target: Morton County North Dakota Law Enforcement
13,333 SUPPORTERS
14,000 GOAL
As we gear up to celebrate Thanksgiving, Native Americans are fighting for their right to their own land, clean water and now, their lives. On Sunday night, Dakota Access Pipeline unarmed protesters were blasted with tear gas, mace, rubber bullets and water cannons for hours in 23-degree weather, all while simply trying to clear the road for emergency services.
While all of this violence is unacceptable, the freezing cold water cannons are especially cruel given the temperature; protesters could easily get hypothermia and even die! Please join the Standing Rock medics in begging Morton County law enforcement to stop the use of water cannons on peaceful protesters immediately.
Protesters were simply trying to clear the road to allow emergency services to get to their camp when the militarized police force assaulted them for hours on end. The medics at the scene said 300 people were injured, 23 of whom ended up in the hospital. The majority of the injured got hypothermia from the freezing water cannons.
Frontline journalists were also targeted and shot with rubber bullets, press drones were shot down and some protectors were shot in the head with rubber bullets and fell unconscious.
This dangerous, potentially lethal treatment of peaceful protesters cannot stand. These people are using legal and unarmed tactics to simply protect their water supply and Morton County may end up killing them. Add your name to ask them to cut the worst of their tactics out: using a freezing water cannon in sub-freezing temperatures.
Message from the National Boricua Human Rights Network
SIGN THIS PETITION NOW!
PLEASE FORWARD FAR AND WIDE WE ARE TRYING TO GET 100,000 SIGNATURES IN 30 DAYS.
Hi all:
We are asking all organizations, communities, unions, churches, activists, political parties- to CALL ON THEIR INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS to sign this petition and spread the word- this is a time-sensitive request!
We must try to achieve the signing of 100,000 signatures by December 11.
No matter how many petitions you have signed- SIGN THIS ONLINE PETITION and get everyone else to do the same. Do not let anyone tell you they have signed petitions or letters before- this is the one that will be highlighted.
After young 11 and 12-year-boys of the Beaumont Bulls football knelt during the anthem to protest police violence against Black youth, their local executive board canceled their entire football season, suspended the coaching staff, and threatened to arrest their parents if they attended any future games, practices or events.
For these young Black kids, the plight of injustice in America is their own. Instead of supporting the boys and their protests, their executive board and league officials abandoned them. The board has decided to strip these kids of the team that they love to punish them for asking for basic rights and dignities. This is about the board reinforcing that police violence in our communities doesn’t matter, that our issues aren’t important and that speaking onthem makes you subject to punishment.
These kids are brave for refusing to give in to the executive board and for standing against injustice. We need to support the fight of these children and show them that their protest is heard.
To the Beaumont Bulls Executive Board,
Immediately reinstate the Beaumont Bulls coaching staff, apologize to the boys and their parents, and allow them to finish their season.
Sincerely,
We need to support the fight of these children and show them that their protest is heard. http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/black-children-punished-anthem-protests/?sp_ref=239333099.176.176140.e.558213.2&referring_akid=6495.1114646.XlU2ME&source=em_sp *---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Support Chelsea's petition to Obama: Reduce sentence to time served
"New York Times, November 14, 2016 -- Chelsea Manning, who confessed to disclosing archives of secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 and has been incarcerated longer than any other convicted leaker in American history, has formally petitioned President Obama to reduce the remainder of her 35-year sentence to the more than six years she has already served."
Official clemency application from Chelsea Manning.
November 10, 2016
Also coverage by the Guardian and the New York Times. November 14, 2016 Washington DC action this Saturday!The White House Committee to Pardon Chelsea Manning invites you to join them this Saturday, November 19th from noon to 2pm in front of the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC. They are calling on President Obama to pardon Chelsea Manning. Facebook page for more info. Fort Leavenworth vigil this Sunday! The Kansas City Peace and Social Justice group is organizing a vigil for Chelsea this Sunday, November 20th at 2pm at the public right-of-way near the long driveway into Ft. Leavenworth, near Metropolitan & North 10th Street.
Chelsea tried committing suicide a second time in October
Chelsea has been informed that the Army will hold another disciplinary hearing on the second attempted suicide, which was prompted by the punishment given by the first disciplinary hearing following her initial suicide attempt.
New York Times
November 4, 2016
Chelsea Manning tried to commit suicide last month as she was starting a week of solitary confinement at the prison barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., her punishment for a previous attempt to end her life in July.
Ms. Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking archives of secret documents to WikiLeaks, disclosed the attempted suicide, which took place Oct. 4, in a statement she dictated over the phone to a member of her volunteer support network. She asked that it be sent this week to The New York Times, according to members of the network who want to keep their identities private.
Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing Ms. Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, confirmed the attempt, which raised new questions about the military’s handling of the troubled soldier, dating to when she was permitted to deploy to Iraq and kept at her post in a secure facility despite signs of erratic behavior. Read the full NYT article here
Letter from a prisoner involved in the current prison strike:
Texas Prison Officials retaliate against me
for protesting prison slavery
By Keith "Malik" Washington
Keith “Malik” Washington Reports (Nov. 13, 2016): TDCJ Has Transferred Me Again; the Struggle Must Continue
Revolutionary greetings, sisters and brothers;
On Nov. 10, 2016 the State of Texas transferred me and 43 other men to the Administrative Segregation Unit at the East Ham Unit in Lovelady, Texas.
East Ham is one of the oldest units in the state. The conditions there are much worse than at the Telford Unit. The most glaring issue for prisoners and guards alike is contaminated drinking water!! High levels of copper and lead have been found in the water supply. The water has a horrible stench to it, like the sulfuric smell you get from roadside excavation projects. And the taste? – Absolutely repulsive!
I will need the help of our environmentalist comrades at the Human Rights Defense Center’s Prison Ecology Project as well as our comrades at Earth First! Journal. The situation here is similar to the one at Wallace Pack Unit, where there are high levels of arsenic in the water (See the exposés by Panagiotis Tsolas at https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/author/panagioti-tsolkas/).
The cells here are extremely small; outside recreation is limited to 2 or 3 times per week. A lieutenant who in 2012 unplugged the fans at the Estelle Unit during 100-degree weather is now a major here at East Ham. His job is to administer the Ad-Seg unit where I am housed. I described my experience with this officer (James Kent) in a 2014 article in SF Bay View (http://sfbayview.com/2014/03/panther-unleashed/).
Bright spots here are the food and the Muslim community. The food at East Ham is very good, as it was at the Pack Unit, but what is the sense in having good food if the pipes and plumbing have corroded to the point that the water supply is toxic?
The Muslim community here is full of conscious New Afrikan/Black men who stand firm on the square of righteousness. But I am isolated from the entire General Population, and it will only be through the pages of SF Bay View and Burning Spear that I will be able to communicate with the thousands of men and wimmin who have joined the movement to Abolish Prison Slavery and amend the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.
Sisters and brothers, I would like to thank all of you who have sent me postcards and letters of support. Please note my new address below.
No matter what dirty tricks the state plays, I will not abandon this fight. Socialists of all creeds, colors and economic backgrounds must unite and form a party that can gain the trust and loyalty of the workers and oppressed masses.
I will need help contacting the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the EPA as I attempt to expose and correct the water problem. I still need legal aid and media help as we push forward the agenda of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.
The election of Donald Trump should be used as a rallying point to all dedicated Servants of the People. During the Holiday Season please make a healthy financial donation to my favorite newspapers, San Francisco Bay View and Turning the Tide.
Dare to struggle, dare to win! All power to the people!
Keith H. Washington #1487958 East Ham Unit 2665 Prison Road #1 Lovelady, TX 75851
Today is the 406th day that Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
languishes in prison doing felony time for a misdemeanor crime he did not
commit. Today is also the day that Robert McKay, a spokesperson for the
Free Rev. Pinkney campaign, gave testimony before United Nations
representatives about the plight of Rev. Pinkney at a hearing held in
Chicago. The hearing was called in order to shed light upon the
mistreatment of African-Americans in the United States and put it on an
international stage. And yet as the UN representatives and audience heard
of the injustices in the Pinkney case many gasped in disbelief and asked
with frowns on their faces, "how is this possible?" But disbelief quickly
disappeared when everyone realized these were the same feelings they had
when they first heard of Flint and we all know what happened in Flint. FREE
REV. PINKNEY NOW.
Please send letters to:
Marquette Branch Prison
Rev. Edward Pinkney N-E-93 #294671
1960 US Hwy 41 South
Marquette, MI 49855
Please donate at http://bhbanco.org (Donate button) or send checks to BANCO:
c/o Dorothy Pinkney
1940 Union St.
Benton Harbor, MI 49022
BACKGROUND:
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
State Seeks to Remove Innocent PA Lifer's Attorney! Free Corey Walker!
The PA Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed legal action to remove Corey Walker's attorney, Rachel Wolkenstein, in November 2014. On Tuesday, February 9, 2016 the evidentiary hearing to terminate Wolkenstein as Corey Walker's pro hac vice lawyer continues before Judge Lawrence Clark of the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas in Harrisburg, PA.
Walker, assisted by Wolkenstein, filed three sets of legal papers over five months in 2014 with new evidence of Walker's innocence and that the prosecution and police deliberately used false evidence to convict him of murder. Two weeks after Wolkenstein was granted pro hac vice status, the OAG moved against her and Walker.
The OAG claims that Wolkenstein's political views and prior legal representation of Mumia Abu-Jamal and courtroom arrest by the notorious Judge Albert Sabo makes it "intolerable" for her to represent Corey Walker in the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Over the past fifteen months the OAG has effectively stopped any judicial action on the legal challenges of Corey Walker and his former co-defendant, Lorenzo Johnson against their convictions and sentences to life imprisonment without parole while it proceeds in its attempts to remove Wolkenstein.
This is retaliation against Corey Walker who is innocent and framed. Walker and his attorney won't stop until they thoroughly expose the police corruption and deliberate presentation of false evidence to convict Corey Walker and win his freedom.
This outrageous attack on Corey Walker's fundamental right to his lawyer of choice and challenge his conviction must cease. The evidence of his innocence and deliberate prosecutorial frame up was suppressed for almost twenty years. Corey Walker must be freed!
Read: Jim Crow Justice – The Frame-up Of Corey Walker by Charles Brover
Go to FreeCoreyWalker.org to provide help and get more information.
Judge Robert Mariani of the U.S. District Court has issued an order in Mumia's case, granting Mumia's lawyers Bret Grote and Robert Boyle's motion to supplement the record.
New medical records documenting Mumia's deteriorated condition from February and March, will be presented June 6th. Judge Mariani has also instructed the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to provide any updates and changes in DOC hep C treatment and policies which affect the plaintiff's treatment.
Calling into Prison Radio, Mumia noted:
"My friends, my brothers, it ain't over 'til it's over, but there is some motion. It means that we're moving closer to hopefully some real treatment not of my symptoms, but of my disease. I thank you all for being there. And freedom is a constant struggle. I love you all. From what used to be death row, this is Mumia, your brother."
Mumia remains quite ill. While stable, his curable hepatitis C is still active and progressive. The only treatment Mumia has received over the last 14 months to this day is skin ointment and photo therapy. He has not received the medically indicated treatment for hep C, the very condition that put him in the Intensive Care Unit in March 2015.
Hepatitis C is a progressive disease that attacks Mumia's organs, skin and liver. Unless the court orders the new hepatitis C treatment - one pill a day for 12 weeks, with a 95% cure rate - Mumia's health will remain at serious risk. Before the court is the preliminary injunction motion, which demands immediate medical care.
The exhaustion of administrative remedy and the procedural hurdles make it extremely difficult for people in prison to actually get their grievances heard through the review process. The Prison Litigation Reform Act was passed specifically to create these very almost insurmountable barriers to access to the courts.
In Abu-Jamal vs. Kerestes, one very telling point was when the DOC's Director of Medical Care, Dr. Paul Noel, took the stand. He said that he had never testified before in court! He has worked for the DOC for over a decade.
That meant that no prisoner had access to adversarial cross examination. Before Mumia's day in court in late December 2015, no prisoner ever had the opportunity to expose the PA DOC's blatant lies. Lies so bold that Dr. Noel disavowed his own signed affidavit, and in court he stated that he "did not sign it and it was false and misleading". The knowingly false and fabricated document was put in the record by Laura Neal, Senior DOC attorney.
Take Action for Mumia
Call prison officials to demand immediate treatment!
Dr. Paul Noel-Director of Medical Care, DOC 717-728-5309 x 5312
John Wetzel- Secretary of DOC 717+728-2573 x 4109
Dr. Carl Keldie-Chief Medical Officer, Correct Care Solutions 800-592-2974 x 5783
Theresa DelBalso-Superintendent, SCI Mahanoy 570-773-2158 x 8101
Thank you for keeping Mumia in your heart and mind,
Noelle Hanrahan
Director, PrisonRadio
SUPPORTERS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, AND FREE QUALITY HEALTH CARE FOR ALL:
The Oasis Clinic in Oakland, CA, which treats patients with Hepatitis-C (HCV), demands an end to the outrageous price-gouging of Big Pharma corporations, like Gilead Sciences, which hike-up the cost for essential, life-saving medications such as the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, in order to reap huge profits. The Oasis Clinic's demand is:
PUBLIC HEALTH, NOT CORPORATE WEALTH!
WE DEMAND:
PUBLIC HEALTH, NOT CORPORATE WEALTH!
IMMEDIATE AND FREE TREATMENT FOR ALL HCV-INFECTED PRISONERS!
NO EXECUTION BY MEDICAL NEGLECT!
JAIL DRUG PROFITEERS, FREE MUMIA!
This message from:
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610 • www.laboractionmumia.org
06 January 2016
Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) was moved by bus from USP Canaan in Waymart, PA. to USP Tucson, Arizona. His mailing address is: USP Tucson United States Penitentiary P.O. Box Tucson, AZ. 85734 (BOP number 99974555)
Sign the Petition:
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, THE Bureau of Prisons, The Governor of Georgia
We are aware of a review being launched of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted and or deserve a new trail because of flawed forensic evidence and or wrongly reported evidence. It was stated in the Washington Post in April of 2012 that Justice Department Officials had known for years that flawed forensic work led to convictions of innocent people. We seek to have included in the review of such cases that of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. We understand that all cases reviewed will include the Innocence Project. We look forward to your immediate attention to these overdue wrongs.
ASAP: The Forgotten Imam Project
P.O. Box 373
Four Oaks, NC 27524
For over 31 years, Major Tillery has been a prisoner of the State.
Despite that extraordinary fact, he continues his battles, both in the prison for his health, and in the courts for his freedom.
Several weeks ago, Tillery filed a direct challenge to his criminal conviction, by arguing that a so-called "secret witness" was, in fact, a paid police informant who was given a get-out-of-jail-free card if he testified against Tillery.
Remember I mentioned, "paid?"
Well, yes--the witness was 'paid'--but not in dollars. He was paid in sex!
In the spring of 1984, Robert Mickens was facing decades in prison on rape and robbery charges. After he testified against Tillery, however, his 25-year sentence became 5 years: probation!
And before he testified he was given an hour and a ½ private visit with his girlfriend--at the Homicide Squad room at the Police Roundhouse. (Another such witness was given another sweetheart deal--lie on Major, and get off!)
To a prisoner, some things are more important than money. Like sex!
In a verified document written in April, 2016, Mickens declares that he lied at trial, after being coached by the DAs and detectives on the case.
He lied to get out of jail--and because he could get with his girl.
Other men have done more for less.
Major's 58-page Petition is a time machine back into a practice that was once common in Philadelphia.
In the 1980s and '90s, the Police Roundhouse had become a whorehouse.
Major, now facing serious health challenges from his hepatitis C infection, stubborn skin rashes, and dangerous intestinal disorders, is still battling.
Major Tillery is an innocent man. There was no evidence against Major Tillery for the 1976 poolroom shootings that left one man dead and another wounded. The surviving victim gave a statement to homicide detectives naming others—not Tillery or his co-defendant—as the shooters. Major wasn't charged until 1980, he was tried in 1985.
The only evidence at trial came from these jailhouse informants who were given sexual favors and plea deals for dozens of pending felonies for lying against Major Tillery. Both witnesses now declare their testimony was manufactured by the police and prosecution. Neither witness had personal knowledge of the shooting.
This is a case of prosecutorial misconduct and police corruption that goes to the deepest levels of rot in the Philadelphia criminal injustice system. Major Tillery deserves not just a new trial, but dismissal of the charges against him and his freedom from prison.
It cost a lot of money for Major Tillery to be able to file his new pro se PCRA petition and continue investigation to get more evidence of the state misconduct. He needs help to get lawyers to make sure this case is not ignored. Please contribute, now.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
Financial Support: Tillery's investigation is ongoing, to get this case filed has been costly and he needs funds for a legal team to fight this to his freedom!
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
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
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
Show your support for Lorenzo by wearing one of our beautiful new campaign t-shirts! If you donate $20 (or more!) to the Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson, we will send you a t-shirt, while supplies last. Make sure to note your size and shipping address in the comment section on PayPal, or to include this information with a check.
Here is a message from Lorenzo's wife, Tazza Salvatto:
My husband is innocent, FREE HIM NOW!
Lorenzo Johnson is a son, husband, father and brother. His injustice has been a continued nightmare for our family. Words cant explain our constant pain, I wish it on no one. Not even the people responsible for his injustice.
This is about an innocent man who has spent 20 years and counting in prison. The sad thing is Lorenzo's prosecution knew he was innocent from day one. These are the same people society relies on to protect us.
Not only have these prosecutors withheld evidence of my husbands innocence by NEVER turning over crucial evidence to his defense prior to trial. Now that Lorenzo's innocence has been revealed, the prosecution refuses to do the right thing. Instead they are "slow walking" his appeal and continuing their malicious prosecution.
When my husband or our family speak out about his injustice, he's labeled by his prosecutor as defaming a career cop and prosecutor. If they are responsible for Lorenzo's wrongful conviction, why keep it a secret??? This type of corruption and bullying of families of innocent prisoners to remain silent will not be tolerated.
Our family is not looking for any form of leniency. Lorenzo is innocent, we want what is owed to him. JUSTICE AND HIS IMMEDIATE FREEDOM!!!
7) Many in Milwaukee Neighborhood Didn’t Vote — and Don’t Regret It
"Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves. To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver."
1) In Canada, a Direct Link Between Fracking and Earthquakes By HENRY FOUNTAIN
In the debate over fracking of oil and gas wells, opponents often cite the risk that the process can set off nearby earthquakes. But scientists say that in the United States, fracking-induced earthquakes are not common.
In Canada, however, a spate of earthquakes in Alberta within the last five years has been attributed to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, in which water, chemicals and sand are injected at high pressure into a well drilled in a shale formation to break up the rock and release oil and gas.
Now, scientists at the University of Calgary who studied those earthquakes, near Fox Creek in the central part of the province, say the quakes were induced in two ways: by increases in pressure as the fracking occurred, and, for a time after the process was completed, by pressure changes brought on by the lingering presence of fracking fluid.
“The key message is that the primary cause of injection-induced seismicity in Western Canada is different from the central United States,” said David W. Eaton, a professor of geophysics at the University of Calgary and co-author of a paper in the journal Science describing the research. The findings could help regulators take steps to avoid such induced earthquakes, he said.
Scientists say most of the recent earthquakes in Oklahoma and other parts of the United States have been caused by the burial of wastewater from all kinds of oil and gas wells rather than by the fracking process itself. Wastewater is injected under pressure into disposal wells drilled into a sandstone or other permeable formation, and flows into the rock. That can cause pressure changes in the formation that can upset the equilibrium around a fault zone, causing an earthquake as the fault slips.
In the Fox Creek area in Alberta, where oil and gas companies have been drilling in recent years into a formation called the Duvernay shale, earlier research had seen links between the earthquakes — all of which were minor and caused little damage — and fracking, rather than wastewater injection.
In their work, Dr. Eaton and Xuewei Bao, a postdoctoral researcher, looked into the links in more detail, analyzing seismic data from a series of quakes at Fox Creek in late 2014 and early 2015, and records from wells where fracking was occurring at the time.
They found two patterns to the seismicity. To the east in the fault zone, most of the earthquakes occurred during the fracking process itself, which lasted up to a month. To the west, there were few immediate quakes; they occurred intermittently over several months after the fracking ended.
Dr. Eaton said the fracking process could be likened to small underground explosions, shocks that travel into the rock formation and rapidly change the stress patterns within. “If there is a critically stressed fault, those stress changes are sufficient to push it over the edge,” he said. That appears to be what happened in the eastern direction.
Once the fracking stops, those stresses relax fairly quickly, he said. But they found that to the west, much of the fracking fluid remained underground in the fractured shale. That would lead to more persistent pressure within the fault zone, and more earthquakes over time.
Dr. Eaton said he and others were conducting more research to understand why Alberta responds differently to fracking than Oklahoma and other parts of the United States. “It’s a different situation,” he said, “and understanding the origin of the differences is important.”
2) Amid Division, a March in Washington Seeks to Bring Women Together By KATIE ROGERS
A movement is growing to gather women across race, creed and political beliefs, by luring them off social media and arranging for them to meet in person.
It’s a nice idea, but there’s one catch: The Women’s March on Washington is being organized on Facebook, the nation’s preferred platform to battle over race, gender, politics and just about everything else.
The timing of the event, which organizers began planning the morning after the election but are careful not to call a protest, is aimed at the coming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump. More than 100,000 people have said on Facebook that they will travel to the nation’s capital to participate. The plan is to walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House on Jan. 21, 2017, the morning after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“We’re doing it his very first day in office because we are making a statement,” one organizer, Breanne Butler, said. “The marginalized groups you attacked during your campaign? We are here and we are watching. And, like, ‘Welcome to the White House.’”
Since Election Day, there has been some momentum around supporting groups that are opposed to Mr. Trump’s espoused views on women and minority groups. Nonprofit organizations, including the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the American Civil Liberties Union, have reported a surge in donations after the election. But the election taught Americans that women are deeply divided along party lines, education level and race: 53 percent of white women voted for Mr. Trump, according to exit poll data.
On the march group’s Facebook page, it is easy to see how complicated the idea of the “women’s vote,” an already mythological concept, has become, and how difficult it might be for organizers to fulfill their aim of gathering women who remain fiercely divided on reproductive rights, gun control, same-sex marriage and immigration, among other issues.
Not everyone on the page believes, for instance, that Hillary Clinton would have made a good president, or that Stephen K. Bannon, a chief strategist under Mr. Trump, holds divisive views about minorities. Debates over both have sprung up in recent days. Bob Bland, one of the march organizers, said in an email that organizers in Maryland had to change a Facebook page from public to private to protect the safety of women who want to attend.
Evvie Harmon, a yoga teacher from Greenville, S.C., who is helping state-based efforts to organize for the march, said that the group had nixed a possible idea for a slogan — “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights” — because it was something that Mrs. Clinton once said.
“This is not an anti-Trump protest,” Ms. Harmon said. “This is the reaction of women and minorities across the world who are very disturbed by the rhetoric that was said over the last year and a half.”
Aside from dueling political views, organizers are trying to take feedback from a cacophony of voices in real time as they try to assemble a network of state volunteers, plan programming, and arrange transportation and lodging for the event. Ms. Butler, a chef who is organizing the event in her spare time, said the march had no official means of funding yet.
There are women on the page who have said that the march is not inclusive enough, and that they don’t want an event organized by white women. Ms. Butler acknowledged the criticism but stressed that the women who are organizing are from different racial and religious backgrounds.
(There was even controversy over the original name: Organizers have changed the name from Million Woman March to the Women’s March on Washington, because observers took issue with the fact that the original name echoed a black women’s march held in Philadelphia in 1997.)
Ms. Butler, 27, said the greater concern would be helping local groups raise money to help women who can’t afford to travel to Washington.
“The reality is that it’s incredibly expensive to fly to D.C. on inauguration weekend,” Ms. Butler said. “We don’t want only an upper-middle class of people at this march because no one else can afford to go.”
Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, 34, who plans to help sign up attendees by visiting churches, synagogues and community centers in New York City, said she had been working to include all types of people — including those who have not been on Facebook lately.
“I am a woman of color and I am an immigrant,” said Ms. St. Bernard-Jacobs, who lives in Brooklyn. She said of the march: “For me, it has been completely inclusive.”
This is all plenty of pressure for a days-old grass-roots movement without a concrete path to funding itself, but organizers are optimistic as they look ahead to January.
According to Ms. Butler, the group’s request for a permit to march is still pending.
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
— E.B. White, “Here Is New York,” 1949
From a sidewalk in Lower Manhattan, the building at 33 Thomas Street, known as the Long Lines Building, looks like nothing less than a monument to the prize of privacy.
With not a window in its walls from the ground up to its height of 550 feet, 33 Thomas looms over Church Street with an architectural blank face. Nothing about it resembles a place of human habitation, and in fact it was built for machines: An AT&T subsidiary commissioned the tower to house long-distance phone lines. Completed in 1974, it was fortified to withstand a nuclear attack on New York, and the architect made plans to include enough food, water and generator fuel to sustain 1,500 people for two weeks during a catastrophic loss of power to the city.
Now, an investigative article in The Intercept and an accompanying 10-minute documentary film, “Project X,” opening on Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, say the building appears to have served another purpose: as a listening post code-named Titanpointe by the National Security Agency. The article and film say that Titanpointe was one of the facilities used to collect communications — with permission granted by judges — from international entities that have at least some operations in New York, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and 38 countries.
According to the article and film, N.S.A. employees and contractors who traveled to Titanpointe were given detailed instructions about how to rent cars anonymously through the F.B.I., how to dress (not surprisingly, they were not to wear badges that said “N.S.A.”) and even what to do if they got into a car accident (don’t make a fuss, make a call; everything would be taken care of). Equipment in the building monitored international long-distance phone calls, faxes, videoconferencing, voice calls made over the internet.
Much of the documentation for the article and film draws on material provided by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the agency who released information in 2013 about the N.S.A.’s collaboration with telecommunication companies in vast surveillance programs. Laura Poitras, who collaborated with Henrik Moltke on the documentary film, was a member of a group of journalists awarded a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Mr. Snowden’s revelations.
The new article and film say that N.S.A. memos from 2013 refer to Titanpointe by its code name and activities that take place there but do not mention its address. Mr. Moltke said a number of details in the Snowden material pointed to 33 Thomas Street, including references to a known code name for AT&T; the building’s location about a block from F.B.I. offices at 26 Federal Plaza; and a reference to satellite intercepts for a program called Skidrowe. The building has satellite dishes on the roof and is the only site in New York City where AT&T has a Federal Communications Commission license for such stations, according to Mr. Moltke, who wrote the article with Ryan Gallagher.
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
— E.B. White, “Here Is New York,” 1949
From a sidewalk in Lower Manhattan, the building at 33 Thomas Street, known as the Long Lines Building, looks like nothing less than a monument to the prize of privacy.
With not a window in its walls from the ground up to its height of 550 feet, 33 Thomas looms over Church Street with an architectural blank face. Nothing about it resembles a place of human habitation, and in fact it was built for machines: An AT&T subsidiary commissioned the tower to house long-distance phone lines. Completed in 1974, it was fortified to withstand a nuclear attack on New York, and the architect made plans to include enough food, water and generator fuel to sustain 1,500 people for two weeks during a catastrophic loss of power to the city.
Photo
An early model of the entrance of 33 Thomas Street, as designed by John Carl Warnecke & Associates, shown in the documentary “Project X.”Credit“Project X”
Now, an investigative article in The Intercept and an accompanying 10-minute documentary film, “Project X,” opening on Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, say the building appears to have served another purpose: as a listening post code-named Titanpointe by the National Security Agency. The article and film say that Titanpointe was one of the facilities used to collect communications — with permission granted by judges — from international entities that have at least some operations in New York, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and 38 countries.
According to the article and film, N.S.A. employees and contractors who traveled to Titanpointe were given detailed instructions about how to rent cars anonymously through the F.B.I., how to dress (not surprisingly, they were not to wear badges that said “N.S.A.”) and even what to do if they got into a car accident (don’t make a fuss, make a call; everything would be taken care of). Equipment in the building monitored international long-distance phone calls, faxes, videoconferencing, voice calls made over the internet.
Much of the documentation for the article and film draws on material provided by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the agency who released information in 2013 about the N.S.A.’s collaboration with telecommunication companies in vast surveillance programs. Laura Poitras, who collaborated with Henrik Moltke on the documentary film, was a member of a group of journalists awarded a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Mr. Snowden’s revelations.
The new article and film say that N.S.A. memos from 2013 refer to Titanpointe by its code name and activities that take place there but do not mention its address. Mr. Moltke said a number of details in the Snowden material pointed to 33 Thomas Street, including references to a known code name for AT&T; the building’s location about a block from F.B.I. offices at 26 Federal Plaza; and a reference to satellite intercepts for a program called Skidrowe. The building has satellite dishes on the roof and is the only site in New York City where AT&T has a Federal Communications Commission license for such stations, according to Mr. Moltke, who wrote the article with Ryan Gallagher.
Photo
The AT&T building, constructed to house long-distance phone lines, was completed in 1974.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times
The New York Times and Pro Publica reported in August 2015, that AT&T had had a close relationship with the N.S.A. for decades and had been lauded by the agency for its “extreme willingness to help.”
However, neither the materials from Mr. Snowden nor the new reports state with certainty that the N.S.A. was using AT&T space or equipment. As it happens, while AT&T Inc. owns the land at 33 Thomas, it has only about 87 percent of the floor space; the balance is owned by Verizon.
Asked about the Intercept report, Fletcher Cook, an AT&T spokesman, did not directly respond but said the company provided information when legally required or in specific emergency cases. “We do not allow any government agency to connect directly to or otherwise control our network to obtain our customers’ information,” he said. A Verizon spokesman took questions about his company’s space but did not provide answers. The N.S.A. did not reply to a request for comment.
For all the powerful machinery available to government surveillance programs, they are subject to some court jurisdiction. That is not the case for commercial surveillance: Every aspect of daily life is tracked by smartphone apps, social media and websites. Whatever spying may go on at 33 Thomas Street would at least still be subject to legal oversight. The building really may be a monument to quaint ideas about privacy.
CULLOWHEE, N.C. — In a year dominated by political frenzy, the water crisis in Flint, Mich., was one of the few stories to grab the headlines away from the presidential race. Pallets of bottled water were donated. Celebrities ran fund-raisers. Congressmen grilled the mayor and the governor, demanding to know how they could let their citizens drink poisoned water. A handwritten warning posted above a drinking fountain became a national disgrace.
Yet how many Americans know or care that a similar “do not drink the water” warning is above every drinking fountain in the Knott County Opportunity Center in Kentucky, which houses a community college, a Head Start program and the county library — and that the warning has been necessary for a decade?
Knott County lies in southeastern Kentucky, deep in Appalachian coal country. When I was there 15 years ago, I could taste the coal in the water. Today you still can. Brent D. Hutchinson, who directs the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, said of the water: “Some of it is brown. Some of it is yellow. Some of it smells like sulfur. We only drink filtered or bottled water in my house, just in case. At the school, we still serve only filtered or bottled water to our students and guests.”
It’s not just Knott County. This year, after yet another water advisory 50 miles away in Martin County, one resident spoke of budgeting over $25 a month for bottled water — in a county with a median household income of just $18,000.
The poisoning of Appalachia’s drinking water — from mining runoff, industrial waste, worn-out pipes, a whole confluence of causes — isn’t a new story. A 2009 New York Times article about the effects of tainted water on a community near Charleston, W.Va., details the effects of anycontact with the water.
It’s worth quoting the article, which begins with an account of one family’s battle with bad water, at length: “Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs, and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.”
In this case, there was a happy ending. Because of a lawsuit against the county, residents received “regular deliveries of clean drinking water, stored in coolers or large blue barrels.” And eventually, pressure from the community forced the state government to build a new pipeline to deliver better water. But it was an isolated success; politicians and the national news media have mostly ignored Appalachia’s water crisis.
This lack of outrage should be especially striking given the rest of the nation’s long-term economic debt to Appalachia, a major source of coal. Perhaps that is part of the problem. America wants cheap energy, and if the region’s inhabitants must suffer to provide it, better that than a higher utility bill.
Appalachia has always given more to America than it has received, especially its natural resources and, in times of war, its sons and daughters. A recent example of this inequity is the Chapter 11 filings of several major coal companies, legal maneuverings that may allow them to evade the millions needed to clean up the devastation they’ve left behind.
As my friend and fellow Appalachian writer Jeff Biggers once told an audience, when you turn on a light switch, think about the people who have risked their lives in mines to make that electricity possible. Also keep in mind those living near the mines who must drink and bathe in contaminated water. It is hard to argue with Daile Boulis, a resident of Loudendale, W.Va., who lamented, in an interview with Blue Ridge Outdoors, that “the rest of the country treats us like we’re the cost of doing business in America.”
When these businesses leave, what happens to the miners who have risked disease and death, and the ruined landscape left behind? The numerous causes of Appalachia’s unsafe water are more complex than they sometimes appear. And so are the solutions, which include how to assist communities that will continue to suffer the environmental fallout.
At a time of such national divisiveness, Americans can find common ground in demanding safe drinking water for all of our citizens. The warning signs remain posted in the rural, almost totally white Kentucky city of Hindman, but the signs also remain up in the largely black Michigan city of Flint. Hindman and Flint are united in their misery. Perhaps safe drinking water can be one of the first issues around which we can begin to reunify our fragmented nation.
Donald J. Trump made coal a centerpiece of his campaign, holding rousing rallies with miners in hard hats, who he said had been neglected under eight years of the Obama administration. The strategy paid off, helping him score crucial wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Now, though, coal may prove a different sort of symbol — that is, of the challenges that the president-elect will face delivering on his many promises to restore struggling sectors of the American economy.
The United States coal industry and the jobs that support it have been in decline for decades as a result of environmental concerns, automation in mining and slowdowns in manufacturing industries that burned coal for power.
And these days, no matter who is president, coal is at the mercy of market economics. Coal’s No. 1 rival is cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas — which could become an even more potent competitor under the incoming administration. The probable easing of restrictions on pipeline building and loosening of rules on gas exploration and production would mean more natural gas reaching the market.
Despite recent increases, coal’s price has been drifting downward for years. But the price of natural gas has fallen even more sharply.
“I don’t think the Trump presidency will have a material impact on bringing coal miners back to work,” said Ted O’Brien, a coal analyst at Doyle Trading Consultants, a leading energy industry research firm.
“He may eliminate the regulatory overhang,” Mr. O’Brien said, referring to the environmental rules that have cast a shadow over coal, “but I have a hard time seeing a surge in coal demand.”
Coal’s long decline predates President Obama’s arrival in the White House in 2009. The collapse of the American steel industry in late 20th century reduced demand for the metallurgical coal that is mined most prominently in Appalachia.
In addition, utilities have been slow to build new coal-fired power plants in recent decades because of air-quality concerns over the burning of the other type of coal — thermal coal — that is used for power plants and is mined across the country.
Mr. Trump campaigned to help both kinds of coal recover.
But natural gas may prove unbeatable. The hydraulic fracturing boom in shale fields that began a decade ago flooded the market with cheap natural gas that continues to erode coal’s market share. As recently as early 2008, coal was the source of roughly half of the electricity generated in the United States. Now it is down to about 30 percent.
“There’s just a lot of gas in this country, and that is going to hold gas prices down,” said Scott Sheffield, chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, a major oil and natural gas producer, who said he voted for Mr. Trump.
The bleak outlook for coal may explain why some of the industry’s executives have been reluctant to comment on how the Trump presidency may help their business: They may be wary of raising false hopes among their workers. And many may be reluctant to repeat past industry arguments that climate change was a hoax. Instead, coal producers would rather have tax incentives to support environmental improvements for coal-fired plants, as a way to ensure coal’s long-term viability even beyond a Trump administration.
“Any exuberance has to be tempered,” said Richard Reavey, vice president for government and public affairs at Cloud Peak Energy, a major Western coal producer. “The view should be cautious optimism.”
Beyond the declining demand for coal, there has been an even more fundamental factor behind the shift in coal mining employment, which peaked decades ago. As with those in many industries, jobs in mining have fallen victim to automation. High-tech shears can now shave coal from underground seams — work that formerly required hundreds of miners. Surface mining, which has been increasing in recent years, has also replaced many workers with heavy machinery.
As a result, there are now just over 50,000 jobs in the American coal mining industry, down from a peak of more than 250,000 in 1980.
Most of the losses have come in Appalachian mines — which produce coal for making steel and electricity — because they are older, deeper and more expensive to operate. But automation is hitting employment in mines across the country.
“The industry is simply not going to produce the number of jobs that were historically available in the coal fields,” said Patrick C. McGinley, a law professor at West Virginia University, who focuses on coal issues.
A few years ago coal executives hoped exports — which represent about 8 percent of national production — would boom along with the economies of China and the developing world. But exports peaked in 2012.
Since then, slower economic growth in the developing world, along with climate and pollution concerns, have depressed demand for coal.
The same considerations have prompted international development banks and large investment companies like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to pull back on financing new coal-fired plants — a trend that is unlikely to change under Mr. Trump.
The Trump administration could help the coal industry somewhat by unwinding President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was designed to replace coal-fired utility plants with those using natural gas and renewable energy sources. But the effects of the plan so far may be hard to reverse.
The tighter air pollution regulations, which are still under challenge in court, forced utilities to choose between revamping aging coal-fired power plants to make them cleaner, or switching to natural gas or green sources like wind and solar. Utilities across the country typically decided to switch.
Last year, as a result, 94 coal-fired power plants were closed across the country, and this year 40 more are expected to close by the end of December. It is most unlikely that Mr. Trump could do anything to bring those plants back online.
“All the older power plants that burned Eastern coal have been basically torn down, dismantled, put in mothballs, some of them permanently,” said Robert J. Zik, the now-retired former vice president for operations at TECO Coal, a subsidiary of TECO Energy that was sold to another operator last year.
Other marginal measures the Trump administration might be able to take on coal’s behalf, industry executives say, include rolling back the rules that protect streams from surface mining and easing those for leases and royalties on coal mined on federal lands.
Industry executives say that to extend the life of at least some of the 400 or so coal-burning power plants still in use in the United States, the Trump administration and lawmakers in Congress could work with them on “clean coal” initiatives.
Acknowledging that climate change is an issue even if Mr. Trump does not, Mr. Reavey of Cloud Peak Energy wants federal incentives for utilities to refit existing power plants to burn coal more efficiently and to attach systems to their facilities that will capture carbon emissions and sink them permanently in the ground. Such systems, known as carbon capture and sequestration, are currently so costly that utilities simply prefer to replace coal-fired plants with gas-fired ones.
Even before Mr. Trump’s election, prices of some types of American coal — particularly the metallurgical variety that is mostly mined in Appalachia and is used to make steel — had been rallying.
That, in turn, had sent the stock prices of some coal mining operations soaring in recent months — a huge win for hedge funds that bought up the debt and equity of the companies when they were cheap.
But the big driver for coal’s price run-up was the dwindling supply, as American producers cut back even as Chinese mines were curbing their own production in recent months. Those price benefits are expected to be short-lived, as demand is depressed both by China’s pivot toward cleaner fuels to address the country’s endemic air pollution and by its new focus on a less energy-intensive consumer economy.
“There is optimism that with government support, coal is more viable,” said Mr. O’Brien, the industry analyst. “But the same headwinds still exist that have existed over the past five years.”
6) At Iowa High School, Election Results Kindle Tensions and Protests By JULIE BOSMAN
IOWA CITY — The air felt leaden in the hallways at West High School on the morning after Election Day. The usual clatter from the building’s 2,000 students was muffled. At lunchtime, Lujayn Hamad was in the cafeteria when she said a boy she barely knew roughly bumped into her and swore at her.
“Go back home,” he told Ms. Hamad, who is 15, and an American citizen, and wears a hijab.
The comment, overheard by a friend at Ms. Hamad’s side — though denied by the male student — set off a turbulent week of tears, fury and demonstrations at West High, a large public school in this university town, which prides itself on its openness and progressivism. Minorities make up nearly 40 percent of the student body at West High, a far more diverse mix than the typical Iowan school.
In the hours and days after Ms. Hamad’s encounter in the cafeteria, similar incidents followed, students said. One girl said she was surrounded by heckling students and called a terrorist. Another said she saw people chanting “Trump” in the hallways when they passed black students. In one classroom, a student noted the absence of a Latino classmate and announced to the others, “I wonder if she got deported.”
Like many other schools around the country since the election, West High has become a microcosm of the United States itself, a place roiled by tension, divisions and mistrust. Students in many schools say supporters of Donald J. Trump have felt empowered to lash out at minorities, while outraged backers of Hillary Clinton have been spurred to organize and demonstrate. And teachers have been struggling to provide guidance even as they themselves are processing the election results.
In Ladue, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, students walked out of a high school twice in a week to protest racist comments made at school after the election of Mr. Trump. Two students were disciplined for telling black students boarding a bus that they should sit in the back.
Swastikas were drawn in a boys’ bathroom at a middle school in Bethesda, Md., which has many Jewish students. Children all over the country, particularly Latinos and Muslims, have fearfully asked teachers and guidance counselors whether they and their families will be deported.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking thousands of such episodes since the election, said the most commonly reported locations for harassment were K-12 schools.
“It’s impossible to wall schools off from the rest of society,” said Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, a program of the law center. “It’s just seeped into the culture. Kids are hearing it at home and they’re amplifying it.”
At West High, some teachers and parents have encouraged students to walk out of class to protest racism and sexism and to support a pluralistic society. Others were livid at the protests, saying the teenagers were overreacting. Some emailed administrators to ask why some students were allowed to skip class for protests during a crucial finals week.
A few teachers have responded by hugging crying students and reassuring them that they are loved. One assured an emotional student that orchestra class “is a safe space where we can all get together and make music,” the student said. But an English teacher announced, to the dismay of some teenagers in her class, that the election was over and “we’re not going to talk about it.”
Everybody seems to agree that the school is a changed place.
“It’s a different environment now,” said Jade Merriwether, 16. “I feel very upset and afraid for my friends. People are using the election as an excuse to discriminate against each other openly.”
Even Trump supporters say they feel under siege. Two girls walked into the principal’s office after the election and told him that as conservatives, they did not feel safe walking through the halls, were receiving dirty looks and felt they were not “on an equal basis” to other students, the principal, Gregg Shoultz, said.
Mason Hanson, 16, a member of the Young Republicans club, said he had publicly supported Mr. Trump during the campaign but was upset by the slurs directed at students in the aftermath.
Now other students are angrily blaming him for Mr. Trump’s victory; he no longer wears his “Hillary for Prison” T-shirt because he does not want to be lumped in with the people accused of making insulting comments to minorities.
“After hearing about that stuff, I was honestly surprised,” he said. “I hadn’t heard it before. Usually we’re all polite to each other.”
The trouble began at West High on Wednesday morning after Election Day, when teachers received an email from the principal warning them: Be objective about the election results and remind students of the school’s inclusiveness.
“Please be positive and strong and teach the heck out of our kids today,” Mr. Shoultz wrote in the email.
Mr. Trump’s victory “changed the earth that we stood on a little bit,” Mr. Shoultz said in an interview. “I had a pit in my stomach that day.”
Travis Henderson, a social studies teacher, arrived at school prepared to talk to his students about democracy and the importance of fidelity to its long and sometimes difficult process. “I knew it was going to be hard, I knew it was going to take a lot of me,” he said. “I expected tears, I expected fear and I expected confusion.”
In her second-period class, Carmen Gwenigale, a Spanish teacher, was faced with three students who were sobbing, distraught over the election results. She was sympathetic, but tried to stay focused on the mission of her class. “I told them, ‘Do it in Spanish, ’ ” she said.
After Ms. Hamad’s encounter in the lunchroom, the first teacher she approached was Ms. Gwenigale. “Lujayn came to my room, crying and sobbing, questioning if she should take off her hijab,” said Ms. Gwenigale, who encouraged her to tell the principal.
Ms. Hamad said she was not ready. “I was like, I just want to go home and talk about it,” she said. “Talk about it with my family and my God.”
After Ms. Hamad left her classroom, Ms. Gwenigale sought out Mr. Henderson.
“I ran straight to his room,” she said. They sat on the stairs in a hallway and spoke in hushed tones. “I said, ‘What are we going to do? How can we work through this?’”
The story spread around the school and reached school administrators, who questioned the male student. He denied saying anything derogatory. Mr. Shoultz, the principal, said video showed an encounter between the two students in the cafeteria, but did not pick up what was said.
By Thursday, he had made a schoolwide announcement, trying to calm tensions by telling students that discriminatory behavior would not be tolerated. A group of students decided to hold a rally the next day.
They marched out of school on Friday, holding signs that read “Love Trumps Hate,” “Say No to Deportation” and “No Hate in Our State.”
On Monday, some students gathered in the cafeteria, handing out safety pins to wear on shirts in a gesture of togetherness.
“It’s showing solidarity and unity,” said Wala Siddig, a junior. “It’s showing that we’re not going to tolerate all this bigotry that’s happening.”
On Tuesday, a few dozen students closed out the day with another protest. They walked out of their classes at 3:30 p.m. and gathered inside the school’s main entrance, where they sat cross-legged with duct tape over their mouths.
When the school day concluded at 4 p.m., the hallways filled with students who stopped short and stared, open-mouthed, at the group.
Mr. Henderson, the social studies teacher, stood on the sidelines and watched the reaction. The next day, Wednesday, marked one week and one day since the election. It was a scheduled day off, a quick breath between trimesters.
“It’s good timing,” he said. “I think they need it.”
7) Many in Milwaukee Neighborhood Didn’t Vote — and Don’t Regret It "Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves. To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver." By SABRINA TAVERNISE
MILWAUKEE — Four barbers and a firefighter were pondering their future under a Trump presidency at the Upper Cutz barbershop last week.
“We got to figure this out,” said Cedric Fleming, one of the barbers. “We got a gangster in the chair now,” he said, referring to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
They admitted that they could not complain too much: Only two of them had voted. But there were no regrets.
“I don’t feel bad,” Mr. Fleming said, trimming a mustache. “Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”
As Democrats pick through the wreckage of the campaign, one lesson is clear: The election was notable as much for the people who did not show up, as for those who did. Nationally, about half of registered voters did not cast ballots.
Wisconsin, a state that Hillary Clinton had assumed she would win, historically boasts one of the nation’s highest rates of voter participation; this year’s 68.3 percent turnout was the fifth best among the 50 states. But by local standards, it was a disappointment, the lowest turnout in 16 years. And those no-shows were important. Mr. Trump won the state by just 27,000 voters.
Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods offer one explanation for the turnout figures. Of the city’s 15 council districts, the decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest was consistently much greater than the drop seen in more prosperous areas — accounting for half of the overall decline in turnout citywide.
The biggest drop was here in District 15, a stretch of fading wooden homes, sandwich shops and fast-food restaurants that is 84 percent black. In this district, voter turnout declined by 19.5 percent from 2012 figures, according to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission. It is home to some of Milwaukee’s poorest residents and, according to a 2015 documentary, “Milwaukee 53206,” has one of the nation’s highest per-capita incarceration rates.
At Upper Cutz, a bustling barbershop in a green-trimmed wooden house, talk of politics inevitably comes back to one man: Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s elections infused many here with a feeling of connection to national politics they had never before experienced. But their lives have not gotten appreciably better, and sourness has set in.
“We went to the beach,” said Maanaan Sabir, 38, owner of the Juice Kitchen, a brightly painted shop a few blocks down West North Avenue, using a metaphor to describe the emotion after Mr. Obama’s election. “And then eight years happened.”
All four barbers had voted for Mr. Obama. But only two could muster the enthusiasm to vote this time. And even then, it was a sort of protest. One wrote in Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The other wrote in himself.
“I’m so numb,” said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He said no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the lives of black people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice. “It’s like I should have known this would happen. We’re worse off than before.”
But Mr. Obama did do something important: “He did give black people something to aspire to. That’s a lot. I’m happy my son was able to see a black president.”
Mr. Fleming, 47, who has been trimming hair, beards and mustaches for 30 years, had hoped his small business would get easier to run. But it hasn’t.
“Give us loans, or a 401(k),” he said, trimming the mustache of Steve Stricklin, a firefighter from the neighborhood. His biggest issue was health insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years ago and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally found one, which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.
“Ain’t none of this been working,” he said. He did not vote.
Mr. Albrecht, of the election commission, said other factors contributed to the decline in turnout. This was the first general election under new state laws that required voters to produce an approved photo ID card, and that stiffened the requirements for new voters to prove their residence. This was particularly onerous for the poor, who move often.
Mr. Albrecht said he believed this change had cost several thousand people in the city their vote.
“To me that’s very significant,” he said. “It takes away from the fairness and integrity of the election.”
Although two federal district courts had ruled that the photo ID law discriminated against African-Americans, who disproportionately lack the approved IDs, the law was applied on Election Day after an appeals court stayed one of the decisions. Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who backed the laws, has said they have no impact on voter participation, and Mr. Albrecht allowed that their effect on Milwaukee’s turnout would not have erased Mr. Trump’s victory in the state.
Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves. To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.
“I felt cornered,” said Ian Pfeiffer, 25, who works the grill at Jake’s Delicatessen and says he did not vote. “We were stuck between Trump and Hillary. They really left us with no choice.”
Mr. Pfeiffer’s grandmother, an avid supporter of Mrs. Clinton, spent months trying to convince him to vote for her. But he could not get over his revulsion at what he saw as trust issues related to the Clinton Foundation. (Mr. Pfeiffer’s grandfather pushed him toward Mr. Trump, but he found him even less appealing.)
He thought Oprah Winfrey would be a good candidate.
“Hey, would you vote for Oprah Winfrey?” he said in a loud voice to a line of customers.
“Yeah, I’d vote for her,” said Erin Miles, 41, a financial services worker waiting for her sandwich. “She has a level head and decision-making skills.”
Few of the men and women interviewed on West North Street last week had voted for Mr. Trump, though many said they admired him. (He spoke his mind. He was rich.)
“If I would have voted, I would have voted for him,” said Andre Frierson, 40, a security guard working the evening shift at Jake’s. “From a business perspective, I loved him.”
As for Mrs. Clinton, “other countries probably wouldn’t have respected us because we had a woman running the country,” he said.
One exception was Justin Babar, who said he voted for Mr. Trump as a protest against Mrs. Clinton. He blamed her husband’s policies for putting him in prison for 20 years.
As for the claims of racism that have dogged Mr. Trump, Mr. Babar wasn’t so worried. “It’s better than smiling to my face but going behind closed doors and voting against our kids,” he said.
Tarvus Hawthorne, 45, a program coordinator at a local nonprofit, agreed.
“He was real, unlike a lot of liberal Democrats who are just as racist” but keep it hidden, he said, his jaw slathered with shaving cream. “You can reason with them all day long, but they think they know it all. They want to have control. That they know what’s best for ‘those people.’”
Still, he voted for Mrs. Clinton, as did many others here.
Upper Cutz gets busier as the day wears on. Children come in after school. Danielle Rogers, Mr. Toney’s sister, stopped by the barbershop for a visit. Everybody agreed they would miss Mr. Obama.
Ms. Rogers said Mr. Obama had aged a lot. “It’s like having a bunch of bad kids,” she said. “He’s probably saying: ‘I’m done. Take them back to their mama’s house.’”
Mr. Fleming was trying to imagine Mr. Trump as president.
“The White House is going to be the penthouse!” he said, adding that Mr. Trump would be like Al Pacino in “Scarface,” with parties in the mansion and exotic animals roaming around the grounds. “If he comes home and finds his wife cheating on him, he could just say, ‘Let’s go to war!’”
They were laughing. But they were also worried.
“He’s going to mess with us on some racist level,” said Otis Jackson, 45, a barber who did not vote. “He’s already appointed a known racist,” he said, referring to Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart News, which has been denounced as a white nationalist hate site.
With so many people sitting in his chair over the years, Mr. Fleming has developed a keen sense of where society is headed. But now he is stumped.
“This was a weird election,” he said, holding a set of clippers and looking pensive. “You can’t tell what’s on people’s minds. There are less cars out there. No one wants to come out. No one knows what comes next.”
8) Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters Soaked by Water Cannons in Clash With Police By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH
Law enforcement officials in North Dakota and protesters opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline clashed in below-freezing weather on Sunday night, as hundreds of demonstrators were pushed back from a bridge by water cannons.
In a statement late on Sunday, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department characterized the demonstration as an “ongoing riot,” releasing photos that it said showed protesters “setting fires and using aggressive tactics” while trying to dismantle a police barricade on Backwater Bridge, which has for months been the site of an protest against the pipeline.
The statement did not address what dispersal methods the department had used against what it estimated to be a crowd of about 400 protesters. Calls and emails to the sheriff’s office were not immediately returned Monday morning.
Rob Keller, a spokesman for the department, told The Bismark Tribunethat water was being used for crowd control, adding that water cannons had also been used to douse the fires.
The paper reported that protesters had started a dozen fires and that officers from the sheriff’s department had said that rocks and logs were being thrown at them. One officer was struck in the head, it said. The Associated Press reported that at least one person was arrested.
Dallas Goldtooth, a spokesman for the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a phone interview on Monday that the Oceti Sakowin medical team, which had been working in tandem with medics from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, had reported that nearly 200 people were injured and 12 people were hospitalized for head injuries. One protester went into cardiac arrest and was revived by the medic team, he said.
The medical teams attributed many of the injuries to rubber bullets, pepper spray and shrapnel from concussion grenades, according to Mr. Goldtooth, and said that water sprayed from cannons caused early signs of hypothermia. The air temperature in the area was about 23 degrees at 10:15 p.m., according to the National Weather Service.
“I would love to emphasize here that this entire situation is ripe with irony,” Mr. Goldtooth said, adding that on Friday, the Morton County sheriff, Kyle Kirchmeier, had urged the protesters to leave their camps because they might be unfamiliar with the harshness of North Dakota winters.
Late last month, tensions boiled over at a protest camp near Backwater Bridge when law enforcement officials forced demonstrators out of the area. That confrontation led to the arrests of more than 140 protesters and resulted in the setting of multiple fires.
Reports coming out of the conflict have been highly contested, with law enforcement officials and protesters leveling substantive accusations of violence at each other.
Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said in a phone interview Monday that the measures law enforcement officials took on Sunday represented a clear escalation of violence.
“The use of water in freezing temperatures just goes to show that they’re being more aggressive and they’re actually trying to hurt people,” he said, his voice grave. “This is far more threatening to human life than any other time of confrontation with law enforcement.”
A live video of Sunday’s protests was posted by a demonstrator named Kevin Gilbertt, who identifies himself on Facebook as a poet and videographer. Early Monday morning, the often-grainy and unclear video had been viewed over 3 million times.
Senator Bernie Sanders shared Mr. Gilbertt’s video on his Facebook page, and called for President Obama to “take all appropriate measures” to protect the protesters.
Senator Sanders also reposted a tweet that said that law enforcement officials were spraying Native Americans with water cannons in 26-degree weather.
The conflict over the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline has lasted for months, as Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based company, attempts to finish construction of the 1,170-mile project
In an interview with The Associated Press published on Friday, Kelcy Warren, the company’s chief executive, said that the company had no alternative but to stick to the plan for construction.
“There’s not another way. We’re building at that location,” Mr. Warren said.
Native Americans, environmental activists and others have said that the pipeline, which would carry oil from North Dakota to Illinois, threatens the local water supply and would also harm sacred Native American grounds.
In an interview with NPR last month, Dave Archambault, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said that while protesters were asked to “remain prayerful and peaceful” that it was “hard to resist reacting” given the dual pressures coming from Energy Transfer Partners and law enforcement.
“Our purpose is to protect the water,” he said. “And no matter what we do, nobody cares. They’re going to force this down our throats again.”
9) Raising 5 Sons Alone, 3 With Autism, Takes a Toll on a Mother’s Body By JOHN OTIS
Though Melissa Ferrer moved into her new home in July, she has refused to paint her sons’ bedroom walls blue. She does not dare get too comfortable, a symptom of her years of homelessness.
Ms. Ferrer, 33, is a single mother of five sons. All of them have spent portions of their childhoods in New York City’s shelter system. What made the experience even worse, Ms. Ferrer said, was that her three youngest children — Aiden Soto, 3; Angel Soto, 7; and Justin Ferrer, 8 — are autistic. They also have attention-deficit disorder and anxiety disorders.
“It’s not a good life,” she said. “It’s hard and it’s stressful and it hurts. Not only for me to live that life but to see the children living that life and to know you’re not stable.”
Last year, she made a successful bid for affordable housing in the Bronx. But in her haste to move, she signed the rental agreement without proper due diligence. The apartment flooded every time it rained. Mold grew on the walls. The heat did not work. Insulation was shoddy. Bugs wiggled up through broken floorboards, traumatizing Justin, who has an insect phobia.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and I lived in shelters,” Ms. Ferrer said. “Animals were coming in and my kids, my children, are sleeping, getting bit by ants.”
This summer, with the help of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times’s Neediest Cases Fund, the family moved into a safer, cleaner home in the Bronx. Drawing from the Neediest funds, Catholic Charities also provided $321 in school clothes for the children.
Despite escaping the gloomy shelters and crumbling apartments, a steady beat of chaos remains.
On a recent afternoon at the family’s apartment, her sons’ mercurial temperaments were on display. They slammed doors and shouted and wailed in constant fits. Glass trinkets were removed from a coffee table and placed in a less precarious spot. One of her sons repeatedly threw a water bottle around the living room. Another snatched a tablet from his brother as he was watching a video.
“God must be giving me the strength, because I don’t know where a woman like me can have so much patience,” Ms. Ferrer said.
Her oldest children, Matthew Ferrer, 18, and Javon Murphy, 13, do their part to corral and calm their younger siblings. Ms. Ferrer speaks glowingly about Matthew in particular. He is rarely home, often working a food-service job to keep the house afloat. Her pride is coupled with guilt.
“He’s young, he doesn’t have any children,” she said. “He shouldn’t be having to deal with that.”
Ms. Ferrer is responsible for paying the roughly $1,000 monthly rent. She receives $1,486 every month in Social Security disability benefits for her three youngest children, $270 in food stamps and $300 that Matthew pitches in from his job. She does not receive child support from her children’s fathers, and because of her autistic sons’ care requirements, she has not worked in more than eight years, since shortly before Justin was born.
“I never thought I’d see myself the way I’m seeing myself, struggling so much,” she said.
The family’s tight finances are a steady source of anxiety for Ms. Ferrer, who worries her family may once again be without a home. As long as she has one, she is meticulous about keeping it pristine. She said she simply cannot tolerate dirty things.
Each morning, she races to get her four school-age children ready. They all attend different schools, riding different buses that arrive at different times. She does it all alone. The children’s fathers cannot be relied on, Ms. Ferrer said, and although she has many family members nearby, they do not help.
“You would think, having such a big family, that we’d be together but we’re not,” she said. “Everybody’s in their own world.”
Her stress is visible. Large clumps of her hair have fallen out. She has cut her hair short to make it less noticeable. Her knees and legs ache from spending long hours on her feet, and she has begun to have panic attacks.
“I might look 33, but I’ll tell you one thing, inside my body, I don’t feel 33,” said Ms. Ferrer. “I feel like I’m 70 years old.”
She dreams of going on vacation, even for a day or two, but she knows it will not be reality. Instead, respite comes in short doses at the end of the day. When her children are in bed, she showers, reflects and thanks God for giving her and her family another day.
“I’m so tired,” Ms. Ferrer said. “Then I’ll get up at five in the morning, and do this all over again.”
10) Man Is Fatally Shot and 2 Officers Are Hurt at Brooklyn Housing Complex By ELI ROSENBERG and EVAN GERSHKOVICH
A man was fatally shot by the police at a public housing complex in Brooklyn on Saturday after he hit two officers with a police baton he had grabbed from one of them, the police said.
The officers, who were in uniform, went to a building in the Van Dyke I Houses in the Brownsville neighborhood around 1:30 p.m. in response to a 911 call about a suspicious man, the police said.
The officers approached a man on the building’s ninth floor and asked for his identification and a “scuffle” ensued, according to James Secreto, chief of the Police Department’s Housing Bureau. The man grabbed a baton from one of the officers and began hitting them both on the head, Chief Secreto said.
Both officers then shot the man, who was pronounced dead at the scene, at 362 Sutter Avenue, the police said. Relatives and the police identified the man as Erickson Gomez Brito, 21, of 563 Mother Gaston Boulevard.
One of the officers sustained a two-inch gash on his head, the police said. Both officers were taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center for treatment, where they were in stable condition, the police said.
Omahis Gomez Brito, 19, the victim’s sister, said her brother had been treated for depression three years ago but had not been taking medication recently. She also said he was treated for addiction at that time, but she did not specify for what.
Speaking to reporters outside the building where she and Mr. Brito lived with their parents, Ms. Brito said: “I want justice for my brother. I want to know why they killed him.”
Mr. Brito’s father, Osiris Gomez, said in Spanish that his son was not violent.
Mr. Brito’s aunt lives in the building where the shooting occurred, relatives said. Ms. Brito said the aunt lived on the first floor, and she was not sure why her brother was on the ninth.
The 22-building Van Dyke I complex is in the 73rd Precinct as well as in the middle of a nine-block area that is among the poorest in the city, according to an analysis done by Queens College in 2014. There had been 12 homicides in the precinct this year, though none at the complex, Police Department statistics show.
Katt Williams, who lives in the neighborhood, said she knew Mr. Brito. “Minds his business,” she said. “It’s sad.”
J. David Goodman and Christopher Mele contributed reporting.
11) Land Mine Casualties Jump 75% as Funding for Their Removal Declines By RICK GLADSTONE
Despite a global treaty that bans land mines, casualties from those weapons and other unexploded munitions lurking in current and past war zones rose sharply last year to the highest point in a decade, a monitoring group said Tuesday in its annual report.
The group, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, also said that financial contributions toward efforts to remove land mines plunged by nearly a quarter last year. It was the third consecutive annual decline in funding, imperiling a pledge by treaty members to complete mine clearance by 2025.
In another setback to the treaty’s goals, the number of countries and areas where land mines are known to exist rose to 64 last year, from 61 in 2014, the report said. It attributed the increase to the use of antipersonnel mines in Nigeria, including improvised mines, and to new data on mines that had already been present in Palau and Mozambique.
The casualty increase was primarily because of the armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, according to the report, which said better availability of data on victims was also a factor.
It said that 6,461 people were known to have been wounded or killed by land mines and other explosive remnants of war in 2015. That was a 75 percent increase from 2014 and the highest reported casualty total since 2006’s figure of 6,573.
“The decade-high number of new casualties caused by land mines and unexploded ordnance, and the continued suffering of civilians, more than a third of whom were children, proves again that these indiscriminate weapons should never be used by anyone,” said Loren Persi Vicentic, one of the editors of the annual report, Landmine Monitor 2016.
The land mine treaty, which took effect in 1999, bans the use of mines and other victim-activated explosive devices placed on or under the ground. They are designed to detonate when a person unwittingly walks over them or is nearby, and they can remain lethal even after lying dormant for many years.
Land mines have long posed a safety threat to civilians, particularly children, who step on the explosives or find them, sometimes well after a conflict has ended.
Landmine Monitor 2016 was released in advance of the 15th meeting of countries that have signed the treaty. The meeting is to begin Monday in Santiago, Chile. At least 162 countries have signed the treaty. Thirty-five countries remain outside the treaty, including China, Russia and the United States. Most of them do not use or produce land mines.
More than 50 countries manufactured land mines before the treaty, a number that has since dwindled to 11. The Landmine Monitor report said the most active producers were India, Myanmar, Pakistan and South Korea.
12) Trump Foundation Won’t Pay Any of $25 Million University Settlement By MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN
Donald J. Trump’s charitable foundation will not be paying any of the $25 million settlement to resolve a series of lawsuits concerning Trump University, the president-elect’s defunct for-profit education venture that drew customer complaints about price gouging.
Representatives for Mr. Trump sent a one-paragraph letter on Friday to Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, stating that no funding for the settlement would come from “any charitable foundation or other charitable entity.”
A copy of the letter, from Alan Garten, executive vice president and general counsel for the Trump Organization, was reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Garten did not respond to a request for comment.
In the past, Mr. Trump has used money from his charitable foundation, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, to settle lawsuits arising from his business and personal activities. Last month, in the heat of the presidential campaign, The Washington Post reported that more than a quarter of a million dollars from Mr. Trump’s charity had been used to settle legal disputes.
“Given Mr. Trump’s reported history of using his charity’s money to fund his and his businesses’ legal settlements, we demanded written assurance that the Trump University settlement would not be paid for by any charitable entity,” said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general.
Mr. Schneiderman sued Trump University in 2013, and his office helped negotiate the settlement, which also resolved two class-action lawsuits filed in federal court in San Diego. One of those suits was scheduled to go to trial in a few days. The settlement foreclosed the possibility of a potentially embarrassing situation for Mr. Trump as he moves forward in putting together his administration.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said he did not like settling lawsuits and insisted that students found Trump University to be “wonderful” and “beautiful.” He took to Twitter early Saturday to say: “The only bad thing about winning the presidency is that I did not have the time to go through a long but winning trial on Trump U. Too bad!”
The lawsuits said that Trump University, which was in business from 2004 to 2010, cheated students out of thousands of dollars in tuition through high-pressure sales tactics and deceptive claims about the program. About 7,000 students will be eligible to recoup some of the money they spent on tuition. The settlement still requires the court’s approval.
Some Trump University students paid as much as $35,000 in tuition. One of them, Jeffrey Tufenkian told The New York Times in 2011 that his experience at Trump University “was almost completely worthless.” He said the program had wiped out much of his and his wife’s savings.
It was not known whether an insurance policy taken out by Trump University would cover any part of the settlement.
Customarily, settlements can be taken as a tax deduction by a business, and that appears to be the case in this situation. However, a $1 million penalty for violating state education laws in New York, which is part of the settlement package, may not qualify for a deduction.
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Chelsea has been informed that the Army will hold another disciplinary hearing on the second attempted suicide, which was prompted by the punishment given by the first disciplinary hearing following her initial suicide attempt.
New York Times
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.
