Friday, September 18, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2015





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Dear Friends,

One year ago, thousands of activists flooded Wall Street in New York, taking mass direct action in the heart of a global financial system that’s fueling the climate crisis.

Now, a year later, people across the continent are preparing and organizing for #FloodTheSystem, a sustained campaign of direct action and civil disobedience targeting the political and corporate elites that profit off of climate change.

To kick off #FloodTheSystem, on Monday, September 28, we’re going to Flood Wall Street West: San Francisco’s financial district. Flood Wall Street West will consist of a tour of shame of some of the worst corporate and political bad actors in downtown San Francisco.

We will take mass direct action to shut down business as usual and emphasize the connections between the climate crisis, capitalism, exploitation and oppression. Here are the details:

What: Flood Wall Street West

When: Monday, September 28, 8 am

Where: Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco, CA

Click here to sign up for more details, and to sign up to attend Flood Wall St. West.

Come dressed in blue. The march organizers will have everything else you need, including chant sheets, banners, signs, props and art.

This is direct action for everybody. While many attendees will risk arrest, everyone can participate safely, whether or not you’re willing to go to jail. There will be a legal briefing and nonviolent direct action training before the march to make sure that everyone is prepared to participate.

The march organizers will need lots of extra hands to make this march a success. If you’d like to volunteer to help out before or during the march, RSVP and indicate that you’d like to take on a volunteer role. Click here to sign up.

#FloodTheSystem is timed to coincide with the Paris climate talks. Instead of hoping that yet another round of negotiations will finally yield a solution to the climate crisis, activists across North America will shut down business as usual and demand real, transformative solutions to the climate crisis.

We hope you’ll join us to kick off this mass mobilization with Flood Wall Street West. Click here to RSVP.

Thanks for all you do.

For a just and stable climate,

The Flood Wall St. West Welcoming Committee

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Wednesday, October 7, 2015, 7pm in Berkeley!
Vijay Prashad on Palestine and the Middle East
Wednesday, October 7, 7pm
First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way
(near downtown Berkeley Bart)
Facebook event

Vijay Prashad is a prominent & charismatic scholar and critic of US foreign policy. Two of his 17 books have been named “Books of the Year” by the Village Voice. Currently Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut, he was previously Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut.

In addition to speaking about his new book, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War & Occupation, Vijay Prashad will give an overview of ever-changing events in the Middle East – not to be missed

“WHAT WE DO IS TO CREATE A SHORT-CIRCUIT BETWEEN THE HEART AND THE HEAD.” - Vijay Prashad

TICKETS: $10, $15, $20 sliding scale – available now through Brown Paper Tickets!

$15 Tickets also available in bookstores
East Bay: Books Inc./Berkeley, Moe's, Diesel, Walden Pond
San Francisco: Modern Times.
You can also get tickets directly from MECA (no service charge!) -- call or email Sue or Nawal weekdays, 510-548-0542, susan@mecaforpeace.org

Vijay Prashad edited Letters to Palestine, tracing the “swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring.” For example, after the 2014 Gaza assault, polls revealed that a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel’s actions unjustified.

Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War & Occupation includes contributions by Mumia Abu Jamal, Naomi Shihab Nye, Robin D.G. Kelley, Teju Cole, Junot Diaz (who wrote the Introduction), Noura Erekat, Huwaida Araf, Remi Kanazi, Sarah Schulman, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Alex Lubin, and more! (Note: these writers will not be speaking at this event.)

Read Vijay Prashad's new piece on the Iran deal here

Check out this recent interview in "Red Pepper" with Vijay Prashad about "Letters to Palestine"

Hear Vijay Prashad on Democracy Now!

Benefit for aid to Palestinian children, cosponsored by KPFA, Arab Resource & Organizing Center, Jewish Voice for Peace/Bay Area, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
Wheelchair accessible. ASL interpreted.

For info www.mecaforpeace.org, 510-548-0542.

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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

Sign the Petition:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/petition.php


Urge Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case. Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In 1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In 2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

In solidarity,

James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA

News Updates

  • Death Row Stories
    Kevin Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be aired on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to be viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.
Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up
- from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
 
Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin.  He has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence.  In a dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d 581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:

  The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their bedsides?

  The sole surviving victim of the murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr. Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's not the man who did it."

  Josh Ryen's description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.

  These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.

  The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been discredited…         (Continue reading this document at: http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

     This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

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Free Albert Woodfox!

On June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement. He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party. Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

http://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=35593&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1506EAIAR2&ea.url.id=414689&forwarded=true

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Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

 

Amnesty for ALL those arrested
demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!
Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's $150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.  

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

 Sign the petition to drop the charges on all who have been arrested.

Petition to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Download PDF of Petition 

http://www.answercoalition.org/amnesty_for_all_those_arrested_demanding_justice_for_freddie_gray?utm_campaign=baltimore_amn1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake
City Hall, Room 250,
100 North Holliday St.,
Baltimore, MD 21202

Dear Mayor Rawlings-Blake:

I stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions. Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos


Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:


Americans now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

American Federation of Teachers
Campaign for America's Future
Courage Campaign
Daily Kos
Democracy for America
LeftAction
Project Springboard
RH Reality Check
RootsAction
Student Debt Crisis
The Nation
Working Families


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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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Action Alert!

Stand with Major Tillery


Dear Bonnie,

Listen to Mumia tell this story. Major Tillery stood up to the prison administration: he confronted them in no uncertain terms, noting that Mumia must get to the hospital in time- before he dies. SCI Mahanory Superintendent Kerestes told Major to mind his own business, to which Major replied 'Mumia is my business'.

Please join us in standing in solidarity with Major Tillery, who has been transferred and put in solitary confinement as punishment for demanding that Mumia receive medical care.

"Major is in the hole, not because of drugs, but because of something prison administrators hate and fear among all things: prisoner unity, prisoner solidarity."

- Mumia Abu-Jamal



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"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -Frederick Douglass

Mumia continues to transcend the prison walls, reaching out to us with his profound commentaries. Prison Radio is committed to amplifying Mumia's voice, getting him the medical care he needs to survive, and winning his freedom.


Mumia Abu-Jamal Has Hepatitis C:
Demand Treatment Now!



Mumia’s Life Is In Grave Danger!

Friends and Comrades:

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal wants you to know:

 Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life is in grave danger, this time not from imminent execution, or the “slow death” of LWOP, but from criminal medical neglect by prison authorities. Like many others in the hell-hole of US prisons, Mumia suffers from a potentially fatal disease which is not being treated by prison authorities.

In Alameda County California recently, a prisoner being held for trial in the county jail died because the for-profit prison medical company refused him a necessary treatment despite numerous requests. The same could happen to Mumia unless we act!

Please read the informational briefs below, and take a few minutes to call the official numbers below to demand competent medical care for Mumia, not transfer to another prison; and for the cure for Hepatitis C to be delivered to Mumia and the other prisoners needing it immediately!
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Last minute notice:
Prisoners and Hep C, including Mumia’s Case
A presentation on “Health Action”
 Monday 14 September, 1 PM Eastern
WBAI Pacifica Radio, New York
NY, NJ, Ct, 99.5 FM
Stream at: www.wbai.org
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _

The following is from:  Johanna Fernandez
for Pam Africa and the Movement to Free Mumia &
the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home:


AN URGENT MESSAGE:

Competent Medical Care, Not Transfer!
Administer the Hepatitis C cure to Mumia &
the 10,000 PA Prisoners with the disease, NOW!

At the urging of Pam Africa, I visited Mumia yesterday, Sunday, September 6. Pam got word from inside that Mumia’s cell had been raided by prison authorities.

As you know, after a series of hospitalizations in March and April 2015, Mumia has remained in the prison infirmary. During this time, most of his property has remained in his old cell.  According to Mumia, on Friday, September 4, officers rushed him out of his regularly-scheduled medical bath to inform him that all the belongings in his cell had been packed up and placed in storage. The handling of prison property in the absence of a prisoner is a violation of prison procedures. After signing the forms required when prisoner property is placed in storage, Mumia asked if he was about to be moved to a different facility, since the boxing up of a prisoner’s property usually precedes a transfer. An officer assured him that he would not be transferred; but this all seemed really strange to Mumia.

These developments follow the immediate aftermath of a medical lawsuit filed by Mumia charging the DOC with medical neglect. Coming at this moment, a prison transfer would not be in Mumia’s best interest as it would disrupt contact with his attorneys and isolate him from his family and supporters. In addition, a move would put Mumia’s at risk; it would further compromise his physical and mental health and interrupt his medical care. The only transfer acceptable would be safe transit to a professional facility that would guarantee the medical attention he needs for a cure of his “active” Hepatitis C condition, for which there is a cure.

As you know, Mumia has been in an acute health crisis for over 9 months, since January 2015. In March 2015, prison infirmary physicians allowed Mumia to fall into diabetic shock and come close to death.

Please urge the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to act in Mumia’s best interests and refrain from transferring him. Please also urge the DOC to give Mumia, and the 10,000 PA Prisoners with Hepatitis C, the cure he needs.

Recently, Mumia has lost approximately 25lbs in two months. Although his spirits are high and his cognitive abilities have improved, he still sleeps all day and is suffering extreme lethargy, a bi-product of untreated, “active” Hepatitis C, a liver disease. The skin around his face is clearer than before and although his leg wounds have closed, they have left crater-like scars, which can erupt at any moment. The skin throughout his body remains jet-black, raw, extremely wrinkled, and rough, like elephant hide. Nails on his hands and feet are falling off and the palms of his hands are blackened. These conditions are also symptoms of his untreated, “active” Hepatitis C.

The denial of the Hepatitis C cure to Mumia –while his medical condition remains precarious and while his disfiguring skin condition continues to cause him unthinkable suffering –is cruel and unusual punishment, and torture through medical neglect.


Demand the Hepatitis C cure for Mumia and for the 10,000 PA Prisoners with the disease, NOW!
John Wetzel, Secretary of Corrections, Pennsylvania Phone: (717) 728-2573
John Kerestes, Superintendent, SCI-Mahanoy prison: Phone: (570) 773-2158

love and solidarity,

Johanna Fernandez
for Pam Africa and the Movement to Free Mumia &
the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home

ROBERT J. BOYLE
Attorney At Law
277 Broadway
Suite 1501
New York, N.Y.  10007
 (212)431-0229

September 7, 2015

SUMMARY OF MEDICAL CRISIS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

          The following is a summary of the medical issues currently confronting Mumia Abu Jamal, currently a prisoner at SCI Mahanoy.  A detailed presentation of his issues is contained in the papers filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in the case of Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes and will be made available upon request.

          Mumia Abu Jamal is suffering from “active” hepatitis C, a serious liver disease.  Tests performed over the last several months show that Mr. Abu Jamal’s liver likely has “significant firbrosis” (scarring) and deteriorated function.  The disease has also manifested itself in other ways.  He has a persistent, painful skin rash over most of his body.  Our consulting physician, who visited Mr. Abu Jamal. has concluded that it is likely a disease known as Necrolytic Acral Erythma, a condition that is almost always associated with an untreated hepatitis C infection.    Mr. Abu Jamal has been diagnosed with “anemia of chronic disease”, another common consequence of hepatitis C.  He has sudden-onset adult diabetes, a complication that led to an episode of diabetic shock on March 30, 2015.  Most recently, he has begun to lose weight again.

          Mr. Abu Jamal’s hepatitis C can be cured – and the painful and dangerous consequences alleviated – if the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) would administer the direct acting anti-viral medication that has now become the standard for treatment for hepatitis C infections.  According to the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD) this hepatitis C treatment “results in sustained virologic response (SVR) which is tantamount to virologic cure”.  See  http://www.hcvguidelines.org.  The AASLD protocol has been adopted by the United States Bureau of Prisons.  Under that protocol, Mr. Abu Jamal is a candidate for “immediate” treatment.

          The DOC has known of Mr. Abu Jamal’s hepatitis C infection since 2012 but never conducted a complete hepatitis C workup until recently.  His skin condition, which had been intermittent for several years  worsened and became constant in August 2014.  His health had deteriorated to such an extent that he was admitted to the hospital in May 2015.  Over those eight days numerous tests were conducted that ruled out many conditions, including some cancers.  Those tests led the doctors to conclude that the symptoms were likely caused by the hepatitis C.

          In June 2015, after Mr. Abu-Jamal’s release from the hospital, his attorneys demanded that a complete hepatitis C workup be conducted and treatment administered.  But it took several weeks for those simple blood tests to be taken.  They concluded that Mr. Abu Jamal does, in fact, have an active hepatitis C infection.  Notwithstanding that determination, and Mr. Abu-Jamal’s continued suffering and deteriorated health, he has not been given the anti-viral drugs.  As our consulting expert had concluded, “failure to treat Mr. Abu-Jamal’s hepatitis C will result in serious harm to his health, as his current-hepatic symptoms will not be cured, and he faces an increasingly serious risk of suffering from fibrosis and cirrhosis, liver cancer, complications of his diabetes, and eventual death.”

A motion for an injunction seeking treatment is pending in federal court.  However, the treatment, as our medical expert has stated, should begin “immediately”.  Given the overwhelming and undisputed evidence that Mr. Abu Jamal is suffering from an active infection, treatment should not await a determination by the court.  It must begin now.
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MUMIA IS INNOCENT!  FREE MUMIA NOW!

 - This message from The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland  CA 94610  •  www.laboractionmumia.org
13 September 2015

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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
 
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at work updating the website and developing an even more formidable and dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system, which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence. Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the 20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately, you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be certified in different work.

The month of the hearing has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom, Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

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

 Email: Through JPay using the code:
              Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
                                     or
              Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com

Have a wonderful day!
- The Team to Free Lorenzo Johnson


freelorenzojohnson.org

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 Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/


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."

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!

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) Shoddy Records Cited in California Oil Spill
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES — The pipeline company responsible for an oil spill that blackened California beaches in May kept shoddy records on emergency training and how it would protect the pristine coastline in the event of a break, federal regulators say.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration proposed six violations from inspections begun in 2013 — some 20 months before the pipeline rupture near Santa Barbara — but imposed no fines.

Among the findings, the agency said Friday, the Texas-based company, Plains All American Pipeline, failed to properly document pressure tests on tanks and failed to keep adequate records on how it would prevent spills in sensitive environmental areas, or respond if one did occur.

The agency said the findings identified areas where the company should improve safety throughout its 18,000-mile pipeline system.

“While the probable violations noted in the enforcement action did not result in a civil penalty, we believe that all safety-related issues matter because they reflect the overall safety culture of an organization,” Artealia Gilliard, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.

Robert G. Bea, a civil engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the latest action by regulators spoke to a weak culture of safety and inadequate efforts to assess risk and prevent spills.

“In all the documentation I have reviewed concerning the pipeline, I have never seen evidence of any advanced risk assessment and management processes being used by Plains,” said Mr. Bea, a former oil executive who has studied spills.

Plains said previously that it had increased spending on safety and hired more staff to prevent spills. A Plains spokesman said the company would work with regulators to resolve their concerns.

One of two lines in the 2013 inspections ruptured May 19 along a corroded section of pipe, releasing at least 101,000 gallons of crude on the coast. The mess forced a popular state park to shut down for two months, goo from the spill washed up on beaches 100 miles away, and hundreds of dead birds and sea lions were found.

They agency said that it could not connect the inspection findings from that time with the pipeline break, but that it might identify related violations in the future.

The company has been criticized for taking about 90 minutes to alert federal responders after confirming the spill, even though federal regulations require the company to notify the National Response Center, a clearinghouse for reports of hazardous-material releases, “at the earliest practicable moment.” State law requires immediate notification of a release or a threatened release.

The cause of the break is under investigation. Prosecutors are considering possible charges.


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2) Safety Suffers as Stock Options Propel Executive Pay Packages
"One group of companies produced consumer staples like foods, beverages and personal care products, while the other manufactured health care products, including medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Over the period studied — from 2004 through 2011 — these two sectors together accounted for over 85 percent of all recall activity reported by the F.D.A., the professors said. Their analysis examined two significant types of product recalls: those in which a product could cause serious harm or death and those in which exposure to a product might cause temporary or medically reversible health consequences."
By

Outsize executive pay packages have frequently been a flash point for stock market investors. Lavish executive compensation at publicly traded companies should be a significant concern for consumers, too.

That’s the message of a new study by three academics at the University of Notre Dame. Their research focuses on companies that rely heavily on stock options in executive compensation. They have found a correlation between generous option grants and the incidence of serious product recalls.

Stock options have been the jet fuel propelling some of the biggest executive pay packages over the years. From an investor’s point of view, these instruments are problematic because they provide an executive with little downside if the company’s underlying shares fall but oodles of upside on the rise.This heads-I-win, tails-I-barely-lose arrangement encourages executives to swing for the fences, an array of academic research has shown. Eager to reap the riches from a rising share price, option-laden executives have been found to make unwise acquisitions or, even worse, to undertake aggressive accounting practices.

Now comes evidence that product recalls are often linked to abundant option grants handed to chief executives. The study, “Throwing Caution to the Wind: The Effect of C.E.O. Stock Option Pay on the Incidence of Product Safety Problems,” concluded that “C.E.O. option pay was associated with both a higher likelihood of experiencing a recall as well as a higher number of recalls.”

The study’s authors are Adam J. Wowak, Michael J. Mannor and Kaitlin D. Wowak, all assistant professors of management at the Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Wowak said that he and his colleagues wanted to build on past analyses of how stock options induce risk-taking among executives. “If options are generally causing C.E.O.s to be more aggressive, then it makes sense that more mistakes could occur and consumers could be affected,” Mr. Wowak said. “Options could be making C.E.O.s ignore the downside potential of some of their actions.”

The researchers scrutinized companies in two industries that are closely regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. All of the companies had sales and assets of at least $10 million. The academics looked at the size of stock options in proportion to a chief executive’s total pay and calculated a two-year average, finding that recalls tended to be more prevalent at companies with higher option percentages. The names of specific companies were not cited in the study.

One group of companies produced consumer staples like foods, beverages and personal care products, while the other manufactured health care products, including medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Over the period studied — from 2004 through 2011 — these two sectors together accounted for over 85 percent of all recall activity reported by the F.D.A., the professors said.

Their analysis examined two significant types of product recalls: those in which a product could cause serious harm or death and those in which exposure to a product might cause temporary or medically reversible health consequences.

The study examined the pay packages of 386 chief executives. One curious finding emerged: Product recalls were less common among companies whose chief executives founded the companies or had long tenures there. Such executives may be more risk-averse because they are generally large shareholders and may also feel that their personal reputations are intertwined with their companies’ actions.

“It was interesting for us to see that options don’t affect everybody the same way,” Mr. Wowak said in the interview. “When boards design pay packages, it would be beneficial for them to think about how their C.E.O. might respond and tailor the package around that.”

Mr. Wowak acknowledged that among publicly traded corporations over all, stock option grants as a percentage of total pay had declined recently. Many companies are dispensing restricted stock instead, making sure that executives feel the pain of a falling share price alongside their stockholders. With options, a falling stock price represents a lost opportunity for a future gain, not an actual hit to executives’ wallets.

But stock options remain popular. Data compiled by Equilar, an executive compensation analytics firm in Redwood City, Calif., shows that among the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, option grants totaled 16.1 percent of direct pay for chief executives in 2014. In 2010, that figure was 20.1 percent.

“Of course, not every product recall that happens is caused by stock options,” Mr. Wowak said. “And it’s possible to pay a lot in options and not have a product recall. But boards are wise to have a balanced view of the potential downside to building in heavy option components to executive pay.”

The researchers’ focus on health care companies was appropriate: These companies are the biggest users of stock options, Equilar found. Last year, 84.4 percent of chief executives at these companies received options, while 67.3 percent of top managers at consumer goods manufacturers were recipients, according to Equilar. At utility companies, by contrast, only 27.6 percent of chief executives were granted options.

Among the top dispensers of stock options as a percentage of total C.E.O. pay, Equilar found, are Monster Beverage, with 87.1 percent; Avago Technologies, a semiconductor maker, with 84.2 percent; and Stericycle, a medical waste management company, at 69.7 percent.

Representatives from the three companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Having fielded complaints from shareholders about excessive executive pay for decades, corporate boards say they have gotten the picture that chief executives’ pay should be aligned with their owners’ interests. As this new study shows, directors should understand that executive pay needs to line up with consumers’ interests as well.






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3) Egypt Security Forces Accidentally Kill Mexican Tourists
By LIAM STACK

Egyptian security forces opened fire on a caravan of tourist vehicles in the country’s Western Desert late Sunday night, killing at least 12 people visiting from Mexico and injuring 10 others, among them Mexican tourists and their Egyptian tour guides, officials said.

The tourists were mistakenly killed by a “joint force from the police and armed forces” who were pursuing “terrorist elements” in an area of the desert, according to a brief statement posted to the official Facebook page of Egypt’s Ministry of Interior. The episode happened around midnight, security officials said.

“The incident resulted in the deaths of 12 people and the injury of 10 people from among the Mexicans and the Egyptians,” the statement said. “They have been taken to hospitals for treatment.”The security forces said that they had believed that the vehicles were being used to transport terrorists. The statement said the group had been driving in a restricted area where unauthorized access is banned.

“A working group has been formed to examine the causes and circumstances of the incident as well as the justification for the presence of a tourist group in a region to which access is prohibited,” the ministry said.

The tourists were traveling in a group of four sport utility vehicles in an area roughly 30 miles from Bahariya Oasis, security officials said. The oasis, a verdant desert outpost, is about 230 miles south of Cairo, and is a popular stop for groups on desert tours.

Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, called the killings “tragic” and demanded Sunday on Twitter that Egypt investigate them thoroughly.

“I deeply regret that our countrymen lost their lives,” he said.

The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations released a statement Sunday night saying it had confirmed the deaths of two Mexican citizens and was working to gather more information about what had occurred in the desert. “The circumstances are not yet clarified,” it said.

Mexico said the victims of the attack were taken to Dar al-Fouad Hospital, an upscale and widely respected facility in Cairo’s western suburbs, and that the Mexican ambassador and consular staff were there to help them.

Egypt has battled an Islamist militant insurgency that emerged after the July 2013 military ouster of President Mohamed Morsi.

The insurgents, largely based in the Sinai Peninsula to the east, have killed hundreds of soldiers and civilians, set off bombs in the capital, attacked Western targets and aligned themselves with the Islamic State, referring to themselves as “the Sinai Province” of the Islamic State.


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4) Israeli Dies in Car Crash After Rock-Throwing Attack
By DIAA HADID

RAMALLAH, West Bank — A 50-year-old Jewish man died Monday morning after attackers pelted the road he was driving on with rocks as he was returning home from a dinner celebrating Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, the Israeli authorities said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting to discuss rock-throwing, mostly by Palestinian youths.

A statement from the Israeli police said the assailants were throwing stones on Sunday night on a road that runs between a Palestinian and Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem. It was not immediately clear if a rock hit the vehicle, but the police said the stone-throwing “led to a self-inflicted accident,” as the man lost control of the car and smashed into a pole.

Luba Samri, a police spokeswoman, said the rock-throwing appeared to have caused the accident but that “nothing is 100 percent sure.”On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said he would call a special meeting after Rosh Hashana ends Tuesday evening to discuss “harsher punishments and strict enforcement” and other means to combat rock-throwing.

The government had already said, on Sept. 2, that it was considering harsher measures against Palestinian stone-throwers, including greater use of live ammunition and tougher minimum sentences for those convicted.

Israeli security forces have increasingly grappled with rock-throwing, particularly along a highway in the occupied West Bank that is mostly used by Jewish settlers and on roads leading to Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

Last week, the Israeli police reported that stone-throwing episodes increased 53 percent in 2014 from the previous year.

Palestinians frequently argue that rocks and crude incendiary devices are among their only weapons to press for independence, and to defend themselves against Israeli forces during confrontations. For some young Palestinians in areas where there are frequent tensions, their use has become a rite of passage.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.


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5) Dozens of Migrants Drown as Boat Capsizes in Aegean Sea
By NIKI KITSANTONIS

ATHENS — The Greek Coast Guard recovered the bodies of 34 migrants, including 15 children, on Sunday in the Aegean Sea after their wooden boat flipped over in strong winds as it attempted the short but often perilous crossing from nearby Turkey.

Sixty-eight others were rescued, and 30 more swam ashore to the small Greek island of Farmakonisi in the eastern Aegean, according to an official at the Greek Shipping Ministry. “It was really windy in the morning,” the official said, describing near-gale conditions.

Rescuers, who were alerted shortly before dawn by a resident of Farmakonisi, found most of the bodies floating near the wreck, but divers recovered seven from the cabin of the boat. Of the 15 children found dead, four were infants, the official said. The victims’ nationalities were not immediately known.

After nightfall, Coast Guard vessels continued to scour the area for survivors. Rescuers were also searching for four children who had been missing since Saturday after their boat capsized off the island of Samos, north of Farmakonisi.

Sunday’s wreck was the latest in a catalog of drownings that underscored the desperation of thousands of refugees fleeing war and of migrants seeking better lives in Western Europe. For most of those who make it, Greece is just a stop on a journey through the Balkans aimed at wealthy nations like Germany and Scandinavian countries like Sweden known for generous welfare programs.

Greece has long been a favored entry point, along with Italy and Malta. But the influx into Greece increased drastically this year, partly because of continuing strife in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. In the first eight months of the year, 230,000 people were intercepted by the Greek Coast Guard, compared with 17,500 in the same period last year, according to the shipping minister, Nikos Zois. Last week, Greece asked for emergency funding from the European Union to improve its response to the migration crisis and to set up additional reception facilities.

Figures released by the International Organization for Migration last week stated that more than 430,000 migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean to Europe this year, with 2,748 drowning or going missing on the way.

Speaking earlier Sunday on Lesbos, another Greek island that has borne the brunt of a seemingly relentless flow of migrants, Greece’s caretaker prime minister, Vassiliki Thanou, dismissed criticism of the country’s efforts as “unacceptable.” She called on critics to “consider the size of the responsibility of guarding European borders that stretch along 16,000 kilometers of coastline.”

Her statement came a day after Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called on Athens to intensify its attempts to protect the European Union’s external borders. “Greece needs to assume its responsibility,” she said.

For Greece, which is struggling with an enduring financial crisis as well as political upheaval, the surge in arrivals of migrants and refugees could not have come at a more challenging time. Islands like Lesbos, Kos and Samos, which are closest to Turkey, have been particularly overwhelmed and lack the resources to accommodate the thousands arriving daily at their shores.

Tensions peaked on Lesbos this month with scuffles between police officers and migrants in the main port. The situation improved last week after more than 20,000 migrants were transferred by ferry to Greece’s main port, Piraeus, near Athens, relieving the pressure on the island of 80,000 residents.

Most of the migrants are now camping in squares across the capital, planning the next leg of their journey deeper into Europe.


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6) Panel Studying Racial Divide in Missouri Presents a Blunt Picture of Inequity
"The commission offers a blunt, painful picture of racial inequity in the region. Black motorists were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over for traffic stops in Missouri than whites last year, the report notes. The average life expectancy in one mostly black suburb, Kinloch, is more than three decades less than in the mostly white suburb of Wildwood, the report finds. And 14.3 percent of black elementary students in Missouri were suspended at least once during a recent school year, compared with 1.8 percent of white students."
By

A commission appointed by Missouri’s governor after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer is calling for sweeping changes across the St. Louis region on matters of policing, the courts, education, health care, housing and more.

In a 198-page report to be made public in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday afternoon, the commission lays out goals that are ambitious, wide ranging and, in many cases, politically delicate. Among 47 top priorities, the group calls for increasing the minimum wage, expanding eligibility for Medicaid and consolidating the patchwork of 60 police forces and 81 municipal courts that cover St. Louis and its suburbs.

The commission offers a blunt, painful picture of racial inequity in the region. Black motorists were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over for traffic stops in Missouri than whites last year, the report notes. The average life expectancy in one mostly black suburb, Kinloch, is more than three decades less than in the mostly white suburb of Wildwood, the report finds. And 14.3 percent of black elementary students in Missouri were suspended at least once during a recent school year, compared with 1.8 percent of white students.

“We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” says the report, which is titled “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity.” “But make no mistake: This is about race.”

The 16-member Ferguson Commission, announced last fall by Gov. Jay Nixon, has been praised for the diversity of its members, which include people from law enforcement, the protest movement, business, education and the clergy. Over the past 10 months, they held 17 meetings of the full commission, convened dozens of times in smaller groups and heard from nearly 2,000 members of the public in sessions that sometimes grew tense.

The Ferguson Commission’s costs, which have reached about $550,000, not including in-kind donations, have been paid for by the state and foundations.

The commission agreed on the report — and its 47 top priorities among 189 total “policy calls to action” — though members disagreed, at times, over some of the recommendations.

The report “is a milestone and not an end,” Rich McClure, a co-chairman of the commission, said in an interview.

The next step, the commission says, is to designate an organization to guide the recommendations into reality. “This is a foundation for the future, but there is a great deal of work to do going forward, and we realize that this is but a step in a long process,” Mr. McClure said.

Many in the region have praised the Ferguson Commission’s efforts, but some have raised questions about whether its findings — however meaningful — might wind up gathering dust. No doubt, many of the commission’s recommendations would require significant action from the State Legislature, locally elected councils and boards, and others.

“What this group has done over the last year has just put into written form what so many people have already voiced for years about change that needs to happen in the St. Louis region, but identifying a problem and fixing it are different,” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who has been active in protests, said on Sunday.

Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democratic state senator, said she feared that the commission’s findings would be announced with great fanfare, “but then we’re just going to hear crickets, crickets, crickets.”She added: “The practicality of getting any of this done is close to null.”

Ms. Chappelle-Nadal and others have criticized the Republican-controlled Legislature for not doing more over the past year to address concerns that emerged in the months after Michael Brown was killed by Darren Wilson, then a Ferguson police officer, in August 2014. Bills to require body cameras on police officers and change the state’s rules for using lethal force were among those that failed to gain traction.

State lawmakers did pass legislation limiting how much revenue municipalities can keep from traffic fines. And some on the commission point to other signs of change already afoot: St. Louis last month passed an increase in the minimum wage, and Governor Nixon, a Democrat, last month called for improved training for law enforcement officers in his state, including more education on “fair and impartial policing.”

In remarks prepared for the release of the report on Monday, Mr. Nixon praised the Ferguson Commission’s work as channeling “the pain and energy” of the protests. “The way to prove this work means something is to do something,” he said. “And much already has been done.”

The commission, though, envisions many more shifts ahead. It calls for an end to predatory lending practices, and the creation of “inclusionary” zoning laws. It wants a task force to study the complex education landscape in the St. Louis region, and a revision of the state’s schools accreditation system.

On questions of policing, the proposed changes are among the most extensive. The commission calls for assigning the state attorney general as a special prosecutor in all cases of police use of force resulting in deaths; requiring the state highway patrol to investigate most police use of force cases ending in deaths; creating a statewide use of force database, available to the public, charting use-of-force complaints; and directing police departments to revise their policies and training to authorize only the minimal use of force needed.

“While there is movement on these critical issues, particularly the issues of police oversight and accountability, there is not enough movement,” the Rev. Starsky Wilson, a co-chairman of the commission, said. “It is a group of citizens saying to our elected officials that this moment is urgent and you must move with greater intentionality to getting justice for all of our citizens.”

Mitch Smith contributed reporting.




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7) Suit Says Police Violated Occupy Wall Street Protesters’ Constitutional Rights
By

As the first anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests approached three years ago, organizers planned a series of marches and rallies, including an attempt to block the streets surrounding the New York Stock Exchange.

The police arrested 185 people that day. Some had refused orders to leave roadways; others had been standing or walking on sidewalks, with the police saying at times that they were obstructing pedestrian traffic.Last week four lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit related to those arrests, saying that New York City had a policy of violating protesters’ constitutional rights and did not properly train police officers in how to handle political demonstrations, which are protected by the First Amendment. The complaint seeks to represent some 200 people arrested on the anniversary, Sept. 17, 2012, and the two preceding days. The lawsuit names the City of New York; former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; Raymond W. Kelly, the former police commissioner; and four police commanders.

Scores of false-arrest lawsuits rooted in Occupy events have been filed against the city, but this one differs from others because the plaintiffs are focusing on the assertion that the city had a deliberate policy of indifference to expressive speech rights. First Amendment activity is typically entitled to wide latitude under the law, said Wylie Stecklow, one of the lawyers who filed the case. But he added that the police have a history of arresting protesters on disorderly conduct charges when their behavior might have caused an inconvenience but was not criminal.

“When the Constitution is involved,” Mr. Stecklow said, “you need a real threat to public order, not just a technical violation, to justify a disorderly conduct charge, and that is not understood by a vast majority of members of the police force, from police officer up to chief.”

“They did training in disorder control about how to break up mass protests and did not do training in First Amendment policing,” he added.

A Police Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the city’s Law Department, Nick Paolucci, said, “We will review the claims and respond accordingly.”

Some Occupy lawsuits, like one that accused police officers of falsely arresting people walking on a sidewalk in the East Village, have resulted in the city’s paying significant settlements. But others were dismissed, including the first class-action suit related to Occupy, which included hundreds of people arrested in 2011 while marching on the Brooklyn Bridge roadway.

Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written about Occupy, said the anniversary lawsuit raised important questions about how the police could adjust their practices to allow for peaceful political demonstrations rather than impeding them.

Another professor, Thomas H. Lee of Fordham University School of Law, who has an expertise in constitutional law and the federal courts, said that the complaint was “well written” and could go forward against the individual commanders. But it would be difficult to attach liability to the city, he said, because of a 2011 Supreme Court decision that the district attorney’s office in New Orleans was not accountable for failing to train a prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence during a murder trial.

“These plaintiffs are going to have a really tough time making a case,” Mr. Lee said.

Jeffrey G. Smith, who filed the suit with Mr. Stecklow, said their claim was strengthened by a pattern of officers’ making wrongful arrests dating to the beginning of Occupy and even back to 2004, when the Republican National Convention was held in New York City. Mr. Stecklow added that they would draw upon dozens of police officer depositions from about 20 Occupy cases his firm had filed that indicated to him that officers were not adequately trained in how to handle First Amendment activities and did not have a consistent view of how to apply the law in those settings.

The new lawsuit seeks damages and a court order that would stop the police from charging people engaged in First Amendment speech with disorderly conduct absent criminal behavior. It names nine plaintiffs who said they were arrested while on sidewalks or in a crosswalk.

Among them is George Packard, a retired Episcopal bishop, who said he marched south on a sidewalk along Broadway on Sept. 17, 2012, with a few hundred people. Metal barricades blocked the marchers from turning east onto Wall Street, he said, and the police stopped them from continuing.

Mr. Packard said the protesters then sat on the sidewalk and were arrested. He was charged with disorderly conduct, he said, and accepted an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, in which charges are dropped if the defendant is not arrested again within six months. “Any civil discourse was blocked,” he said.


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8) For Those Who Remain in Syria, Daily Life Is a Nightmare
By MAHER SAMAAN and

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Every morning, at the dawn call to prayer, women and children move silently from the Damascus suburb of Douma to the surrounding farm fields, seeking safety from the day’s bombardments by the Syrian government.

The walk is part of a surreal routine described by the fraction of Douma’s residents who remain: shopping on half-demolished streets, scavenging wild greens, carrying out mass burials. But not even the fields are safe; recently, medics said, bombs killed two families there — 10 people, including seven children.

As crowds of Syrians transfix the world with their flight to Europe, this kind of life is one of the many nightmares they are fleeing. They leave behind increasingly empty neighborhoods — from the Damascus suburbs to the northern city of Aleppo — that testify to the scale of their exodus.Such bombardments have been going on for years in insurgent-held areas like Douma, one of the first areas to revolt against the government in 2011. And yet, the situation can still get worse. The past month in Douma made that clear.

Government forces began a barrage even more intense than usual, using not only the artillery shells that Douma has come to expect, but also airstrikes. Perhaps four out of five residents had already fled what was once a bustling community of around half a million, and emergency workers say the new bombings drove out thousands more.

More than 550 people, mostly civilians, have died in the past month in Douma and nearby suburbs, 123 of them children, Red Crescent medics say. August was one of the bloodiest months in the district, with at least 150 trauma injuries being treated each day from Aug. 12 to 31 — a number that includes only patients from 13 makeshift clinics that work with Doctors Without Borders.

Such concentrated violence has shaken even the most steadfast holdouts, said Ahmed, a Douma resident and a paramedic in his 20s who asked to be identified only by his first name for his safety. Of those who remained in early August, half have fled, he said, while the rest trek daily to hide in the fields or stay “trapped at home, praying they won’t get killed.”

As international focus has shifted to the Islamic State’s highly publicized violence and the threat it poses beyond Syria, less attention has been paid to the original struggle between President Bashar al-Assad and the insurgent groups that rose up after the crushing of a protest movement in 2011.

But that earlier conflict — which turned residential areas into battlegrounds — was driving people from their homes long before the Islamic State existed in its current form.

Advocacy groups for the Syrian opposition, as well as international watchdogs like Human Rights Watch, have long contended that the security forces’ bombardment of insurgent-held areas like Douma takes the largest toll on civilians, killing far more people than the Islamic State. Although no definitive numbers exist, a tally by a Syrian civilian opposition group, the Violations Documentation Center, said that 18,000 people had been killed by airstrikes, which only the government has the ability to carry out, and that more than 27,000 had died in shelling and rocket attacks by all sides.

The Syrian government says it is bombing terrorists.

Douma, like other poorly served satellite cities around Damascus, rose up early, and many men there took up arms. It is now a stronghold for the Army of Islam, an insurgent group. The Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria, is also active there, while the Islamic State is not known to play a role.

Insurgents also use indiscriminate tactics. After the new wave of attacks in Douma, insurgents shelled Damascus, killing at least 20 people, according to death notices on pro-government websites. No one claimed responsibility.

But in terms of scale, the government’s bombing of rebellious areas is on another level. It has laid waste to large sections of central Homs in western Syria, Aleppo and the Damascus suburbs. In Aleppo, the weapons of choice are shrapnel-packed barrel bombs, unguided and dropped from helicopters.

In the past month, more than 450 civilians died from government bombings in East Ghouta, a semicircle of opposition-held working-class towns around Damascus, according to lists kept by the local branch of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Many of the victims were in Douma, the group said, including elderly people, women and children.

But it is not just bombings that deform life in Douma. Years of government blockades have forced residents to depend on tunnels and smugglers for daily goods. Humanitarian aid is largely blocked, and few people can get in or out.

Government and opposition fighters alike take their cuts of bribes and smuggling revenues, part of a thriving war economy. Some insurgents act as warlords, enriching themselves and cracking down on dissent. The human rights lawyer Razan Zeitouneh and other secular opposition activists disappeared from Douma in 2013, believed to have been kidnapped after criticizing the Army of Islam.

So escape means dealing with smugglers and new risks, even for those who have no plans to take a boat on the Mediterranean. It begins from the moment of leaving one’s own block, on the way to Damascus.

“It’s completely normal for people to wish they can go overseas,” Ahmed, the paramedic, said. But, he added, “Can they?”

Those who do reach Damascus — joining seven million Syrians displaced within the country — can be harassed or even arrested by security forces suspicious of people from opposition areas.

That drives many to neighboring Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey, which host most of the four million Syrians officially registered as refugees abroad. The Damascus suburbs have hemorrhaged 165,000 people to Lebanon alone. But those countries have become less hospitable, with residency crackdowns and shrinking benefits.

So refugees can go further afield, including to Europe. Or they can go back to Douma, and to a war that has killed a quarter of a million Syrians. Because of the siege and restrictions on journalists by combatants, life there can only be glimpsed on videos posted by insurgent groups, anti-government activists and rescue workers. They show entire streets engulfed by uneven piles of brick, rooftops tilted askew and steel reinforcement bars pulled apart like spaghetti.

In one recent clip, a volunteer — perhaps a teenager — slung over his shoulder the limp body of a small boy. In another, a slight youth dug a ragged, bloody corpse from under rocks until a voice behind him says, “Don’t film the body. Enough.” In another, a child was rushed to a hospital as workers tried to revive him.“Neighborhoods fell on the heads of the residents,” Imad al-Din, a Douma resident, said recently over Skype. “The screaming can still be heard.”

“Black Sunday” is what Douma residents call Aug. 16. At least 122 people died in one of the war’s deadliest air attacks, on a vegetable market, according to rescue officials, the Syrian Network for Human Rights and other monitoring groups.

Bilal Abu Salah, a resident who left the market just before the strike, is haunted by the faces of the pushcart vendors who sold him cucumbers, zucchini, and eggplant — the prices, as usual, inflated. Minutes later he saw one covered with blood; one died, two were seriously injured.

Dr. Adnan Tobaji operated in a makeshift basement clinic, sometimes on the floor, without anesthetic or sterile supplies. Shortages could be deadly, he said. One woman died waiting for a blood bag to arrive.

The new attacks have gutted Douma’s meager remaining street life and local institutions. Nine civil defense workers were killed. The local authorities imposed a curfew and even canceled Friday Prayer.

Douma’s free fall has prompted Dr. Tobaji and several hundred colleagues and residents to sign a petition calling for a complete humanitarian truce, hoping it spurs negotiations and ends the war.

The call is striking coming from rebellious Douma. It sets no preconditions for the fate of Mr. Assad, long a sticking point.

“The fate of Assad for us is nothing compared to the fate of Syria the country, the people and the children,” Dr. Tobaji said. “At this moment while we are talking a Syrian is being killed. We need a solution by any means to stop the fighting.”

The solution, he added, “might not suit me or many other people but it’s not for me or for this or that person. It’s for Syria.”




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9) How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth
By

Americans commonly — and mistakenly — believe that well-to-do black people no longer face the kind of discrimination that prevents them from living anywhere they can afford. But a federal housing discrimination complaint filed last week by the National Fair Housing Alliance shows that this toxic problem is very much with us, nearly 50 years after Congress outlawed housing discrimination in the Fair Housing Act.

The complaint, and the investigations that led to it, shows how real estate agents promote segregation — and deny African-Americans the opportunity to buy into high-value areas that would provide better educations for children and a greater return on their investments.

Over the course of nearly a year, the alliance reports, black and white testers posing as home buyers had drastically different experiences when they contacted a real estate company near Jackson, Miss. Agents often declined to show properties to black customers who were better qualified than whites, with higher incomes, better credit scores and more savings for down payments. Meanwhile, white testers who had expressed interest in properties in the majority-black city of Jackson were steered into majority-white communities elsewhere.

These problems are not limited to the South. Indeed, another alliance investigation covering a dozen metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, San Antonio and the District of Columbia, suggests that housing market discrimination is universal.

Despite being better qualified financially, black and Latino testers were shown fewer homes than their white peers, were often denied information about special incentives that would have made the purchase easier, and were required to produce loan pre-approval letters and other documents when whites were not.

Moreover, real estate agents enforced residential and school segregation by steering home buyers into neighborhoods based on race. Whites were encouraged to live where the schools were mainly white; African-Americans where schools were disproportionately black; and Latinos where schools were disproportionately Latino.

This behavior is reminiscent of the practices used by the real estate industry in the early 20th century that created ghettos for blacks regardless of income. As the black population grew in Northern cities, realty agents developed a variety of tools for isolating black families, including contracts that barred owners from renting or selling to “outsiders” — always a code for African-Americans.

The Federal Housing Administration, created during the New Deal to promote homeownership, openly supported these racist measures; it forbade lending to black people even as it subsidized white families that moved from the cities to the suburbs. Cut off from fairly priced home loan credit, black neighborhoods deteriorated and their values plummeted.Many discriminatory practices were formally ended with the civil rights and fair lending laws of the 1960s and 70s. But these were quickly replaced by subtler techniques that encouraged ghettoization, like channeling black families away from white areas and banks’ and mortgage brokers’ systematically pushing middle-income black families into high-cost, high-risk loans when they could have qualified for more affordable loans.

This history of discrimination has taken an enormous toll on black wealth, as is shown in research by Douglas Massey and Jonathan Tannen at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research. In 1970, two years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, for example, the average well-off black American lived in a neighborhood where potential home wealth, as measured by property values, stood at about only $50,000 — as opposed to $105,000 for affluent whites and $56,000 for poor whites.

By 2010, affluent African-Americans had passed poor whites in potential home wealth but had fallen further behind affluent whites. There is more than money at stake, Mr. Massey and Mr. Tannen write, because home values “translate directly into access to higher quality education given that public schools in the United States are financed by real estate taxes.”

Throughout history, ethnic groups have been able to translate economic gains into housing in better neighborhoods and advantages for their children. But for African-Americans, the researchers write, that transition has been “thwarted by segregation and the prejudice and discrimination that create and maintain it.” In other words, the damage reaches across generations and continues today.



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10) Report Details Economic Hardships for Inmate Families
"A survey of families that have a family member in jail or prison has found that nearly two-thirds struggle to meet their basic needs, including 50 percent that are unable to afford sufficient food and adequate housing. ...Twenty-six percent of the more than 700 former inmates surveyed for the study remained unemployed five years after their release, and the vast majority of others had found only part-time or temporary jobs, the report said. ...Even public defenders are not always free. Most states permit courts to charge defendants who use public defenders — with costs sometimes rising to thousands of dollars, the report said. Other states charge defendants extra fees for jury trials.
The study said that among those surveyed, the average debt for court-related fines and fees alone was $13,607 — more than the $11,770 annual income poverty line for individuals. The vast majority of prison and jail inmates live at or below the poverty line. Women — the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and girlfriends of the incarcerated — nearly always become responsible for the legal and prison costs, the report found."
By

A survey of families that have a family member in jail or prison has found that nearly two-thirds struggle to meet their basic needs, including 50 percent that are unable to afford sufficient food and adequate housing.

The report, by the Oakland, Calif.-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and more than a dozen community and civil rights organization that work with incarcerated people, found that costs associated with incarceration, like traveling for prison visits, had pushed more than one-third of the families into debt.

The focus on the economic hardships endured by families after an arrest is an often overlooked element of the nation’s criminal justice system, where 2.4 million people are in prison or jail — many of whom are fathers or mothers who had been their family’s primary income earners, according to the report.After an inmate’s release, a criminal conviction often means a family loses its ability to live in government-subsidized housing. And former inmates are barred from competing for various federal student grants and loans and have difficulty finding even menial work.

Twenty-six percent of the more than 700 former inmates surveyed for the study remained unemployed five years after their release, and the vast majority of others had found only part-time or temporary jobs, the report said.

The findings emphasize the link between imprisonment and poverty, said Azadeh Zohrabi, national campaigner for the Ella Baker Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on racial and economic justice issues.

Previous research has shown that a significant number of prison and jail inmates come from impoverished backgrounds.

“Incarceration weakens the social fabric and disrupts the social ecology of entire communities through the way it disrupts families’ economic stability,” Ms. Zohrabi said. “Often, it leaves it broken beyond repair.”

In all, researchers interviewed more than 1,000 former inmates and family members in 14 states and found that court fees and fines, phone and visitation expenses, and commissary costs frequently sink families deep into poverty.

Even public defenders are not always free. Most states permit courts to charge defendants who use public defenders — with costs sometimes rising to thousands of dollars, the report said. Other states charge defendants extra fees for jury trials.

The study said that among those surveyed, the average debt for court-related fines and fees alone was $13,607 — more than the $11,770 annual income poverty line for individuals.

The vast majority of prison and jail inmates live at or below the poverty line.

Women — the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and girlfriends of the incarcerated — nearly always become responsible for the legal and prison costs, the report found.

A recent University of Washington study found that 44 percent of black women and 12 percent of white women have a family member imprisoned, compared with 32 percent of black men and 6 percent of white men.

Researchers for the Ella Baker study surveyed 1,080 people from around the country who had been incarcerated, or who were family members of people who had been. The participants were asked how the criminal justice system had affected their economic and psychological well-being.

Among those surveyed was Shamika Wilson-Johnson, 35, who five years ago became involved with Damon Shuja Johnson, who had been in prison for more than 25 years for his role in a murder and attempted robbery. Although the couple are not married, she considers Mr. Johnson her husband and has become largely responsible for supporting him financially.

But Ms. Wilson-Johnson, who is studying for her master’s degree in education, is herself living below the poverty line.

She and her two children have lived in and out of homeless shelters for years because she has been unable to pay rent. They survive on about $500 a month — $300 of which goes for rent.

Ms. Wilson-Johnson said she saved what she could to afford two trips a year from her San Francisco Bay Area home to the Southern California prison where Mr. Johnson is held.

The trip takes 10 hours by car and can cost as much as $1,000, including gas, hotel and food, she said.

“There are lots of things I can’t do with my children because we can’t afford it,” Ms. Wilson-Johnson said. “So we have to make choices. I’ll say, ‘Do you want to go to Chuck E. Cheese’s, or do you want to see Dad?’ And it really surprises me that they say, ‘We want to see Dad.’”

The report said that as state and federal legislators seek ways to reduce the budget burden of mass incarceration that attention also should be focused on the places the inmates are from.

“It is not enough to reform the criminal justice system without considering its purpose and impact on communities,” the report said. “Institutions with power must acknowledge the disproportionate impacts the current system has on women, low-income communities, and communities of color and address and redress the policies that got us here.”




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11) Power Cuts Prompt Palestinians to Take to Gaza Streets in Largest Protests in Years
By MAJD AL WAHEIDI

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Several hundred Palestinians demonstrated in central Gaza on Monday evening over increasing power cuts, the latest in a series of protests that appear to have erupted over the issue.

The demonstrations, which began Saturday in Rafah, a southern city in the Gaza Strip, are the largest in years. Still, it is uncertain if the protesters can sustain their momentum, and it is unclear if they will pose a challenge to Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

Cuts in electricity are just one of many hardships that Palestinians have endured in recent years, including unrelenting poverty and unemployment amid virtual imprisonment in the coastal strip because of restrictions by neighboring Egypt and Israel.

And there were three wars with Israel. Yet for three days, hundreds of Palestinians have emerged on the streets to protest the shortages, which have left them with a shaky supply of four to six hours of power a day — when they are lucky.“We are sick of this life!” chanted hundreds of men at the Monday demonstration in the Bureij refugee camp. They tried to march to the nearby electricity distribution office, but were stopped by Hamas riot police.

Palestinians have tolerated rolling blackouts for years. But over the summer, power was reduced even more.

Gaza receives less than 50 percent of its electricity through lines from Israel and Egypt, and from its local power plant.

The latest shortages appear to have occurred after deterioration in the lines from Egypt, said Nathan Thrall, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, which closely monitors Gaza. Mr. Thrall added that Israel closed its commercial crossing with Gaza for Rosh Hashana, which meant that the power plant received less fuel. The last protest of note in Gaza involved several dozen people in April. It was the only significant demonstration against Hamas in more than four years.

But the protesters have no clear target for their ire. They are ruled by Hamas, which is in rivalry with the government of President Mahmoud Abbas, which presides over Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

Israel also still controls passage over its border with Gaza as well as exports and imports. Egypt has largely shut down its border crossing as well as the hundreds of tunnels that once crisscrossed the border and were used to bring goods into Gaza that Israel had tightly restricted.

“The situation is different from other Arab countries, because there they could go out and say the people want the fall of the regime. It was clear there was a people, and a regime,” said Ibrahim Abrach, who teaches political science at Al Azhar University. “Here, the situation isn’t clear.”

Hamas and Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment on the electricity shortages.

Wissam Nassar contributed reporting from Bureij refugee camp, and Diaa Hadid from Ramallah, West Bank.


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12) Study Finds Snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada to Be Lowest in 500 Years
By NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

The snow that blanketed the Sierra Nevada in California last winter, and that was supposed to serve as an essential source of fresh water for the drought-stricken state, was at its lowest levels in the last 500 years, according to a new study.

The paper, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, used tree-ring data from centuries-old blue oaks to provide historical context for the mountain range’s diminished snowfall. As of April 1, the snowpack levels were just 5 percent of their 50-year historical average.

The paper is the first to create a model that describes temperature and precipitation levels on the Sierra Nevada that extend centuries before researchers started measuring snow levels each year.

“The 2015 snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is unprecedented,” said Valerie Trouet, one of the authors of the study and a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona. “We expected it to be bad, but we certainly didn’t expect it to be the worst in the past 500 years.”

Snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada fills reservoirs that provide a third of all of the drinking water for the state of California, as well as water to fight wildfires and to generate electricity.

“The scope of this is profound,” said Thomas Painter, a snow hydrologist with NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, adding that models like the one developed in the study suggested a dry future for California in years beyond the current drought. “This has been a very bad drought, and being able to understand the context of it is extraordinarily important.”

To determine snowpack levels from 500 years ago, the research team combined two data sets of blue oak tree rings. The first set provided historical precipitation levels from more than 1,500 blue oaks from 33 sites in California’s Central Valley. The team compared part of that data from the years 1930 to 1980 with actual snowpack measurements and found that both findings matched.

Using this correlation, the team combined the precipitation data with a second data set of tree rings that looked at winter temperatures from 1500 to 1980.

After analyzing the data, the team determined with its model that snowpack levels as low as this year’s were a once-in-1,000-years event. But because of rising temperatures caused by human activities, the researchers said they thought that snow droughts would become much more frequent.

California has a Mediterraneanlike climate, which means that it receives most of its precipitation in the winter and is dry during the summer. The blue oaks that encircle the Central Valley and cover the rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada serve as a good indicator of snowfall on the mountains because they are very sensitive to winter precipitation, according to David W. Stahle, a geoscientist from the University of Arkansas and an author of the paper.

Many of the winter storms that pile snow on the Sierra Nevada also fall as rain on the blue oaks. The trees use the moisture stored in the soil to grow during the spring and summer, and the width of their tree rings reflects the amount of precipitation from the preceding winter. Wide rings indicate wet winters, while narrow rings denote dry ones.

“Having an ultrasensitive record of wet-season precipitation in ancient blue oak trees is a gift of nature to the modern water-dependent world,” Dr. Stahle said in an email.

Some researchers said the results were valuable to understanding the current drought. Others found the results to be less surprising.

“I don’t think anything they say is alarmingly shocking,” said David Rizzardo, the chief snow surveyor at the California Department of Water Resources. “From a department perspective, you can go back 500 years or 10,000 years, it doesn’t really change the context of the here and now. We’re stuck in this situation.”

Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford, said the study provided valuable information about the historical context of the drought, which would help in understanding its causes. He said that, when combined with previous studies, the new findings helped “provide strong evidence that global warming has substantially increased the probability of getting these extremely low snow conditions.”

A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University, said the study added to evidence that rising temperatures had exacerbated the lack of snow in California.

“We are now migrating into this new world where temperatures are higher,” Dr. Williams said. “So even though the chances of an event like this were extremely unlikely in the past, in the future it will be more likely to occur.”



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13) Video Shows Cops Wrestle a Black Teen to the Ground for Walking in the Street
By Avi Asher-Schapiro
September 17, 2015
https://news.vice.com/article/video-shows-cops-wrestle-a-black-teen-to-the-ground-for-walking-in-the-street?utm_source=vicenewsemail

Police in Stockton, California, tackled a black 16-year-old to the ground and put him in handcuffs after he allegedly walked in a bus lane and refused to comply with an officer's request to get back on the sidewalk.

The incident was filmed by bystander Evan Avendaño, who gave his version of events in a Facebook post.

"The kid got stopped for 'jaywalking' when he barely stepped out of the bus he was 2 feet away from the sidewalk," Avendaño wrote. "The cop was telling him to take a se[a]t but the teen kept walking to his bus but the cop kept grabbing his arm & the kid took off the cop's hand off his arm so the cop took out his baton & that's when I started recording."

When the footage begins, the teenager is yelling, "Get off!" as he appears to be trying to push the officer away while huddled in a fetal position. The officer is pressing his nightstick against the boy, who also has his hands on it. A crowd had gathered as the two were struggling, and a woman can be heard shouting, "He's a fucking kid!" while the officer repeatedly tells the boy to "stop resisting" arrest.

"He didn't do nothing wrong," she yells. "That is a child that was jaywalking around here!"

When the teen juts his face out to the officer with his hands still on the nightstick, the officer wields it laterally and appears to hit the boy's face with the end of it. The boy holds a hand to his face and soon begins to cry.

The officer had called for backup, and eight other officers soon arrive on the scene. Four officers wrestle the teenager to the ground while the other five cordon off the area.

Stockton Police Officer Joseph Silva told VICE News that the teenager had been walking in a bus lane and did not respond to an officer's request to get out of the street.

"For safety reasons, the officer told the young man to get on the sidewalk," Silva said. "After the teenager refused to comply and used obscene language, the officer went over and a there was a scuffle."

This part of the encounter is difficult to verify because Stockton police say that the arresting officer's body camera was knocked off during the initial altercation. That footage will not be immediately released, the department said, because of an ongoing investigation.

The use of force by the officers is now under review.

"Anytime an officer uses force there's an automatic administrative review," Silva said, adding that "the preliminary investigation is showing that the officers were within our policy."

"If everyone would just comply with lawful orders from the police," he added, "we wouldn't have to use force in the first place."

The 16-year-old was later released to his mother at the police station and given a citation. Stockton police said he was unharmed.

Community groups in Stockton have called for a demonstration on Thursday against police brutality.


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14) Mexico’s Fruitless Hunt for Justice
By IOAN GRILLO

MEXICO CITY — Sept. 26 will mark a year since one of the most heinous crimes in modern Mexico, when police officers and drug cartel hit men are believed to have abducted 43 students and killed another six students or passers-by in the town of Iguala. There have been even bigger mass killings by cartels in the past, also involving the security forces who are supposed to be fighting them. But the Iguala attacks caused far more outrage because they targeted students, the police were on the front line, and they were close to the capital.

The images of the missing youths and their distraught families shook Mexican society, provoking hundreds of thousands to take to the streets demanding justice. It became a watershed case, emblematic of the killings and disappearances that have ravaged this nation.With the world watching, the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto had the chance to prove it could deliver justice for the victims. But rather than becoming an exemplary case, the investigation has shown the deep flaws among Mexico’s police force and prosecutors. A report released on Sept. 6 by a group of experts, appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, concluded that there had been a slow response, possible torture of suspects, and damage to key evidence and crime scenes. The justice system itself was put on trial — and found guilty.

The vices detailed in the report are typical in Mexico. Torture is widespread, as shown in a recently released video of police officers in Jalisco beating teenage robbery suspects as they questioned them. Corruption in the security forces is rife, as shown by the arrest of prison guards and intelligence agents accused of helping the kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, escape prison through a tunnel with electric lights and air vents. And investigators are often simply incompetent, as shown in the daily mishandling of crime scenes.

The result is a double tragedy of horrendous crimes going unpunished while innocent people rot in jail. Many Mexicans have lost all faith in the justice system. Even before the report, the families of the victims and many journalists refused to believe the official account of what happened to the students.

Many Mexicans have no confidence in anything the government says. When Mr. Guzmán escaped, a survey by the newspaper Reforma found that 54 percent of respondents didn’t accept that he had fled through a tunnel as the government had announced; instead, people claimed he had walked out the front door. This breakdown of trust has painful implications. In recent years, thousands of Mexicans have formed vigilante militias to take justice into their own hands. More unrest may well follow.

The Mexican government, with the support of the international community, needs to make a herculean effort to strengthen its justice system and restore some credibility. And this can begin with a renewed effort to deliver justice in the Iguala attacks. Mr. Peña Nieto said he had asked investigators to take into account the findings of the experts’ report; now he needs to follow up with concrete action.

The failures in the Iguala investigation leave serious doubts about who exactly was involved, what their motive was, and what happened to the victims. Prosecutors claim that hit men from the Guerreros Unidos cartel burned the students on a bonfire at a garbage dump. The authors of the report argue that the evidence shows such a fire never happened there — and the search needs to continue. The police found the charred remains of two of the students, allegedly in a nearby river, but there has been no sign of the others.

This confusion tears at the students’ families; they have no closure. Across Latin America, mothers still search for their children who disappeared in “dirty wars” that governments waged in the 1970s and 1980s. It is chilling that cartel killers, and the corrupt police officers they work with, use this same tactic of disappearing victims today. The gangsters don’t just disappear people to hide evidence; it is also a potent form of terror.

Mexican agents have arrested more than 100 people suspected of having taken part in the Iguala attacks, including city police officers, the mayor and his wife, and reputed Guerreros Unidos assassins. Some have confessed. But accusations that they were tortured undermine the cases against them. If some are the killers but are freed because of a bungled prosecution, it would only add to the tragedy. The case needs to be strengthened with solid physical evidence. State and federal forces also need to be more thoroughly questioned about their actions on the night of the abductions.The Iguala report questions the motives behind this brutal attack. The students, from a nearby teachers’ college, had gone to the town to commandeer buses that they wanted to use to travel to a march in Mexico City. The report recommends pursuing the theory that students unwittingly took a bus in which heroin, or its precursor, opium paste, was stashed. The Guerreros Unidos produce heroin to supply the surge in use across the United States.

Prosecutors have also cited an alleged Guerreros Unidos hit man, who said the group (mistakenly) believed the students had been infiltrated by a rival gang. Yet another theory is that the police were trying to stop students from disrupting a public event held by the mayor and his wife, both of whom are believed to have been in league with the cartel.

Whatever drove the killers that night, cartels and corrupt police officers have a track record of disposing of innocent civilians, sometimes for just being in the wrong place. After his son was killed by cartel thugs, the poet Javier Sicilia toured cities across Mexico packed with thousands grieving over their loved ones. According to a government count, cartels and the security forces fighting them killed more than 83,000 people between 2007 and 2014. Some journalists claim it is many more.

The failures in the Iguala investigation have taken a toll on Mr. Peña Nieto, who has fallen to a 35 percent approval rating. He did not invent the problem of cartel bloodshed when he took power in 2012. But, as president, he needs to take responsibility and lead real efforts to fix the justice system during his remaining three years in power.

And when the United States supports Mexico in fighting cartels, it cannot just provide hardware like Black Hawk helicopters. It needs to help Mexico rebuild its institutions from the bottom up.

Ioan Grillo, a British journalist who covers Latin America, is the author of “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency.”


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15) Suit Alleges ‘Scheme’ in Criminal Costs Borne by New Orleans’s Poor
By

NEW ORLEANS — Late at night, after the lawyers had gone home, Alana Cain washed the floors at a downtown firm. One morning, a ring disappeared; Ms. Cain, 26, was charged and eventually pleaded guilty. The judge ordered her to pay $1,800 in restitution. He also imposed roughly $950 on top of that in court fines and fees.

She paid in installments, coming to the collections office with $50 every two weeks for more than a year. Once, after too long a jobless spell, she was late with her payment. She phoned the court collections officer and told him she was getting the money. It was in her pocket when the police pulled over the car in which she was riding, citing a broken taillight. There was already a warrant; she spent a week in jail before she could see a judge.On Thursday, Ms. Cain joined five other plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the criminal district court here, among others, alleging that judges and court officials have been running an “illegal scheme” in which poor people are indefinitely jailed if they fall behind on payments of court fines, fees and assessments. The suit describes how fees are imposed with no hearing about a person’s ability to pay, and how nearly all components of the local criminal justice system — the judges, the prosecutors, the public defenders — benefit financially to some degree.

“The extent to which every actor in the local New Orleans legal system depends on this money for their own survival is shocking,” said Alec Karakatsanis, a founder of Equal Justice Under Law, a civil rights group, and one of the lawyers who filed the suit. The funding arrangements at the court have been particularly controversial here in recent years, in the wake of allegations of abuses in the way money raised from defendants has been spent.

But in general, said Mr. Karakatsanis, who filed a similar suit in Ferguson, Mo., in February and helped force changes to jailing policies in Montgomery, Ala., last year, “the effort to fund local court systems on the backs of the very poor is not an aberration.”

The funding of criminal justice systems through the fining of poor defendants has drawn intense scrutiny across the country over the past year. This is in part because the protests in Ferguson highlighted these funding arrangements. But it is also because the practice has become more widespread, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice.

“As budgets have grown tighter, jurisdictions and politicians have balked at tax increases,” Ms. Eisen said. “So the burden of revenue for this vastly expanding criminal justice system has been shifted to those who find themselves defendants in courts or inmates in prisons.”

A spokesman for the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate in the country, the state pays the salaries of the local criminal court judges. Local jurisdictions argue they do not have the resources to make up all of the remaining costs, leaving the local criminal justice system well short of the money needed to function effectively. So legislators have responded by allowing the costs to be pushed onto the people who find themselves in the system.

“The way Louisiana has funded the criminal justice system is to try and provide as many user fees as possible to finance it,” said Rafael Goyeneche, the president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group. Pointing out that the fees can sometimes be larger than the actual criminal fine, Mr. Goyeneche said that the system created a clear incentive for high fees, and even for conviction. “These Louisiana laws violate the Constitution,” he said.

While more than eight out of 10 defendants in the criminal court here qualify as indigent, the suit alleges that fees are often imposed without hearings to consider the defendants’ ability to pay. This was the case with all of the named plaintiffs in the suit. One of the plaintiffs is a man kept in jail for weeks for unpaid debts despite his protests that he had a job waiting that would have allowed him to earn the money. Another man spent six days in jail on a warrant issued in error, while a third was told by a collections officer to pay double every time he was late with a payment.

“It’s a failing system, and they know it’s a failing system,” said the third man, Reynaud Variste, 26, who was arrested in a police raid at his home one morning this year after he had fallen a few weeks behind in payments connected to a two-year-old illegal possession case.

The fees can begin accumulating immediately after an arrest, as soon as a bond is set. While a federal court in 1991 struck down a state law allowing New Orleans judges to take a percentage of each bond, a subsequent law mostly reinstituted this arrangement — but split up the percentage among the other actors in the criminal justice system.“Obviously, there is a legal issue there,” said Calvin Johnson, a retired chief judge of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. But he said those most likely to protest the arrangement — the public defenders, the prosecutors and the sheriffs — all benefit from it. “We got all of them in the mix,” he said, “and so they had no interest in saying, ‘Judges, y’all can’t do it.’”

Mr. Johnson has become an outspoken critic of this structure, but said it remained a grudging necessity in the absence of any other funding. “We as a citizenry, we don’t want to pay for the criminal system because we think it only impacts criminals,” he said.

The part of the system here that has drawn the most public outrage recently has been the judicial expense fund. This fund is intended to cover costs — from coffee to office supplies to the salaries of court support staff — unmet by state and local dollars. It is fed by assessments imposed on individual defendants at the judge’s discretion, and can reach $2,000 per felony charge.

This fund was the subject of a scathing state auditor’s investigation in 2012. It detailed how criminal court judges spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from the judicial expense fund on premium health benefits. The judges argued that the fund was not legally considered public money and thus bound by the same restrictions; the district attorney, in turn, accused the judges of illegally forcing defendants to pay into the fund or have their probation revoked. The scandal has since quieted.

Once the fines and fees are set by the judges after conviction, those who cannot pay immediately are referred to a collections department. This department determines the schedule for repayment, though “no inquiry is ever made into a person’s ability to pay,” and partial amounts are not acceptable, the suit alleges. If a person misses payments, the suit says, a collections agent will sign the judge’s name to a warrant, and the person then faces potential jail time with an automatic $20,000 bond required for release. Once arrested, the suit continues, people can stay in jail for days without notice of a hearing.

Ms. Cain has paid down the restitution she owed but has hundreds of dollars to go, most of it in judicial expense fund fees. She has no car, has been turned down for job after job and lives with her mother in a one-bedroom apartment, the ceiling of which has a gaping hole. But she has not missed a payment since her jail stay; her mother and sister have scraped together what money they can so she can keep up.

“It’s a struggle,” Ms. Cain said. “I must say it is.”


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16) Construction in Buildings Declared Vacant Surprises Some: The Tenants
By

The complaints to the city from 292 Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, read like dispatches from chaos.

“They have huge piles of dust and concrete, which is getting tenants sick,” one said.

“Caller’s apartment is vibrating, and he is afraid his ceiling will drop,” said another.

When New York property owners plan to do work on their buildings, they are required to tell the city if people are living there and, if so, to submit plans to protect them from dust, blocked exits and other perils. But at 292 Bedford and numerous other occupied work sites, the city allowed work to proceed even though owners or their agents asserted the buildings were empty, claims that could be easily disproved through public databases, or by simply pressing the buzzers outside the front doors.

City officials acknowledge they have no system to verify whether buildings undergoing construction are unoccupied, a blind spot that tenants and their advocates argue has helped promote a climate of lawlessness, particularly for rent-stabilized residents.

Even as Mayor Bill de Blasio has made preserving and creating rent-stabilized apartments a focus of his administration, tenants and some elected officials say that some landlords have exploited the lack of enforcement to harass these residents into leaving their apartments, freeing them to be rented out for more money.

“They have made our lives unbearable to see how long we can take it before we leave,” said Maribel Rosario, 43, an executive secretary at a hospital who said she and her husband had rejected repeated buyout offers from the landlord at 292 Bedford. She said her young son and daughter had constant flulike symptoms and allergies during the construction.

Even when the city becomes aware of an incorrect permit application, it has typically allowed landlords simply to correct the paperwork and provide the required protection plans. That does not always help, as landlords sometimes flout the plans, tenants in some of the buildings say.

“Certainly the Buildings Department has been really falling down on the job,” said State Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried, a Democrat who is among several elected officials who plan to meet with the department on Friday over the issue. They want the department to do more to verify occupancy status and impose more severe penalties, especially for repeat offenders.

“Not only are landlords and developers defrauding the Buildings Department with these filings,” Mr. Gottfried said, “but they’re also endangering the lives and safety of tenants, as well as working to destroy affordable housing.”

Department officials say they are aware that false filings are a problem and have been working to upgrade their technology to identify potential wrongdoers. One way to do that, the department and its critics agree, is to create a system to crosscheck permits with the state’s database of rent-stabilized buildings.

But Timothy E. Hogan, the deputy commissioner of enforcement, said that “just because there’s construction it doesn’t mean there’s tenant harassment.” Mr. Hogan said some of the inaccurate information, which can be filled in by engineers, architects, property managers and the owners themselves, may stem from innocent mistakes, like erroneously listing the building as vacant because the proposed renovation is limited to a vacant floor.

He added, though, that it was “really incumbent on these licensed professionals to be truthful.” And department officials say they are now considering more aggressively penalizing owners who submit false information.

The problem appears to be so endemic that even buildings undergoing cosmetic work sometimes give inaccurate information. The building on the Upper West Side where City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer rents an apartment, for instance, was recently approved for $284,100 worth of facade repairs, even though it listed the building as unoccupied. (The building’s management did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.)

Tenant groups and lawyers say false information on permits is widespread in neighborhoods where the market can sustain the transformation of rent-stabilized apartments into expensive rentals.

A neighborhood group in Chelsea known as Community Residents Protection compiled a list of several dozen occupied buildings where it suspected permit falsifications, and city building officials have so far confirmed 41 had incorrect filings. The department issued violations for the false filings, which carry fines of $1,200 to $4,800, as well as stop-work orders, officials said.

Only one case was considered tenant harassment, building officials said; that case was referred to a city-state tenant protection task force.

At 292 Bedford, the city did not issue violations related to the permit application and many other complaints until this year, after the building’s manager, Isaac Rosenberg, 27, was charged in February with bribing city housing inspectors to dismiss violations for mold, lack of heat and other problems there and elsewhere.

Mr. Rosenberg has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer, Kevin Keating, said he would not comment on the charges or the false filings.

The incorrect permit applications, first filed in 2013, were signed by Cheski Weiss (also listed on a permit application as Cheskie Weisz), a managing member of the corporation that owns the building. Mr. Weiss did not return calls for comment.

Violations involving false permit applications are infrequent — about 100 were issued last year out of more than 77,000 permits for residential work. Building officials say the sheer number of applications makes it unfeasible to verify the occupancy status for each one.

Prosecutions are even rarer, and usually involve a pattern of antitenant behavior.

In two criminal cases brought against Brooklyn landlords and one engineer this year — and in a civil case against a Manhattan landlord settled out of court — owners who were accused of lying about occupancy on permits were also accused of actions such as cutting off heat and other essential services, exposing residents to excessive dust, noise and lead, and wrecking kitchens and bathrooms, all to force tenants to leave.

“Lying on forms that are designed to protect tenants is a very serious offense, whether on its own or as part of a larger scheme to harass and evict New Yorkers,” the attorney general’s office, which brought charges in one of the criminal cases, said in a statement.

Residents at another building, 15 West 55th Street in Manhattan, who are mostly elderly rent-stabilized tenants, have complained to the city of unpermitted work, damage to walls and floors and drilling “for hours” as sections of the building are being turned into a members-only club for the designer Domenico Vacca.

Some permit applications for the work listed the building as vacant, but in July a liaison from the Buildings Department told tenant representatives that the paperwork had been corrected and that a tenant protection plan would be in effect to limit noise, restrict construction hours to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and keep debris, dirt and dust “at a minimum.”

Weeks later, though, tenants said that the plan had not been enforced, and that noise and work outside the scope of the permit continues.

“I feel they just give them carte blanche on the permits,” said Marilyn Hemery, 78, a legal secretary who came home recently to find a hole inn her bathroom floor that allowed her to see through to the vacant apartment below.

The building’s owner, the developer Salim Assa, said through a spokeswoman that “the architect made a mistake” when filing the original paperwork for the permit.

In an Aug. 14 response to a letter sent by Mr. Gottfried and other elected officials on behalf of the tenants, a department official, Reynaldo Cabrera, officer of a new office created this year to pursue complaints against building owners, said the department “continues to investigate the matter.”

But Building Department officials said they had checked out the numerous complaints and issued violations when warranted. However, the department said in a statement, “there are numerous unsubstantiated complaints at this property where the owner had the proper permits, and was not engaged in any unsafe construction at the time of inspection.”

Across the street from Mr. Stringer’s building on the Upper West Side, tenants have organized to battle gut renovations and scaffolding that deprived them of their use of terraces and exposed them to construction dust with lead. The building, which is owned by the Brodsky Organization, led by Daniel Brodsky, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was ordered by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to clean up the dust and minimize it in the future.

The permit applications said the building was unoccupied. The Buildings Department issued stop-work orders and violations this summer for work done without permits and for the false tenant information claims, but found no harassment. The owners corrected the permits and put in a tenant protection plan, officials said.

In a statement, the Brodsky Organization said, “We continue to maintain a safe building first and foremost, and are correcting any permitting issues that have occurred in the building.”

The building, known as the South Pierre, has 302 units, of which 138 are rent-stabilized, a spokeswoman said. Tenants said they feared the construction was part of an effort to try to get more rent-stabilized tenants out.

“The city is not as vigilant as it could be,” Susan Schwartz, a tenant leader in the building, said. “When the tenants are complaining, it doesn’t seem to carry a lot of weight.”

Paige Pagan contributed reporting.




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17) $900 Million Penalty for G.M.’s Deadly Defect Leaves Many Cold
"But she admitted that it will take more than apologies for G.M. — which went bankrupt in 2009 and needed a $49 billion government bailout to survive — to restore its reputation in the eyes of consumers."

By DANIELLE IVORY and

As the number of deaths linked to defective cars made by General Motors has steadily risen to 124, victims’ families have waited for the answer to a burning question: How will federal prosecutors hold the automaker accountable for its decade-long failure to disclose the defect?

On Thursday, they got their answer, and many were disappointed.

In a settlement with prosecutors, no individual employees were charged, and the Justice Department agreed to defer prosecution of the company for three years. If G.M. adheres to the agreement, which includes independent monitoring of its safety practices, the company can have its record wiped clean.

And even though General Motors will pay a $900 million penalty, it was 25 percent less than the record $1.2 billion Toyota agreed to pay last year.“I don’t understand how they can basically buy their way out of it,” said Margie Beskau, whose daughter Amy Rademaker was killed in an October 2006 crash in Wisconsin. She added, “They knew what they were doing and they kept doing it.”

At a news conference, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, defended the settlement. “It has been a challenging case, for the agencies, for the prosecutors and for me,” Mr. Bharara said. “We’ve had to think long and hard about the appropriate resolution in this case.”

Mr. Bharara said that the victims had been paramount in the minds of the prosecutors on the case.

“I met personally with families who lost loved ones in tragic accidents involving the switch and, I’ll tell you, those were among the most searing moments I’ve ever spent in my six-plus years as United States attorney,” he said.

G.M.’s cooperation, he said, was the reason the settlement was reached after only 18 months, rather than after four years or more, as in the Toyota case.

“From the moment the top management came forward to disclose the defect in February of 2014, the company’s cooperation and remediation have been fairly extraordinary,” Mr. Bharara said, citing G.M.’s creation of a compensation fund for victims of the defect and its dismissal of 15 employees, among other factors.

“Good behavior after the fact does not absolve G.M. or any company of responsibility,” Mr. Bharara said, “but companies should be encouraged to act as G.M. did here to help the truth come out faster.”

Mr. Bharara cited an internal investigation conducted for G.M. as favorable in determining the penalties paid by the automaker,

The two law firms hired for that inquiry, King & Spalding and Jenner & Block, had previously done legal work for G.M. And court papers show that Anton R. Valukas, the chairman of Jenner & Block, who headed the G.M. investigation, helped represent the automaker in its talks with the Justice Department.

Mr. Valukas declined to be interviewed, and several corporate lawyers said such arrangements are not unusual because an outside law firm that conducts an investigation knows the facts of a case. But Deborah L. Rhode, a professor at Stanford Law School, said the public’s interest may suffer when a law firm wears so many different hats.

“It would be nice to know that the law firm doing the internal investigation was truly disinterested and didn’t have an interest in subsequent representation” of the same company, Ms. Rhode said.

The overall tone of the news conference was notably more subdued than the bravado that accompanied the Toyota announcement last year. At that news conference, the attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx both attended and spoke, calling Toyota’s behavior shameful. On Thursday, neither Mr. Holder’s successor, Loretta Lynch, nor Mr. Foxx attended.

The complaint filed by prosecutors details what has become a familiar narrative in the G.M. safety crisis — employees within General Motors were aware going back more than a decade of problems with the ignition switch, which is prone to turning off, cutting the engine and disabling systems like power steering and airbags.

But prosecutors focused their attention to a relatively short period of time — only about 20 months from the spring of 2012 to February 2014, when G.M. began recalling 2.6 million older cars to fix the switch — even though the first reports of the problem had been made more than a decade earlier. As awareness of the problem grew inside the company, the automaker’s legal department was aggressively fighting back against a mounting wave of litigation, even settling lawsuits.

Mr. Bharara emphasized that individuals could still be charged, but bringing a case against employees faces higher legal hurdles than in some other industries. Two employees in particular were singled out in the complaint as playing a central role in concealing information from regulators, but they were identified only by a vague job description.

“This knowledge extended well above the ranks of investigating engineers to certain supervisors and attorneys at the company — including G.M.’s safety director and G.M.’s safety attorney,” prosecutors said in their statement of facts that accompanied the complaint.

The Justice Department and G.M. declined to comment on the identities of the safety director and safety attorney. But among those dismissed last year were Carmen Benavides, the director of product investigations, and William Kemp, a G.M. lawyer who handled safety matters. Both of their actions as described in Mr. Valukas’s internal investigation and in congressional documents match the descriptions in the complaint.

Mr. Kemp did not return a message left at his home and Ms. Benavides did not return an message left at a LinkedIn account matching her name and career description.

Lawmakers who have been persistent critics of G.M. were unpersuaded by the settlement.“This outcome fails to require adequate and explicit admission of criminal culpability from G.M. and individual criminal actions,” said Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, in a joint statement. “This outcome is extremely disappointing.

G.M. struck a tone of contrition on Thursday. In a meeting with employees at G.M.’s huge technical center north of Detroit, Mary T. Barra, the chief executive, again apologized.

“Let’s pause for a moment and remember that people were hurt and died in our cars,” Ms. Barra told about 1,000 workers gathered in an atrium at the company’s vehicle engineering center. “That’s why we are here.”

Ms. Barra had flown back overnight from the Frankfurt Auto Show to attend the town hall, and then take questions from reporters.

Her address to workers highlighted all the improvements in safety practices that G.M. has made since the company first began recalling the defective vehicles.

But she admitted that it will take more than apologies for G.M. — which went bankrupt in 2009 and needed a $49 billion government bailout to survive — to restore its reputation in the eyes of consumers.

“We accept the penalties being announced today because they are part of being accountable,” she said. “But apologies and accountability do not amount to much if you don’t change your behavior.”

Her address to employees came on a day when G.M. reached another legal milestone, setting aside $575 million to resolve the cases of about 1,380 people, all represented by Robert C. Hilliard. Mr. Hilliard, a lawyer who is among those leading the class-action cases against the automaker, said that 45 death cases were among those settled. The $575 million also includes the settlement of a shareholder suit filed by the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System.

Altogether, the private lawsuit settlements resolve more than half the outstanding private cases against G.M.

In the end, victims said they were unsatisfied by the Justice Department’s announcement.

“I don’t see how Mary Barra can sleep,” said Laura Christian, the birth mother of 16-year-old Amber Rose, who was killed in a July 2005 crash in Maryland. She said the deferred-prosecution agreement was like probation.

“We buried our loved ones because G.M. buried a deadly defect,” Ms. Christian said. “And yet today all G.M. has to do is write another check to escape. We can’t escape — every day I am missing a daughter.”

Barry Meier contributed reporting.





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18) 15,000 Migrants in Croatia Stranded by Border Crackdown
By JOSEPH OROVIC and MATTHEW BRUNWASSER

BELI MANASTIR, Croatia — At least 15,000 migrants found themselves all but trapped in Croatia on Friday, having been barred from Hungary, sent packing from Serbia and unable to move on to Slovenia.

The human exodus, the result of Hungary’s decision on Tuesday to seal its borders, was orderly but miserable. Along the roads of eastern Croatia, the migrants’ detritus — abandoned blankets, torn clothing, empty cans of tuna — littered the highways. Those who could afford to take a taxi westward did so; others boarded buses or simply walked.

Three young Iraqi men on the side of a road outside the border town of Tovarnik, Croatia, said they had spent two excruciating days there. “It was crowded, there was no food, no transport and nowhere to go,” said one of them, Ibrahim Yusuf, 25, a construction worker from Baghdad, eating chocolate wafers in the shade of a walnut tree. He said he was considering returning to Iraq and asked a reporter for directions back to Belgrade, Serbia.The migrants have not only been trapped within national borders. They were also caught in mass confusion, evidenced by heightening tensions among neighboring nations in a volatile region, incoherent national policies and the continuing failure of greater Europe to resolve the crisis.

On top of it all, Hungarian troops were laying a new razor-wire fence along Hungary’s border with Croatia, extending the barrier it erected along the border with Serbia.

Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said Croatia was overwhelmed by the influx, and he lashed out at Hungary for what he said was a failure to live up to its obligations as a member of the European Union.

Mr. Milanovic also implicitly criticized Germany for effectively extending an invitation to the migrants without having a comprehensive plan to get them to Germany.

“Croatia has shown it has a heart,” he said at a news conference. “We also need to show we have a brain.”

Mr. Milanovic added: “A solution isn’t to leave these refugees in Croatia. Today we will start changing our methods. We cannot house these people. We won’t block entries, but we also won’t block exits.”

Addressing migrants, he said: “You are welcome in Croatia, and you can pass through Croatia. But go on. Not because we don’t like you, but because this is not your final destination.”

The practical implications of his remarks were not clear. The nation closed seven of its eight border crossings with Serbia at 11 p.m. on Thursday, but 3,000 people have entered since then, according to the Croatian Interior Ministry.

On Friday, throngs continued to enter, walking across fields around Tovarnik, Croatia, and Sid, Serbia. On the Croatian side of the border, police officers in vans were seeking to take the arrivals to reception centers; from there, it was unclear whether they would be registered or expelled.

Many of the migrants — about 30 busloads — had traveled roughly 300 miles through Serbia, from its southern border with Macedonia to its northern border with Croatia. In Presevo, in southern Serbia, posters in Arabic warned: “The Hungarian border is closed. Croatia is open.”

The influx left Croatia scrambling to create more processing centers, including using a military barracks in the town of Beli Manastir, about 100 miles from the border. The barracks, intended to house 200, was flooded by 8,000, said the town’s mayor, Ivan Dobos. They had arrived suddenly by bus and train, from the border towns of Tovarnik and Batina, he said.

The roads leading to Beli Manastir were strewn with the remnants of the migrants’ overnight stay. Cots provided by the Croatian military were propped against fences. In the town, migrants were lining up at banks, apparently looking to exchange money and possibly to pay their way to Slovenia. Some stopped taxis and vans to ask to be taken there.

A Syrian man who gave his name as Anas, 38, said he hoped to reach the Netherlands, where he planned to send for his family in Damascus — his two young children and his wife, who is due to deliver their third child in 10 days.

He said that he did not want to squander his money on a smuggler, and that he was waiting for a bus to Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

“If the Slovenian police want to catch me, it’s O.K.,” Anas said, sounding resigned and weary. “I have nothing to lose.” He added that he had found the lack of hospitality puzzling, given that the migrants just wanted to pass through: “Hungary, Slovenia, Austria — they know we don’t want to stay there.”

The mixed messages from Croatia, which joined the European Union in 2013, highlighted how the countries of the former Yugoslavia — smaller and economically weaker than their richer and more populous Western counterparts — are ill equipped to deal with the surge of people who have suddenly turned up on their doorsteps.Slovenia, bracing for the migrants who are streaming through Croatia toward its borders, has set up six reception centers. At one of them, police vans delivered about 15 migrants every few minutes; the official number was 166 by noon Friday, but unofficial estimates placed it higher.

Croatian police officers could be seen on Friday telling migrants who arrived by taxi to turn back. Other migrants tried to cross into Slovenia on foot, walking through meadows, fields and even wading through a river, the Sutla.

Because of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the experience of mass outflows of people is part of the recent memory of people in this region. But most salaries in the countries of this region are relatively low, welfare states are stretched and the prospect of hosting large numbers of migrants threatens to spur a backlash.

The crisis has also dealt a heavy blow to European unity, as the Schengen area of borderless travel, long a cornerstone of European integration, has crumbled.

In Hungary, where riot police officers this week fired water cannons and tear gas to fend off migrants trying to breach a border gate, workers on Friday began laying razor wire along the country’s southern border with Croatia, extending by about 25 miles the 109 miles of razor wire it had already set up along its border with Serbia. The Hungarian government also has plans to reinforce the eastern border with Romania.

On Friday, Hungary declared a state of crisis in four southern counties near its borders with Croatia and Slovenia. Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the authorities had deployed 600 soldiers and 200 police officers there, and that an additional 1,200 troops and 600 officers would be sent to the area.

“There is no dune, no molehill for anyone to hide behind in the hope of entering Hungarian territory illegally,” Mr. Orban said. “We will protect Hungary’s border.”

The authorities said that nearly 500 migrants had been detained on Hungary’s border with Croatia.

The United Nations and the European Union have criticized Hungary for erecting barriers to keep out migrants, most of whom are hoping to reach countries like Germany and Sweden. But Hungary has retorted that none of these people have a right to apply for asylum in Hungary, as they are coming from so-called safe countries, like Serbia, and not directly from their homes in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.

Further south, more than 4,000 people crossed into Macedonia from Greece on Thursday, the authorities said. In Edirne, Turkey, migrants seeking to enter Greece were awaiting word from the Turkish capital, Ankara, about whether they would be allowed to walk over the border.

Joseph Orovic reported from Beli Manastir, Croatia; and Dan Bilefsky from London. Reporting was contributed by Kristina Bozic in Llubljana, Slovenia; Matthew Brunwasser from Sid, Serbia; Palko Karasz from Budapest; Aleksandar Dimishkovski from Skopje, Macedonia; and Boryana Dzhambazova from Edirne, Turkey.





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