for those who have been unemployed for lengthy periods because companies often view them as too old, not flexible and not computer-literate.

Repeated joblessness, Mr. Koenig said, takes a financial toll, adding, “Jobs that pay less or have fewer hours undermine financial security for these workers now and into the future.”

About one-fifth of those in the AARP study had two stints of unemployment over the last five years, and 23 percent had three or more jobless spells over the same time period. About 57 percent had one period of unemployment.

Over all, 73 percent of those who told the AARP they were unemployed had been out of work for six months or longer, and the rest were shorter-term unemployed. That did not include the estimated 12 percent who have left the labor force completely after failing to find a job. Even though the total numbers of long-term unemployed have declined, Mr. Koenig said older workers are still seriously affected — many by age bias. (Age discrimination is hard to prove, however, and lawsuits are on the decline).

“People don’t want somebody old,” agreed Lawrence Hardy, 65, an Internet services consultant of Columbus, Miss. A former teacher and employee of Sprint and Teletech in the Denver area, Mr. Hardy also wrote a book on the history of computing.

Since returning to Mississippi, where he was born, Mr. Hardy found some employment and lists himself as retired. He said he had gotten the brushoff from many prospective employers.

“They are too smart to say it’s an age issue, but they see my degree was from 1975 and they say, ‘We’ll call you back.’”

Despite the competition for fewer jobs and the impediment of age bias, Mr. Koenig said that of those who reported they were able to find a new job, two-thirds said they had full-time jobs and the rest found part-time work. Full time work is considered 35 hours a week or more.

Among those who had found employment, fewer than one-third of those responding said they were earning more, and even fewer said their benefits were better.

It took Cheryl Moyer, 62, of Leonidas, Mich., several years to find a job after she was laid off in 2006 when the appliance parts company where she worked was closed. She had been a factory worker for more than two decades at different locations. She had a brief stint in security work, but then needed to care for her husband, Jerry, who died in early 2014.

In 2011, she found a part-time job working as deputy treasurer for Leonidas. The position has no benefits, and pays a minimum hourly wage. And like some 45 percent of the re-employed, she found her job through contacts, and not social media, which was little used by older job seekers.

Among those who were able to find work, nearly half, including Oscar Rojas, 65, of Tampa, Fla., said they had a better work situation — despite lower salaries and fewer benefits. Mr. Rojas lost his job last year as a Medicare insurance agent after his employer, Physicians United Plan, a large private insurer, was declared insolvent.

He spent four months unemployed, then found work with a tax preparation company helping people register and get subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

“I don’t get any fringe benefits,” he said, “but I don’t have to travel 7,500 miles a month around Florida to visit our clients.”

Others, like Gary L. Olson, 61, of Portland, Ore., are shaping their working lives with their own businesses.

When Mr. Olson, a retirement plan administrator in California, moved back to Oregon after his wife died in early 2013, he found that employers “took one look at my job history and my salary level, and I’m all gray and white hair. I pretty much look my age, so I could see that they were thinking that ‘I can hire someone and pay a lot less.’”

After sending out 20 applications and receiving only two interviews, he decided to go into a different occupation, a path that was taken by some 53 percent of those who found a job after stints of unemployment.

On March 1, he closed on Le Cookie Monkey, a cake and cookie shop in Portland, which he bought from its founder.

“I used some retirement funds to buy the business,” he said, “but it’s got good people who work there. I’m going to be taking care of the financial end and let them handle the baking.”


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4) In Brazil, Some Inmates Get Therapy With Hallucinogenic Tea
By

JI-PARANÁ, Brazil — As the night sky enveloped this outpost in Brazil’s Amazon basin, the ceremony at the open-air temple began simply enough.

Dozens of adults and children, all clad in white, stood in a line. A holy man handed each a cup of ayahuasca, a muddy-looking hallucinogenic brew. They gulped it down; some vomited. Hymns were sung. More ayahuasca was consumed. By midnight, the congregants seemed strangely energized. Then the dancing began.

Such rituals are a fixture across the Amazon, where ayahuasca has been consumed for centuries and entire religions have coalesced around the psychedelic concoction. But the ceremony one night this month was different: Among those imbibing from the holy man’s decanter were prison inmates, convicted of crimes such as murder, kidnapping and rape.“I’m finally realizing I was on the wrong path in this life,” said Celmiro de Almeida, 36, who is serving a sentence for homicide at a prison four hours away on a road that winds through the jungle. “Each experience helps me communicate with my victim to beg for forgiveness,” said Mr. de Almeida, who has taken ayahuasca nearly 20 times at the sanctuary here.

The provision of a hallucinogen to inmates on short furloughs in the middle of the rain forest reflects a continuing quest for ways to ease pressure on Brazil’s prison system. The country’s inmate population has doubled since the start of the century to more than 550,000, straining underfunded prisons rife with human rights violations and violent uprisings complete with beheadings.

One of the bloodiest prison revolts in recent decades took place in the nearby city of Pôrto Velho, in 2002, when at least 27 inmates were killed at the Urso Branco prison. Around the same time, Acuda, a pioneering prisoners’ rights group in Pôrto Velho, began offering inmates therapy sessions in yoga, meditation and Reiki, a healing ritual directing energy from the practitioner’s hands to a patient’s body.

Two years ago, the volunteer therapists at Acuda had a new idea: Why not give the inmates ayahuasca as well? The Amazonian brew, which is generally made by blending and boiling a vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) with a leaf (Psychotria viridis), is growing in popularity in Brazil, the United States and other countries.

Acuda had trouble finding a place where the inmates could drink ayahuasca, but they were finally accepted by an offshoot here of Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion founded in the 1930s that blends Catholicism, African traditions and the trance communications with spirits popularized in the 19th century by a Frenchman known as Allan Kardec.

“Many people in Brazil believe that inmates must suffer, enduring hunger and depravity,” said Euza Beloti, 40, a psychologist with Acuda. “This thinking bolsters a system where prisoners return to society more violent than when they entered prison.” At Acuda, she said, “we simply see inmates as human beings with the capacity to change.”

Ms. Beloti and other therapists test aspects of this philosophy at a compound in a sprawling prison complex in Pôrto Velho. Judges and wardens allow about 10 inmates from maximum-security prisons in the city to live in the Acuda building, a former army installation. Dozens of other prisoners from surrounding penitentiaries attend Acuda’s therapy sessions each day.

Inside the compound, the inmates practice meditation. They perform ayurvedic massage on one another. They learn skills like motorcycle maintenance. A furniture workshop gives them access to tools like saws, hammers and drills. And they tend a garden, growing vegetables and the plants used to make ayahuasca.

Treating inmates with psychedelic drugs anywhere is thought to be rare. In one short-lived experiment in the United States in the early 1960s, researchers from Harvard University under the direction of the psychologist Timothy Leary gave psilocybin, a drug derived from psychoactive mushrooms, to inmates at a prison in Concord, Mass.

“It’s certainly novel among prisoners, but ayahuasca has great potential because under optimal conditions, it can produce a transformative experience in a person,” said Dr. Charles S. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine who has conducted extensive studies on ayahuasca.

Dr. Grob cautioned that there were risks. The brew could exacerbate the illnesses of people being treated with antipsychotic medications for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Ingesting drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine before consuming ayahuasca is also dangerous.

“That would be a disaster, because the individual could have a hypertensive reaction leading to a stroke,” Dr. Grob said.

The supervisors at Acuda, who obtain a judge’s permission to take about 15 prisoners once a month to the temple ceremony, say they are mindful of the risks of ayahuasca, commonly called Daime in Brazil or referred to as tea. At the same time, Acuda’s therapists consume the brew with the inmates, as well as with the occasional prison guard who volunteers to accompany the group.

“This is how it should be,” said Virgílio Siqueira, 55, a retired police officer who works as a guard at the prison complex that includes Acuda. “It’s gratifying to know that we can sit here in the forest, drink our Daime, sing our hymns, exist in peace.”

Many people in Brazil, where conservative politicians are growing in strength as they vow to crack down on crime in a country with more homicides per year than any other, remain unconvinced. Therapists who volunteer at Acuda said they had lost clients in their private practices who disagreed with providing such attention to convicts. Some relatives of victims who suffered at the hands of the Acuda prisoners contend that the project is unfair.

“Where are the massages and the therapy for us?” asked Paulo Freitas, 48, a manager at a leather factory whose 18-year-old daughter, Naiara, a college student, was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Pôrto Velho in 2013 by a group of men, a crime that stunned many people in this corner of the Amazon.

Mr. Freitas said he had been shocked to learn recently that one of the men convicted in the killing of his daughter was expected to be transferred soon into Acuda’s care. “This is utterly revolting,” he said. “My daughter’s dreams were extinguished by that man, but he will be allowed to go into the jungle and drink his tea.”

Others question whether consuming Daime can help lower re-incarceration rates. Luiz Marques, 57, an economist who founded Acuda, said the organization hoped to reduce recidivism, but he emphasized that a more immediate goal was “expanding the consciousness” of prisoners about right and wrong.

At the temple here in Ji-Paraná, the inmates appeared to experience a range of reactions after drinking the ayahuasca. Sitting on plastic lawn chairs under a tile roof, some were stone-faced. Others seemed lost in contemplation. One was constantly in tears, as if demons were at the door. All of them sang at the top of their lungs when the rhythm of the hymns intensified.

“We are considered the trash of Brazil, but this place accepts us,” said Darci Altair Santos da Silva, 43, a construction worker serving a 13-year sentence for sexual abuse of a child under 14. “I know what I did was very cruel. The tea helped me reflect on this fact, on the possibility that one day I can find redemption.”

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.




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5) Catholics on Left and Right Find Common Ground Opposing Death Penalty
By MARK OPPENHEIMER 

As the editor of The National Catholic Reporter, a national biweekly, Dennis Coday reads his competitor, The National Catholic Register. But he does not have to agree with it.

The Reporter is seen as somewhat liberal in theology and politics. The Register, a competing biweekly with a confusingly similar name, is popular with more theologically traditional Roman Catholics, who often fall to the right politically.

But last year, seeing the amount of attention that The Register was giving to arguments opposing the death penalty, Mr. Coday came up with an idea: Maybe the two newspapers could collaborate on an editorial calling on Catholics to oppose the death penalty.

“What struck me the most was Oklahoma Archbishop Paul Coakley came out strongly against it,” Mr. Coday said. “And his comments were covered by The National Catholic Register.”

Indeed, The Register had covered Catholic death-penalty opposition last May, after the botched execution of an Oklahoma inmate, Clayton Lockett, and again in July, after the protracted execution in Arizona of Joseph R. Wood III, who took nearly two hours to die.

Eventually, Mr. Coday got three other publications, including The Register, to join him. On March 5, “Catholic Publications Call for an End to Capital Punishment” ran on the websites of The Reporter; The Register; Our Sunday Visitor, which is considered conservative; and the Jesuit magazine America, which is considered liberal. The editorial was written principally by Mr. Coday, with the involvement of the four editorial boards.

The editorial was an unusual show of unity among publications that speak for often antagonistic niches of Catholic public thought. Editors at the publications agreed, in interviews this week, that such a joint effort would be unlikely on other topics, like same-sex marriage or abortion.

With the death penalty, the time seemed right. According to last year’s major Pew survey, support for the death penalty is slipping nationally. At the same time, different branches of Roman Catholicism are uniting behind a message that has been consistently delivered by Pope Francis and his predecessors Benedict XVI and John Paul II.

“We, the editors of four Catholic journals,” the editorial begins, “urge the readers of our diverse publications and the whole U.S. Catholic community and all people of faith to stand with us and say, ‘Capital punishment must end.’ ”

“The Catholic Church in this country has fought against the death penalty for decades,” it says. “Pope St. John Paul II amended the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church to include a de facto prohibition against capital punishment. Last year, Pope Francis called on all Catholics ‘to fight ...for the abolition of the death penalty.’ The practice is abhorrent and unnecessary.”

The Register’s editor, Jeanette De Melo, said that when Mr. Coday first broached the idea last fall, they could not quite make it work.

“The Register’s take on the death penalty,” Ms. De Melo said, “is to talk about it in broader context of the life issues,” like abortion and euthanasia. “We wanted to contextualize it last fall in that broad context.”

Ms. De Melo said that she and Mr. Coday could not agree on an editorial that brought in so many contentious issues. But when, in January, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case of Glossip v. Gross, which challenges Oklahoma’s use of lethal injection, she thought that maybe it was time for an editorial solely on capital punishment.

“Since the Supreme Court took up this case,” Ms. De Melo said, “it seemed maybe we could look at it in a narrower context. I felt it was important to stand on something we can stand together on, these diverse publications with diverse audiences. We do agree this should end.”

Some readers questioned Ms. De Melo’s decision to join with more liberal publications. On March 16, she wrote her own editorial, placing her death penalty opposition in the context of issues that are important to conservatives.

“Euthanasia, abortion, war and capital punishment differ in moral weight, but they all threaten human dignity, and we must work to end them,” Ms. De Melo wrote.

The church now teaches that the death penalty could be justified only for self-defense in the narrow sense of preventing a killer from committing a future killing. So in the modern state, the argument goes, with effective prisons and life sentences to keep killers off the street, there is no morally valid reason to use it. According to the Catholic theorist Robert George, who teaches at Princeton, capital punishment is not as bad as abortion or euthanasia, but it nonetheless needs to end.

“Although I do not regard capital punishment to be on a moral par with the deliberate killing of innocent persons — including killing unborn babies by abortion and killing elderly or handicapped persons in euthanasia — I believe that the abolition of killing as a punishment will promote a culture of life,” Professor George wrote in a Feb. 19 letter to the governor and legislature of Kansas.

Coming from Professor George, who is admired by the Catholic right, the letter was another indication that on this particular issue, a unified position may be emerging.

Not everyone agrees. The Rev. John McCloskey, a conservative priest, wrote this month that “the Catholic Church’s Magisterium does not and never has advocated unqualified abolition of the death penalty.” He invoked Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in support of the death penalty, as well as Pope Pius XII.

Then there are the 59 percent of white Catholics who, according to the Pew survey, favor capital punishment — four points higher than the average for all American adults.

Matt Malone, who edits America magazine, said Catholic journalists were starting to reach across these political divides. He pointed to a symposium his publication hosted in December, which drew journalists from the Register, the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, U.S. Catholic, and the conservative magazine First Things, popular with Catholics.

“I think it’s part of a general trend where we’re less afraid to reach out to each other and do things than we used to be,” Father Malone said.

Greg Erlandson, the publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, said that Catholics needed to keep talking to one another, lest they become as dysfunctional as the secular world.

“The ideological polarization that has paralyzed American political life has seeped into the church, unfortunately,” Mr. Erlandson said. “So something like this” — the joint editorial — “is an important signpost for the church.”


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6) Income Inequality: It’s Also Bad for Your Health
By

We know that living in a poor community makes you less likely to live a long life. New evidence suggests that living in a community with high income inequality also seems to be bad for your health.

A study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute examined a series of risk factors that help explain the health (or sickness) of counties in the United States. In addition to the suspects you might expect — a high smoking rate, a lot of violent crime — the researchers found that people in unequal communities were more likely to die before the age of 75 than people in more equal communities, even if the average incomes were the same.

“It’s not just the level of income in a community that matters — it’s also how income is distributed,” said Bridget Catlin, the co-director of the project, called the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps.

Many factors besides inequality affect health, of course. How much people smoke, whether they are obese, and the safety of air and water, among many other factors, make a difference. But the effect of inequality was statistically significant, equivalent to a difference of about 11 days of life between high- and low-inequality places. The differences were small, but for every increment that a community became more unequal, the proportion of residents dying before the age of 75 went up.

(An aside: The entire County Health Rankings and Roadmap project is full of interesting maps, data and observations about the differences in risk factors and health in various counties. It is well worth a browse.)

The research on inequality at the county level is new, but existing literature suggests there are relationships between income inequality and life expectancy among countries in the world. “Inequality effects, over and above average income, are pretty well established,” said S.V. Subramanian, a professor of population health and geography at Harvard, who has studied the phenomenon. We know that inequality tends to concentrate income in fewer hands, creating more low-income households — and people in low-income households don’t live as long. But what causes the drop in life expectancy is debatable.

One theory is that while money does tend to buy better health, it makes a bigger difference for people low on the income scale than those at the top. That means that having fewer very poor people in a community will improve average health more than having fewer very rich people will diminish it.

But another, more sociological theory, has to do with the communities themselves. The researchers think that places where wealthy residents can essentially buy their way out of social services may have less cohesion and investment in things like education and public health that we know affect life span. There is also literature suggesting that it’s stressful to live among people who are wealthier than you. That stress may translate into mental health problems or cardiac disease for lower-income residents of unequal places.

The researchers measured inequality by comparing the number of people in a given place who earned above the 80th percentile in the county with the number of people earning less than the 20th percentile. Then they measured life expectancy using a custom measurement they developed — it counts the “potential life years lost” in each community by measuring all those who died before the age of 75, and the age at which they died. So someone who died at age 70 would have five years of potential life lost. Then they adjusted the numbers according to how old people were in the county, so counties with more old people wouldn’t look sicker than counties that were younger. The study looked at only the average life span and not that of higher-income versus lower-income residents.For every one-point increase in the ratio between high and low earners in a county, there were about five years lost for every 1,000 people. That’s about the same difference they observed when a community’s smoking rate increased by 4 percent or its obesity rate rose by 3 percent. Researchers said that inequality effect persisted even when they compared communities of similar average income and racial composition.Here’s what that means in some real counties. The researchers compared the adjoining Park and Fremont Counties in Wyoming. Both have relatively small populations and are predominantly white. Both include parts of large national parks. But the Fremont inequality ratio is 4.6, compared with Park’s 3.6. And, in Fremont County, there are 13 years of potential life lost for every 1,000 residents, compared with only 7.5 in Park.


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7) Steep Costs of Inmate Phone Calls Are Under Scrutiny
By

Since the Pennsylvania police arrested Anthony Kofalt last March for walking out of a Walmart with 21 boxes of Crest White Strips he had not paid for, his wife, Heather, has spent $3,000 — about $60 a week — on phone calls to the prisons and jails where he has been held.

The cost of a 15-minute call is $12.95, although Mr. Kofalt is in a prison only a few hours’ drive from his wife’s home in Franklin, Pa. The cost for a similar non-prison call would be about 60 cents.

And every time Ms. Kofalt deposits $25 into the prison phone account, the private company that runs the system charges her $6.95.

“I don’t drive,” said Ms. Kofalt, 39, who works as a home health care aide and lives with her 19-year-old son, his girlfriend and their two children. “This is all we have. The people in jail did wrong, but the only people being punished are the families.”Until the 1990s, inmates could place and receive calls to lawyers and family members at rates similar to those outside prison walls. But the prison phone system is now a $1.2 billion-a-year industry dominated by a few private companies that manage phones in prisons and jails in all 50 states, setting rates and fees far in excess of those established by regular commercial providers. The business is so considerable — some 500 million prison and jail phone calls totaling more than six billion minutes in 2014 — that it has caught the eye of private equity firms.

Now, after years of complaints from prison-rights groups and families of the incarcerated, the Federal Communications Commission is investigating the financial intricacies of the industry, which has been largely unregulated.

At the core of the inquiry are the hundreds of millions of dollars in concession fees, known as commissions, paid by the phone companies to state and local prison systems in exchange for exclusive contracts. The fees help drive phone charges as high as $1.22 per minute, and the leading companies say they need to charge at least 20 cents per minute, compared with typical commercial rates of about 4 cents a minute.

In 2013, a total of $460 million in concession fees was paid to jails and prisons, and to state, county and local governments, according to the F.C.C. The fees are legal, and they cover a range of expenses within prisons as well as outside.

The agency is expected to rule this year on whether to ban the concession fees and limit the costs of prison phone calls.

An analysis released in 2013 by the F.C.C. said the fees “have caused inmates and their friends and families to subsidize everything from inmate welfare to salaries and benefits, states’ general revenue funds and personnel training.”

It added, “The companies compete not based on price or service quality, but on the size of the commission.”

The possibility of eliminating the fees has met fierce opposition from prisons and jails, sheriff’s departments and local officials. Some law enforcement groups have said changes could stoke inmate violence against prison guards because there might be less money for security.

“I don’t know any sheriff who’s making a profit,” said Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association, a group that supports the concession fees. “What they are trying to do is to provide a service for their inmates while protecting their communities.”

But in providing that service, the companies are generating a lot of money.

Global Tel-Link Corp. and Securus Technologies, the dominant players in the industry, have each changed hands twice among private equity firms since 2009. Global Tel-Link, which controls 50 percent of the market for correctional institutions, was sold for $1 billion in 2011 to American Securities, a New York-based firm. Securus, which has about 20 percent of the market, was most recently sold in 2013 to ABRY Partners, based in Boston, for $640 million.

Global Tel-Link recently announced that it reached a record high of 215 million prison calls totaling three billion minutes in 2014. Securus said that on Christmas Day it completed the most calls in its history.

“They are profiting off of people in vulnerable situations,” said Kasie Campbell, who said she lives paycheck to paycheck and spends $150 a month on phone calls to her husband, Allen, in a Texas prison for robbery. “The cost determines when I can talk to my husband and when my son can read a book to him. It’s detrimental to rehabilitation.”

Ms. Campbell, 33, said Securus’s fees for its prison phone service included a charge of $2.49 for processing her bill and $5 if she wants to pay it over the phone.

Securus, according to company documents, imposes dozens of fees for calls and basic services, including establishing, maintaining and closing an account.

The fees make up an estimated 40 percent of the average prison phone bill, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization.

In its first foray into regulating the industry, the F.C.C in February 2014 capped the cost of interstate calls to and from prisons at 25 cents. Phone companies responded by increasing fees on calls made to and from prisons in the same state, which account for about 90 percent of prison and jail calls.

Global Tel-Link and Securus say any rate cap below about 20 cents a minute would cut too deeply into their operating margins, preventing them from adequately providing monitoring of calls for security.

But prisoner advocates say a cap of about 7 cents a minute would allow phone companies to make a profit while providing inmates more opportunities to speak to their families.

Richard A. Smith, Securus’s chief executive, said in a letter to regulators that his company had paid $1.3 billion in concession fees to prisons and local governments over the past decade. He did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

”We believe that the intention of the commission to allow correctional facilities to recover the costs of hosting inmate calling while seeking to address pricing issues in the market is a step in the right direction for all parties involved,” Kirk Vespestad, a Global Tel-Link spokesman, said in a statement.

The significance of the fees paid to win a contract was illustrated recently in a solicitation by the Arizona Department of Corrections for a new five-year phone contract. The department’s bidding system awarded 1,250 points to the company that proposed paying the highest concession fee. All other factors, including technical requirements, were worth only a combined 300 points.

Joymara Coleman, a 25-year-old California college student, met her father for the first time last summer at the Louisiana penitentiary where he is serving a life sentence for murder. She said the cost of phone calls meant that she had talked to him only twice since her visit.

Adding to her financial and psychological strain, she said, are two brothers also serving time in prison.

“I’m the first in my family to go to college,” Ms. Coleman said. “I don’t have the money. I’m just trying to keep the family together.”


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8) Witnesses, Who Say Police Killed Activist, Are to Be Charged in Egypt
By

CAIRO — Egyptian prosecutors are bringing criminal charges against witnesses who said they saw the police kill an unarmed poet and activist during a demonstration, a lawyer who has seen the charges said on Monday.

The witnesses voluntarily told the Egyptian authorities that on Jan. 24, they had seen a group of riot police officers fire birdshot across a street into the peaceful march, which had been headed to Tahrir Square to lay memorial flowers to mark the anniversary, on the following day, of the Arab Spring uprising here.

The poet and activist, Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, 31, was among the marchers. Photographers captured what the witnesses saw: Ms. Sabbagh died of her wounds in the arms of a friend. Within days, stark images of her death circulated on the Internet and made her a symbol of police abuse, resonating so widely that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for an investigation.The most prominent witness, Azza Soliman, a human rights lawyer and the head of the Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, was having lunch with her family across the street from the march, as she and other witnesses have recounted many times.

Rumors began circulating last week that prosecutors intended to charge Ms. Soliman and other witnesses, in a possible attempt to intimidate them, with participating in an unauthorized street protest even though they were only bystanders.

On Monday, one of Ms. Soliman’s lawyers, Yasser Abdel Gawad, said prosecutors had for the first time allowed him to see and confirm the charges. Seventeen people, including Ms. Soliman, are to appear in court on Saturday for trial on charges of demonstrating without a permit, a crime that carries a penalty of up to several years in prison under a law passed shortly after the military takeover in 2013.

In an interview, Ms. Soliman reiterated that she was just “having lunch with friends and members of my family,” and she accused the authorities of seeking to bully witnesses into silence about the misconduct of the police. “The rule of law is becoming more and more meaningless and more and more weak,” she said.

“The police are sending a message that ‘nobody can judge the police, we can do anything,’ ” she added. “The message is very clear to anybody who sees anything not to go to the court, because they can see my example now. The police are trying to scare us.”

Spokesmen for the general prosecutor and the interior ministry declined to comment. Prosecutors had previously said they were charging a police officer with a form of manslaughter, battery leading to death, in connection with Ms. Sabbagh’s killing. But they have not disclosed the officer’s name.


Merna Thomas contributed reporting.


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9) California: Policy Adopted Against Execution Drugs
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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10) Movement to Increase McDonald’s Minimum Wage Broadens Its Tactics
By

ATLANTA — On a recent Friday, Kwanza Brooks, a $7.25-an-hour McDonald’s worker, climbed into a 14-person van to take a four-hour ride from Charlotte, N.C., to Atlanta.

As she and other workers headed south, Ms. Brooks, a short, fiery woman, swapped stories with her companions about unsafe conditions and unfair managers. Upon arriving, they joined more than 400 other people — including home care aides, Walmart workers, child care workers and adjunct professors — at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been a pastor.

The gathering on March 21 was in part a strategy session to plan for the fast-food movement’s next big wave of protests, which is now scheduled for April 15. But the meeting was also seeking to be something far more ambitious. Through some strategic alchemy, the organizers hoped the gathering would turn the fast-food workers’ fight for a $15 hourly wage into a broad national movement of all low-wage workers that combined the spirit of Depression-era labor organizing with the uplifting power of Dr. King’s civil rights campaign.

On the campaign’s first day of strikes two and a half years ago, 200 fast-food workers walked out in just one city, New York. But in the wave of actions on April 15, organizers say more than 60,000 people will join strikes and protests in 200 cities nationwide. They also predict there will be strikes and support actions in 35 other countries.

Organizers say they expect 10,000 people at the Fight for 15 protests in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, with many college and high school students joining the actions. They chose April 15 because the date, 4/15, sounds like “for 15.”

“When we started it was very hard to get people to sign up — they were scared, ‘I might lose my job,’ ” said Ms. Brooks, who became a fast-food worker after funding for her job as a youth counselor was eliminated. “But this movement is really growing. People who didn’t know who we were, they now know who we are.”

Whether from Burger King or Walmart workers, much of the talk was about not being able to make ends meet. Some members of the Black Lives Matter campaign joined the session, and so did three octogenarians who spoke about participating in the famous 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, during which Dr. King was assassinated. To drum up support for the April 15 protests, several fast-food workers have gone on “freedom ride” bus trips to Tulane, Vanderbilt and other colleges, while pastors at dozens of churches in New York, Chicago and Detroit plan to tell congregants about the protests.

McDonald’s, the movement’s main target, has shown no signs of bowing to the demands to raise pay or invite in a union. With its sales languishing and having recently replaced its C.E.O., the company has much else to worry about. McDonald’s says the series of one-day strikes has barely affected its restaurants, adding that hardly any workers walked out.

“These events have not been ‘strikes,’ but organized rallies designed to garner media attention for which demonstrators are transported to various locations,” said Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem, a McDonald’s spokeswoman. “Historically, very few McDonald’s employees have participated in these organized events.”

While the movement may not be close to persuading McDonald’s to adopt a $15 minimum wage, even the campaign’s critics acknowledge it has achieved some of its goals by prompting a national debate about low-wage work and nudging various cities and states to raise their minimum wage.

“They have contributed to the wins in the ballot initiative in different states and localities,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research center. “We saw the ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage passed even in Arkansas, and we see cities such as Seattle having a $15 minimum wage. So they’re succeeding in that way.”

Ms. Furchtgott-Roth argued that the so-called Fight for 15 would ultimately hurt many of the low-skill, entry-level workers that it is trying to help, saying that pushing up wages beyond what the market can bear would lead to less hiring.

The Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest and most activist unions, has quietly pumped more than $15 million into the movement, helping to hire dozens of organizers to rally fast-food workers nationwide.

The S.E.I.U. has been increasing pressure on McDonald’s. It helped arrange for a coalition of European and American unions to accuse McDonald’s European operations last month of avoiding more than 1 billion euros in taxes by having royalty payments go through a small Luxembourg-based subsidiary. In response, the European Union’s directorate of competition has begun a preliminary inquiry on McDonald’s tax practices.

Brazil’s two biggest labor federations sued McDonald’s largest franchisee in Latin America as well, accusing it of time-clock fraud, unsanitary working conditions and failure to pay unemployment insurance. Those charges could lead to fines of up to 30 percent of annual sales.

The franchisee, Arcos Dorados, said it was “absolutely confident” that its labor practices complied with all laws.

The S.E.I.U. helped persuade the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel to accuse McDonald’s of being a joint employer with its franchisees, a move that could make it jointly responsible when franchise operators illegally fire workers or cheat them on wages. McDonald’s, with the support of many similar restaurant chains, is fighting this action.

Two weeks ago McDonald’s workers in 19 cities filed complaints with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, saying they had been burned on the job — while filtering grease, for instance — because of a lack of training and protective equipment. McDonald’s said that it would review the allegations and that its franchises “are committed to providing safe working conditions.”

Hinting that they have other weapons in their arsenal, the movement’s strategists voice confidence that McDonald’s will at some point move toward them on wages. Mary Kay Henry, the service employees’ president, said, “I have no idea how this breakthrough will occur — it’s possible it will happen as we prepare for their shareholders meeting in May.”

That may be wishful thinking, but with Walmart and several other companies starting to raise their base pay in response to public pressure and tighter labor markets, McDonald’s may eventually feel compelled to join in.

Before last May’s shareholders meeting, more than 1,000 protesters demonstrated outside McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., and more than 100 were arrested at a sit-in. Organizers say this year’s protests might be bigger.

Some of the S.E.I.U.’s two million members have grumbled that this campaign might do little for the janitors and hospital workers who belong to the union. But Ms. Henry said the movement had already succeeded in raising wages for workers beyond fast food.

“There is no longer an internal debate,” she said. “This movement is changing our political debate. The movement is changing what employers think they can get away with. The movement is making cities and states raise minimum wages.”

The campaign’s ripple effects, she said, helped persuade San Francisco to approve a $15 minimum hourly wage and Chicago to adopt a $13 minimum. She said it helped persuade the Los Angeles school district to agree to pay all its employees at least $15 an hour.

Joining in, the Chicago Teachers Union recently demanded that janitors and all other workers in that city’s public schools be paid at least $15 an hour. Ms. Henry noted that the Multnomah County Board in Oregon had established a $15 minimum wage for the county’s employees, many of whom now earn $11.99 an hour.

Angelo I. Amador, the National Restaurant Association’s vice president for labor policy, criticized the demand for $15. “It goes way beyond anything being considered at the federal level,” he said, pointing to President Obama’s call for a $10.10 minimum wage. “It’s not going to have a good effect.”

He said a $15 wage would reduce restaurant employment and push up menu prices.

Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said it was striking that the Fight for 15 movement seemed to be making substantial gains on one front even as labor unions suffered serious setbacks in other areas, including the passage of so-called right-to-work laws in Wisconsin and Michigan’s barring of any requirement that workers pay union fees.

“This movement is way beyond fast food,” Ms. Henry said. “We aren’t going to stop until the service sector in the U.S. becomes the foundation for the next American middle class.”



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11) Study Reveals Sad Link Between Poverty And Children's Brain Development
By
March 30, 2015
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/30/brain-development-poverty_n_6968758.html?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067

We've long known that children from affluent families get a head start that can translate into a long-lasting advantage, especially when it comes to academic achievement. Now, scientists have found what may be part of the explanation: Children who grow up in higher-income families appear to have larger brains.

Researchers from nine universities across the country, led by neuroscientists at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and Columbia University Medical Center, conducted a major new study of the effects of family income and parental education on child and adolescent brain development.

"We've known for a long time that kids from lower-income or disadvantaged families don't do as well in school and have more difficulties on standardized tests," Dr. Elizabeth Sowell, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told The Huffington Post. "We know that the brain is driving cognition and behavior, so there must be some difference in the brain. This is the largest study to look at things like family income and the size of the brain."

The researchers studied nearly 1,100 individuals between the ages of 3 and 20, collecting data on their socioeconomic situation and conducting MRI brain scans and cognitive tests measuring executive functions like self-control and anticipation of consequences.

The results revealed a strong positive association between family income and brain surface area, largely in those brain areas that are linked to skills instrumental in learning and academic success.

The brain of "the kid whose family makes less than $25,000 is about 6 percent smaller in surface area than the kid whose family made $150,000," Sowell said.

Higher family income was also associated with better performance on tests of executive function. The researchers hypothesize that the better performance is linked to the greater brain surface area.

They found that the relationship between family income and brain surface area was most dramatic at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Why the differences in brain size? Since the researchers controlled for genetic factors, it's likely the advantage observed in children from higher-income families arose from other influences -- such as their exposure to better nutrition, health care, schools, play areas, air quality and other environmental factors known to play a role in brain development.

The good news is that improving a disadvantaged child's environment -- through after-school programs, healthier school lunches and other initiatives -- may have a long-lasting positive effect on the child's brain development and cognition.

"We know that experiences in the environment impact the way the brain wires itself through childhood and adolescence," Sowell said. "If we could somehow enrich the environments of particularly the poorer children, we might be able to change that trajectory to equalize it, to some extent."

The study's findings were published March 30 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.  


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12) Prosecutors Scrutinize Minority Borrowers’ Auto Loans
By and

Minority borrowers were once starved for credit through redlining — banks’ refusal to provide mortgages in their communities.

Now the booming auto industry has turned that historic wrong on its head, government authorities say, singling out minority borrowers and extending them the costliest car loans, a development that threatens to exacerbate the economic distress in some black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

The practice, known as reverse-redlining, is presenting new challenges for government authorities trying to shield the most vulnerable Americans from predatory lending. Prosecutors from the Justice Department and top officials with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are grappling with how to root out the practice in a fractured industry, where some of the least regulated players, the auto dealers, wield the most power and where virtually no national data exists to quantify the problem.The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is now examining whether dealerships are discriminating against their minority borrowers.

“In every facet of the auto lending market, combating discrimination is a top priority for the Civil Rights Division,” Vanita Gupta, acting assistant attorney general for the division, said in an interview. Ms. Gupta joined the Justice Department in October from the American Civil Liberties Union, where she was deputy legal director and headed its Center for Justice.

The latest push against auto dealers comes as previous efforts aimed solely at lenders have faced challenges, including intense resistance from the industry. One prominent action taken by the federal authorities against a large lender, Ally Financial, has been fraught with complications.

More than a year ago, Ally agreed to pay $80 million to auto buyers as part of a broader settlement over accusations that it charged minority customers higher interest rates. But none of that money has been paid out, according to several people briefed on the settlement.

One reason for the delay, the people said, is that federal authorities have found it complicated to determine which Ally customers are minorities who might have suffered harm. Before sending out the checks, the regulators wanted to make sure that none were sent to white borrowers, the people said. Another wrinkle is that information about the settlement is being sent in six languages.

A spokeswoman for Ally said the bank “has taken and will continue to take steps to ensure that customers are treated fairly.”

Neither auto dealers nor lenders are required to collect information about a borrower’s race or ethnicity. The mortgage market is different. After the redlining scandals in housing, Congress in 1975 passed the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which required lenders to detail their mortgage lending by race, ethnicity and ZIP code.

Faced with a dearth of data in auto lending, the government authorities created a method that analyzes borrowers’ surnames and addresses to determine their race.

Such so-called proxies are not new in civil rights investigations. The Justice Department has used a similar analysis in investigating potential violations of voting rights. Using proxies in their auto lending investigation into Ally, the federal authorities calculated that roughly 235,000 minority borrowers paid higher interest rates than white ones from April 2011 to December 2013.

Government economists and statisticians have tested the data, but the analysis is far from foolproof.

Ally is not the only lender facing scrutiny. The government authorities, the people said, are in discussions with other large auto lenders, including JPMorgan Chase, over potential disparities in interest rates charged to minorities.

Part of the problem in the eyes of the federal authorities, the people said, is “dealer markups,” in which dealers tack additional interest onto a borrower’s loan. The markups can be used, the people said, to charge minority borrowers higher rates than white ones with similar credit profiles.

But eradicating the markups has emerged as a big sticking point in the talks over discriminatory pricing. None of the banks, the people said, want to be the first to turn away loans from auto dealers that include markups. If they do, the banks have argued privately, the dealers will simply take their business elsewhere.

Even Ally, which reached a settlement with the consumer protection agency and the Justice Department in December 2013, did not expressly agree to shun loans that included dealer markups. Instead, it agreed to monitor its loans for potential discrimination and continue to make payments annually to customers who might have been harmed.

Ally agreed to settle the matter because the bank, which was still owned largely by the government at the time, felt pressured by banking regulators to resolve it, according to people briefed on the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. At the time, Ally was seeking financial holding company status from the Federal Reserve.

Any proposal to ban such markups across the industry would most likely run up against one of the most powerful political players in Washington, the auto-selling industry. Interest-rate markups are a big revenue generator for the dealers.

At some dealerships, the Justice Department is taking aim at discriminatory practices that go beyond markups.

In February, the department resolved a case against two dealerships in Charlotte, N.C., for intentionally targeting African-American borrowers with unfair and predatory practices in the financing of used-car purchases.

To lure the borrowers, the department said, the dealerships were situated in overwhelmingly African-American neighborhoods. At times, the dealerships’ owner used racial epithets to describe his African-American customers, the officials said.

The dealers charged most borrowers the highest allowable interest rate under North Carolina law and repossessed some borrowers’ cars even though they had not fallen behind on payments. The dealers’ owner forced one African-American customer, whose car was seized even though she was current on her loan, to pay a fee to retrieve her vehicle.

As part of their settlement, the dealerships agreed to cap their maximum interest rates for all borrowers and not to charge substantially more than other local dealers for used cars.

The dealerships denied any wrongdoing, adding that they agreed to the settlement “to avoid the risks and burdens of costly litigation.”


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13) 'Heart Over Hard': Thousands Protest Austerity in Brussels
Demonstrators call for Belgian government to tackle fraud and enact higher taxes on the rich
by Deirdre Fulton
Monday, March 30, 2015
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/03/30/heart-over-hard-thousands-protest-austerity-brussels
 


Protesters in Brussels on Sunday. (Photo: Geertje Franssen/Hart boven Hard/Facebook)

For the second day in a row, thousands of demonstrators and trade union activists protested in the streets of Brussels on Monday, calling for an alternative to the Belgian government's austerity measures.

According to the Associated Press, those participating in Monday's rally "braved hail and winds as they demanded the right-wing government change course and make sure the brunt of the austerity is borne by the wealthy."

Calling for higher taxes on the rich, notably on capital gains, and tougher action to tackle fraud, the protesters specifically "targeted measures by the business-friendly government of Prime Minister Charles Michel such as cuts in public sector pay, the extension in working hours and restrictions to social services," AP reports.

Up to 7,000 people were expected to take place in strikes across the country Monday.

TeleSUR reports that the event was organized by the "social NGO Hart boven Hard," which translates to "Heart over Hard."

Monday's demonstration follows one that took place on Sunday, where an estimated 20,000 protesters from various cities rallied against social injustice.

As Press TV reported: "A number of the protesters shouted slogans like, 'Yes, there is an alternative'... They also called for a fair tax system and a better distribution of government spending." 


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