Sunday, August 20, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 2017

ILWU Local 10 March to Stop the Fascists in San Francisco Saturday, August 16, 2017, 10:00 A.M.

400 North Point St, San Francisco, CA 94133,

United States

Port shutdown and march to Crissy Field by Local 10 ILWU.

Motion to Stop the Fascists in San Francisco

[ILWU Local 10. August 2017]

Whereas, the fascists, the KKK, Nazis and other white supremacists rallied and marched by torchlight in Charlottesville, whipping up lynch mob terror with racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic slogans, and

Whereas, that attack resulted in one anti-racist counter demonstrator murdered and many others injured when one of the fascist bullies ran them down with a car, and

Whereas, President Trump’s whitewashing this violent, deadly fascist and racist attack saying “both sides are to blame”, and his attacking anti-racists for opposing Confederate statues that honor slavery adds fuel to the fire of racist violence, and

Whereas, the Klan, Nazis and other racist terrorists represent a deadly threat to African Americans, Latinos and immigrants, as well as Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people among many others, and directly to members of our union and the labor movement as a whole, and

Whereas, the fascist “Patriot Prayer” group that staged violent racist provocations in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere, attracting Nazi and other violent white supremacists, has announced it will rally on Crissy Field on Saturday August 26, and

Whereas, far from a matter of “free speech”, the racist and fascist provocations are a deadly menace as shown in Portland on May 26 when a Nazi murdered two men and almost killed a third for defending two young African American women he was menacing; and our sisters and brothers in the Portland labor movement answered racist terror with the power of workers solidarity, mobilizing members of 14 unions against the fascist/racist rally there on June 4, and

Whereas, ILWU Local 10 has a long and proud history of standing up against racism, fascism and bigotry and using our union power to do so; on May Day 2015 we shut down Bay Area ports and marched followed by thousands to Oscar Grant Plaza demanding an end to police terror against African Americans and others; the San Francisco Bay Area is a union stronghold and we will not allow labor-hating white supremacists to bring their lynch mob terror here,

Therefore, ILWU Local 10 in the best tradition of our union that fought these rightwingers in the Big Strike of 1934, will not work on that day and instead march to Crissy Field to stop the racist, fascist intimidation in our hometown and invite all unions and antiracist and antifascist organizations to join us defending unions, racial minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, women and all the oppressed.

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Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? (City Lights Open Media)

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

A Book Review by Robert Fantina

With the recent acquittal of two more police officers in the deaths of unarmed Black men, the question posed by the title of this book is as relevant as it ever was. Through a series of concise, clear essays, Mumia Abu-Jamal details the racism against Blacks, comparing today's behaviors with the lynchings that were common in the south prior to the decade of the sixties. He points out the obvious: The passage of Civil Rights legislation hasn't changed much; it simply changed the way racism operates.

The ways in which the white establishment has worked to oppress Blacks is astounding. After the Civil War, when slavery was no longer legal, "whites realized that the combination of trumped-up legal charges and forced labor as punishment created both a desirable business proposition and an incredibly effective tool for intimidating rank-and-file emancipated African Americans and doing away with their most effective leaders."

Abu-Jamal states that, today, "where once whites killed and terrorized from beneath a KKK hood, now they now did so openly from behind a little badge." He details the killing of Black men and women in the U.S. with almost complete impunity.

There are two related issues Abu-Jamal discusses. The first is the rampant racism that enables the police to kill unarmed Blacks, as young as 12 years old, for no reason, and the second is the "justice" system that allows them to get away with it.

One shocking crime, amid countless others, occurred in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2012; a police officer was acquitted in the deaths of two, unarmed Blacks, after leaping onto the hood of their car and firing 15 rounds from his semi-automatic rifle into the car's occupants. That is 137 shots, at point blank range, into the bodies of two unarmed people.

If this were an anomaly, it would be barbaric, but it is not: it is common practice for the police to kill unarmed Blacks, and, on the rare occasions that they are charged with a crime, for the judges and juries to acquit them.

In the U.S., Black citizens are disproportionally imprisoned. With for-profit prisons on the rise, this injustice will only increase.

Abu-Jamal relates story after story with the same plot, and only the names are different. An unarmed Black man is stopped by the police for any of a variety of reasons ranging from trivial (broken tail light), to more significant (suspect in a robbery). But too often, the outcome is the same: the Black man is dead and the police officer who killed him, more often than not white, is either not charged, or acquitted after being charged.

The Black Lives Matter movement formed to combat this blatant injustice, but it will be an uphill battle. As Abu-Jamal says, "Police serve the ownership and wealth classes of their societies, not the middling or impoverished people. For the latter, it is quite the reverse." As a result, people of color suffer disproportionately, too often winding up on the wrong side of a gun.

What is to be done? Abu-Jamal refers to the writings of Dr. Huey P. Newton, who calls not for community policing, but for community control of the police. Abu-Jamal argues forcefully for a new movement, "driven by commitment, ethics, intelligence, solidarity, and passions; for without passion, the embers may dim and die."

Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? is powerful, disturbing, well-written, and an important book for our day.

Robert Fantina is the author of Empire, Racism and Genocide: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy. His articles on foreign policy, most frequently concerning Israel and Palestine, have appeared in such venues as Counterpunch and WarIsaCrime.org.

—New York Journal of Books, July 2017

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/Black-lives

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Haiti: Stop the Repression.

No impunity. NO NEW ARMY

The people of Haiti need our solidarity in the face of the increasing violence of the fraudulently imposed government of Jovenel Moise

Thursday July 14, 2017, in Petionville, Haiti, near Port-au-Prince, a young book vendor was shot to death by a police officer in front of horrified witnesses. The police used tear gas and batons against a crowd outraged by the murder and the quick, forcible removal of the body in a perceived attempt at a cover up. This is the latest of recent extra-judicial killings by the Haitian police and paramilitary forces.

The brutal killing occurred as the occupation government of Jovenel Moise, installed in the fraudulent elections of November 2016, is pushing to restore the brutal and corrupt Haitian military, which was disbanded by then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995. Moise has stated that he wants the Army back within two years. Haitians remember the US-supported bloody rampage by former members of this army that claimed thousands of lives during the period of the 2004 coup d'etat against the elected government. The US/UN forces and occupation governments subsequently integrated many of these killers into the Haitian police and government paramilitary units.

This announcement takes place at a volatile moment in Haitian society. The Haitian police and other government paramilitary forces, accompanied by UN occupation forces, have carried out criminal attacks against protesting teachers, students, factory workers, market women, street vendors and others who are victims of government extortion, theft of land, money and merchandise.

On July 10 - 12, 2017, during three days of peaceful protest for an increase in the minimum wage, Haitian police attacked the workers from the industrial park in Port-au-Prince with tear gas, batons and cannons shooting a liquid skin irritant. One of the beaten workers is a woman who had recently returned to work from giving birth.

·      On June 12, the government-appointed rector of the Haitian State University used his car to hit and run over a protesting university student. The government prosecutor has ignored the complaint filed by the students against the rector and is instead pursuing the victim's colleagues in a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate them.

·      In May 2017, units of the Haitian police and paramilitary forces again attacked the people of Arcahaie protesting the government's plan to remove the main revenue-generating district from the community, located about 30 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince.

·      In May 2017, a food vendor in Petionville was killed after he was deliberately hit and run over by a car of the municipal paramilitary forces according to outraged witnesses.

·      On March 20th, 2017, police officers were videotaped shooting at the car carrying President Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas presidential candidate Dr. Maryse Narcisse as they returned from court. The police officers were reportedly observed returning to the national palace; there was no condemnation of this blatant assassination attempt by the government.

Adding a newly organized Haitian Army to this mix is a sign that the Haitian government is planning on more repression. The Haitian military's purpose was to protect Haitian dictatorships and to attack any challenges by the Haitian people.  Whether under the Duvalier dictatorships from 1957-1986 or when the military overthrew the democratically elected Aristide government in 1991, leading to the killing of over 5000 people, the military has been a central anti-democratic institution in Haitian society. When then-President Aristide disbanded the narco-trafficking Haitian military in 1995, the Army was eating up 40% of the national budget in a country with fewer than two doctors per 10,000 people.

Now this infamous military is being restored just as the United Nations is said to begin a staged withdrawal of its troops. This is similar to what happened following the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, a period in which 20,000 Haitians were killed. As the U.S. forces withdrew, they left in place a neo-colonial army with Haitian faces to do their bidding and continue the repression of popular discontent.

Haitians are saying NO to the restoration of an additional repressive military force.  They are demanding an end to police terror and an end to impunity.  We join their call.

E-mail and phone-in campaign to:

·       Say No to the Restoration of the brutal Haitian military

·       Hold the US and UN occupation accountable for the terror campaign by the Haitian police and security forces they train and supervise.

·       Say No to impunity for police terror in Haiti

Contact:

-  US State Department: HaitiSpecialCoordinator@state.gov

-  Your Member of Congress: 202-224 3121

- UN Mission in Haiti: minustah-info@un.org

Sent by Haiti Action Committee

www.haitisolidarity.net

@HaitiAction1 and on FACEBOOK

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

B) ARTICLES IN FULL

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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MILLIONS FOR PRISONERS HUMAN RIGHTS MARCH ON WASHINGTON - AUGUST 19, 2017

Millions For Prisoners Human Rights march and rally, Washington, DC, August 19, 2017

March participants are asked to meet at Freedom Plaza, located at the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW at 11:00 am, but may arrive as early as 9 am. The March will begin promptly at 11:30 am from Freedom Plaza to Lafayette Park where the Rally will begin at 12 noon and will continue until 5. Individuals who are unable to participate in the Marching demonstration can go straight to Lafayette Square, directly north of the White House on H Street, Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 16th Street NW.

Millions for Prisoners Human Rights core demands for Action:

A) We DEMAND the 13th amendment ENSLAVEMENT CLAUSE of the United States Constitution be amended to abolish LEGALIZED slavery in America.

B) We DEMAND a Congressional hearing on the 13th Amendment ENSLAVEMENT CLAUSE being recognized as in violation of international law, the general principles of human rights and its direct links to:

Private entities exploiting prison labor

Companies overcharging prisoners for goods and services

Private entities contracted by states/federal government to build and operate prisons. This would also include immigration detentions

Racial disparities in America's prison population and sentencing

Policing: the disproportionate (unaccountable) killings by police in the black and brown communities

Felony Disenfranchisement laws

Immigration and Customs Enforcement 34,000 detention quotas

Producing the world largest prison population

There are multiple ways to get from Union Station to Freedom Plaza and Lafayette Park. The easiest way might be to walk or take a metrobus or train. Please visit WMATA to find the best option. Cars and other vehicles can utilize Union Station Parking Garage, 30 Massachusetts Ave NE, Washington, DC 20002. Buses can utilize Union Station – Bus & RV, 1st St NE, Washington, DC 20002. For specific parking fee information and to make reservations please visit https://www.ecolonial.com/

Supporters across the nation are planning solidarity events to coincide with the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March on August 19th in Washington. Thus far events are being held in Riverside CA, San Jose CA, Asheville NC, Montgomery AL, Carrabelle FL, Kansas City MO, St Louis MO, Albuquerque NM, Duluth MN and Omaha NE.

Visit iamweubuntu.com to stay connected or get involved.

LOC's (Local Organizing Committees) are being established in cities all throughout the country to bring awareness and promote the March on Washington!

Additional Support is need in the following areas:

– Lawyers – Legal Observer – Lobbyist – Public Relations – Event Planners – Fundraisers

Please contact us if you want to support us in these or other areas:

Email: millionsforprisonersmarch@gmail.com
Tel.: 803-220-4553
Website: www.iamweubuntu.com
Facebook: Facebook.com/groups/MillionsforPrisonersMarch/
Twitter: Twitter.com/milli4prisoners
Address:
iamWE
P.O Box 58201
Raleigh NC 27658

Update 6-24-2017:
More details here.

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CODEPINK Fall Action at Creech:

Oct. 5 to Oct. 12 (All welcome!)

(Oct. 7 is the 16th Anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan)

SHUT DOWN CREECH: Spring 2018: Apr. 8-14. (National Mass Mobilization to Resist Killer Drones)

(Thanks to Sandy Turner, from Ukiah, CA, for sharing this link!)

The Pentagon and CIA now have Brett Velicovich, their own drone veteran and CEO of an "online drone retail store" (Dronepire, Inc. and Expert Drones) , to glorify drone killing. Shameful that NPR couldn't ask the very difficult and important questions. Lots of public education is needed to help people separate fact from fiction!

Would love for someone to do research on this guy!

Please listen to this interview (filled with misinformation), and consider joining us at Creech in the fall and/or spring to be a voice against the slaughter.

(Dates below).

Life As A 'Drone Warrior'

http://www.npr.org/2017/07/08/536125111/life-as-a-drone-warrior

NPR interview "with Brett Velicovich about his memoir, Drone Warrior, which details his time hunting and killing alleged terrorists using drones in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places."

http://www.npr.org/2017/07/08/536125111/life-as-a-drone-warrior

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/drone-warrior-author-brett-velicovich-hunting-terrorists/

PS: We should have a massive letter writing and phone calling to NPR for this totally biased and dangerous misrepresentation!

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SIGN THE PETITION: DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST REALITY WINNER

https://couragetoresist.org/drop-charges-reality-winner/

Jun 8, 2017

Department of Justice:

Drop the changes against Ms. Reality L. Winner, the defense contractor who allegedly shared with the media evidence of attacks against US election systems by foreign agents. This information should not have been classified. Ms. Winner's prosecution appears politically motivated.

Courage to Resist will attempt to keep signers of the Reality Winners petition up-to-date with periodic news and alerts from her family and attorney. You will be able to opt out at any time.

WHY ALLEGED WHISTLE-BLOWER REALITY WINNER DESERVES SUPPORT

BY JEFF PATERSON, COURAGE TO RESIST. JUNE 8, 2017

Reality Winner is a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who was arrested in Augusta, Georgia on June 3rd. She allegedly released classified NSA documents to The Intercept, which were the basis for a story about Russian hacking efforts against US election systems leading up to last year's presidential election. Reality is currently in the Lincoln County Jail in Georgia, and faces up to ten years in prison.

Reality Winner—yes, that is her given legal name—did the right thing, and she should be defended.

Reality allegedly leaked information regarding attempted interference in an election, tampering that many believe assisted in Donald Trump's presidential win—despite earning nearly four million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The documents published by The Interceptonly confirm earlier accounts of US election hacking attempts and, given the current administration's extreme antagonisms against facts, the release of these documents was clearly in the public interest. Like the vast majority of government documents that are hidden from public view, these reports should have been declassified by now anyway.

Now Trump's own Department of Justice has targeted Reality. It's a sinister move, but on the other hand, simply a continuation Obama's unprecedented zeal in prosecuting whistle-blowers. Trump inherited an atrocious War on Leaks, and Reality is the latest victim of that war. Her arrest is a signal to the world, and the four million other Americans with access to classified information: Only sanctioned leaks benefiting the government will be tolerated.

There's a striking hypocrisy to Trump's crackdown. Less than a month ago the President was criticized for carelessly leaking classified information to Russian officials during a White House meeting. We now know this information concerned a bomb that is being developed by ISIS. This is standard operating procedure: lawmakers have no issue leaking classified information if it somehow furthers their interest, but they aggressively prosecute citizens who expose actual wrongdoing.

I believe that Reality Winner's possible actions should be understood within the context of recent heroic whistleblowing. Shortly before leaving office, Barack Obama commuted the remaining sentence of US Army soldier Chelsea Manning, who was facing 27 more years in prison for exposing war crimes and corruption. Edward Snowden, who leaked information about our government's massive spying program, was granted asylum in Russia but faces espionage charges back home. Just like Manning, it seems that Reality was able to see the inner workings of the United States' war machine.

She served in the Air Force from 2013 until early this year, working as a linguist. Like Snowden, she would have had a better view than most as to how our security state works. Up until last week, she was a military defense contractor with the Pluribus International Corporation in the suburbs outside of Augusta, Georgia, and had Top Secret security clearance.

The US government has spent tens of millions of dollars in better auditing capabilities since the disclosures by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Those that would rather keep the public in the dark as to what their government is doing with their tax dollars and in their name, have redoubled their efforts to identify whistle-blowers much more quickly. Winner's arrest was facilitated by the government's increased ability to more easily identify the relatively small number of people that recently accessed documents in question as well as the yellow-colored, nearly-invisible micro dots that most color printers today use to include a printer's serial number and time stamp on each printed page. This appears to have contributed to the focus on Reality Winner.

Reality is expected to plead not guilty to charges against her today. We don't know exactly why she allegedly released the NSA documents to the press, but we do have some insight into her views about the world. Her social media accounts show a woman who, like a clear majority of Americans, is critical of Donald Trump. She has also voiced support for Edward Snowden, and opposition to the US fabricating a reason to attack Iran.

According to The Intercept, [Winner's leak] "ratchets up the stakes of the ongoing investigations into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives . . . If collusion can ultimately be demonstrated – a big if at this point – then the assistance on Russia's part went beyond allegedly hacking email to serve a propaganda campaign, and bled into an attack on U.S. election infrastructure itself."

We are talking about a potentially monumental story that might require prosecutions, but Reality Winner shouldn't be the one who ends up in jail. While the details of the story continue to unfold, by all indications she deserves our support, and the release of these documents should be celebrated.

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Solidarity Statement from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners

Friends,

CCWP sent the solidarity statement below expressing support with the hunger strikers at the Northwest County Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma Washington, one of the largest immigration prisons in the country. People at NWDC, including many women, undertook the hunger strike starting at the beginning of April 2017 to protest the horrendous conditions they are facing. Although the peak of the hunger strike was a few weeks ago, the strikers set a courageous example of resistance for people in detention centers and prisons around the country.

Here is a link to a Democracy Now! interview with Maru Villalpando of Northwest Detention Center Resistance (http://www.nwdcresistance.org/) and Alexis Erickson, partner of one of the hunger strikers, Cristian Lopez.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/14/700_immigrants_on_hunger_strike_at

For live updates, visit:

https://www.facebook.com/NWDCResistance/

California Coalition for Women Prisoners Statement

California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) stands in solidarity with the hunger strikers, many of them women, detained by ICE at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC), a private prison operated by the GEO group contracted by ICE in Washington state. We applaud the detainees at NORCOR, a county jail in rural Oregon, who recently won their demands after sustaining six days without meals.

Since April 10th, those detained in NWDC have refused meals to demand changes to the abhorrent conditions of their detention, including poor quality food, insufficient medical care, little to no access to family visits, legal counsel or legal documents, and lack of timely court proceedings. Hunger strikes are a powerful method of resistance within prisons that require commitment and courage from prisoners and their families. We have seen this historically in California when tens-of-thousands of prisoners refused meals to protest solitary confinement in 2011 and 2013, and also currently in Palestine where over 1,500 prisoners are on hunger strike against the brutal conditions of Israeli prisons.

As the Trump administration continues to escalate its attacks on Latinx/Chicanx and Arab/Muslim communities, deportations and detentions serve as strategies to control, remove, and erase people—a violence made possible in a context of inflamed xenophobia and increasingly visible and virulent racism. We stand with the families of those detained as well as organizations and collectives on the ground in Washington State struggling to expose the situation inside these facilities as well as confront the escalating strategies of the Trump administration.

CCWP recognizes the common struggle for basic human dignity and against unconstitutional cruel and inhumane treatment that people of color and immigrants face in detention centers, jails, and prisons across the United States. We also sadly recognize from our work with people in women's prisons the retaliatory tactics such as prison transfers and solitary confinement that those who fight oppression face. Similar abuses continue to occur across California at all of its prisons and detention centers, including the GEO-run women's prison in McFarland, California.. CCWP sends love and solidarity to the hunger strikers in the Northwest. Together we can break down the walls that tear our families and communities apart. ¡ya basta! #Ni1Más #Not1More

Northwest Detention Center Press Release May 4, 2017

Despite threats and retaliation, hunger strikers continue protest

ICE ignores demands for improved conditions

Tacoma, Washington/The Dalles, Oregon—Immigrants held at ICE facilities in two states—the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC), run by GEO Group, and NORCOR, a rural public jail—continued their hunger strike today, despite growing weakness from lack of food. The exponential growth of immigration detention has led ICE to contract the function of detaining immigrants out to both private prison companies and to county governments, with both treating immigrants as a source of profit. ICE has been using NORCOR as "overflow" detention space for immigrants held at NWDC, and is regularly transferring people back and forth from the NWDC to NORCOR. People held at NORCOR have limited access to lawyers and to the legal documents they need to fight and win their deportation cases. They are often transferred back to NWDC only for their hearings, then shipped back to NORCOR, where they face terrible conditions. Jessica Campbell of the Rural Organizing Project affirmed, "No one deserves to endure the conditions at NORCOR—neither the immigrants ICE is paying to house there, nor the people of Oregon who end up there as part of criminal processes. It's unsafe for everyone."

The strike began on April 10th, when 750 people at the NWDC began refusing meals. The protest spread to NORCOR this past weekend. Maru Mora Villalpando of NWDC Resistance confirmed, "It's very clear from our contact with people inside the facilities and with family members of those detained that the hunger strike continues in both Oregon and Washington State." She continued, "The question for us is, how will ICE assure that the abuses that these whistle-blowing hunger strikers have brought to light are addressed?"

From the beginning of the protest, instead of using the strike as an opportunity to look into the serious concerns raised by the hunger strikers, ICE and GEO have both denied the strike is occurring and retaliated against strikers. Hunger strikers have been transferred to NORCOR in retaliation for their participation. One person who refused transfer to NORCOR was put in solitary confinement. Just this week, hunger striking women have been threatened with forced feeding—a practice that is recognized under international law to be torture. In an attempt to break their spirit, hunger strikers have been told the strike has been ineffective and that the public is ignoring it.

Hunger striker demands terrible conditions inside detention center be addressed—including the poor quality of the food, the dollar-a-day pay, and the lack of medical care. They also call for more expedited court proceedings and the end of transfers between detention facilities. Hunger strikers consistently communicate, "We are doing this for our families." Despite their incredibly oppressive conditions, locked away and facing deportation in an immigration prison in the middle of an industrial zone and in a rural county jail, hunger strikers have acted collectively and brought national attention to the terrible conditions they face and to the ongoing crisis of deportations, conditions the U.S. government must address.Latino Advocacy

Maru Mora Villalpando

www.latinoadvocacy.org

For live updates, visit:

https://www.facebook.com/NWDCResistance/

News mailing list: News@womenprisoners.org

http://womenprisoners.org/mailman/listinfo/news_womenprisoners.org

Activist Goes on Hunger Strike Outside the Northwest Detention Center

Maru Mora Villalpando Joins the Tacoma 12 and Adelanto 9 in Calling for an End to Human Rights Abuses in Immigrant Detention

Tacoma, WA - On Monday, June 19th, Maru Mora Villalpando, member of the NWDC Resistance, will begin a hunger strike to call attention to the plight of up to 1,600 immigrants held in detention suffering human rights abuses at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). On June 15, 2017, at least a dozen detainees went on hunger strike to call attention to inhumane detention conditions, refusing to eat for multiple days. By June 18, NWDC Resistance organizers received reports that more than 25 hunger strikers are calling on GEO Group to provide edible, nutritious food, on ICE to provide fair and timely hearings, and on civil society to step up and take action for the injustices in our communities. In response, Maru Mora Villalpando is going on hunger strike, and is joined by other members of civil society who are stepping up their solidarity.

As hunger strikers on the inside are discussing ceasing their strike on the inside, Maru will keep the hunger strike continuous by holding space on the outside. A female hunger striker in detention said: "I feel more deteriorated every day, more bad, more worse, because of what we are living through and what we are seeing inside. What we are suffering is horrible, horrible. Here they don't care what conditions we are living in… they don't care about anything." To listen to her story, go to: http://bit.ly/2sIyXzZ

GEO Group's human rights abuses are not a case of "bad apples." Just this week, GEO employees have refused to complete basic maintenance, such as repairing a broken air conditioner when projected temperatures are expected to reach 78 degrees. Likewise, people in detention have noted repeated problems with incorrect medications resulting in hospital visits, suicide attempts, and inadequate access to medical treatment -- even in diagnosed cases of malignant cancers.

There are also 9 asylum seekers on hunger strike at the GEO-owned Adelanto Detention Facility in Southern California. Rather than releasing asylum seekers pending their hearing, they were subjected to further trauma -- pepper spray, beating and solitary confinement. The #Adelanto9 continue on hunger strike to call attention to these blatant human rights abuses, meaning that people inside and outside detention centers are on hunger strike throughout the West Coast.

Call to Action: Hunger strikers and solidarity supporters are holding down a 24-7 encampment outside the Northwest Detention Center. Please join them to show people held in detention that they are not alone, and the state of Washington will no longer tolerate human rights abuses!

For live updates on the #Tacoma12 and solidarity hunger strikes, visithttps://www.facebook.com/ NWDCResistance/.

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NWDC Resistance is a volunteer community group that emerged to fight deportations in 2014 at the now-infamous Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA. NWDC Resistance is part of the #Not1More campaign and supported people detained who organized hunger strikes asking for a halt to all deportations and better treatment and conditions.

Contact: Maru Mora Villalpando, (206) 251 6658, maru@latinoadvocacy.org

#Tacoma12 #Adelanto9 #Not1More #NoEstánSolos

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Labor Studies and Radical History

4444 Geary Blvd., Suite 207, San Francisco, CA 94118

415.387.5700

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/mayday.html

Hours

(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day

We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

Services

Reference Librarian On-site

Email and Telephone Reference

Interlibrary Loan

Online Public Access Catalog

Microfilm Reader/Printer

DVD and VCR players

Photocopier

Quiet well-lighted place for study and research

For an appointment or further information, please email: david [at] holtlaborlibrary.org

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Support:

CONTRIBUTE

Thank you for being a part of this struggle.

Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win!

Noelle Hanrahan, Director

To give by check:

PO Box 411074

San Francisco, CA

94141

Stock or legacy gifts:

Noelle Hanrahan

(415) 706 - 5222

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MEDIA ADVISORYMedia contact: Morgan McLeod, (202) 628-0871
mmcleod@sentencingproject.org

NEW REPORT FINDS RECORD NUMBER OF PEOPLE SERVING
LIFE SENTENCES IN U.S. PRISONS
Washington, D.C.— Despite recent political support for criminal justice reform in most states, the number of people serving life sentences has nearly quintupled since 1984.

A new report by The Sentencing Project finds a record number of people serving life with parole, life without parole, and virtual life sentences of 50 years or more, equaling one of every seven people behind bars.

Eight states — Alabama, California, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, and Utah — have at least one of every five prisoners serving a life or de facto life sentence in prison.
The Sentencing Project will host an online press conference to discuss its report Still Life: America's Increasing Use of Life and Long-Term Sentences, on Wednesday, May 3rd at 11:00 a.m. EDT.

Press Conference Details

WHAT: Online press conference hosted by The Sentencing Project regarding the release of its new report examining life and long-term sentences in the United States. REGISTER HERE to participate. The call-in information and conference link will be sent via email.
WHEN:

Wednesday, May 3, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. EDT
WHO:

Ashley Nellis, The Sentencing Project's senior research analyst and author of Still Life: America's Increasing Use of Life and Long-Term Sentences

Evans Ray, whose life without parole sentence was commuted in 2016 by President Obama

Steve Zeidman, City University of New York law professor and counsel for Judith Clark—a New York prisoner who received a 75 year to life sentence in 1983

The full report will be available to press on Wednesday morning via email.

Founded in 1986, The Sentencing Project works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration.

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The Sentencing Project works for a fair and effective U.S. justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration.
Sign up for our updates here. Not interested anymore? Unsubscribe.
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The Sentencing Project
1705 DeSales Street NW, 8th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20036
sentencingproject.org
202.628.0871

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When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression

BAY AREA ANTI-REPRESSION COMMITTEE

When they knock on your front door: Preparing for Repression
BY OAKLANDANTIREPRESSION

On May 24th 2017, police in the Bay Area raided two houses and arrested one person in connection to the recent protests in Berkeley California. In this moment of increasing state repression, we must be vigilant in protecting ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Never speak to the police. Remember that any response can incriminate you and others. You have a right to remain silent, but not to lie – even to say "I don't know." Better responses are "I have nothing to say to you." or "No comment." We recommend practicing how to respond to emergency situations such as raids where police are particularly threatening and nefarious about getting you to speak to them.

Share this information with friends and housemates, particularly those who are intimately tied to political communities but are not that involved or invested in them. These are often the people the state targets to get information on wider activist communities.

Political repression in any form has the common purpose of undermining our movements as a whole, even when it seems particular individuals are the targets. Therefore it is extremely important that we all get prepared for further repression. We do this by supporting each other in remaining calm and brushing up on some basic know-your-rights information as well as being mindful of how we communicate on the internet.

Here are some links with helpful info to get you started:

If an Agent Knocks
This booklet is the best know-your-rights manual to dealing with law enforcement encounters that we've come across. Although it was written for how to handle encounters with federal agents, the information is just as useful in situations with local police. The first chapter, which is only 8 pages, covers law enforcement visits and searches. The booklet also covers state infiltration, surveillance, grand jury resistance, and special considerations for non citizens.

Time to Beef up Defense Against Far-Right Doxxing
Now that there's a far right, internet-based movement growing in this country, we have to deal with attacks on two fronts: the state, and the far right. The alt-right might put you on the radar to the state and/ vis versa. If our personal information is available online, the alt right can find you and "doxx" you, meaning they publicize your name, address, phone number and your family members' names, addresses and phone numbers for the purpose of harassing and intimidating you. Below is an article with tips on preventing this from happening, along with a list of websites that the alt-right uses to uncover people's sensitive, personal information.

Security in a Box – Digital security tools and tactics
The state can and does monitor activists' communication and internet activity. This website is an excellent resource for giving you step-by-step guides to encrypting and securing your various devices and computer operating systems. It also goes over encrypting email.

Resisting Grand Juries
With resistance comes repression and unfortunately often repression leads to more repression. We can help damage control this by always refusing to talk to law enforcement. Sometimes investigations result in grand juries. It is important to be prepared to remain silent if subpeoned to a grand jury. We should all prepare ourselves to support those who refuse to testify. This website has tons of information on grand juries, how they work, and the importance of resisting them. We particularly recommend reading the "Statement of Resistance" written by a collective of folks from various movements in the Bay Area and endorsed by dozens of groups, political prisoners, and former grand jury resisters.

Lastly, if you or anyone you know has been approached by law enforcement or has been visited at their homes or jobs please contact the National Lawyers Guild at 415-285-1011 to access legal advice, resources, and support.

Solidarity is our best weapon in the face of repression. Lets use it!

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A Message to the... Activist Community From The Mothers and Family Victims Of Police Violence and the Racist Raids By ICE Immigration and NYPD Gang Units

This message is obviously directed to the East Coast cities of New York and New Jersey. But after reading their "What We Want, What We Need" May, 2017 - NY/NJ Parents 10 Point Justice Platform and Wish List I think the platform could be applied pretty much as is to practically every community. Check it out.

Mothers Message to the NY/NJ Activist Community

In order to effectively combat the existing opportunism, hidden agendas and to better provide ALL genuinely good willed social justice organizations and individuals who work inside of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas... with more concrete guidelines;

The following "10 Point Platform and Justice Wish List" was adopted on Saturday, May 13, 2017 during the "Motherhood: Standing Strong 4 Justice" pre-mothers day gathering which was held at Hostos Community College - Bronx, New York.......

"What We Want, What We Need"

May, 2017 - NY/NJ Parents 10 Point Justice Platform and Wish List

Point #1 - Lawyers and Legal Assistance: Due to both the overwhelming case loads and impersonal nature of most public defenders, the Mothers believe that their families are receiving limited options, inadequate legal advise and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to help us in gaining access to experienced "pro-bono" and/or activist attorneys as well as the free resources provided by non-profit social justice and legal advocacy groups.

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Point #2 - First Response Teams: The Mothers felt that when their loved ones were either killed or captured by the police that they were left in the hands of the enemy and without any support, information or direction on how to best move forward and therefore; WE WANT and NEED community activists to help us develop independently community controlled & trained first response teams in every borough or county that can confirm and be on the ground within 24 hours of any future incident.

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Point #3 - Security and Support At Court Appearances: The Mothers all feel that because community activist support eventually becomes selective and minimal, that they are disrespected by both the courthouse authorities, mainstream media and therefore; WE WANT and NEED community activists to collectively promote and make a strong presence felt at all court appearances and; To always provide trained security & legal observers... when the families are traveling to, inside and from the court house.

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Point #4 - Emotional/Spiritual Healing and Grief and Loss Counseling: After the protest rallies, demonstrations, justice marches and television cameras are gone the Mothers all feel alone and abandoned and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to refer/help provide the families with clergy, professional therapy & cultural outlets needed in order to gain strength to move forward.

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Point #5 - Parents Internal Communication Network: The Mothers agreed as actual victims, that they are the very best qualified in regards to providing the needed empathy and trust for an independent hotline & contact resource for all of the parents and families who want to reach out to someone they can mutually trust that is able understand what they are going through and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to help us in providing a Parents Internal Communication Network to reach that objective.

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Point #6 - Community Offices and Meeting Spaces: The Mothers agreed that there is an extreme need for safe office spaces where community members and family victims are able to go to for both confidential crisis intervention and holding organizing meetings and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to help us in securing those safe spaces inside of our own neighborhoods.

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Point #7 - Political Education Classes and Workshop Training: The Mothers agreed in implementing the "each one, teach one" strategy and therefore; WE WANT and NEEDfor community activists to help us in being trained as educators and organizers in Know Your Rights, Cop Watch, First Response, Emergency Preparedness & Community Control over all areas of public safety & the police in their respective neighborhoods.

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Point #8 - Support From Politicians and Elected Officials: The Mothers believe that most political candidates and incumbent elected officials selectively & unfairly represent only those cases which they think to be politically advantageous to their own selfish personal success on election day and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to help us in either publicly exposing or endorsing these aforementioned political candidates and/or elected officials to their constituents solely based upon the uncompromising principles of serving the people.

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Point #9 - Research and Documentation: The Mothers believe that research/case studies, surveys, petitions, historical archives, investigative news reporting and events should be documented and made readily available in order to counter the self-serving police misinformation promoted by the system and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to help us by securing college/university students, law firms, film makers, authors, journalists and professional research firms to find, document & tell the people the truth about police terror & the pipeline to prison.

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Point #10 - Grassroots Community Outreach and Information: The Mothers believe that far too much attention is being geared towards TV camera sensationalism with the constant organizing of marches & rallies "downtown" and therefore; WE WANT and NEED for community activists to provide a fair balance by helping us to build in the schools, projects, churches and inside of the subway trains and stations of our Black, brown and oppressed communities where the majority of the police terror is actually taking place.

The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he's a the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal... If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Malcolm X

www.hugopinell.com

www.kiilunyasha.blogspot.com

@nyashakiilu

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My Heartfelt "Thank You!"

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

Several days ago I received a message from both of our lawyers, Bob Boyle and Bret Grote, informing me that the latest lab tests came in from the Discovery Requests.

And they told me that the Hepatitis C infection level is at zero and as of today I'm Hepatitis C free.

This is in part due to some fine lawyering by Bret and Bob who—remember—filed the suit while I was in the throes of a diabetic coma, unconscious and thus unable to file for myself.

But it's also due to you, the people. Brothers and sisters who supported our efforts, who contributed to this fight with money, time, protests and cramming court rooms on our behalf, who sent cards, who prayed, who loved deeply.

I can't thank you all individually but if you hear my voice or read my words know that I am thanking you, all of you. And I'm thanking you for showing once again the Power of the People.

This battle ain't over, for the State's cruelest gift is my recent diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver. With your love we shall prevail again. I thank you all. Our noble Dr.'s Corey Weinstein, who told us what to look for, and Joseph Harris who gave me my first diagnosis and who became the star of the courtroom by making the mysteries of Hep C understandable to all. An internist working up in Harlem, Dr. Harris found few thrills better than telling his many Hep C patients that they're cured.

This struggle ain't just for me y'all.

Because of your efforts thousands of Pennsylvania prisoners now have hope of healing from the ravages of Hepatitis C. [singing] "Let us march on 'til victory is won." So goes the old Negro Spiritual, "The Black National Anthem."

We are making it a reality. I love you all.

From Prison Nation,

This is Mumia Abu-Jamal

—Prison Radio, May 27, 2017

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Court order to disclose DA files in Mumia Abu-Jamal's legal case [video]

This 9-minute video gives background on new revelations about conflict of interest -- an appeals judge who had previously been part of the prosecution team -- in upholding the 1982 conviction of journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal on charges of killing a police officer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Tp5NlllLU

A ruling to implement a judge's recent order for "discovery" could be made on May 30.

Judge Tucker granted discovery to Mumia Abu-Jamal pursuant to his claims brought under Williams v Pennsylvania that he was denied due process because his PA Supreme Court appeals from 1998-2008 were decided by Ronald Castille, who had previously been the District Attorney during Mumia's 1988 appeal from his conviction and death sentence, as well as having been a senior assistant district attorney during Mumia's trial.

The DA is given 30 days—until May 30, 2017—to produce all records and memos regarding Mumia's case, pre-trial, trial, post-trial and direct appeal proceedings between Castille and his staff and any public statement he made about it. Then Mumia has 15 days after receiving this discovery to file amendments to his PCRA petition.

This date of this order is April 28, but it was docketed today, May 1, 2017.

This is a critical and essential step forward!

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Dear Friend,

For the first time- a court has ordered the Philadelphia DA to turn over evidence and open their files in Mumia's appeal. In a complacency shattering blow, the District Attorney's office is finally being held to account. Judge Leon Tucker of the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court ordered the DA to produce all of the documents relevant to former PA Supreme Court Justice's role in the case. Castille was first a supervisory ADA during Mumia's trial, then District Attorney, and finally as a judge he sat on Mumia's appeals to the PA Supreme Court.

This broad discovery order follows just days after the arguments in court by Christina Swarns, Esq. of the NAACP LDF, and Judith Ritter, Esq. of Widner Univ.

During that hearing, Swarns made it clear that the District Attorney's practice of lying to the appellate courts would not be tolerated and had been specifically exposed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the Terrence Williams case, which highlights Ronald Castile's conflict, the Supreme Court in no uncertain terms excoriated the office for failing to disclose crucial evidence. Evidence the office hid for years. This is an opportunity to begin to unravel the decades long police and prosecutorial corruption that has plagued Mumia's quest for justice.

In prison for over thirty six years Mumia Abu-Jamal has maintained his innocence in the death of Philadelphia Police officer Daniel Faulkner on Dec. 9th 1981.

"The Commonwealth must produce any and all documents or records in the possession or control of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office showing former District Attorney Ronald Castille's personal involvement in the above-captioned case ... and public statements during and after his tenure as District Attorney of Philadelphia."

It is important to note that the history of the District Attorney's office in delaying and appealing to prevent exposure of prosecutorial misconduct and the resulting justice. At every turn, there will be attempts to limit Mumia's access to the courts and release. it is past time for justice in this case.
Noelle Hanrahan, P.I.

Prison Radio is a 501c3 project of the Redwood Justice Fund. We record and broadcast the voices of prisoners, centering their analyses and experiences in the movements against mass incarceration and state repression. If you support our work, please join us.

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

Thank you for being a part of this work!

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Kevin "Rashid" Johnson Packed Off to Florida!

Rashid: I'm off to Florida and a new phase of reprisals for publicizing abuses in US prisons

July 14, 2017

Readers are urged to share this story widely and write to Rashid right away; mail equals support, and the more he gets, the safer he'll be: Kevin Johnson, O-158039, RMC, P.O. Box 628, Lake Butler FL 32054

by Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson

http://sfbayview.com/2017/07/rashid-im-off-to-florida-and-a-new-phase-of-reprisals-for-publicizing-abuses-in-us-prisons/

Packed off to Florida

Following Texas prison officials planting a weapon in my cell on March 26, 2017, then stealing most of my personal property on April 6, 2017, in an ongoing pattern of retaliation for and attempts to repress my writing and involvement in litigation exposing and challenging abuses in Texas prisons, including their killing prisoners, I was unceremoniously packed off to the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) on June 22, 2017.

This transfer came as outside protests mounted against the abuses, and Texas officials became more and more entangled in a growing web of their own lies invented in their efforts to cover up and deny their reprisals against me, and also while a contempt investigation was imminent upon a motion I filed in a federal lawsuit brought by relatives of one of the prisoners they'd killed – a killing I'd witnessed and publicized.

Florida, notorious for its own extremely abusive prisons, readily signed on to take up Texas's slack. And being an openly corrupt system unaccustomed to concealing its dirt, FDC officials shot straight from the hip in expressing and carrying on efforts to repress and act out reprisals for my exposing and challenging prison abuses.

The Welcoming Committee

Following a four-hour flight from Texas to Florida, I was driven in a sweltering prison van from an airport just outside Jacksonville, Florida, to the FDC's Reception and Medical Center (RMC) in Lake Butler, Florida. I was forced to leave most all my personal property behind in Texas.

Upon reaching RMC, I was brought from the van, manacled hand and foot into an enclosed vehicle port, where I was met by a mob of white guards of all ranks. I was ordered to stand in a pair of painted yellow footprints on a concrete platform as the guards crowded around me.

I was ordered to stand in a pair of painted yellow footprints on a concrete platform as the guards crowded around me. "This is Florida, and we'll beat your ass! We'll kill you!" said the spokesman.

Their "chosen" spokesman, a tall goofy guard, R. Knight, stepped forward and launched into a speech consisting of threats and insults. He emphasized that I was "not in Virginia or wherever else" I'd been. That "this is Florida, and we'll beat your ass! We'll kill you!" He assured my "Black ass" that my tendency to protest "won't be tolerated here."

He went on and on, like an overseer explaining the plantation's code of decorum and the "place" to a newly arrived Black slave. The analogy is apt. "You will answer us only as 'no sir' and 'yes sir,' 'no ma'am' and 'yes ma'am.' You forget this and we'll kick your fucking teeth out," he barked.

I was then taken through the various stages of being "processed" in: fingerprinted, examined and questioned by medical staff etc. Knight took possession of my property and stole a number of documents and all my writing supplies (five writing tablets, four ink pens, 19 envelopes, stamps), all my hygiene supplies (deodorant, shampoo, two bars of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, nail clippers) and so on.

All these items that I brought with me from Texas were inventoried and logged by Texas officials. Knight logged and inventoried me as receiving from him only my watch, some legal papers, 15 envelopes and my eyeglasses.

Next, I was taken into an office and sat before a Sgt. L. Colon, RMC's "gang (or STG, Security Threat Group) investigator." He proceeded in the same hostile terms. He explained that he knew all about me and his displeasure with my published articles about prison abuses, and he assured that FDC would put an end to it. He admitted his purpose was to put an STG profile on me, refer it to FDC's central office in Tallahassee to be upheld, and I would then be put on STG file, which in turn would be used to stop my writings.

He proceeded to ask about me being a "Black Panther leader" and, using a thoroughly amateur interrogation method, attempted to have me characterize myself and my party as a gang. When his efforts failed, he charged me with being a "bullshitter." I told him only that I am a member of a constitutionally protected, non-violent communist party and whatever false stigma he wanted to try and invent against me and us was typical of fascist governments and we'd address it publicly and in court. Our "interview" was terminated.

Another nurse did my medical history check, remarking that my blood pressure reading was extremely high, 145/103. Although she had all my medications sitting there in front of her, and I told her I had not received my dose that day, she refused to provide them and did nothing.

Upon arriving in Florida, I had not received my hypertension medications since the prior morning. The sweltering heat was aggravating my condition. During the intake process a routine blood pressure check was done and my reading was around 145/103. The nurse who did the reading passed me on to another nurse who did my medical history check, remarking that my reading was extremely high. Although she had all my medications sitting there in front of her, and I told her I had not received my dose that day, she refused to provide them and did nothing.

Barbaric housing

Following completing the intake process, I was walked a substantial distance across the prison yard carrying my bag of property in handcuffs and the sweltering midday heat, dizzy from my elevated blood pressure.

I was led to K-building, the solitary confinement unit, where I was put into a cell, K-3-102, which had no bunk in it and had a commode that had to be flushed by guards from outside the cell – often they would not flush it when it needed to be and I asked them to. The commode had otherwise been obviously left unflushed for long periods, because inside the bowl was and is a thick, yellowed layer of calcium and waste residue and it reeked of fermented urine and feces.

Just before I entered the cell, it was wet-mopped, not to sanitize it, but to cover the entire floor with water that would not, and did not, dry for over a day afterward due to the extreme humidity and lack of air circulation in the cells. There is no air conditioning in the cell blocks and, unlike in Texas, FDC prisoners may not have in-cell fans.

My cell was infested with ants which would find their way into my bed as I slept on the floor. I received numerous bites from them and I believe also roaches that frequently crawled into the cell. At night, in the pitch black cells – and even when the lights were on – mice and huge, two-inch-long cockroaches, along with the "regular" smaller breed of roaches, ran into and explored the cell.

My cell was infested with ants which would find their way into my bed as I slept on the floor. I received numerous bites from them. At night, even when the lights were on, mice and huge, two-inch-long cockroaches, along with the "regular" smaller breed of roaches, ran into and explored the cell.

The K-building lieutenant, Jason Livingston, posted a special note outside my cell door stating I was on a heightened security status, that I and the cell were to be specially searched any time I exited or entered the cell, that I was to be specially restrained and the ranking guards had to accompany me to and from any destination outside the cell. The pretense was that I was an extreme physical threat.

I was denied my hypertension medications until I briefly fell unconscious on the evening of June 24, 2017.

Following sending word out to an attorney and others about my conditions and experiences, who apparently raised complaints on my behalf, I was moved to a "regular" cell, K-1-204, on June 30, 2017, with a bunk and a commode I can flush. I was repeatedly confronted by various guards who've commented that I'm no dangerous person and they don't understand why I've been profiled or treated as though I am.

A week later FDC officials would come clean, exposing on the record their actual motives for my mistreatment, and "special" security status.

Solitary confinement for publicizing abuses

My readers and others will recall when, in January 2017, I was given a disciplinary infraction by Texas officials for a statement I wrote about suffering their abuses that was published online. When confronted about such retaliatory acts by a PBS reporter, Ms. Kamala Kelkar, TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark initially lied, denying that I received any such infractions, until Ms. Kelkar emailed him a copy of the charge I'd received. He then suddenly changed his story, lying yet again to claim the infraction had been overturned, then declined to answer any further questions.[i]

Clark knew enough to deny and try to cover up such acts of retaliation against a prisoner exercising his right to freedom of speech. Florida officials, however, have come right out admitting and exposing such actions.[ii]

On July 6, 2017, I was confronted by RMC classification officer Jeremy Brown, who notified me that I am to be formally reviewed for placement on Close Management I status, which is the FDC's name for solitary confinement. The reason he gave for this review was the exact STG pretext Sgt. L. Colon told me on my first day was going to be created to justify suppressing my writings about prison abuses.

Brown served me written notification stating my CMI review was based upon my alleged "documented leadership in a Security Threat Group that is certified by the Threat Assessment Review Committee in Central Office." Remember, this is the very same illegal basis upon which California prison officials were indefinitely throwing prisoners in solitary confinement which prompted three historic mass prisoner hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013 and was abolished upon the settlement of a class action lawsuit against the practice in 2015.

My assignment to solitary confinement is for "documented leadership in a Security Threat Group" … This is the very same illegal basis upon which California prison officials were indefinitely throwing prisoners in solitary confinement which prompted three historic mass prisoner hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013 and was abolished upon the settlement of a class action lawsuit against the practice in 2015.

But FDC officials went much further in supporting "comments" to state their true motives for devising to put me in solitary and for my mistreatment up to that point.

As Colon had threatened, an STG label was invented against the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, a party about which Colon admitted he and the FDC had no prior knowledge. The reason the party was designated an STG and gang was because (get this!) I'd written articles while in Oregon and Texas prison systems that were published online about abuses in the prisons which generated concern and perfectly legal protests from the public, which was characterized as my gang following that "caused disruption in the orderly operations" of the prisons.

The notice went on to admit, as I've long contended in my writings, that these writings are the actual reason I've been transferred from state to state – illegal retaliatory transfers – which was characterized as STG activities.

Passing mention was made that I'd received disciplinary infractions while in Oregon and Texas, but no attempt was made to show those infractions bore any connection to my party affiliation. In fact, those who have followed my writings and the series of official reprisals – which is now being admitted by FDC officials – know those infractions were fabricated retaliations, many of which I was prevented from contesting.

So, according to FDC officials, I am a confirmed gang leader because I publicize prison abuses through articles that are posted online and my gang members and followers are members of the public who read my articles and make complaints and inquiries of officials, which acts are characterized as presenting disruptions to prison operations – or in other words throwing a monkey wrench in their business-as-usual abuses.

According to FDC officials, I am a confirmed gang leader because I publicize prison abuses through articles that are posted online and my gang members and followers are members of the public who read my articles and make complaints and inquiries of officials, which acts are characterized as presenting disruptions to prison operations.

For this I am to be thrown into solitary, which means any future posting and publishing of writings by me about prison abuses will be characterized as my continuing to engage in STG or gang activities, and any legal public protests as my gang members threatening prison security.

I didn't make this up, it's all in writing; read it HERE (scroll down to "SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS"). This is where taxpayers' monies are going in financing these ubiquitous gang busting units. And should you protest, you will be labelled a gangster yourself. I won't belabor the point.

Dare to struggle, Dare to win!

All Power to the People!

[i] Kamala Kelkar, "Resistence Builds Against Social Media Ban in Texas Prisons," PBS NewsHour Weekend, Jan. 29, 2017, 5:23 p.m. EST

[ii] "The First Amendment forbids prison officials from retaliating against prisoners for exercising the right of free speech," Farrow v. West, 320 F.3d 1235, 1248 (2003)

Send our brother some love and light – and share this urgent story widely. The more people who write to him now, the safer he'll be: Kevin Johnson, O-158039, RMC, 7765 S. Cr. 231, P.O. Box 628, Lake Butler FL 32054.

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http://www.freeleonard.org/case/

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Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson featuring exchanges with an Outlaw Kindle Edition

by Kevin Rashid Johnson (Author), Tom Big Warrior (Introduction), Russell Maroon Shoatz(Introduction)

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Major Battles On

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.

And the fight ain't over.

[©'16 MAJ 6/29/16]

Major Tillery Needs Your Help and Support

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!

Go to JPay.com;

code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

Tell Philadelphia District Attorney

Seth Williams:

Free Major Tillery! He is an innocent man, framed by police and and prosecution.

Call: 215-686-8711 or

Email: DA_Central@phila.gov

Write to:

Major Tillery AM9786

SCI Frackville

1111 Altamont Blvd.

Frackville, PA 17931

For More Information, Go To: Justice4MajorTillery/blogspot

Call/Write:

Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com

Nancy Lockhart (843) 412-2035, thewrongfulconviction@gmail.com

Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq. (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com

Justice4MajorTillery/blogspot

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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

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

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

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

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

In solidarity,

James Clark
Senior Death Penalty Campaigner
Amnesty International USA

Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up - from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org

Kevin Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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B. ARTICLES IN FULL

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1) Ferraris and Opera Were Urgent, but Grenfell Tower Risks Went Unheeded

By KATRIN BENNHOLD AUG. 15, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/world/europe/london-inequality-grenfell-tower-fire.html?hp&action=

click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-

news&WT.nav=top-news

2) Sperm Count in Western Men Has Dropped Over 50 Percent Since 1973, Paper Finds

By MAYA SALAM AUG. 16, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/health/male-sperm-count-problem.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=

click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

3) 1 in 7 New York City Elementary Students Will Be Homeless, Report Says

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS AUG. 15, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/nyregion/report-says-elementary-students-homeless-new-york.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

4) The Real Opioid Emergency
By CARL L. HART AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/opioids-drugs-race-
treatment.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=
opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=
opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

5) The Justice Department Goes Fishing in DreamHost Case
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/justice-department-dreamhost-site-trump.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

6) Mother of Woman Killed in Charlottesville Says She Will Not Speak to Trump
By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/politics/susan-bro-trump-heather-heyer.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=
Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

7) Indian Girl, 10, Who Was Raped and Denied an Abortion Gives Birth
By HARI KUMAR and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN AUG. 17, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/world/asia/indian-girl-10-who-was-raped-and-denied-an-abortion-gives-birth.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

8) Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language

By LIAM STACK AUG. 15, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/alt-left-alt-right-glossary.html

9) Chris Long Makes the Gesture We've Been Waiting For

by Dave Zirin
https://www.thenation.com/article/chris-long-with-the-gesture-weve-been-waiting-for/

10) Florida locks down all 97,000 prisoners, blocking them from Aug. 19 Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March

August 18, 2017

by Prison Abolition Prisoner Support (PAPS) and The Ordinary People Society (TOPS)

http://sfbayview.com/2017/08/florida-locks-down-all-97000-prisoners-blocking-them-from-aug-19-millions-for-prisoners-human-rights-march/?t=1&cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email&iid=3a26b61a5fbd42fa8d01db4eddf59dc8&uid=95102586&nid=244+272699400

11) Counterprotesters Surge Into Boston, Overshadowing Rally
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, ALAN BLINDER and JESS BIDGOOD AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/demonstration-race-free-speech-boston-charlottesville.html?&hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=nytmm_FadingSlideShow_item&module=photo-spot-region&region=
top-news&WT.nav=top-news

12) M.T.A. to Modify Subway Station Design Resembling Confederate Flag
By MATT STEVENS AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/nyregion/mta-confederate-flag-tiles.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=
click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=
latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

13) Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle
By CLYDE HABERMANAUG. 19, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/arts/dick-gregory-dies-at-84.html

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1) Ferraris and Opera Were Urgent, but Grenfell Tower Risks Went Unheeded
By KATRIN BENNHOLD AUG. 15, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/world/europe/london-inequality-grenfell-tower-fire.html?hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-
news&WT.nav=top-news

LONDON — The Ferraris were driving people batty in affluent South Kensington. Drivers revved their engines and ripped past Harrods. Residents were already irritated by the dust and noise from superrich neighbors building underground swimming pools and cinemas. Now came complaints about Middle Eastern "types" drag racing at night.

Up in North Kensington, a part of London that is home to some of Britain's poorest residents, the complaints were more elemental. People were fighting plans to close a day care center, lease out a public library and demolish a community college. At one public housing project, Grenfell Tower, residents had complained about fire safety issues for years: power surges that blew up television sets and filled rooms with smoke, outdated fire extinguishers and the absence of a communal fire alarm.

The very different complaints from the opposite ends of Kensington received very different responses from the 50-member council representing the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The Ferraris were debated in the council chamber. Fines of up to 1,000 pounds were imposed on revving engines. Underground construction projects were restricted.

The concerns in North Kensington, particularly those of Grenfell Tower residents, were mostly ignored. By last November, one resident, Edward Daffarn, was so frustrated that he predicted "only a serious fire" resulting in a "serious loss of life" would make the council pay attention. The councilor in charge of housing, Rock Feilding-Mellen, dismissed him as a ''fantasist.''

Seven months later, as a deadly blaze engulfed the building in the early morning hours of June 14, Mr. Daffarn fled his apartment on the 16th floor. Stumbling through the smoke-filled landing, he was found by a fireman and guided to safety. But at least 80 of his neighbors died.

"This council does not represent the people of North Kensington," Mr. Daffarn said.

Last year's referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union, known as Brexit, exposed the deep resentment of working-class Britons outside London toward the elites in the wealthy, cosmopolitan capital. But the charred remains of Grenfell Tower have become a shocking symbol of inequality at the heart of the capital itself. They have changed the national narrative.

If the Brexit vote was driven by a populist message that immigrants and Europe's open borders were to blame for the nation's malaise, the fire has brought back into focus how years of steep government cuts have disproportionately hit the poorest, amplifying the pain from stagnant wages after the financial crisis.

"These are volatile and uncertain times," Alan Milburn, the chairman of the government's Social Mobility Commission, said last month after warning that social and economic divisions were dangerously widening. "Whole tracts of Britain feel left behind," he said. "The growing sense that we have become an us-versus-them society is deeply corrosive of our cohesion as a nation."

Kensington and Chelsea is a microcosm of a divided Britain. The south is home to Kensington Palace Gardens, better known as Billionaires' Row, one of the most expensive streets in the country. Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire, owns a mansion there reportedly worth £125 million ($163 million). And Kensington Palace is where Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge will be raising their children.

To the north, Golborne ranks as one of the two poorest wards in London. Victorian-era diseases like tuberculosis and rickets have made a comeback. Life expectancy in parts of North Kensington is 20 years lower than in South Kensington.

In recent years, the council has spent millions of pounds subsidizing opera tickets and paying tax rebates to all except the poorest at a time when services for youths and toddlers were reduced, and free swimming classes for state-funded schools and older residents were canceled. The contempt directed at those raising concerns about fire safety at Grenfell Tower was not an exception, residents said, but the fire exposed the disconnect between an elitist council and poor residents in the north.

"They don't know how the other side lives," said Monica Press, a Labour councilor from North Kensington.

The council leader, Elizabeth Campbell, admitted last month that in her 11 years as a council member she had never set foot inside a high-rise housing project.

Ms. Campbell, who took over as leader after the Grenfell fire, has vowed to rebuild trust. But local residents said the social contract between those who govern and those they purport to represent is broken. Police officers investigating the fire have told survivors that there were "reasonable grounds to suspect" that the council and the organization managing its social housing might have committed corporate manslaughter.

On Tuesday, the head of the inquiry into the fire said it would examine the conduct of the local authorities but would not take into account the broader issues involving social housing, although Prime Minister Theresa May said she was "determined" to address those questions.

Niles Hailstones, whose youngest son attended school with several children who died in the fire, said, "How do you think our children feel seeing people not care about their mothers, fathers, grandparents, uncles, aunties?"

He added: "We watched the building burn down in front of our eyes."

Of Earls and Ladies

Today, the face of London is the Muslim son of a bus driver. Sadiq Khan, the city's directly elected mayor, in many ways represents how the city sees itself: multicultural, liberal and socially mobile.

But much local governing authority is devolved to the councils that run London's 32 boroughs, which can look very different from that.

Of the Kensington council's 50 members, 46 are white and 37 are Conservatives. The cabinet, led by Ms. Campbell, is entirely white. One of her fellow councilors is Lady Catherine Faulks. Another is Mr. Feilding-Mellen, the stepson of the Earl of Wemyss and March. Another is Prof. Sir Anthony Coates, known locally as a man of letters — the letters being those he lists after his name to highlight his credentials.

Timothy Coleridge, one of several councilors who attended Eton, Britain's most exclusive private school, has served on the council since 1986, as did his father before him. Two years ago, he received an email from a distressed resident.

Subject line: "Our borough is becoming a nightmare!!"

Sports cars were speeding in his Knightsbridge neighborhood, one of the most expensive in London, the resident complained. Limousines hogged parking spaces outside his home.

"The super car situation was ghastly during the last few summers, keeping us all awake in North Terrace," the resident wrote on June 2, 2015, demanding urgent action.

Mr. Coleridge sympathized. "We totally agree with you, and our experiences as local residents matches yours," he replied, 14 hours after receiving the complaint. Lawyers were put to work. The police were consulted. Five months later, a Public Space Restriction Order imposing steep fines had been passed.

Councilors representing the north of the borough acknowledged that in the lives of the rich, this was a legitimate concern. "But the alacrity with which they took it up was remarkable," said Robert Atkinson, a Labour councilor.

Grenfell Tower residents were treated differently. The council kept deducting rent from a Grenfell survivor even after the fire, a mistake Lady Faulks called a "tiny" thing before backtracking. The council's former leader, Nicholas Paget-Brown, defended the body's decision not to install sprinklers, suggesting residents did not want them. And his deputy, Mr. Feilding-Mellen, a property developer, had insisted on keeping down the cost of the external cladding used in a £10 million renovation in 2014, according to a leaked email, resulting in the choice of what turned out to be highly flammable materials.

Mr. Feilding-Mellen declined to be interviewed.

With the national government pursuing policies of economic austerity, grants for local councils have been slashed by more than half since 2010. Yet the Kensington council routinely underspent its budget. It currently has £274 million in usable reserves — money that critics said should have been invested in the north.

And a £100 tax rebate, for those who paid council tax in full before the 2014 local elections, was met with broad approval.

Yet South Kensington has hardly been neglected. A recent enhancement of Exhibition Road outside the Victoria and Albert Museum featuring an inset granite diamond pattern cost nearly £30 million, with the council picking up roughly half the cost.

Mr. Coleridge, until recently in charge of the arts, oversaw a £5 million grant to Holland Park Opera to make opera tickets more accessible. "The seats are very good value," he said, "only £60 to £65" ($78 to $84).

Daniel Moylan, another Conservative councilor, blames welfare policy for the fraught relations between North Kensington residents and the council. "Social housing embeds disempowerment," he said. "I'm a big believer in private property."

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, as prime minister, introduced "Right to Buy" — allowing established tenants in social housing to buy their homes at a discount. But soaring house prices have put Right to Buy out of reach for most.

"If a flat costs £500,000, a £100,000 discount doesn't make it affordable," said Tony Auguste, a local campaigner who is disabled and relies on social housing. "It's an insult, really." A £500,000 apartment is equivalent to $650,000.

Social Cleansing

North Kensington Library, a stately Victorian building near Portobello market, is the rare place where children from the housing projects mix with those from Notting Hill Preparatory School and Chepstow House School, two private schools that cost more than £6,000 ($7,800) a term. But now the public library might have to move out so that one of the prep schools can move in.

Mr. Feilding-Mellen negotiated a deal to lease the building to Notting Hill Preparatory School, which is getting a year rent-free so it can refurbish the building.

The council says this arrangement is not unusual. Local critics say it is practically paying for the refurbishment. Mr. Feilding-Mellen's twins are on the waiting list for the school.

Meanwhile, the council is spending over £18 million of public money on a new building in which the public section of the library will be limited to the ground floor, while students from Chepstow House will get their own access and separate floor.

Mr. Feilding-Mellen's children are on the Chepstow House waiting list, too. At a council meeting on Oct. 19, 2016, he insisted that he did not have a conflict of interest, although he conceded that it might be "perceived" as such.

"This council seems more interested in handing over public premises to prep schools than it is to provide homes for hard-pressed local families," said Mr. Atkinson.

The library is just one flash point. Many North Kensington residents speak of "managed decline," a strategy to allow public institutions and spaces to fall into disrepair and then create a case for redeveloping them with a commercial motive.

Social cleansing, they call it.

Two years ago, the Maxilla day care center near Grenfell Tower was closed. More recently, plans to demolish and relocate Kensington and Chelsea College, a vocational school, and build an apartment block that will include commercial housing were announced.

"This place is my success story," Drei Mullings, a young black man, said of the college at a recent public meeting. His course enabled him to go to the University of Northampton, he said.

"We are market-led," a college representative told the crowd.

"You should be community-led," a woman shouted back.

Opposite the condemned college building, Wornington Green, once a public park, has already been turned into an apartment block. The whole street, once filled with social housing, is being redeveloped as "Portobello Square ."

Conservative councilors argue that they have done their best to protect public services and have invested over £70 million in North Kensington infrastructure in recent years, including the ill-fated renovation of Grenfell Tower. They refute any suggestion of social cleansing.

"Utterly not true," Mr. Coleridge said. "Some people live in a dream world of conspiracy theories."

The council is creating more social housing — just not much of it inside the borough. Certain new housing developments are supposed to include a quota of social housing — but private developers often dodge the requirement by paying the council a fee instead. The council struck deals to receive £33.4 million in such fees in the year through September 2016.

While the council has built only 336 new affordable housing units in the borough since 2011, instead of the 200 a year it had originally pledged, it has bought units in cheaper parts of London as alternatives.

In the south of the borough, by contrast, thousands of apartments are routinely empty, the second, third and fourth homes of members of the global elite. Until four years ago, second-home owners even got a discount on council tax.

Scores of Grenfell survivors have yet to be rehoused. Two weeks after the fire, the City of London Corporation bought 68 apartments in a new luxury block for that purpose. Some existing inhabitants, who enjoy a 24-hour concierge service, a swimming pool and a private cinema, were not happy.

"My service charge bill, and this is a low one this year, is £15,500, and I would feel really resentful if someone got the same thing for free," said a woman named Donna who phoned in to LBC radio in June. "I feel sorry for those people, but my husband and I work very hard to be able to afford this."

A Bitter Awakening

One night in May 2013, the light in Mr. Daffarn's Grenfell Tower living room started flickering wildly. Soon his stereo stopped working and his television box blew up. Some of his neighbors reported sparks flying from their light fittings and smoke coming from their toasters.

The complaints were mostly ignored until three weeks later, when entire rooms were filling with smoke. Residents marched to the tenant management office, and the electrical wiring was eventually repaired.

Mr. Daffarn, a social worker who has lived in Grenfell Tower since 2001, has meticulously documented the grievances of residents in seven years of email correspondence with the council. Some 350 blog items he wrote with a fellow resident are being archived by the British Library.

"I wanted to create a resource for anyone, who in 30 years' time wants to study how London ended up like this, with only rich people left," he said.

But the Grenfell Tower fire has changed his motivation. "Now, it's evidence," Mr. Daffarn said, alluding to the criminal inquiry. He hopes the investigation will bring convictions and also document "the institutionalized contempt" for poor people.

Some things have already changed.

"People have woken up to the two extremes of Kensington," said Emma Dent Coad, the member of Parliament for Kensington. "Everyone now knows that Kensington is not just about cafes and museums and designer shops and fabulousness. That facade has dropped and we can see the rest of Kensington that has been betrayed by a very, very rich council refusing to spend what is pocket money to them on the things that help people better themselves."

Since the fire, Ms. Campbell, the council leader, has promised to use the council's reserves to build more social housing. And she has put on hold all redevelopment projects, including North Kensington Library and Kensington and Chelsea College pending a review. But distrust remains.

"Nothing has changed until they put it in black and white," Mr. Daffarn said. "They need to go, all of them," he added. "They're all implicated."

Iliana Magra contributed reporting.

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2) Sperm Count in Western Men Has Dropped Over 50 Percent Since 1973, Paper Finds
By MAYA SALAM AUG. 16, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/health/male-sperm-count-problem.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=
click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

The sperm count of men in Western countries has been declining precipitously with no signs of "leveling off," according to new research, bolstering a school of thought that male health in the modern world is at risk, possibly threatening fertility.

By examining thousands of studies and conducting a meta-analysis of 185 — the most comprehensive effort to date — an international team of researchers ultimately looked at semen samples from 42,935 men from 50 countries from 1973 to 2011.

They found that sperm concentration — the number of sperm per milliliter of semen — had declined each year, amounting to a 52.4 percent total decline, in men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Total sperm count among the same group also tumbled each year for a total decline of 59.3 percent over the nearly 40-year period.

Decreasing sperm count was first reported a quarter century ago, but the new analysis shows that "this decline is strong and continuing," said Dr. Shanna H. Swan, one of the study's authors and a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

And while this paper offers the most data yet on a subject of lengthy debate, it is far from settled, as the cause and the impact on fertility — and whether it has any real-life consequence — remain unknown.

llan Pacey, a professor of andrology at the University of Sheffield in Britain — who wrote an article in 2013 questioning this sort of research— has been skeptical of studies that claim a recent decline in sperm count.

He noted that a 52.4 percent decline in concentration "may sound a lot," but it represents a change from "normal (99 million sperm per milliliter) to normal (47 million sperm per milliliter)."

Still, Professor Pacey conceded in a recent interview that the new paper piqued his interest and represented "a step forward in the clarity of the data, which might ultimately allow us to define better studies to examine this issue."

Possible causes

That the downtrend in sperm count is seen in Western countries suggests that "chemicals in commerce" are playing a role, Dr. Swan said.

While this survey did not focus on the causes of these declines, its authors pointed to existing research that showed that exposure to cigarette smoke, alcohol and chemicals while in utero, as well as stress, obesity and age, were factors in the drop.

"If the mother smokes, her son's sperm count is decreased — that's been shown in multiple studies," she said.

A 2005 study, Dr. Swan said, showed that prenatal exposure to phthalates, also called plasticizers, affected the development of sons.

Phthalates are a group of chemicals used to make plastics more flexible and harder to break. In several studies over the last two decades, they have been shown to disrupt the operation of male hormones like testosterone and have been linked to genital birth defects in male infants.

Dr. Swan, who conducted a 2008 study about phthalate exposure, said that scientists have had the ability to measure exposure to plasticizers only since about 2000, via urine. That has led to a 20-year lag in the process since researchers cannot enroll men to produce sperm until they are in their 20s.

That evidence is the "missing piece of the puzzle," she said.

Professor Pacey cautions that while the changes in data may be driven by "greater exposure of pregnant women or adult men to more man-made chemicals," it is too soon draw a conclusion.

No trend studies were performed in the first half of the 20th century, said Niels Skakkebaek, a reproduction researcher at the University of Copenhagen, but in the 1940s, fertility doctors claimed that men should have at least 60 million sperm per milliliter to be considered normal and that many had more that 100 million per milliliter.

"Nowadays, average young men have 40-50 per milliliter," he said.

Professor Skakkebaek, an author of a 1992 study that suggested chemicals play a role in the steady decline in semen quality, has since indicated that a rise in abnormal male reproductive systems may be linked to exposures to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

"We must find out which ones are to blame for the problems with male reproduction, including male infertility and testicular cancer," Professor Skakkebaek said.

The website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the effects from low-level exposure to phthalates are unknown, but it acknowledges that some types of phthalates have affected the reproductive system of laboratory animals and that more research is needed. The agency declined to offer further comment.

The National Institutes of Health also declined to comment on the research. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine did not respond to a request for comment.

The practical effects

Professor Skakkebaek pointed to Denmark and Germany as examples of how this course is playing out.

"In Denmark, 8 percent of all children are now born after assisted reproduction," he said. "In spite of this activity, the birthrates have for 40 years been significantly below replacement level."

"The number of young Germans have already declined 50 percent since the 1960s," he said, adding that a similar pattern has been seen in Japan, which while not a Western country, is a developed one.

In the United States, he said, the fertility rate among white people is "below the levels where the population can be sustained."

Data about assisted pregnancies has been linked to women having children later in life, and in developed nations, statistics have shown that more women are choosing to have fewer (or no) babies, which may also contribute to the fluctuations.

Non-Western men

In the recently released research, no significant decline in sperm quality was seen in men from non-Western countries, but this segment made up only about a quarter of the results.

Dr. Hagai Levine, the head of the Environmental Health Track at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the team, said that one of the differences between Western and non-Western countries is that man-made chemicals like phthalates "became widespread much earlier in time" in developed nations.

Professor Skakkebaek said that reproductive issues among African men were less common: "It is already known that Africans have significantly lower rates of another testicular problem: testicular cancer."

A study published last fall that looked at samples from just over 30,600 Chinese men asserted that semen quality and sperm count in the men had declined over a 15-year period ending in 2015 — with the percentage of qualified donors at a Hunan clinic falling from 55.8 percent to 17.8 percent in that time. To qualify, donors need to meet acceptable semen parameters including sperm concentration, sperm motility and semen volume.

"We urgently need international research collaboration to detect the causes," Professor Skakkebaek said.

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3) 1 in 7 New York City Elementary Students Will Be Homeless, Report Says
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS AUG. 15, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/nyregion/report-says-elementary-students-homeless-new-york.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

There were 100,000 homeless students in New York City public schools during the 2015-16 school year, a number equal to the population of Albany.

The daunting challenges that creates, both for individual children struggling to learn and for schools trying to improve performance, are laid out in a report to be released on Wednesday by the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness. If current trends continue, the report's authors say, one in every seven New York City public school students will be homeless at some point during elementary school.

"In every school classroom, that's two or three kids," said Anna Shaw-Amoah, principal policy analyst at the institute. "And the challenges are not just about whether you're currently living in a shelter or a doubled up setting, but did they have that experience last year, or did they have this experience in kindergarten? The instability really travels with students. If you fall behind in one year, it's going to be harder to get on grade level the next year."

Within the last six years, more than 140,000 New York City students have been homeless, the report said.

The growing number of homeless children is part of the fallout of the city's housing crisis, which has seen a growing number of families in city shelters, as rents have risen, federal and state aid has dwindled, and a state rental assistance program ended. The de Blasio administration has struggled to slow the rising numbers, but with little success.

Homelessness is difficult under any circumstances, but for children, the stress and physical dislocation can be like a tornado dropped into the school day. Students bounce from school to school as their family leaves home, perhaps staying with friends, before entering the shelter system, where they are often moved from place to place. Getting children to school each day becomes an enormous challenge, especially if families have recently moved across the city.

The typical homeless elementary school student missed 88 days of school, according to the report, which is almost half of a school year.

Families who have lost their home must make the wrenching choice of leaving a child in a school they know, or transferring them to a school closer to where they are staying. Moving to a new school may further the feeling of dislocation, but it makes it easier for the child to get to class. The report found that the typical homeless child transferred schools midyear at least two times during elementary school.

Homeless children were more likely than those with stable housing to be on the wrong side of a huge array of indicators. They were more likely to to be suspended or drop out, more likely to face delays in being identified as needing special education services, and more likely to need services to help them learn English. Their proficiency rates on the state math and English exams for third through eighth graders were about 20 points lower than classmates'. And homeless students graduated at a rate of just 55 percent, while students with stable housing graduated at a rate of 74 percent.

One in every six students identified as still learning English was classified as homeless, according to the report. Most of them were doubled up. Children learning English who were homeless were more likely to need services longer than their peers with a stable place to live.

The institute relied on the city's data for its report. The definition used by the city for homelessness includes any child in "temporary housing" at some point during the school year. This can mean a student whose family is living in its car or in a motel, staying with extended family or friends, or living in shelters. The number of students in shelters during the 2015-16 school year was 33,000, according to the city's Independent Budget Office.

"We recognize students in temporary housing face additional challenges and are providing more resources," Toya Holness, a spokeswoman for the city's education department, said in an email. She cited bus services for students in kindergarten through sixth grade who live in shelters, and said the city has hired more social workers in schools with large numbers of homeless students.

The city has also made a push to register more homeless students for pre-K, an effort the report found to be working — the institute found a 17 percent increase in pre-K enrollment among homeless children from the 2014-15 school year to the 2015-16 school year. More broadly, the de Blasio administration has announced a plan to open 90 new sheltersto replace a makeshift network of hotels and temporary apartments scattered across the city and to try to allow families to stay closer to their home neighborhood and schools.

Another crucial point in the report is how homeless students are distributed among the city's schools, with some schools and districts seeing intense concentrations, while others bear a relatively light burden. In Bayside, Queens, 823 students were homeless in the 2015-16 school year, while in District 10 in the Bronx, which includes neighborhoods like Fordham and Belmont, more than 10,000 students did not have a stable place to live.

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4) The Real Opioid Emergency
By CARL L. HART AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/opioids-drugs-race-
treatment.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=
opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=
opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

Every Friday evening, with sadness and with pride, I make a 90-minute trek from Columbia University to Sing Sing Correctional Facility to teach a drugs and behavior course. My students, who are bright and predominantly black, enthusiastically engage with the curriculum, not least because some of them have a personal stake in the subject. Several are serving time for a drug-related offense, as are hundreds of thousands of other Americans.

On Aug. 10, driven largely by public perception that many white Americans are experiencing problems and even dying from opioid use, Donald Trump proclaimed the opioid problem a national emergency. The president's announcement appeared to consolidate a shift in the way we view certain drug users. They are now patients in need of our help and understanding, rather than criminals deserving scorn and incarceration.

This was made abundantly clear in 2014 when the governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin, devoted his entire State of the State address to the "heroin crisis." He urged his overwhelmingly white electorate to deal with addiction "as a public health crisis, providing treatment and support, rather than simply doling out punishment, claiming victory and moving on to our next conviction." Public officials from both parties and throughout the United States have echoed these sentiments, which ultimately spurred the White House to form the task force that urged Mr. Trump to declare an emergency.

What looks like a radical shift to a more enlightened drug policy — one that favors treatment over incarceration — has encouraged many to hope that there will be far fewer drug-related arrests than there were in previous decades. I don't count myself among the optimists.

Don't get me wrong: I support the approach. It's what we should do. But it is not, historically, what we have done for all of our citizens.

During the so-called crack epidemic in the late 1980s, the perceived user and trafficker of crack was black, young and menacing. But a majority of crack users were white, and most drug users buy their drugs from dealers within their own racial group. In 1992, though, more than 90 percent of those sentenced under the harsh crack cocaine laws that were passed in the late '80s were black. They were required to serve a minimum prison sentence of at least five years for small amounts of crack, even if they were first-time offenders.

To the extent that the use of crack among whites was acknowledged, newspaper articles sympathetically detailed the plight of white middle-class crack users. It was seen as a hazard of stressful professional lifestyles. According to this scenario, the victims — Wall Street executives, computer programmers and the like — had initially snorted cocaine recreationally after hours but had gradually moved on to smoking the drug during work time.

For this demographic, medical experts were quoted extolling the effectiveness of treatment. Any law enforcement perspective was conspicuous by its absence. Public service announcements, geared toward middle-class crack users, encouraged sympathy and not judgment.

This pattern of racial differentiation — one drug policy for white users and another for black users — followed the format of the heroin crisis of the 1970s. The face of the heroin addict then, as the newspapers told it, was black, destitute and engaged in repetitive petty crimes to feed his or her habit. New York State's infamous 1973 Rockefeller drug laws created mandatory minimum prison sentences of 15 years to life for possession of small amounts of heroin or other drugs — and served as a model for the federal cocaine law. More than 90 percent of those convicted under the Rockefeller laws were black or Latino, even though they represented a minority of drug users.

This punitive approach to black heroin users coincided with a great expansion of methadone maintenance programs — for mainly white "patients." Even President Richard Nixon was a fan, praising methadone as "a useful tool in the work of rehabilitating heroin addicts," one that "ought to be available to those who must do this work."

This characteristically American pattern of cognitive flexibility on drug policy, with harsh penalties for some and sympathetic treatment for others, thus has a long history — one that continues to this day.

Most opioid users are white. The country recognizes this. That is one reason Republican senators from those states hit hardest by opioid-related deaths withheld their support from the recent Senate health care bill — they saw it as underfunding treatment for opioid dependence. But the humane approach is only part of the picture.

Multiple states have drafted or passed legislation that enhances penalties for opioid possession and trafficking. In some states, prosecutors can now charge a drug dealer with murder for selling drugs to someone who died from an overdose. Deaths related to fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, have fueled such initiatives. Kentucky's new law makes the sale of fentanyl, in any amount, punishable by prison sentence of up to 10 years. Sound familiar?

If past drug law enforcement action is predictive of future behavior, most of those convicted of opioid-related crimes will be black and brown. Recent federal data back this up: More than 80 percent of those convicted of heroin trafficking are black or Latino, although all racial groups buy and sell drugs at roughly the same rate. This is largely because of the discretionary nature of drug law enforcement, which continues to focus mostly on black and Latino communities. This is well documented: For example, police are three times more likely to search the car of a stopped black driver than that of a stopped white driver.

The reimposition by Attorney General Jeff Sessions of more mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenses will result in more black and brown people locked away. This is not just anachronistic, mean and racist but also helps to obscure the actual black experience of opioid use: While the death rate among whites from overdose has risen most steeply in recent years, by 267 percent from 2010 to 2014, the mortality rate for black users has risen by a comparable 213 percent over the same period. Yet the face of the sympathetic, suffering opioid addict who deserves help and treatment is not black. Not in Mr. Sessions's world, nor in Mr. Trump's.

The corrections officer's abrupt, loud knock on the thick glass window signals the end of our class period. My students stoically prepare to go back to being inmates. And I prepare to leave, as I do every Friday night, with the same sinking feeling that our approach to dealing with drugs hasn't appreciably changed in more than a century. I want better for my students at Sing Sing and better for all Americans, including the black and brown ones.

Carl L. Hart (@drcarlhart), the chairman of the psychology department at Columbia, is the author of "High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society."

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5) The Justice Department Goes Fishing in DreamHost Case
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/justice-department-dreamhost-site-trump.html?action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=
opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Do you use the internet? Are you interested in politics? Do you value your privacy? If you answered yes, you should be alarmed by the shockingly broad search warrant sought by the Justice Department, and approved by a judge in Washington, D.C., last month, targeting DreamHost, an internet hosting company based in Los Angeles.

As DreamHost explained in a blog post on Monday, it hosts disruptj20.org, a website that helped organize anti-Trump protests on Inauguration Day, and posted pictures of those protests in the days after. There were large-scale protests across Washington on Jan. 20, most of which involved peaceful marches or sit-ins. But some people turned to violence, breaking store windows, setting fires, throwing rocks at police officers and, in one case, assaulting Richard Spencer, the white nationalist, during a television interview. More than 200 people have been charged with felony rioting.

As part of its continuing investigation, the Justice Department demanded that DreamHost turn over "all records or other information" relating to the site, which received more than 1.3 million requests to view its pages in six days after the inauguration. Those records include personal information like I.P. addresses, which identify a specific computer; data about which of the site's pages a user viewed, and when; and the type of operating software on that person's computer. Federal prosecutors are also seeking all emails, photos and other content sent to and from the site.

"That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution's First Amendment," DreamHost wrote in its blog post.

It doesn't matter whether the visitor is suspected of participating in a crime, or is even known to have attended the protests. If someone clicked anywhere on the site from anywhere in the world, the government wants to know.

DreamHost has so far refused to turn over this information, and for good reason: The indiscriminate "digital dragnet," as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has called it, may well violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

That amendment requires the government to be specific about what it wants to seize, but nowhere does the DreamHost warrant justify a need for the logs of all visitors to the site.

Prosecutors aim to vacuum up millions of points of data about people's political associations, sift through it all and only then decide what they want — a process that has been used in other criminal investigations. But given that the investigation into the riots has been active for months, it shouldn't be hard for prosecutors to narrow their search. DreamHost also objects that the warrant fails to provide any protocol for how investigators would examine the sprawling data, or explain what would happen to personal information that is found to be of no use in the case.

This is a dangerous way for any Justice Department to conduct an investigation, especially one involving political speech and association, activities that enjoy the First Amendment's strongest protections. As the Supreme Court said in a 1958 case, the "inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs." Sweeps like this have the potential to be even more chilling to speech when conducted under a thin-skinned president like Donald Trump, who has already made his intolerance of protest clear.

By forcing the government to defend this data sweep, DreamHost is doing an important service not only to its users, but also to the public at large. Prosecutors know that most companies don't have the resources to fight such warrants, so a common tactic is to overreach and then wait for pushback. If the site or service provider folds and turns over the requested data, any constitutional violation may not be revealed until years later, when a diligent defense lawyer is challenging a conviction in a single criminal case. That's a bad recipe for protecting all Americans' right to freely associate, and to be free of unreasonable government intrusion, in the digital age.

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6) Mother of Woman Killed in Charlottesville Says She Will Not Speak to Trump
By JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/politics/susan-bro-trump-heather-heyer.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=
Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The mother of the woman who was run down by a car during violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va., said Friday that after seeing President Trump's comments equating white supremacist protesters with those demonstrating against them, she does not wish to speak with him.

"I'm not talking to the president now; I'm sorry," Susan Bro said. "After what he said about my child."

In an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," Ms. Bro said that she had initially missed several calls from the White House, the first of which came during the funeral of her daughter, Heather D. Heyer, who was killed when a man drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters on Saturday.

She said that she had been too busy with the funeral and working to set up a foundation in her daughter's name to watch the news until Thursday night. That was when she saw footage of Mr. Trump's explosive Tuesday news conference, in which he said that there was "blame on both sides" for the violence in Charlottesville.

"I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. Heyer with the K.K.K. and the white supremacists," Ms. Bro said.

She acknowledged a statement that she had released on Monday, in which she thanked Mr. Trump for his "words of comfort and for denouncing those who promote violence and hatred" that day. But she said that after hearing his Tuesday comments, which effectively reversed what he had said the day before, she decided that she did not want to hear from him.

"You can't wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying 'I'm sorry,'" she added. "I'm not forgiving for that."

Asked toward the end of the interview on Friday if there was a message she wanted to convey to the president, Ms. Bro was brief:

"Think before you speak," she said.

A White House spokeswoman, Lindsay Walters, had said that the White House was looking to set up a "convenient" time for the president to talk to Ms. Bro. Mr. Trump had tweeted Wednesday that Ms. Heyer was "a truly special young woman" who would be "long remembered by all!"

He did not mention Ms. Heyer by name in his Tuesday news conference, but several times he referred to Ms. Bro's statement thanking him for asserting that "racism is evil" and condemning hate groups including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

"I thought that the statement put out, the mother's statement, I thought was a beautiful statement," Mr. Trump said. "I tell you, it was something that I really appreciated. I thought it was terrific."

Ms. Heyer, 32, was one of a crowd of counterprotesters struck by a Dodge Challenger that the police say was driven by James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio. Nineteen people were injured. At her memorial service on Wednesday, her family and friends remembered her as passionate and strong in her political convictions.

Ms. Bro said at the memorial service that her daughter's death should serve as a rallying cry for those who stood up against discrimination. She received a standing ovation after telling attendees to fight for their values, as her daughter had.

"They tried to kill my child to shut her up," Ms. Bro said. "Well, guess what — you just magnified her."

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7) Indian Girl, 10, Who Was Raped and Denied an Abortion Gives Birth
By HARI KUMAR and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN AUG. 17, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/world/asia/indian-girl-10-who-was-raped-and-denied-an-abortion-gives-birth.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=
stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

NEW DELHI — A 10-year-old Indian girl who was raped by an uncle, and then lost her legal battle to have an abortion, gave birth on Thursday to a girl.

The girl, who was under general anesthesia while the baby was delivered by cesarean section, had not been told that she was pregnant and had no idea that she had given birth, doctors said. She was told instead that she had a kidney stone that needed to be removed.

The baby was premature and weighed a bit more than five pounds. She was placed in an intensive care unit and will ultimately be put up for adoption.

"Neither the girl nor her family even saw the child," said Dr. Dasari Harish, head of the team that performed the surgery, adding that the family wanted nothing to do with the newborn.

The case, which many Indians found shocking, was watched closely by activists working to overhaul India's abortion law. In India, it is forbidden to abort a fetus after more than 20 weeks unless an exception is granted. Abortion rights activists tried to get an Indian court to allow the exception, arguing that abortion procedures are much safer than they were when the 20-week law was enacted more than 40 years ago. But the effort failed.

The 10-year-old was admitted nearly a week ago to a state-run hospital in Chandigarh, in northern India. To make sure nothing went wrong, a large team of physicians attended the birth, including three gynecologists, two pediatricians, two psychologists, a dietitian and a cardiologist.

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8) Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language
By LIAM STACK AUG. 15, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/alt-left-alt-right-glossary.html

President Trump angrily denounced the so-called alt-left at a news conference on Tuesday, claiming that the group attacked followers of the so-called alt-right at a white supremacist rally that exploded into deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday.

"What about the 'alt-left' that came charging at the, as you say, the 'alt-right'? Do they have any semblance of guilt?" he asked. There was "blame on both sides," he said. "I have no doubt about it."

Both phrases are part of a broad lexicon of far-right terminology that has become important to understanding American politics during the Trump administration. Many of these terms have their roots in movements that are racist, anti-Semitic and sexist.

Here is a brief guide to the meaning of those expressions and others used by white supremacists and far-right extremists.

Alt-Right

The "alt-right" is a racist, far-right movement based on an ideology of white nationalism and anti-Semitism. Many news organizations do not use the term, preferring terms like "white nationalism" and "far right."

The movement's self-professed goal is the creation of a white state and the destruction of "leftism," which it calls "an ideology of death." Richard B. Spencer, a leader in the movement, has described the movement as "identity politics for white people."

It is also anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and opposed to homosexuality and gay and transgender rights. It is highly decentralized but has a wide online presence, where its ideology is spread via racist or sexist memes with a satirical edge.

It believes that higher education is "only appropriate for a cognitive elite" and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships.

Alt-Left

Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the "alt-left." Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and "anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn't like."

Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.

"It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network," Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. "It's just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don't like 'fake news.'"

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the "alt-left" was partly to blame for the Charlottesville violence, during which a counterprotester, Heather D. Heyer, was killed.

Alt-Light

The "alt-light" comprises members of the far right who once fell under the "alt-right" umbrella but have since split from the group because, by and large, racism and anti-Semitism are not central to its far-right nationalist views, according to Ryan Lenz, the editor of Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Members of the alt-right mocked these dissidents as "the alt-light."

"The alt-light is the alt-right without the racist overtones, but it is hard to differentiate it sometimes because you're looking at people who sometimes dance between both camps," he said.

The two groups often feud online over "the Jewish Question," or whether Jews profit by secretly manipulating the government and the news media.

Antifa

"Antifa" is a contraction of the word "anti-fascist." It was coined in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s by a network of groups that spread across Europe to confront right-wing extremists, according to Mr. Pitcavage. A similar movement emerged in the 1980s in the United States and has grown as the "alt-right" has risen to prominence.

For some so-called a ntifa members, the goal is to physically confront white supremacists. "If they can get at them, to assault them and engage in street fighting," Mr. Pitcavage said. Mr. Lenz, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the group "an old left-wing extremist movement."

Members of the "alt-right" broadly portray protesters who oppose them as "antifa," or the "alt-left," and say they bear some responsibility for any violence that ensues — a claim made by Mr. Trump on Tuesday.

But analysts said comparing antifa with neo-Nazi or white supremacist protesters was a false equivalence.

Cuck

"Cuck" is an insult used by the "alt-right" to attack the masculinity of an opponent, originally other conservatives, whom the movement deemed insufficiently committed to racism and anti-Semitism.

It is short for "cuckold," a word dating back to the Middle Ages that describes a man who knows his wife is sleeping with other men and does not object. Mr. Lenz said the use of the word by the "alt-right" often had racial overtones.

S.J.W.

S.J.W. is short for "social justice warrior" and is used by the right as an epithet for someone who advocates liberal causes like feminism, racial justice or gay and transgender rights. It is also sometimes used to imply that a person's online advocacy of a cause is insincere or done for appearances. It became widely used during "GamerGate," a controversy that began in 2014 over sexism in video game subcultures.

Mr. Lenz, whose organization has specific criteria for which groups it classifies as Nazi organizations, said the right used the phrase "to rhetorically address the fact that the left sometimes calls anyone who disagrees with it Nazis." He said the alt-right had created the term so its followers had a similar blanket term to deride the left.

Blood and Soil

Video taken at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday showed marchers chanting "blood and soil." The phrase is a 19th-century German nationalist term that connotes a mystical bond between the blood of an ethnic group and the soil of their country.

It was used as a Nazi slogan in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and since then "has been transported to neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists around the world," Mr. Pitcavage said. It is one of several Nazi symbols that have been adopted as a slogan by some members of the "alt-right."

Globalism

Globalism is sometimes used as a synonym for globalization, the network of economic interconnection that became the dominant international system after the Cold War. The word has become more commonly used since Mr. Trump railed against globalism frequently on the campaign trail.

For the far right, globalism has long had distinct xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic overtones. It refers to a conspiratorial worldview: a cabal that likes open borders, diversity and weak nation states, and that dislikes white people, Christianity and the traditional culture of their own country.

White Genocide

White genocide is a white nationalist belief that white people, as a race, are endangered and face extinction as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the races, a process being manipulated by Jews, according to Mr. Lenz. It is the underlying concept behind far-right, anti-immigration arguments, especially those aimed at immigrants who are not white Christians.

The concept was popularized by Bob Whitaker, a former economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management, who wrote a 221-word "mantra" on the subject that ended with the rallying cry: "Anti-racist is code word for anti-white."

Mr. Pitcavage said the concept of white genocide was often communicated online through a white supremacist saying called the Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

The saying was created by David Lane, a white supremacist sentenced to 190 years in prison in connection with the 1984 murder of the Jewish radio host Alan Berg.

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9) Chris Long Makes the Gesture We've Been Waiting For

by Dave Zirin
https://www.thenation.com/article/chris-long-with-the-gesture-weve-been-waiting-for/

There is a hidden history of white, male professional athletes standing up against racism and taking some of arrows usually reserved for their black and brown teammates. There was Pee Wee Reese standing alongside Jackie Robinson as the racists rained down invective, saying, "Maybe tomorrow we'll all wear 42, that way they won't tell us apart." There was NFL linebacker Dave Meggyesy speaking out against racism and the war in Vietnam. There was pitcher Jim Bouton standing with the anti-apartheid struggle, and there was Bill "Spaceman" Lee in his Red Sox uniform calling out the bigotry of Boston fans. More recently, NBA players like Steve Nash helped organize his team to wear Los Suns shirts to push back against anti-immigrant bashing in Arizona, and in today's NBA, J.J. Redick has been thoughtful and outspoken about racism in the United States.
It's not widely known, and it's not deep, but it exists. It's also precious because of the conversations it can open up among white families. And today, for the first time in a long time, its embers are lit.
Yesterday Chris Long, defensive end of the Philadelphia Eagles, made a very simple gesture before a preseason game by putting his arm around teammate Malcolm Jenkins as he raised his fist during the National Anthem. Malcolm Jenkins has been holding his fist high for a year and has pledged to continue doing so this season:

Last season, I raised my fist as a sign of solidarity to support people, especially people of color, who were and are still unjustly losing their lives at the hands of officers with little to no consequence. After spending time with police officers on ride-alongs, meeting with politicians on the state and federal level and grass roots organizations fighting for human rights, it's clear that our criminal justice system is still crippling communities of color through mass incarceration.

Long, who went to UVA and is from Charlottesville, has spoken in recent days about his outrage following the Nazi march in his hometown as well as Donald Trump's shameful response. Last night, he attached deeds to his words. After the game Long said, "It's been a hard week for everybody. It's not just a hard week for someone being from Charlottesville. It's a tough week for America… Malcolm is a leader and I'm here to show support as a white athlete. I just told Malcolm, 'I'm here for you.'"
As for Jenkins, he said, "This is a moment in time where he feels the need to kind of take that step and lead, and I appreciate that."
Long's actions also come, as Deadspin's Barry Petchesky pointed out, just a day after Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett challenged white athletes on ESPN's SportsCenter to take some of this weight. Bennett said, "It would take a white player to really get things changed, because when somebody from the other side understands and they step up and they speak up about it …it would change the whole conversation. Because you bring somebody who doesn't really have to be a part of [the] conversation making himself vulnerable in front of it, I think when that happens, things will really take a jump."
This is one of those moments where the opportunity for a "big jump" is right in front of us. It will require more white athletes to stand in defense of a very basic, often empty principle that we are taught from the first time any of us take the field: A team is supposed to be like a family. Right now there is a president trying to tear that family apart. You either let that happen, or put your arm around your brother and let the world know that you won't be divided.

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10) Florida locks down all 97,000 prisoners, blocking them from Aug. 19 Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March

August 18, 2017

by Prison Abolition Prisoner Support (PAPS) and The Ordinary People Society (TOPS)

Florida Department of Corrections has placed all of its 97,000 inmates on lockdown, just days before the Aug. 19 Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March on Washington, D.C., calling for an end to the legalized slavery of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Cracking down on the mobility of inmates by correctional officials has become a common tactic to prevent prisoners from joining outside supporters in calling for an end to mass incarceration.

Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, who was recently moved to a Florida prison from a Texas unit on interstate compact following a massive call-in and write-in campaign to return his legal materials, witnessed these same tactics in Texas prior to the 2016 national prison strikes: "The actual aim of this lockdown was and is to pre-empt the prisoners at this unit from participating in the Sept. 9 protest by confining everyone to their cells in advance of it and well into the period during which it might last."

Mr. Johnson, who organizes with the New Afrikan Black Panther Party Prison Chapter, has been disappeared in the Florida Department of Corrections system. The inmate locator website and officials will not reveal where he is being held, once again making vague claims of security threats – as they are doing to attempt to justify this unreasonable lockdown.

Prison activists and family members of prisoners are concerned that this lockdown and repression may lead to more violence. At Kinross Prison in Michigan last September, inmates peacefully marched in the yard and then were met with brutal retaliation from correctional officers.

Speaking from the Millions for Prisoners rally at the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), Alejo Stark of Michigan Abolition and Prisoner Support (MAPS) stated, "Protest at Kinross Correctional Facility had been peacefully resolved for hours before MDOC sent in ERT squads, causing panic and terror by deploying chemical weapons at imprisoned people."

Cracking down on the mobility of inmates by correctional officials has become a common tactic to prevent prisoners from joining outside supporters in calling for an end to mass incarceration.

Pastor Kenneth Glasgow of The Ordinary Peoples Society was held in three different Florida prisons for a span of two years before becoming a prisoner advocate for the last two decades. "These lockdowns are some of the most egregious, inhumane places that these prisoners can find themselves. But it also burdens the families because they do not know the whereabouts or the care-abouts of their family members. They cannot visit them or call them to know whether they are alive or dead."

For more information, contact Azzurra Crispino at iheartpaps@gmail.com or Pastor Kenneth Glasgow at topssociety@yahoo.com.

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11) Counterprotesters Surge Into Boston, Overshadowing Rally
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, ALAN BLINDER and JESS BIDGOOD AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/demonstration-race-free-speech-boston-charlottesville.html?&hp&action=
click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=nytmm_FadingSlideShow_item&module=photo-spot-region&region=
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BOSTON — Thousands of demonstrators, emboldened and unnerved by the fatal eruption of violence in Virginia last weekend, surged into the nation's streets and parks on Saturday to denounce white supremacy and Nazism.

The demonstrations were loud but broadly peaceful, even as tensions and worries coursed through protests that unfolded from Boston Common, the nation's oldest public park, to Hot Springs, Ark., and the bridges that cross the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. Other protests were expected on Saturday in Chicago, Dallas and Houston.

Boston faced dueling demonstrations, but a rally to promote "free speech" was brief and unamplified. It was undercut by police planning and starved by an enormous buffer zone between protesters and their opponents, many of whom had feared that the rally would become a haven for neo-Nazis and white nationalists.

"This city has a history of fighting back against oppression, whether it's dumping tea in the harbor or a bunch of dudes standing around with bandannas screaming at neo-Nazis," said a 21-year-old protester in Boston who would identify himself only as "Frosty" and wore an American flag to obscure much of his face.

Saturday's demonstrations, one week after a 32-year-old woman died amid clashes between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., occurred as the nation was again confronting questions about race, violence and the standing of Confederate symbols.

President Trump, who has faced unyielding, and bipartisan, criticism after he said there was "blame on both sides" in Charlottesville, wrote on Twitter on Saturday that it appeared there were "many anti-police agitators in Boston."

"Police are looking tough and smart!" he continued. "Thank you."

Law enforcement officials were on alert, wary of being seen as irresolute and ineffective after the protests in Virginia turned fatal when someone drove a car through a crowd of protesters. Officers patrolled on bicycles, on foot and from helicopters. In some instances, officers in riot gear faced off with demonstrators and tried to maintain order. There were some scuffles and arrests.

The epicenter of the weekend's demonstrations appeared to be here in Boston, where the Common had been the expected setting for a pair of protests, including one that the Boston Free Speech Coalition organized before the Charlottesville violence. Organizers said they were appealing to "libertarians, conservatives, traditionalists, classical liberals, Trump supporters or anyone else who enjoys their right to free speech."

But supporters of the free speech rally, scheduled for noon, faced thousands of counterprotesters, many of whom marched toward the Common from the Roxbury neighborhood.

As the minutes ticked by on a day that began with fog but became hot and sticky, counterdemonstrators on the Common shouted, "Scum! Scum!"

Earlier, the counterprotesters had shouted down their opponents — "No Nazis! No K.K.K.! No fascist U.S.A.!" — as Massachusetts state troopers used their bikes to keep rival demonstrators apart. City officials had said they would enforce a policy of zero tolerance for violence.

"If anything gets out of hand," Mayor Martin J. Walsh said on Friday, "we will shut it down."

The rally, which could have lasted until 2 p.m., concluded by about 12:50 p.m. The bandstand emptied, officials removed flags tied to the free speech rally and the crowd of counterprotesters sang, "Hey, hey, hey, goodbye."

A spokesman for the Boston police, Lt. Detective Mike McCarthy, said the free speech demonstrators had "decided they were done, and they left the Common." The police escorted them as chants of "Shame!" rained down from the crowd.

Rondre Brooks, 36, who said he had traveled from Detroit for the counterdemonstration, said he was pleased to see the apparent early end of the free speech rally. "It's a very good look for America as a whole," he said.

But another man, who said he supported the speech rally and gave his name, after some hesitation, as Matt Staley, interjected to ask if those demonstrating in support of free speech were not Americans, too.

"I think it's awful that people can't speak out to express opinions," Mr. Staley said.

The counterprotesters descended on the Common for hours before the planned rally, and they found fliers showing symbols of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The leaflet, which protesters appeared to have prepared, urged people to "learn to identify these symbols and let anyone displaying them know that they are not welcome in our city!"

"Boston is an anti-fascist zone!" it added.

"Charlottesville is what forced me out here," said Rose Fowler, 68, a retired teacher who is black and was among the people who had gathered to march from Roxbury toward the Common, about two miles away. "Somebody killed for fighting for me. What is wrong with me if I can't fight for myself and others?"

Although the protests in Boston were expected to be among the weekend's largest, several hundred people gathered on Friday evening in Portland for an "Eclipse Hate" rally. The protest soon swelled to more than 1,000 people, many of whom used chants that demonstrators used in Boston on Saturday.

The demonstrators swarmed two of Portland's bridges, halting traffic in both directions and chanting, "Whose bridge? Our bridge!"

In Arkansas on Saturday morning, a small demonstration supporting Confederate symbols drew about 50 people in Hot Springs. A small group of opponents walked by occasionally, denouncing Mr. Trump and racial hatred.

Along a side street in Charlottesville, the mood was somber at about 1:30 p.m. as people marked the time when, a week earlier, a man drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather D. Heyer.

Ms. Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, stood before a memorial of flowers and candles, weeping as she leaned into her husband, Kim Bro. Hundreds of people gathered around and watched silently as someone wrote with purple chalk — Ms. Heyer's favorite color — on the pavement, "I miss you baby girl, love mom."

After a few minutes, Ms. Bro turned to address the crowd.

"Thank you guys for coming," she said. "I know she's gone on, but this is the spot where I lost my baby."

She encouraged people to come closer to her, and the crowd came in, some people laid hands on her, and they sang "This Little Light of Mine."

Ms. Bro said she hoped that some good could come out of her daughter's death. And for those who might take joy in seeing her grieve, she said, "Karma's a you know what."

Law enforcement officials made extensive plans for the demonstrations in the wake of the Virginia bloodshed.

In Dallas, where a gunman killed five police officers who were protecting a protest in July 2016, the authorities planned to form a barricade around Saturday's demonstration site with buses and heavy equipment to "lock down" the area and keep any cars from drawing too close to the crowd.

The Boston authorities cleared the Common of vendors and their carts, and they shut down the Swan Boats, a major tourist attraction in the nearby Public Garden.

Marchers were banned from bringing weapons, bats, sticks, flagpoles or anything that might be used as a weapon or a projectile, and backpacks were subject to search.

Boston's approach to the day's protests represented something of a balancing act. Mr. Walsh, the mayor, said the city had consulted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group based in Montgomery, Ala., that monitors extremist behavior, on how to handle hate groups.

He said the center warned that "interacting with them gives them a platform to spread their message of hate" and that it recommended that people "not confront" them.

"So we're urging everyone to stay away from the Common," Mr. Walsh said. "At the same time, we can't look away."

The mayor had begun the week by telling hate groups that they were not welcome in Boston. By Friday, he acknowledged their right to assemble and express their views.

"The courts have made it abundantly clear they have the right to gather, no matter how repugnant their views are, but they don't have the right to create unsafe conditions," Mr. Walsh said. "So we're going to respect their right of free speech, and in return they must respect our city."

Still, tensions here had been rising all week. On Monday night, a teenager threw a rock at the New England Holocaust Memorial, shattering the glass; passers-by quickly tackled the youth before the police arrived.

And with the national spotlight on the debate over Confederate monuments in the South, John W. Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, said he was "haunted" by the racist legacy of his predecessor, Tom Yawkey, who resisted integrating the ball club long after every other club in Major League Baseball had hired black players.

Mr. Henry said he wanted to lead an effort to rename Yawkey Way, a public street outside Fenway Park, "in light of the country's current leadership stance with regard to intolerance."

Duke University announced early Saturday that it had removed a recently vandalized statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from the entrance to its campus chapel in Durham, N.C.

"I took this course of action to protect Duke Chapel, to ensure the vital safety of students and community members who worship there, and above all to express the deep and abiding values of our university," Vincent E. Price, the university's president, said in an email to students, employees and alumni.

Dr. Price said the statue would be "preserved so that students can study Duke's complex past and take part in a more inclusive future."

Katharine Q. Seelye and Jess Bidgood reported from Boston, and Alan Blinder from Atlanta. Reporting was contributed by John Eligon from Charlottesville, Va.; Manny Fernandez from Dallas; Rob Moritz from Hot Springs, Ark.; and Courtney Sherwood from Portland, Ore.

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12) M.T.A. to Modify Subway Station Design Resembling Confederate Flag
By MATT STEVENS AUG. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/nyregion/mta-confederate-flag-tiles.html?rref=
collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=
click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=
latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

To busy New Yorkers walking briskly by, the mosaic inside a Times Square subway station might look like a Confederate flag.

It is not, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority assured riders on Friday. But less than a week after violence broke out at a Virginia rally, ostensibly over the planned removal of a statue of a Confederate general, officials are not taking any chances.

So in order to "avoid absolutely any confusion," the M.T.A. said in a statement that it would modify the design to make it "absolutely crystal clear" that it does not depict a symbol of Southern defiance.

The design, which is essentially a red square covered by a blue-and-white "X," is actually "based on geometric forms that represent the 'Crossroads of the World,'" officials said.

It appears inside at least one subway entrance on 40th Street near the corner Seventh Avenue; there, a ribbon of green, blue and yellow tiles stretches across the top of an otherwise white wall. The square design, which has apparently been mistaken for a Confederate flag, stamps the ribbon every few feet — repeating over and over.

In their brief statement, M.T.A. officials did not make clear where exactly the design appears, whether it appears at other subway stations, or how frequently it appears.

Officials also did not say when work to modify the design would begin or specify how much the work would cost.

The M.T.A. announcement came less than a week after a violent rally in Charlottesville, Va., that was ostensibly meant to protest a plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy's top general, from the city's Emancipation Park.

Following the demonstration, which resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman and dozens of injuries, leaders in New York — like those across the country — have sprung into action, announcing a flurry of moves that take aim at Confederate memorials.

On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York asked the acting secretary of the Army to change the names of two streets at the Fort Hamilton Army base in Brooklyn that are named after Southern generals.

Also on Wednesday, the president of the Bronx Community College said the school would remove the bronze busts of those two Southern generals, Lee and Stonewall Jackson, from its Hall of Fame for Great Americans.

The same day, a Brooklyn church removed two plaques that honored Lee from a churchyard tree.

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13) Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle
By CLYDE HABERMANAUG. 19, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/arts/dick-gregory-dies-at-84.html

Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.

Mr. Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who announced his death on social media, said more details would be released in the coming days. Mr. Gregory had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier Facebook post.

Early in his career Mr. Gregory insisted in interviews that his first order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change how white America treated Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time). “Humor can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure cancer,” he said. Nonetheless, as the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.

Mr. Gregory was a breakthrough performer in his appeal to whites — a crossover star, in contrast to veteran black comedians like Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley and Slappy White, whose earthy, pungent humor was mainly confined to black clubs on the so-called chitlin circuit.

Though he clearly seethed over the repression of blacks, he resorted to neither scoldings nor lectures when playing big-time rooms like the hungry i in San Francisco or the Village Gate in New York. Rather, he won audiences over with wry observations about the country’s racial chasm.

He would plant himself on a stool, the picture of insouciance in a three-button suit and dark tie, dragging slowly on a cigarette, which he used as a punctuation mark. From that perch he would bid America to look in the mirror, and to laugh at itself.

“Segregation is not all bad,” he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” Or: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.” Or: “I heard we’ve got lots of black astronauts. Saving them for the first spaceflight to the sun.”

Some lines became classics, like the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve colored people here,” to which Mr. Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,” he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”

Mr. Gregory was a national sensation in the early 1960s, earning thousands of dollars a week from club dates and from records like “In Living Black and White” and “Dick Gregory Talks Turkey.” He wrote the first of his dozen books. Time magazine, enormously powerful then, ran a profile of him. Jack Paar, that era’s “Tonight Show” host, had him on as a guest — after Mr. Gregory demanded that he be invited to sit for a chat. Until then, black performers did their numbers, then had to leave. Time on Paar’s sofa was a sign of having arrived.

Newspapers in those days routinely put Mr. Gregory on a par with two white performers, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, anointing them a troika of modern satire. Just as routinely, he was later credited with paving the way for a new wave of black comedians who would make it big in the white world, notably two talents of thoroughly different sensibilities: the reflective Bill Cosby and the trenchant Richard Pryor.

It was Mr. Gregory’s conviction that within a well-delivered joke lies power. He learned that lesson growing up in St. Louis, achingly poor and fatherless and often picked on by other children in his neighborhood.

“They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh with me instead of at me,” he said in a 1964 autobiography, written with Robert Lipsyte. “After a while,” he wrote, “I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them.”

He titled that book “nigger,” lowercase N. The word — typically reduced these days to “the N-word” — figured prominently in his routines, even as he shunned the obscenities that casually littered the acts of other comedians.

“I said, let’s pull it out of the closet, let’s lay it out there, let’s deal with it, let’s dissect it,” he said in a 2000 interview with NPR. “It should never be called ‘the N-word.’ ”

In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.

Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”

He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”

In 1965, he was shot in the leg (the wound was not grave) by a rioter as he tried to be a peacemaker during the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

Increasingly, he skipped club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups. Club owners became reluctant to book him: Who knew if he might fly off to Alabama on a moment’s notice? As the ’60s wore on, the college lecture circuit became his principal forum.

Mr. Gregory, then a candidate for president, before speaking in Norfolk, Va., in October 1968.

“Against the advice of almost everyone, he decided to risk his career for civil rights,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” (2003). Some pillars of the movement, like Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, who died in 1971, believed that Mr. Gregory was more valuable to their cause onstage than in the streets. To which Mr. Gregory replied, “When America goes to war, she don’t send her comedians.”

In 1967, his head now ringed with a full beard and bushy hair — no more the thin mustache of earlier years — he ran for mayor of Chicago, more or less as a stunt. The next year he ran for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, getting by his count 1.5 million write-in votes. The official figure was 47,133.

There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.

And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.

His fasting led to a keen interest in nutrition. Working in the 1980s with a Swedish health food company, Mr. Gregory developed a weight-reduction powder called Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet. The partners had a falling-out, and the business swooned.

Still, Mr. Gregory remained a fervent health-food advocate. In late 1999, he learned he had lymphoma but rejected chemotherapy, relying instead on vitamins, herbs and exercise. The cancer went into remission.

His activism came at a price, however. For one thing, the cascade of cash that he had once enjoyed turned into a trickle. His family paid, too.

Mr. Gregory moved to Chicago to build a comedy career in the late 1950s. There he met Lillian Smith, a secretary at the University of Chicago, and they were married in 1959. They had 11 children, one of whom, Richard Jr., died in infancy.

In 1973, when cash was still rolling in, they bought a 400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. (Why Plymouth? “I think the white folks is coming back, and I’m going to get a handful of Indians and stop ’em there this time,” Mr. Gregory said.) But by the early 1990s, the strapped Gregorys had lost the farm and moved into an apartment in Plymouth.

Over more than five decades of marriage, Lillian Gregory said, she understood her husband’s need — some called it an obsession — to wander off on behalf of this or that cause, typically earning nothing except attention, and sometimes not even that. But Christian Gregory, a chiropractor in Washington, said to The Washington Post in 2000: “He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family. It was a hard pill to swallow.”

Father absenteeism was a familiar phenomenon for the man born Richard Claxton Gregory in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932. He was the second of six children. His father, Presley, disappeared after the birth of each child, and finally left for good. The Gregory children were reared by their mother, Lucille, who scraped by on welfare and a meager income as a maid.

“Kids didn’t eat off the floor,” Mr. Gregory said of their Depression-era poverty. “When I was a kid, you dropped something off the table, it never reached the floor.”

Information about Mr. Gregory’s survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Gregory graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis, then attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill. At both schools he was a track star and enjoyed local fame.

Not that the acclaim was free of complications. In 1961, by then a national figure, he received the key to the city from the mayor of St. Louis. Yet in his hometown he was denied a room at a leading hotel. “They gave me the key to the city,” Mr. Gregory said, “and then they changed all the locks.”

He left college in 1954 and joined the Army, where he was able to work on comedy routines while attached to Special Services. He then returned to college, only to give it up again without graduating.

In 1956 he headed to Chicago, where he worked in small-time clubs at night and at odd jobs by day. He even tried running a club of his own, but that venture failed.

In one part-time job Mr. Gregory sorted mail in a post office. His pattern, he later said, was to toss letters destined for Mississippi into a slot marked “overseas.” That job did not last long.

His real break came in January 1961, when he was asked to fill in for the comedian Irwin Corey, who had canceled a gig at the flagship Playboy Club in Chicago. On the big night, club managers had misgivings; the house was packed with businessmen from the Deep South. No matter, Mr. Gregory said. He insisted on performing.

“I understand there are a great many Southerners in the room tonight,” he began his act. “I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night.” He so won over the crowd that Playboy’s Hugh Hefner signed him for three more weeks, then extended the contract.

Despite having sworn off nightclubs in 1973, saying he could no longer work in places where liquor was served, Mr. Gregory returned to them on occasion in later years, a thin presence wreathed in white hair and beard. Though his best days were well behind him, his approach never seemed to waver from principles that he set for himself when starting out. He put it this way in his autobiography:

“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man.”

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Sunday, August 20, 2017

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SUNDAY, AUGUST 20, 2017

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Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

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A) EVENTS, ACTIONS AND ONGOING STRUGGLES

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MILLIONS FOR PRISONERS HUMAN RIGHTS MARCH ON WASHINGTON - AUGUST 19, 2017

Would love for someone to do research on this guy! Please listen to this interview (filled with misinformation), and consider joining us at Creech in the fall and/or spring to be a voice against the slaughter. (Dates below).

Life As A 'Drone Warrior'

SIGN THE PETITION: DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST REALITY WINNER

WHY ALLEGED WHISTLE-BLOWER REALITY WINNER DESERVES SUPPORT

BY JEFF PATERSON, COURAGE TO RESIST. JUNE 8, 2017

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Solidarity Statement from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners

California Coalition for Women Prisoners Statement

Northwest Detention Center Press Release May 4, 2017

Despite threats and retaliation, hunger strikers continue protest

ICE ignores demands for improved conditions

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Labor Studies and Radical History

4444 Geary Blvd., Suite 207, San Francisco, CA 94118

415.387.5700

http://www.holtlaborlibrary.org/mayday.html

Hours(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

Services

Reference Librarian On-site Email and Telephone Reference Interlibrary Loan Online Public Access Catalog Microfilm Reader/Printer DVD and VCR players Photocopier Quiet well-lighted place for study and research For an appointment or further information, please email: david [at] holtlaborlibrary.org

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Support: CONTRIBUTE Thank you for being a part of this struggle.Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win! Noelle Hanrahan, Director To give by check: PO Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141 Stock or legacy gifts: Noelle Hanrahan (415) 706 - 5222

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BAY AREA ANTI-REPRESSION COMMITTEE

Mothers Message to the NY/NJ Activist Community

In order to effectively combat the existing opportunism, hidden agendas and to better provide ALL genuinely good willed social justice organizations and individuals who work inside of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas... with more concrete guidelines;

The following "10 Point Platform and Justice Wish List" was adopted on Saturday, May 13, 2017 during the "Motherhood: Standing Strong 4 Justice" pre-mothers day gathering which was held at Hostos Community College - Bronx, New York.......

"What We Want, What We Need"

May, 2017 - NY/NJ Parents 10 Point Justice Platform and Wish List

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My Heartfelt "Thank You!"

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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* Kevin "Rashid" Johnson Packed Off to Florida!

Rashid: I'm off to Florida and a new phase of reprisals for publicizing abuses in US prisons

July 14, 2017

Readers are urged to share this story widely and write to Rashid right away; mail equals support, and the more he gets, the safer he'll be: Kevin Johnson, O-158039, RMC, P.O. Box 628, Lake Butler FL 32054

by Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson http://sfbayview.com/2017/07/rashid-im-off-to-florida-and-a-new-phase-of-reprisals-for-publicizing-abuses-in-us-prisons/

Packed off to Florida

The Welcoming Committee

I was ordered to stand in a pair of painted yellow footprints on a concrete platform as the guards crowded around me. "This is Florida, and we'll beat your ass! We'll kill you!" said the spokesman.

Another nurse did my medical history check, remarking that my blood pressure reading was extremely high, 145/103. Although she had all my medications sitting there in front of her, and I told her I had not received my dose that day, she refused to provide them and did nothing.

Barbaric housing

My cell was infested with ants which would find their way into my bed as I slept on the floor. I received numerous bites from them. At night, even when the lights were on, mice and huge, two-inch-long cockroaches, along with the "regular" smaller breed of roaches, ran into and explored the cell.

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Would love for someone to do research on this guy!

Please listen to this interview (filled with misinformation), and consider joining us at Creech in the fall and/or spring to be a voice against the slaughter.

(Dates below).

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Hours

(call 415.387.5700 to be sure the library is open for the hours you are interested in. We close the library sometimes to go on errands or have close early) suggested)

7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Closed on all major holidays and May Day

We can arrange, by request, to keep the library open longer during the day or open it on weekends. Just ask.

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Support:

CONTRIBUTE

Thank you for being a part of this struggle.

Cuando luchamos ganamos! When we fight we win!

Noelle Hanrahan, Director

To give by check:

PO Box 411074

San Francisco, CA

94141

Stock or legacy gifts:

Noelle Hanrahan

(415) 706 - 5222

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Kevin "Rashid" Johnson Packed Off to Florida!

by Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson

http://sfbayview.com/2017/07/rashid-im-off-to-florida-and-a-new-phase-of-reprisals-for-publicizing-abuses-in-us-prisons/

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