Wednesday, March 25, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 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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Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 https://www.unacpeace.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A financial contribution of any amount will be greatly appreciated.

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

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

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

Rachel Wolkenstein
Sister, Advocate and Friend of the Extended Family


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

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

This message has been sent to you by:
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA  •  510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org

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

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Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

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

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

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

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

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

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


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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


SIGN LORENZO JOHNSON'S FREEDOM PETITION

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

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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MESSAGE FROM REV. PINKNEY

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

New Court Date on 4 Motions for Rev. Pinkney 

TUES, FEB. 24 1pm Berrien County Court 

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/

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

November 24, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network

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) Netanyahu’s Win Is Good for Palestine
By YOUSEF MUNAYYER




2) In Wisconsin, a Trial Run for a New Law
By THE NEW YORK TIMES




3) Target Plans to Raise Pay to at Least $9 an Hour
By





4) The Case for Free-Range Parenting
By




5) Black Man’s Body Found Hanging From Tree in Mississippi
By




6) Florida: Life Sentences for Juveniles Thrown Out
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




7) In Eric Garner Case, Judge Rules Against Releasing Grand Jury Evidence
By





8) Why Not Utopia?
By
March 20, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/why-not-utopia.html




9) First Amendment, ‘Patron Saint’ of Protesters, Is Embraced by Corporations
By





10) Atlanta Police Shooting Victim Tried to Live a Life That Mattered
By RICHARD FAUSSET




11) Justice Dept., Criticizing Philadelphia Police, Finds Shootings by Officers Are Common
By




12) Utah: Governor Signs Law Allowing Firing Squads
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




13) Oklahoma Senate Panel Approves Nitrogen Gas Executions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS





14 How Poor Are the Poor?
By




15) Smartphone Use Changing Our Brain and Thumb Interaction, Say Researchers
By Jim Drury, REUTERS




























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1) Netanyahu’s Win Is Good for Palestine
By YOUSEF MUNAYYER

WASHINGTON — IF anyone doubted where Benjamin Netanyahu stood on the question of peace, the Israeli prime minister made himself clear just before Tuesday’s election, proclaiming that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch. Then he decided to engage in a bit of fear-mongering against Palestinian citizens of Israel in hopes of driving his supporters to the polls. “The right-wing government is in danger,” Mr. Netanyahu announced on Election Day. “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.”

But Mr. Netanyahu’s victory is actually the best plausible outcome for those seeking to end Israel’s occupation. Indeed, I, as a Palestinian, breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear that his Likud Party had won the largest number of seats in the Knesset.

This might seem counterintuitive, but the political dynamics in Israel and internationally mean that another term with Mr. Netanyahu at the helm could actually hasten the end of Israel’s apartheid policies. The biggest losers in this election were those who made the argument that change could come from within Israel. It can’t and it won’t.

Israelis have grown very comfortable with the status quo. In a country that oversees a military occupation that affects millions of people, the biggest scandals aren’t about settlements, civilian deaths or hate crimes but rather mundane things like the price of cottage cheese and whether the prime minister’s wife embezzled bottle refunds.

For Israelis, there’s currently little cost to maintaining the occupation and re-electing leaders like Mr. Netanyahu. Raising the price of occupation is therefore the only hope of changing Israeli decision making. Economic sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s increased its international isolation and put pressure on the apartheid regime to negotiate. Once Israelis are forced to decide between perpetual occupation and being accepted in the international community, they may choose a more moderate leader who dismantles settlements and pursues peace, or they may choose to annex rather than relinquish land — provoking a confrontation with America and Europe. Either way, change will have to come from the outside.

The boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (B.D.S.) has thrived while Mr. Netanyahu has led Israel. He has become the internationally recognized face of Israeli intransigence, settlement building and brazen disregard for Palestinian human rights. But while Mr. Netanyahu has become synonymous with the occupation, he is in many ways a product of it. There are also entrenched political and economic interests that benefit from maintaining the status quo.

By monopolizing West Bank land and natural resources, Israel reaps the benefits of occupation with few costs. Settlements are a major state investment, and add both a geographic and political obstacle to peace since settlers play a key role in shaping Israeli politics and their interests cannot be ignored.

Mr. Netanyahu’s style has certainly heightened tensions and harmed relations with Israel’s allies. He has clashed with President Obama and thumbed his nose at the Democratic Party by helping to make Israel a partisan political issue in America. His most recent speech before a joint session of Congress, which 60 members of Congress boycotted, was merely the latest incident.

Replacing Mr. Netanyahu with his challenger, Isaac Herzog, would have slowed down the B.D.S. movement and halted pressure on Israel by creating the perception of change. A new prime minister would have kick-started a new “peace process” based on previous failed models that would inevitably fail again because of a lack of real pressure on Israel to change its deplorable behavior.The re-election of Mr. Netanyahu provides clarity. Two years ago Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the maximum time left for a two-state solution was two years. Mr. Netanyahu officially declared it dead this week in order to drive right-wing voters to the polls. The two-state solution, which has seen more funerals than a reverend, exists today only as a talking point for self-interested, craven politicians to hide behind — not as a realistic basis for peace.

The old land-for-peace model must now be replaced with a rights-for-peace model. Palestinians must demand the right to live on their land, but also free movement, equal treatment under the law, due process, voting rights and freedom from discrimination.

Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election has convincingly proved that trusting Israeli voters with the fate of Palestinian rights is disastrous and immoral. His government will oppose any constructive change, placing Israel on a collision course with the rest of the world. And this collision has never been more necessary.

The election results will further galvanize the movement seeking to isolate Israel internationally. B.D.S. campaigns will grow, and more countries will move toward imposing sanctions to change Israeli behavior. In the past few years, a major Dutch pension fund divested large sums from Israeli banks active in the West Bank, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been divested from companies, like G4S and SodaStream, that operate in occupied territory.

There won’t be real change on the ground or at the polls without further pressure on Israel. And now, that pressure will increase. For this, we have Mr. Netanyahu to thank.

Yousef Munayyer is executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

 


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2) In Wisconsin, a Trial Run for a New Law
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Since the deaths of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner on Staten Island, police use of deadly force against unarmed black men has become a topic of national discussion.

Protests recently flared in Madison, Wis., after the killing of Tony Terrell Robinson Jr., 19, there. Mr. Robinson was shot on March 6 inside an apartment by Matt Kenny, a veteran officer who responded to reports of a man jumping in front of traffic and assaulting someone in a home.

Mr. Robinson’s shooting is significant for another reason: Wisconsin has a unique way of investigating police shootings.

In most places, shootings involving officers are investigated by those officers’ own police departments. But Wisconsin has a one-year-old law that mandates that an outside agency investigate cases of police shootings.

The law was championed by Michael Bell after his son was shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., in 2004.Mr. Bell has met with Mr. Robinson’s family and offered advice. “I know what they are going through,” he said. “You’re walking around living your life and something like this happens. You’re overwhelmed, and you don’t know how to deal with the media and with the system. There’s no place where you can go and find out what to do when your son is shot by a police officer.”

Civil rights advocates are pushing for other states to enact policies similar to Wisconsin’s. Mr. Bell said that he receives phone calls and emails daily from lawmakers interested in passing similar legislation in their states.

Mr. Bell has praised officials for their handling of the case in Madison, but he says the law in Wisconsin does not go far enough. He is advocating for legislation that would require the outside investigation to be handed to an independent review board. The board would include those who have retired from law enforcement and also police academy instructors, with the aim of reducing future uses of excessive force.

When the law was just one week old in 2014, Dontre Hamilton was shot by a police officer in Milwaukee. As this Times video explains, it would be the first case to test how effective the new law is. Could it help provide a new faith in the justice system?


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3) Target Plans to Raise Pay to at Least $9 an Hour
By


Target said on Wednesday that it would increase the pay of its workers to at least $9 an hour, joining retailers like Walmart and TJX in raising its hourly wage in a more competitive job market and facing pressure from labor groups.

Target, a retailer with about 347,000 workers in the United States, has begun telling them that they will start to receive higher wages this spring, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s plans. The retailer has said it already pays all of its employees more than the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour.

Brian Cornell, Target’s chief executive, told financial analysts this month that the company would make sure that it remained “very competitive from a wage standpoint.” Target said that it did not expect those efforts to affect its earnings.

Molly Snyder, a Target spokeswoman, said the company did not disclose pay, but that it was continuously evaluating pay levels.

Target, which is making a turnaround after years of lackluster sales, said last week that it was laying off 1,700 corporate employees in a cost-cutting drive at its Minneapolis headquarters. Target aims for a cost savings of $2 billion in two years to reinvest in areas like food, e-commerce and supply-chain technology.Walmart last month took the lead in announcing a raise for its hourly workers, saying they would earn at least $9 an hour by April and at least $10 by next February. Since then, TJX, which operates TJ Maxx, Marshalls and Home Goods stores, said it would increase wages this year.

Pay is rising in the retail industry as an improved job outlook has increased competition for low-wage, hourly workers. The economy is adding jobs rapidly, the jobless rate is at its lowest level since 2008 and wages are climbing slowly, government figures showed last week.


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4) The Case for Free-Range Parenting
By

BETHESDA, Md. — ON her first morning in America, last summer, my daughter went out to explore her new neighborhood — alone, without even telling my wife or me.

Of course we were worried; we had just moved from Berlin, and she was just 8. But when she came home, we realized we had no reason to panic. Beaming with pride, she told us and her older sister how she had discovered the little park around the corner, and had made friends with a few local dog owners. She had taken possession of her new environment, and was keen to teach us things we didn’t know.

When this story comes up in conversations with American friends, we are usually met with polite disbelief. Most are horrified by the idea that their children might roam around without adult supervision. In Berlin, where we lived in the center of town, our girls would ride the Metro on their own — a no-no in Washington. Or they’d go alone to the playground, or walk a mile to a piano lesson. Here in quiet and traffic-safe suburban Washington, they don’t even find other kids on the street to play with. On Halloween, when everybody was out to trick or treat, we were surprised by how many children actually lived here whom we had never seen.

A study by the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that American kids spend 90 percent of their leisure time at home, often in front of the TV or playing video games. Even when kids are physically active, they are watched closely by adults, either in school, at home, at afternoon activities or in the car, shuttling them from place to place.

Such narrowing of the child’s world has happened across the developed world. But Germany is generally much more accepting of letting children take some risks. To this German parent, it seems that America’s middle class has taken overprotective parenting to a new level, with the government acting as a super nanny.

Just take the case of 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora Meitiv, siblings in Silver Spring, Md., who were picked up in December by the police because their parents had dared to allow them to walk home from the park alone. For trying to make them more independent, their parents were found guilty by the state’s Child Protective Services of “unsubstantiated child neglect.” What had been the norm a generation ago, that kids would enjoy a measure of autonomy after school, is now seen as almost a crime.

Today’s parents enjoyed a completely different American childhood. Recently, researchers at the University of Virginia conducted interviews with 100 parents. “Nearly all respondents remember childhoods of nearly unlimited freedom, when they could ride bicycles and wander through woods, streets, parks, unmonitored by their parents,” writes Jeffrey Dill, one of the researchers.

But when it comes to their own children, the same respondents were terrified by the idea of giving them only a fraction of the freedom they once enjoyed. Many cited fear of abduction, even though crime rates have declined significantly. The most recent in-depth study found that, in 1999, only 115 children nationwide were victims of a “stereotypical kidnapping” by a stranger; the overwhelming majority were abducted by a family member. That same year, 2,931 children under 15 died as passengers in car accidents. Driving children around is statistically more dangerous than letting them roam freely.

Motor development suffers when most of a child’s leisure time is spent sitting at home instead of running outside. Emotional development suffers, too.“We are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives,” writes Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College. He argues that this increases “the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders,” which have gone up dramatically in recent decades. He sees risky, outside play of children among themselves without adult supervision as a way of learning to control strong emotions like anger and fear.

I am no psychologist like Professor Gray, but I know I won’t be around forever to protect my girls from the challenges life holds in store for them, so the earlier they develop the intellectual maturity to navigate the world, the better. And by giving kids more control over their lives, they learn to have more confidence in their own capabilities.

It is hard for parents to balance the desire to protect their children against the desire to make them more self-reliant. And every one of us has to decide for himself what level of risk he is ready to accept. But parents who prefer to keep their children always in sight and under their thumbs should consider what sort of trade-offs are involved in that choice.

At a minimum, parents who want to give their children more room to roam shouldn’t be penalized by an overprotective state. Cases like the Meitivs’ reinforce the idea that children are fragile objects to be protected at all times, and that parents who believe otherwise are irresponsible, if not criminally negligent.

Besides overriding our natural protective impulses in order to loosen the reins of our kids, my wife and I now also have to ponder the possibility of running afoul of the authorities. And we thought we had come to the land of the free.

Clemens Wergin is the Washington bureau chief for the newspaper Die Welt.


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5) Black Man’s Body Found Hanging From Tree in Mississippi
By

NEW ORLEANS — Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are investigating the death of a black man who was found hanging from a tree in a small Mississippi town on Thursday morning.

The man was hanging by a bedsheet, said Sheriff Marvin Lucas of Claiborne County, who added that it had not yet been determined if hanging had been the ultimate cause of death.

The man’s hands were not tied, the sheriff said, adding that the death had not yet been ruled a homicide or a suicide. The man has not yet been formally identified.

“This person had been out in the woods for a while,” Sheriff Lucas said. “He didn’t just go out there yesterday.”

But the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. identified the man as Otis James Byrd, 54.

Sheriff Lucas said that seemed possible, though an identification would not be certain until an autopsy was performed.

Mr. Byrd has been missing since March 2 from the small town of Port Gibson, which is not far from the Mississippi River. His family had filed a missing person’s report with the Sheriff’s Department six days later.

On Thursday morning, according to Jason Pack, a supervisory special agent with the F.B.I., which is assisting state and local authorities in the investigation, the Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks were conducting a search for Mr. Byrd when agents found the body hanging in the woods.

The location was about 500 yards from a house Mr. Byrd had been renting, Sheriff Lucas said.

According to the Mississippi Department of Corrections, Mr. Byrd was convicted of capital murder for killing a woman in February 1980 during a robbery. He was released on parole in November 2006.

The federal Department of Justice is also investigating the death for possible civil rights violations. The state N.A.A.C.P. had urged federal involvement.

“Considering Mr. Byrd’s body was found hanging from a tree, we are calling on federal authorities to immediately investigate to determine whether his death is a result of a racial hate crime,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the state conference of the N.A.A.C.P., said in a statement.


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6) Florida: Life Sentences for Juveniles Thrown Out
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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7) In Eric Garner Case, Judge Rules Against Releasing Grand Jury Evidence
By

A judge ruled on Thursday against releasing the evidence presented to the grand jury that decided not to indict a New York police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.

Lawyers for the parties seeking the evidence had seized on the public outcry for transparency after the grand jury, as well as the one in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., declined to bring criminal charges against the officers involved.

The prosecutor in the Brown case made public much of the information about the Ferguson grand jury. But on Staten Island, Justice William E. Garnett of State Supreme Court decided against the request for public disclosure sought by the New York Civil Liberties Union; the city’s public advocate, Letitia James; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and The New York Post.Mr. Garner died on July 17 after a confrontation with the police. Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold as he and other officers tried to take Mr. Garner into custody on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. Mr. Garner was unarmed.

In his decision, Justice Garnett’s reasoning reflected his line of questioning in the hearing when he asked what each party would do with the documents if released. Ultimately, he ruled, the parties seeking disclosure had failed to establish a “compelling and particularized need” to make the grand jury minutes public.

The parties, Justice Garnett wrote in his conclusion, “merely ask for disclosure for distribution to the public.”

“This request is not a legally cognizable reason for disclosure,” he continued. “What would they use the minutes for? The only answer which the court heard was the possibility of effecting legislative change. That proffered need is purely speculative and does not satisfy the requirements of the law.”

State law strictly protects the secrecy of grand jury materials.

“But that presumption is not absolute,” Arthur Eisenberg, the legal director of the civil liberties group, said.

Ms. James and the civil liberties group immediately vowed to appeal the decision. They have 30 days to file notice.

One of the parties’ chief complaints is that while for most felonies grand juries are swift, bare-bones proceedings, those involving police-related deaths can go on for weeks or months and take on the feel of a minitrial carried out behind closed doors.

At a news conference, Ms. James said she hoped disclosure would help answer key questions. “How many witnesses? What was the substance of their testimony? What was the physical evidence? Why did it take nine weeks? What were the charges? What was the explanation of law?” she said. “All of those questions and more need to be answered.”

Jonathan Moore, a lawyer representing Mr. Garner’s mother and his widow and five children, said, “I think it’s unfortunate given the great deal of public interest in this case that he’s refused to provide the public access to any of the materials in the grand jury.”

Mr. Moore said the grand jury process needed reform.

“Secret grand juries are an anachronism,” he said. “The judge has essentially sanctioned the use of a secret trial for a very public matter. If this was a normal grand jury process, they would have had an indictment in five minutes.”

Mr. Donovan, a Republican, is considered the likely successor to Representative Michael G. Grimm, who resigned earlier this year. Though Mr. Donovan succeeded in arguing for public disclosure of summary information about the Garner grand jury after its vote in December, he issued a one-line statement on Thursday: “We respect and will adhere to Judge Garnett’s well-reasoned decision.”



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8) Why Not Utopia?
By
March 20, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/why-not-utopia.html

SOME quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

But before the robots replace us, we face the challenge of decreasing real wages resulting, among other factors, from automation and outsourcing, which will itself be automated before long. Inequality (you don’t need more statistics on this, do you?) is the biggest social challenge facing us. (Let’s call climate change, which has the potential to be apocalyptic rather than just awful, a scientific challenge.) And since wealthy people don’t spend nearly as high a percentage of their incomes as poor people do, much wealth is sitting around not doing its job.

The result is that we’re looking at fewer jobs that pay the equivalent of what an autoworker or a teacher made in the ’60s and ’70s. All but a lucky few will either have the kind of service jobs that are now paying around $9 an hour, or be worse off.

And if robots can think, be creative, teach themselves, beat humans at chess and even Jeopardy, flip burgers, take care of your aging parent, plant, tend and harvest lettuce, drive cars, deliver packages, build iPhones and run warehouses — Amazon’s “Kiva” robots can carry 3,000 pounds, stock shelves and select and ship packages — it’s hard to imagine what these jobs might be.

Welcome to the Brave New World, one featuring even fewer haves and more have-nots than the current one. The winners and losers are the same, but the polarity is even more extreme.

And although this is morally detestable, as Robert B. Reich, the former secretary of labor and current professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me a couple of weeks ago, it’s also “a crass economic issue. Because as you have more and more people who are getting paid relatively little, the question in most economic heads is, where is the aggregate demand going to come from?” If no one can buy, there’s very little to sell; again, relative to their income, rich people don’t buy much. (A hundred million people with $100 each spend a lot more than one person with $10 billion.)

In other words, almost everyone agrees that income inequality stinks, but what’s to stop it from getting worse? (Certainly not this week’s proposed budget!) Defeatism will only guarantee defeat, but there are short-term solutions that can come from both top and bottom. The government’s role should be to stop corporate handouts, accept that rising tides do not lift all boats and prioritize a decent life for all citizens through a desperately needed enormous public works program, one that would create at least some dignified and well-paying jobs.

Those unable to get those jobs — and, given that one in six Americans qualifies for food stamps, it’s clear that there isn’t enough good work to go around — can survive only if income distribution is addressed. One way to do this is through the earned-income tax credit, a kind of reverse income tax, similar to Milton Friedman’s proposal and therefore acceptable to many Republicans.

But this assumes that people have work that pays a taxable income, and that’s not a safe assumption. Better is the Guaranteed Basic Income, which is not universally despised (it’s at least as old as Thomas Paine, was endorsed by the economist Friedrich Hayek and was recently considered by Switzerland), because it would simplify matters and help keep the economy moving. How all of this would be financed is of course a question; we could make the income tax look like it did 60 years ago, when the top rate was 91 percent (and, by the way, the economy was just fine), or we could institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion, or ... well, there’s no dearth of ideas. The way to address income distribution is to redistribute income.

A combination of public works and guaranteed welfare (not, by the way, a dirty word) is the best top-down solution for the short term. But the bottom-up situation has even more potential for a more equitable economic system. What we’re seeing, on a small but growing scale, is a world where energy and even power may become increasingly decentralized, and communities are building more on local and regional levels, creating organizations that benefit more of their members. Worker ownership — which, for obvious reasons, combats income inequality directly — is becoming more common, and these organizations are talking to one another locally. Even something as simple as the farm-to-school movement means that economies are becoming more local and communities are supporting their own businesses.

The historian and economist Gar Alperovitz, who details these efforts in his book “What Then Must We Do?” (a Tolstoy quote about, essentially, inequality), recently said to me, “The political game is beginning to resemble a checkerboard strategy: Some of the squares on the board are clearly blocked, but others are open. The goal, of course, is to expand the number of squares that are receptive to democratization efforts — not just to restore economic health and sustainability in struggling communities, but to demonstrate viable alternatives.”NONE of this is short term, but neither are the robots taking over tomorrow, and it’s safe to say that nearly all the humans on Earth 20 years from now would prefer an economic system that would guarantee a decent life, whether their “rulers” are heartless robots or merely gazillionaires. We just need to do short-term work with a long view, and remember that few predicted the great changes of our time: the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring. Nineteen years ago, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages blessed by other states — and look what’s happened since.

Between the recession (which is only over if you were making real money to begin with) and the crushing of our spirits by death-ray-wielding, 40-foot-high titanium monsters, perhaps there’s time to reimagine society.

It’s not as if this question hasn’t been well considered. There was Karl Marx, whose analysis was largely correct but whose reputation was soiled by the alternatives developed in his name. There was Edward Bellamy, whose popular 1888 book “Looking Backward” anticipated a kind of Internet and the ease with which things are made and delivered, and painted a picture of cooperation instead of competition, describing in sensible detail what was once called a socialist utopia. (We’d have to pitch this differently, of course, as both those words are forbidden in neoliberal society.) And there was even John Maynard Keynes, who suggested that a 15-hour workweek would eventually be considered full-time.

And why not? We need equally big thinkers now, and dreamers, and we need to be acting with them.

We have achieved a level of social equality barely imagined by progressives 50 years ago, but economic equality has gotten much worse. No one knows what the world will look like in 50 years, but if we resign ourselves to dystopia — in which capital has full control, as it nearly does now — we’ll surely have one.

Let’s resolve to build something better. In the long run we know that we’ll make the transition from capitalism to some less destructive and hopefully more just system. Why not begin that transition now? If there is going to be a global market that will further enrich capitalists, there must be guarantees that the rest of the population can at least afford housing and food. And things can be even better than that: We’ll have the robots work for us. 


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9) First Amendment, ‘Patron Saint’ of Protesters, Is Embraced by Corporations
By

WASHINGTON — Liberals used to love the First Amendment. But that was in an era when courts used it mostly to protect powerless people like civil rights activists and war protesters.

These days, a provocative new study says, there has been a “corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” The assertion is backed by data, and it comes from an unlikely source: John C. Coates IV, who teaches business law at Harvard and used to be a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the prominent corporate law firm.

“Corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment,” Professor Coates wrote. The trend, he added, is “recent but accelerating.”

Professor Coates’s study was only partly concerned with the Supreme Court’s recent decisions amplifying the role of money in politics.

“It’s not just Citizens United,” he said in an interview, referring to the 2010 decision that allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations in elections. His study, he said, analyzed First Amendment challenges from businesses to an array of economic regulations.

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, described the shift in First Amendment doctrine in 2013 in The New Republic.

“Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint,” Professor Wu wrote.

“Madison’s Music,” a new book by Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, gives a detailed history of the transformation of First Amendment law. In his account, “the American right discovered the First Amendment” in the early 1970s.

“An expansive conception of free speech became attractive to Republican justices,” he wrote, “both because robust free-speech protections fit neatly into the right’s skeptical, deregulatory approach to government generally, and because it energized vigorous transmission by powerful speakers of the right’s newly energized collection of ideas.”

Those conservative justices, Professor Neuborne wrote, found willing allies in liberal justices long committed to free speech.

In the next two decades, the Supreme Court continued to protect dissent, twice voting to strike down laws banning flag burning. But now, Professor Neuborne wrote, broad coalitions of justices also voted to protect the powerful.

In 1976 alone, he wrote, the court shielded both unrestricted election spending by rich people, “giving the 1 percent a tangible reason to celebrate a muscular First Amendment,” and commercial advertising, “giving corporate management a strong stake in the First Amendment.”

By the time the left woke up and realized it had made “a Faustian bargain,” Professor Neuborne wrote, “the bipartisan coalition had generated an enormously powerful body of precedent establishing an imperial free speech clause.”

The case on commercial speech, Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, was a turning point, Professor Coates found in his study. After that ruling, the average number of First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court involving businesses started to rise to 2.2 a year from 1.5, and the number involving individuals started to fall, to 3.6 from 4.3.

More striking, the success rates for both groups increased, but far more for businesses. Individuals won 55 percent of the time, up from 41 percent. Businesses also won 55 percent of the time, up from 20 percent.

Before 1976, First Amendment challenges from corporations generally involved companies in the business of free expression, like newspapers, book publishers and film producers. More recently, companies have filed free-speech challenges to laws regulating how ordinary products may be marketed or advertised.

Professor Coates also analyzed data from federal appeals courts, finding that “businesses are growing steadily more aggressive in their use of the First Amendment.” Court dockets these days are full of free-speech challenges from pharmaceutical firms, tobacco companies, miners, meat producers and airlines.

Such lawsuits, he wrote, have pernicious consequences for both free enterprise and the rule of law. Corporations are diverting resources from research and innovation to litigation, he wrote.

“Concentrated, moneyed interests, represented by those in control of the country’s largest business corporations,” he wrote, “are increasingly able to turn law into a lottery, reducing law’s predictability, impairing property rights, and increasing the share of the economy devoted to rent-seeking rather than productive activity.”

The court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been receptive to arguments based on corporations’ free-speech rights.

In a recent essay, Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, offered a cautious partial defense of the Citizens United decision. But he said it was an instance of a larger phenomenon.

“It is part of a trend in First Amendment law that is transforming that body of doctrine into a charter of largely untrammeled libertarianism,” he wrote, “in which the regulation of virtually all forms of speech and all kinds of speakers is treated with the same heavy dose of judicial skepticism, with exceptions perversely calculated to expose particularly vulnerable and valuable sorts of expression to unconvincingly justified suppression.”

Professor Tribe gave examples of the sorts of people whose First Amendment arguments have not fared well in the Roberts court: students, prisoners, pacifists and whistle-blowers.

Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer who has defended The New York Times and was on the winning side in Citizens United, reflected on the trend toward protecting the powerful in a speech last week at Temple University.

“There is truth in the proposition that a number of recent First Amendment victories in recent years have been on behalf of the ‘haves’ — some of them corporations, some individuals,” he said. “But that is no basis for concluding that the decisions were wrongly analyzed or wrongly decided.”



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10) Atlanta Police Shooting Victim Tried to Live a Life That Mattered
By RICHARD FAUSSET

MONCKS CORNER, S.C. — Long before two bullets from a police officer’s handgun tore through Anthony Hill’s chest, he had tattooed it with the words of advice that his grandfather regularly imparted to him in this small Southern city: “Be sensible.”

Last week, Mr. Hill’s relatives buried him in Moncks Corner. On their shirts and lapels, they had pinned photos of him, smiling and sharp, in his Air Force uniform. It was a wordless rebuke to the TV news images that had shown Mr. Hill as he wandered in his last living moments — naked, unarmed and acting in a way that alarmed neighbors — through his suburban Atlanta apartment complex.

It was March 9, a Monday afternoon. A DeKalb County Police officer, Robert Olsen, arrived on the scene, responding to a 911 call. Witnesses said Mr. Hill, an African-American, approached the officer, who is white, with his hands either up or at his sides, but he did not heed the policeman’s order to stop.Officer Olsen fired. And Mr. Hill would become another hashtag for a roiling national movement that has questioned the value that police officers place on black lives.

For those closest to Mr. Hill, the pain has been amplified by the fact that he had, until that last day, largely heeded his grandfather’s counsel. He had no criminal record. He had served in the war in Afghanistan. And before his death, Mr. Hill, 26, had been trying, like many other Americans, to make sense of the complex questions of race and law enforcement that have emerged since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In a Twitter post on Christmas Eve, he had challenged protesters not to reflexively condemn all police officers.

“If 99 of 100 officers” were on the streets “killing black men like its hunting season,” he wrote, “that still leaves 1 just doing his job. Stop w/ the generalizations.”

A state investigation of the shooting is underway. But according to friends and family, Mr. Hill had been told by doctors that he had bipolar disorder after returning from Afghanistan. They believe that his bizarre antics before the shooting — in which he removed his clothes and repeatedly jumped from a second-floor balcony — were symptoms of his illness.

In Moncks Corner, the grief and anger commingled with incredulity. Mr. Hill was the last man anyone would ever have expected to tangle with the police, they said. And he deserved better.

“To come home from Afghanistan and be killed by someone who’s supposed to protect you – that I don’t understand,” said James A. Hill, 29, Mr. Hill’s brother.

“Why would you go directly to deadly force for someone who clearly does not have a weapon?” said his father, who is also named Anthony Hill.

“I don’t hate him,” said Mr. Hill’s mother, Carolyn Giummo, referring to Officer Olsen, who has been placed on administrative leave pending the investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “I’m very disappointed in him.”

Ms. Giummo, 54, raised her son with the help of her parents, Theola and William Baylor, in Moncks Corner, a Lowcountry city of 7,900 where residents take pride in a certain racial harmony. The public high school, from which Mr. Hill graduated in 2006, is racially mixed, and students tend to segregate by areas of interest, not skin color. Over the years, Mr. Hill’s extended family came to include a number of nonblack members.

“I never thought to tell my son, ‘You’re black, you’d better look out,’” said Ms. Giummo, who is African-American.

Armed instead with “Be sensible” — his grandfather’s counsel nearly every time he left the house — Mr. Hill came of age in a world that revolved around school, family, and the weekly rhythms set by the Moncks Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he sang in the youth choir and was captivated, early on, by the power of music.

In high school, he played Danny Zuko in a production of “Grease.” The summer after graduation, his mother said, he worked as an intern with a local law enforcement agency.

He tried his hand at college, but eventually dropped out to enlist, in 2008, in the Air Force. Two years later, Mr. Hill was deployed to Afghanistan. His father said he was responsible for loading ordnance into aircraft in Kandahar Province.

His Atlanta roommate, Kailien Alexander, a 23-year-old college student, said that Mr. Hill told him that he had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he had seen children killed in Afghanistan.

“It just didn’t sit right with him,” Mr. Alexander said.

After doctors diagnosed PTSD, his mother said, he was “medically retired” from the Air Force. Later, Mr. Hill moved to Atlanta, in hopes of breaking into the music business. He worked as an intern at a recording studio, and also took odd jobs while constructing R&B tracks at home, sometimes recording in his closet with Mr. Alexander’s help.

He was open about his mental illness, even commenting about it on Twitter. The illness, his family members said, seemed to mostly manifest itself in bursts of hourslong phone conversations. But before March 9, no one had seen him fully lose control.

Mr. Alexander said that he and Mr. Hill were poor but happy, and eager to make friends in an apartment complex mostly filled by Latino families. One hot afternoon, Mr. Alexander recalled, the pair spent some of their last money on ice pops for the kids in the neighborhood.

They also closely followed the national conversation about minorities and the police sparked by the shooting in Ferguson. Mr. Alexander said that Mr. Hill was troubled by examples of over-aggressive policing. But on social media, he challenged those who would dismiss all police officers as evil, and those who sought simple definitions of heroes and villains.

“Some of us black folks have to start actually living like #blacklivesmatter but I’ll probably get called a house slave for saying so,” he wrote on March 6.

At the same time, Mr. Hill was struggling with the medication he had been given by the doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Bridget Anderson, 22, Mr. Hill’s girlfriend, said he had stopped taking his medicine about 10 days before he was shot.

On the morning of March 9, Mr. Hill made his final Facebook post: “Where I once saw death i only see life.” But Mr. Alexander was with him that morning, and said that before he left for class, Mr. Hill seemed upbeat.

After the shooting, DeKalb police officials said that Officer Olsen had a Taser with him at the time of the shooting. They also said Officer Olsen had undergone training in dealing with the mentally ill. This week, the department announced that it would increase its training requirements for “critical incidents,” which include encounters with the mentally ill, but Capt. Steven R. Fore said that the change was unrelated to the shooting.

In an interview last week, Mr. Hill’s family blamed the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to properly treat Mr. Hill, arguing that he should have had better guidance after he learned of his mental illness and retired. Officials said they could not comment on an individual case.

Ms. Giummo said that she did not think her son’s story had much to do with race. “There is a ‘black and white’ issue” in the country, she said, “But our main concern is we want to know what happened. And if he was a black officer, we’d still feel the same way.”

At Mr. Hill’s Sunday afternoon funeral, the P.A. system played Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” an oldie, but Mr. Hill’s favorite.

Sandy W. Drayton, the former pastor at Moncks Corner AME Church, referred to the officer as “the betrayer who misunderstood,” and asked God to forgive him.

Later, Mr. Drayton described death as the door that leads away from this world — away from “the racial stuff,” he said, and “the ethnocentrism” — and into “a new heaven, a new earth, a New Jerusalem.”



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11) Justice Dept., Criticizing Philadelphia Police, Finds Shootings by Officers Are Common
By

WASHINGTON — Roughly once a week, 390 times over the past eight years, Philadelphia police officers opened fire at a suspect. The shootings involved 454 officers, most of them on patrol. Almost always, the suspects were black. Often, the officers were, too.

Fifty-nine suspects were unarmed. Officers frequently said they thought the men — and they were almost always men — were reaching for a weapon, when they were actually doing something like holding a cellphone.

The statistics were laid out in a Justice Department report on Monday, which does not allege racial discrimination but offers an unusually deep look at the use of lethal force inside a major city police department, including information on the race of officers and suspects. It is the kind of data that has been nearly absent from the debate over police tactics that began last summer with a deadly shooting in Ferguson, Mo.Only a handful of major departments regularly publish statistics on police shootings, and those that do are not always consistent. That makes comparing the records of police departments difficult. But even with such spotty figures, Philadelphia stands out when compared with the public data in other cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In many years, Philadelphia saw more police shootings than New York, a city with five times the number of residents and officers.

“I want to express regrets for all who have been shot and killed in Philadelphia — civilian and police officers,” Mayor Michael A. Nutter said at a news conference Monday.

The report comes as tensions linger over the death of Brandon Tate-Brown, a 26-year-old Philadelphia man who was stopped in December for driving with his headlights off. The district attorney, R. Seth Williams, said Mr. Tate-Brown had been shot and killed while reaching for a gun in the car. Mr. Williams called it a “terrible tragedy, but not a crime.”

Last month, the Justice Department issued a scathing review of the Police Department in Ferguson, where, the authorities said, officers engaged in unconstitutional practices. In its tone and findings, the Philadelphia report is very different. It was conducted by federal experts who specialize in community-oriented policing, rather than federal prosecutors. And while the Ferguson report contains vivid anecdotes of ticket-fixing, racist emails and unwarranted arrests, the Philadelphia report is a simple, by-the-numbers accounting.

Philadelphia has one of the nation’s most turbulent histories of police violence and corruption. In 1979, the Justice Department sued the city over police brutality. Six years later, in a standoff with the radical group Move, the police dropped a bomb on a house and allowed the fire to burn for nearly an hour before trying to control it. Six adults and five children were killed and 250 people were left homeless after the fire destroyed 61 homes. More recently, police officers have been videotaped punching and beating people. Last month, two officers were arrested and accused of knocking a man off his scooter and beating him with their fists and batons.

“History does matter,” said Ronald L. Davis, the director of the Justice Department’s office that focuses on community-oriented policing. “That history can change people’s views with regards to trust.”

Charles H. Ramsey, Philadelphia’s police commissioner, requested the Justice Department inquiry after a philly.com article in 2013 revealed that while crime was down, the number of officers firing at suspects was on the rise. At the time, Commissioner Ramsey said he considered the department’s policy on lethal force to be an industry “best practice.”

The Justice Department report, however, found repeated flaws. It describes a department where training is weak, oversight is spotty and shootings are all too frequent.

Officers are not routinely given less lethal tools like stun guns and receive inadequate training on how to defuse situations without violence. “Instructors should train students not only when and how to use force, but when and how not to use force and to de-escalate, verbally and tactically, if appropriate,” the Justice Department wrote.

Philadelphia is the nation’s fifth-largest city but maintains the only police department that has more than 1,000 officers and does not offer a field training program for new officers. Instead, the Justice Department said, new officers are assigned to foot patrol. “As a result, recruits can be thrown into situations where their only guidance comes from their rookie partner,” the report found. Patrol officers accounted for 93 percent of the shootings. The average age of the officers was 33.

Commissioner Ramsey has emerged recently as a national figure in the policing debate. He leads President Obama’s policing task force, which recently made recommendations on how to improve trust between law enforcement and minorities. “I wasn’t selected because the president thought we had the perfect police department,” he told reporters on Monday.

“Commissioner Ramsey and his team have been implementing change from Day 1,” said Mr. Nutter, who because of term limits cannot run for re-election in November. “We will hand off a road map, and a blueprint, and a game plan to whoever the new mayor will be.”

The Justice Department called on the department to be more forthcoming with details about police shootings, publish annual data on shootings and appoint an independent investigator whenever officers kill an unarmed person.

Over all, despite some high-profile cases of the police shooting African-American suspects, the report did not find a pattern of racial targeting. While blacks accounted for 80 percent of police shooting victims, whites who were shot by the police were more likely than blacks to be unarmed, the Justice Department concluded. When federal investigators looked at the race of the officers and the suspects, they found no statistically significant difference in the outcomes.

Nevertheless, the debate over Mr. Tate-Brown’s shooting remains racially charged. Ten people were arrested at a public forum last week when protesters tussled with police officers.

Both Commissioner Ramsey and Mr. Nutter, who are black, said they welcomed the Justice Department’s conclusions and would quickly begin acting on the recommendations. But they reminded people of the violence plaguing the city.

“Folks need to quit killing each other,” Commissioner Ramsey said, noting that about 85 percent of victims and perpetrators in Philadelphia are black. He said he was not proud of that figure. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m black myself.”

Mr. Nutter added: “People want good police officers. Police officers need good citizens.”

Bryon MacWilliams contributed reporting from Philadelphia. 




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12) Utah: Governor Signs Law Allowing Firing Squads
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



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13) Oklahoma Senate Panel Approves Nitrogen Gas Executions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OKLAHOMA CITY — Legislation that authorizes the use of nitrogen gas to execute Oklahoma death row inmates has been approved by a state Senate committee.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 8-0 Tuesday for the House-passed measure and sent it to the full Senate for a vote.

Under the bill, lethal injection would remain the primary method of execution, but nitrogen gas would be an alternative if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional or if the drugs are unavailable.

Currently, electrocution is the second option, followed by firing squad. The bill would make electrocution the third method, followed by firing squad.

Supporters began studying alternative methods after an execution went awry last year and led the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of Oklahoma's three-drug protocol.


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14 How Poor Are the Poor?
By

There is a consensus among poverty experts that over the past 50 years there has been some improvement in the condition of the poor.

“Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the U.S. in recent decades, primarily due to the success of anti-poverty programs” and the declining cost of “food, air-conditioning, communications, transportation, and entertainment,” David Autor, a professor of economics at M.I.T., wrote in response to my query.

Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about the problem of relative poverty, what we are now calling inequality. Poverty cannot be viewed in isolation from the larger economy. We must take disparities in the way the benefits of growth and productivity are distributed into account.I set out to ask a number of experts about this in response to a controversial essay published in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, “The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?” by Christopher Jencks, a sociologist at Harvard with unassailable liberal credentials.

Jencks argues that the actual poverty rate has dropped over the past five decades – far below the official government level — if poverty estimates are adjusted for food and housing benefits, refundable tax credits and a better method of determining inflation rates. In Jencks’s view, the war on poverty worked.

The Jencks article and the response among those I contacted reveals how politically explosive and ideologically charged the seemingly arcane debate over the determination of the poverty rate is.

Democratic supporters of safety net programs can use Jencks’s finding that poverty has dropped below 5 percent as evidence that the war on poverty has been successful.

At the same time liberals are wary of positive news because, as Jencks notes:

It is easier to rally support for such an agenda by saying that the problem in question is getting worse than by saying that although the problem is diminishing, more still needs to be done.

The plus side for conservatives of Jencks’s low estimate of the poverty rate is the implication that severe poverty has largely abated, which then provides justification for allowing enemies of government entitlement programs to further cut social spending.

At the same time, however, Jencks’s data undermines Republican claims that the war on poverty has been a failure – a claim exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 quip: “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

Jencks’s methodology is simple. He starts with the official 2013 United States poverty rate of 14.5 percent. In 2013, the government determined that 45.3 million people in the United States were living in poverty, or 14.5 percent of the population.

Jencks makes three subtractions from the official level to account for expanded food and housing benefits (3 percentage points); the refundable earned-income tax credit and child care credit (3 points); and the use of the Personal Consumption Expenditures index instead of the Consumer Price Index to measure inflation (3.7 percentage points).
Continue reading the main story

Jencks’s conclusion: “The absolute poverty rate has declined dramatically since President Johnson launched his war on poverty in 1964.” At 4.8 percent, Jencks’s calculation is the lowest poverty estimate by a credible expert in the field.

No one casts doubts on Jencks’s expertise. Nevertheless, his conclusion — that instead of the official count of 45.3 million people living in poverty, the number of poor people in America is just under 15 million — understates the scope of hardship in this country.

Other credible ways to define poverty paint a different picture. One is to count all those living with less than half the median income as poor. There are strong theoretical justifications for the use of a relative poverty measure. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts it this way:

In order to participate fully in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norms of a community. For example, the clothing budget that allows a child not to feel ashamed of his school attire is much more related to national living standards than to strict requirements for physical survival.

Using one-half of the median income estimates the number of poor people at over 70.6 million, far above the 45.3 million official number, according to Shawn Fremstad, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes in an email that that “the official poverty line was about half of median income in 1963, but is less than 30 percent of median now because of general economic growth.”

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, pointed out to me in an email that using a relative measure shows that the United States lags well behind other developed countries:

If you use the O.E.C.D. standard of 50 percent of median income as a poverty line, the United States looks pretty bad in cross-national relief. We have a relative poverty rate exceeded only by Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Israel (which has seen a big increase in inequality in recent years). And that rate in 2010 was essentially where it was in 1995.

Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, responded by email to my question on the relative measure:

Most Americans are probably relativists when it comes to thinking about poverty today. Even if they acknowledge that the absolute living standards of fellow citizens in the bottom 15 percent of the income distribution have improved over time, they probably think of poverty in terms of the economic and social distance between someone in the exact middle of the distribution and a person who is near the bottom.

While the United States “has achieved real progress in reducing absolute poverty over the past 50 years,” according to Burtless, “the country may have made no progress at all in reducing the relative economic deprivation of folks at the bottom.”

Burtless’s point goes to the heart of the dispute: How severe is the problem of poverty?

Part of the answer hinges on which measures you use to calculate inflation. Measures that show a higher rate of inflation will increase the number of poor people because the cost of basic necessities rises at a faster clip. A measure that shows a slower rate of inflation will lead to the appearance of reduced poverty levels because the cost of food, shelter and other needs will be lower.

Fremstad, of the Center for American Progress, points to a consequence of Jencks’s use of the Personal Consumption Expenditures index instead of the Consumer Price Index to determine increases in the cost of living. Since the P.C.E. measure provides a lower inflation rate than the C.P.I., the P.C.E. index suggests that the poor can live on even less income than provided for in the official government calculation.

Fremstad notes that using the P.C.E. measure, “an elderly couple was not poor in 2013 if they had an income, including housing and food benefits, equal to $11,300.” Under the C.P.I. measure, by contrast, the same couple was officially poor as long as their income remained under $14,095.“The vast majority of Americans would say that an elderly couple needs more than $14,095 today to have a minimally decent living standard, and I imagine even more would think that $11,300 is far below minimally decent,” Fremstad noted.

At the same time, two other poverty researchers, Kathryn Edin, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins, and Luke Schaefer, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, contend that the poverty debate overlooks crucial changes that have taken place within the population of the poor.

These changes have produced winners and losers, those who have benefited from two major policy initiatives adopted over the past 20 years, and those who were left behind.

The first policy initiative was the enactment of welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act), which limited eligibility for welfare benefits to five years. The limitation has forced many of the poor off welfare: over the past 19 years, the percentage of families falling under the official poverty line who receive welfare benefits has fallen from to 26 percent from 68 percent. Currently, three-quarters of those in poverty, under the official definition, receive no welfare payments.

The second policy initiative was the enactment of expanded benefits for the working poor through the earned-income tax credit and the child care credit.

According to Edin and Schaefer, the consequence of these changes, taken together, has been to divide the poor who no longer receive welfare into two groups. The first group is made up of those who have gone to work and have qualified for tax credits. Expanded tax credits lifted about 3.2 million children out of poverty in 2013. So far, so good.

The second group, though, has really suffered. These are the very poor who are without work, part of a population that is struggling desperately. Edin and Schaefer write that among the losers are an estimated 3.4 million “children who over the course of a year live for at least three months under a $2 per person per day threshold.”

While Edin and Schaefer address the growing advantage the working poor have over nonworkers, Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, raises a different set of issues. He agrees with the general finding that “government programs — transfers and tax subsidies — have helped lift low incomes, and poverty, correctly measured, has fallen.” But focusing on these findings, Mishel argues, diverts attention from the more serious problem of “the failure of the labor market to adequately reward low-wage workers.”

To support his case, Mishel points out that hourly pay for those in the bottom fifth grew only 7.7 percent from 1979 to 2007, while productivity grew by 64 percent, and education levels among workers in this quintile substantially improved.

The effectiveness of government programs rewarding work, according to Mishel, means that in practice, taxpayers “are subsiding low-wage employers,” who, he wrote, “are not putting in enough relative to the publicly provided social safety net.”

A report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, “The War on Poverty 50 Years Later,” which was published last year, provides support for Mishel’s case that falling private sector wages are a major factor in the problems of those in the bottom quintile of the income distribution. The following chart, Figure 1, shows that if there had been no new government initiatives after 1967, the poverty rate now would be higher than it was 48 years ago.

The question of how to compare levels of poverty over a half-century remains hotly contested. Jencks argues in his email for consistency:

The poverty line was too low in 1964, and it is still too low today. But if you want to measure absolute progress, you can’t move the goal posts just because you think they were set in the wrong place.

The measurement of absolute progress is a worthy undertaking, but in terms of evaluating the lived experience of poverty and its detrimental effects, it is equally important, if not more so, to explore the relative progress of the poor. The semi-success of government anti-poverty policy has also marginalized and beaten down millions of people. Without understanding relative poverty — and in particular the “small percentage” that falls to the very bottom, almost off the grid — we haven’t really begun to tackle the problem.



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15) Smartphone Use Changing Our Brain and Thumb Interaction, Say Researchers
By Jim Drury, REUTERS

Typing text messages, scrolling web pages, and checking your email on your smartphone could be changing the way your thumbs and brain interacts. That's according to researchers from the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, and University of Fribourg.

Dr Arko Ghosh, of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, led the research which involved using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the cortical brain activity in 37 right-handed people, 26 of whom were touchscreen Smartphone users and 11 users of old-fashioned cellphones.

A total of 62 electrodes were placed on an EEG cap worn by subjects to record how the brain processed touch from their thumb, forefinger and middle finger. Brain activity was then compared with the individual commands recorded by each individuals' phone logs.

"We measured people's brain activity using a bunch of electrodes on the scalp and what these maps indicate is essentially how much of the variance between people we could explain by just looking at the phone logs, so how much brain activity can be explained by looking at people's history of use on the phones alone," said Ghosh.

Pointing at brain scans on his computer he added: "For instance these red spots here indicate when you measure the signals of these electrodes a lot of the differences between one person and the next can be explained simply by how much phone they were using in the previous ten days."

Electrical activity in the brains of smartphone users was shown to be enhanced when all three fingertips were touched. According to research student Magali Chytiris, activity in the cortex of the brain associated with the thumb and index fingertips was directly proportional to the intensity of phone use, as quantified by built-in battery logs.

"This activity is related to the amount of use from the past days of phone use," said Chytiris. "So we used the logs, the battery logs, from the phone and we found that if the EEG recording was just after the peak of high intensive use then the brain activity was higher."

Ghosh says the results suggest that repetitive movements over the touchscreen surface reshape sensory processing from the hand, with daily updates in the brain's representation of the fingertips. He believes that cortical sensory processing in the contemporary brain is continuously shaped by personal digital technology.

"Most superficially what we found was that smartphone users have a brain that processes touch differently than people who don't use smartscreen touch phones," said Ghosh. "However, if you dig a bit deeper into the data what you essentially see is that the most recent usage that people accumulated on their smartphones that reflected on the way that brains processed information from their fingertips. So essentially these day-to-day fluctuations that we encounter through our daily lives they imprint on the brain on the way that it processes information from your hands."

Ghosh says that smartphone use is an ideal way to explore the everyday plasticity of the human brain. "It gives us a very good excuse to go back and look into the phone logs in greater detail to understand how our digital histories could be used to understand brain function and develop real world solutions by studying the real world example of brain plasticity," he said.

The team published their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.


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