Saturday, May 11, 2019

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SATURDAY, MAY 11, 2019

CODEPINK MOTHER'S DAY MARCH:

Walk for

IMMIGRANT MOTHERS & THEIR FAMILIES

And for PEACE

Sunday, May 12, 2019, NOON

Golden Gate Bridge

We Stand with Immigrant Mothers

-End Family Separation

-Close All Detention Centers Now!

-Immigration is NOT a Crime

Mother's Day was originally founded post-Civil War, as a call to organize women around the world to unite to abolish war. CODEPINK has been honoring that original pledge every Mother's Day since 2007, bringing our messages of peace & justice to the Golden Gate Bridge.

We live in dark times today, with immigrant children being cruelly torn apart from their parents, and placed indefinitely in detention centers, traumatizing them with long-lasting psychic wounds, ending in death for some. There are thousands of immigrant children right now suffering in detention centers right now, without their parents.

This Mother's Day we will walk in solidarity with immigrant mother's who are separated from their children, or who are threatened to be separated. This is also to support a national call to action against these inhumane ICE and U.S. policies:

Mother's Day Rally to End Family Separation and Child Detention.

NO WALLS, NO CAMPS, NO BORDERS!

BUILD BRIDGES NOT WALLS!

This Mother's Day please join us on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bring your mothers and daughters, your sons and fathers, your grandchildren, friends and neighbors to honor our history. We will also carry messages to express our passion for PEACE! MOTHERS SAY NO WAR!

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Chelsea Manning Released From Prison

Manning was released after being held for 62 days for refusing to testify about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7013205/Chelsea-Manning-released-prison-held-62-days.html

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Painting by Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on San Quentin's death row. www.freekevincooper.org

Decarcerate Louisiana

Declaration of Undersigned Prisoners

We, the undersigned persons, committed to the care and custody of the Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC), hereby submit the following declaration and petition bearing witness to inhumane conditions of solitary confinement in the N-1 building at the David Wade Corrections Center (DWCC).

Our Complaint:

We, the Undersigned Persons, declare under penalty of perjury:

1. We, the undersigned, are currently housed in the N-1 building at DWCC, 670 Bell Hill Road, Homer, LA 71040.

2. We are aware that the Constitution, under the 8th Amendment, bans cruel and unusual punishments; the Amendment also imposes duties on prison officials who must provide humane conditions of confinement and ensure that inmates receive adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and must take reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of the inmates.

3. We are aware that Louisiana prison officials have sworn by LSA-R.S.15:828 to provide humane treatment and rehabilitation to persons committed to its care and to direct efforts to return every person in its custody to the community as promptly as practicable.

4. We are confined in a double-bunked six-by-nine foot or 54 square feet cell with another human being 22-hours-a-day and are compelled to endure the degrading experience of being in close proximity of another human being while defecating.

5. There are no educational or rehabilitation programs for the majority of prisoners confined in the N-1 building except for a selected few inmates who are soon to be released.

6. We get one hour and 30 minutes on the yard and/or gym seven days a week. Each day we walk to the kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which takes about one minute to get there. We are given ten minutes to eat.

7. The daily planner for inmates confined in the N-1 building is to provide inmates one hour and 30 minutes on yard or gym; escort inmates to kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to sit and eat for approximately ten minutes each meal; provide a ten minute shower for each cell every day; provide one ten minute phone call per week; confine prisoners in cell 22-hours-a-day.

8. When we are taking a shower we are threatened by guards with disciplinary reports if we are not out on time. A typical order is: "if you are not out of shower in ten minutes pack your shit and I'm sending you back to N-2, N-3, or N-4"—a more punitive form of solitary confinement.

9. When walking outside to yard, gym or kitchen, guards order us to put our hands behind our back or they'll write us up and send us back to N-2, N-3, N-4.

10. When we are sitting at the table eating, guards order us not to talk or they'll write us up and send us back to N-2, N-3, N-4. )

11. Guards are harassing us every day and are threatening to write up disciplinary reports and send us back to a more punitive cellblock (N-2, N-3, N-4) if we question any arbitrary use of authority or even voice an opinion in opposition to the status quo. Also, guards take away good time credits, phone, TV, radio, canteen, and contact visits for talking too loud or not having hands behind back or for any reason they want. We are also threatened with slave labor discipline including isolation (removing mattress from cell from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M.,) strip cell (removing mattress and bedding and stationery from cell for ten to 30 days or longer), food loaf (taking one's meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner and mixing it all together into one big mass, bake it in oven and serve it to prisoners for punishment.)

12. When prison guards write up disciplinary reports and transfer us to the more punitive restrictive solitary confinement in N-2, N-3, N-4 or N-5, guards then enforce an arbitrary rule that gives prisoners the ultimatum of sending all their books and personal property home or let the prison dispose of it.

13. Louisiana prison officials charge indigent prisoners (who earn less than four cents an hour) $3.00 for routine requests for healthcare services, $6.00 for emergency medical requests, and $2.00 for each new medical prescription. They wait until our family and friends send us money and take it to pay prisoners' medical bills.

Our concerns:

14. How much public monies are appropriated to the LDOC budget and specifically allotted to provide humane treatment and implement the rehabilitation program pursuant to LSA- R.S.15:828?

15. Why does Elayn Hunt Correctional Center located in the capitol of Louisiana have so many educational and rehabilitation programs teaching prisoners job and life skills for reentry whereas there are no such programs to engage the majority of prisoners confined in the N-1, N- 2, N-3, and N-4 solitary confinement buildings at DWCC.

16. It is customary for Louisiana prison officials and DWCC prison guards to tell inmates confined in the prison's cellblocks to wait until transfer to prison dormitory to participate in programs when in fact there are no such programs available and ready to engage the majority of the state's 34,000 prisoner population. The programs are especially needed for prisoners confined in a six-by-nine foot or 54 square feet cell with another person for 22-or-more-hours-per-day.

17. Why can't prisoners use phone and computers every day to communicate with family and peers as part of rehabilitation and staying connected to the community?

18. Why do prisoners have to be transferred miles and miles away from loved ones to remote correctional facilities when there are facilities closer to loved ones?

19. Why are prison guards allowed to treat prisoners as chattel slaves, confined in cages 22-or-more-hours-per-day, take away phone calls and visitation and canteen at will, and take away earned good time credits for any reason at all without input from family, one's peers and community?

20. Why do the outside communities allow prison guards to create hostile living environments and conditions of confinement that leaves prisoners in a state of chattel slavery, stress, anxiety, anger, rage, inner torment, despair, worry, and in a worse condition from when we first entered the prison?

21. Why do state governments and/or peers in the community allow racist or bigoted white families who reside in the rural and country parts of Louisiana to run the state's corrections system with impunity? For example, DWCC Warden Jerry Goodwin institutes racist and bigoted corrections policies and practices for the very purpose of oppression, repression, antagonizing and dehumanizing the inmates who will one day be released from prison.

22. David Wade Correctional Center Colonel Lonnie Nail, a bigot and a racist, takes his orders from Warden Jerry Goodwin, another racist and bigot. Both Goodwin and Nail influences subordinate corrections officers to act toward prisoners in a racist or bigoted manner and with an arrogant attitude. This creates a hostile living environment and debilitating conditions of confinement for both guards and prisoners and prevents rehabilitation of inmates.

23. In other industrialized democracies like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, et al, it is reported that no prisoner should be declared beyond reform or redemption without first attempting to rehabilitate them. Punitive or harsh conditions of confinement are not supported because they see the loss of freedom inherent in a prison sentence as punishment enough. One Netherlands official reported that their motto is to start with the idea of "Reintegration back into society on day one" when people are locked up. "You can't make an honest argument that how someone is treated while incarcerated doesn't affect how they behave when they get out," the official added.

24. Additionally, some Scandinavian countries have adopted open prison programs without fences or armed guards. Prisoners who prove by their conduct that they can be trusted are placed in a prison resembling a college campus more than a prison. The result is a 20 percent recidivism rate, compared to a 67 percent rate in the United States.

25. The National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) in a position statement says: "Prolonged (greater than 15 consecutive days) solitary confinement is cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, and harmful to an individual's health."

What We Believe:

26. We believe that when the greater portion of public monies goes to war and the military, this leaves little funds left for community reinvestment and human development.The people have less access to resources by which to get a better idea of human behavior and rely on higher education instead of prison to solve cultural, social, political, economic problems in the system that may put people at risk to domestic violence and crime as a way to survive and cope with shortcomings in the system.

27. We believe that investing public monies in the rehabilitation program LSA-R.S.15:828 to teach prisoners job and life skills will redeem inmates, instill morals, and make incarcerated people productive and fit for society.

28. We believe that confining inmates in cellblocks 15-or-more=hours-per-day is immoral, uncivilized, brutalizing, a waste of time and counter-productive to rehabilitation and society's goals of "promoting the general welfare" and "providing a more perfect union with justice for all."

29. We believe that corrections officers who prove by their actions that incarcerated people are nothing more than chattel slaves are bucking the laws and creating hardening criminals and these corrections officers are, therefore, a menace to society.

Our Demands:

30. We are demanding a public conversation from community activists and civil rights leaders about (1) the historic relationship between chattel slavery, the retaliatory assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the resurrection of slavery written into the 13th Amendment; (2) the historic relationship between the 13th Amendment, the backlash against Reconstruction, Peonage, Convict Leasing, and Slavery; (3) the historic relationship between the 13th Amendment, the War Against Poverty, the War on Drugs, Criminal Justice and Prison Slavery.

31. We demand that the Louisiana legislature pass the Decarcerate Louisiana Anti-Slavery and Freedom Liberation Act of 2020 into law and end prison slavery and the warehousing of incarcerated people for the very purpose of repression, oppression, and using prisoners and their families and supporters as a profit center for corporate exploitation and to generate revenue to balance the budget and stimulate the state economy.

32. We are demanding that Warden Jerry Goodwin and Colonel Lonnie Nail step down and be replaced by people are deemed excellent public servants in good standing with human rights watchdog groups and civil rights community.

33. We are demanding that the LDOC provide public monies to operate state prison dormitories and cellblocks as rehabilitation centers to teach incarcerated people job and life skills five-days-a-week from 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.

34. We are demanding that the LDOC release a public statement announcing that "from this day forward it will not support punitive or harsh conditions of confinement," and that "no prisoner should be declared beyond reform or redemption without first attempting to rehabilitate them."

35. We are demanding that the prison cellblocks be operated as open dormitories (made in part a health clinic and part college campus) so that incarcerated people can have enough space to walk around and socialize, participate in class studies, exercise, use telephone as the need arise. Prisoners are already punished by incarceration so there is no need to punish or further isolate them. Racism and abuse of power will not be tolerated.

36. We are demanding an end to unjust policies and practices that impose punishments and deprive incarcerated people of phone calls, visitation, canteen, good time credits, books and other personal property that pose no threat to public safety.

37. We are demanding that LDOC provide incarcerated people cellphones and computers to communicate with the public and stay connected to the community.

38. We are demanding the right to communicate with reporters to aid and assist incarcerated persons in preparing a press release to communicate to the public Decarcerate Louisiana's vision and mission statements, aims, and plans for moving forward.

39. We are demanding the right to participate in the U.S.-European Criminal Justice Innovation Project and share our complaint, concerns, and demands for a humane corrections program.

40. We are only demanding the right to enough space to create, to innovate, to excel in learning, to use scientific knowledge to improve our person and place and standing in the free world. The rule of law must support the betterment and uplifting of all humanity. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

41. We demand that the responsibility for prisoner medical care be removed from DOC wardens and place it under the management of the state's health office; increase state health officer staff to better monitor prisoner healthcare and oversee vendor contracts.

42. We have a God-given right and responsibility to resist abuse of power from the wrongdoers, to confront unjust authority and oppression, to battle for justice until we achieve our demands for liberation and freedom.

We, the undersigned, declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

Executed on this 28th Day of January 2019.

Ronald Brooks #385964

David Johnson #84970

Freddie Williams #598701

Earl Hollins #729041

James Harris #399514

Tyrone Carter #550354

Kerry Carter #392013

Ivo Richardson #317371

Rondrikus Fulton #354313

Kentell Simmons #601717

Jayvonte Pines #470985

Deandre Miles #629008

Kenneth P. #340729

Brandon Ceaser #421453

Tyronne Ward #330964

Jermaine Atkins #448421

Charles Rodgers #320513

Steve Givens #557854

Timothy Alfred #502378

—wsimg.com, January 2019

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/1f4bce95-7ddd-4b2d-8ee7-d8edf36f394f/downloads/Declaration_of_Undersigned_Prisoners.pdf?ver=1555809786117

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Venezuelan Embassy stands strong

Activist-tenants vow to resist illegal eviction

Embassy is owned by Government of Venezuela and protected by international law

People from all over the United States came to Washington, D.C. and joined together last night at the Venezuelan Embassy in a powerful demonstration of solidarity with the people of Venezuela. While banners were hung from outside the windows of the Embassy, people held a night of political education and tactical discussions. The ongoing Embassy Protection Collective continues to prevent the U.S. government from illegally seizing the Embassy of Venezuela in Washington, D.C.

The Embassy building, located in Georgetown, is owned by the Venezuelan government and is a protected international compound by the Vienna Conventions. Progressive activists have been working and living inside the Embassy as invited guests for weeks.

The Embassy Protection Collective was initiated by CODEPINK and Popular Resistance, and the ANSWER Coalition has been mobilizing support for this effort in Washington and around the country. Many ANSWER volunteers and organizers are inside the Embassy.

"The people inside this Embassy are here at the invitation of its lawful owner, the Government of Venezuela," said ANSWER's National Director Brian Becker. "The Trump administration is acting as the world's number one international pirate as it seizes Venezuelan assets, properties and diplomatic compounds. In pure colonial fashion, U.S. and European entities have grabbed hold of Venezuela's oil revenue, gold reserves and bank accounts — while openly championing the Monroe Doctrine. We are joining with the people of the world to declare that the days of the Monroe Doctrine are over."

Becker continued, "Any action to evict the Embassy's current tenant guests by the MPD, Secret Service or other police agencies would be an illegal and unlawful arrest under both D.C. and international law. What we are doing here in this Embassy is not an act of civil disobedience. International law and D.C. law are on our side. The violator of these laws — the criminal in this case — is none other than the Trump White House and the U.S. State Department."

A letter was sent last night from the Embassy Protection Collective, with the assistance of lawyer Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, to the U.S. State Department:

Members of the Embassy Protection Collective are writing to make it expressly clear and ensure all personnel are put on notice that any arrest of persons inside the embassy would constitute an unlawful arrest. We understand from our communications with your office that you are threatening to arrest persons inside the Venezuelan embassy.

Not only are we here at the invitation of persons lawfully in charge of the premises but we are also here as people with lawful rights under Washington, DC tenancy law.

It is our intention to hold responsible any person who orders or effectuates any unlawful actions against us.

We have received no eviction notice and due process opportunity to challenge any attempted eviction as is required by law.

[VIDEO: Eyewitness Venezuela Webinar. If you missed Saturday's informative webinar with anti-war leaders and journalists, or want to re-watch it, the whole thing has been posted here. Please share with friends and family to get out the truth about Venezuela!]

Please make a donation to support the anti-war movement's ongoing work to stop the Trump administration's regime change effort against Venezuela.

Here is the address to the Venezuelan Embassy:

Embassy of Venezuela
1099 30th St NW
Washington, DC 20007
United States
Google map and directions

ANSWER Coalition

http://www.answercoalition.org/

ANSWER Coalition · United States
This email was sent to caroleseligman@sbcglobal.net.
To stop receiving emails, click here.
You can also keep up with ANSWER Coalition on Facebook.

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New Prison and Jail Population Figures Released by U.S. Department of Justice

By yearend 2017, the United States prison population had declined by 7.3% since reaching its peak level in 2009, according to new data released by the Department of Justice. The prison population decreases are heavily influenced by a handful of states that have reduced their populations by 30% or more in recent years. However, as of yearend 2017 more than half the states were still experiencing increases in their populations or rates of decline only in the single digits.

Analysis of the new data by The Sentencing Project reveals that:

The United States remains as the world leader in its rate of incarceration, locking up its citizens at 5-10 times the rate of other industrialized nations. At the current rate of decline it will take 75 years to cut the prison population by 50%.


The population serving life sentences is now at a record high. One of every seven individuals in prison – 206,000 – is serving life.


Six states have reduced their prison populations by at least 30% over the past two decades – Alaska, Connecticut, California, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont.

The rate of women's incarceration has been rising at a faster rate than men's since the 1980s, and declines in recent years have been slower than among men.


Racial disparities in women's incarceration have changed dramatically since the start of the century. Black women were incarcerated at 6 times the rate of white women in 2000, while the 2017 figure is now 1.8 times that rate. These changes have been a function of both a declining number of black women in prison and a rising number of white women. For Hispanic women, the ratio has changed from 1.6 times that of white women in 2000 to 1.4 times in 2017.

The declines in prison and jail populations reported by the Department of Justice today are encouraging, but still fall far short of what is necessary for meaningful criminal justice reform. In order to take the next step in ending mass incarceration policymakers will need to scale back excessive sentencing for all offenses, a key factor which distinguishes the U.S. from other nations.

Share This

[Note: China's population is 1,419,147,756* as of April 26, 2019 with 1,649,804 in prison***; while the population of the USA is 328,792,291 as of April 27, 2019** with 2,121,600 in prison.***

*http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/china-population/

**https://www.census.gov/popclock/

***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate]

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"This is a people's victory" Pam Africa.

Who would ever think that we would see this headline, in our lifetime. This is the press release up on the Philadelphia District Attorney's website posted minutes ago.

The path to freedom is going to be hard and long, but we are on it. When We Fight, We Win,
Noelle Hanrahan, P.I. Prison Radio

Mumia Abu-Jamal

See below:

Statement: Philadelphia District Attorney's Office withdraws appeal in Mumia Abu-Jamal case

PHILADELPHIA DISTRICT ATTORNEY'S OFFICE

April 17, 2019 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Ben Waxman

PHILADELPHIA (April 17th, 2019) — Today the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office withdrew its recent appeal of an opinion granting a re-hearing of some previously decided issues in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. We withdrew the appeal because the opinion we appealed has been modified consistent with our primary concern — -that ruling's effect on many other cases.

By way of background, Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the murder of a young police officer, Daniel Faulkner, that occurred on December 9, 1981. Even after Maureen Faulkner, the wife of the victim, chose not to continue seeking the death penalty several years ago in hopes of closure, the case has evoked polarizing rhetoric and continues to assume a symbolic importance for many that is distinct from the factual and often technical legal issues involved in the case.

The technical issue at stake here is simply whether or not some decided issues need to be re-heard by a Pennsylvania appellate court due to one former judge's having worn two hats — -the hat of an apparently impartial appellate judge deciding Abu-Jamal's case after he earlier wore the hat of a chief prosecutor in the same case. Although the issue is technical, it is also an important cautionary tale on the systemic problems that flow from a judge's failing to recuse where there is an appearance of bias.

Justice Castille did not recuse himself before deciding appeals in the Abu-Jamal case and several others, including the Williams case. In the Williams case, the United States Supreme Court decided that Castille should have recused himself because of the role he took as a chief prosecutor in Mr. Williams's matter. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that Mr. Williams's appeal be re-heard by the Pennsylvania appeals judges, without the taint of Castille's participation.

A similar question of Castille's role exists in the Abu-Jamal case. In order to help resolve it, our Office exhaustively searched hundreds of file boxes in relation to the Mumia Abu-Jamal matter, including six previously undisclosed boxes (now turned over to the defense, as required by law). While we did not find any document establishing the same level of involvement by Castille in the Abu-Jamal case as in the Williams case, we did find (and turned over) a June, 1990 letter from then-District Attorney Castille to then-Governor Robert Casey, urging that the Governor issue death warrants, especially in cases involving people who have killed police, in order to "send a clear and dramatic message to all police killers that the death penalty actually means something." Although the letter does not mention Mr. Abu-Jamal or his case by name, at the time Justice Castille wrote to Governor Casey, there were only three cases involving people who had been convicted of killing police that were pending. One was Mr. Abu-Jamal's.

In the end, the trial-level judge considering this issue wrote an opinion that agreed with us that these indications of strong feelings on the part of Justice Castille did not rise to the level of the direct and active involvement Justice Castille took in the Williams case but went further, deciding there should be a re-hearing of Abu-Jamal's decided issues anyway, based on more general principles of judges needing to recuse to avoid the appearance of bias.

We appealed, making it extremely clear in our court papers that our primary concern was with the overly broad language of the opinion and its potentially devastating effect on hundreds of long settled cases, decades after their cases were resolved, including its hurtful effect on victims and survivors. We highlighted our concern with the overly broad language of that opinion in five specific respects and specifically noted that we would re-consider appealing if the trial-level court issued another decision addressing the concerns we raised.

Although the judge was not required to do so, on March 27 he issued another decision that addressed the concerns we raised. The judge made clear that his opinion should not be read to mean that several hundreds of cases were disturbed — -it should be applied only to people convicted of killing police officers whose cases were in the District Attorney's Office while Castille was District Attorney (the category of cases Castille highlighted in his June 1990 letter to Casey). Given that the trial-level court has now addressed the concerns that led us to appeal in the first place, we have withdrawn the appeal.

Our decision to withdraw the appeal does not mean Mr. Abu-Jamal will be freed or get a new trial. It means that he will have the appeals that Justice Castille participated in deciding reconsidered by a new group of appellate court judges, untainted by former Chief Justice Castille participating in their decision. The trial-level judge has ordered the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office and the defense to re-submit the legal briefs done in the past (which were written under prior administrations), effectively setting the clock back to where it was in the past.

The result will be that long-settled convictions in other cases will not be disturbed and that decisions made by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on the legal issues raised decades ago in the Abu-Jamal matter will no longer be tainted by the appearance of bias. ===========end press release====================

Cuando luchamos, ganamos. When We fight, we win.

Noelle Hanrahan
Director, Prison Radio

To give by check:
PO Box 411074
San Francisco, CA
94141

Stock or legacy gifts:
Noelle Hanrahan

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Funds for Kevin Cooper

https://www.gofundme.com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108

For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.

Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .

In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.

The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls.

Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!

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Don't extradite Assange!

To the government of the UK

Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state. Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority. We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested.

Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning. The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West.

Sign now!

The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible. They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him. Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger. The world is still watching.

Sign now!

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.html

[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/

Sign this petition:

https://internal.diem25.org/en/petitions/1

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Chelsea Manning denied release from jail

Yesterday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to keep Chelsea Manning jailed for contempt of court. Chelsea has been jailed since March 8th for refusing to collaborate with the grand jury investigating Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. "While disappointing, we can still raise issues as the government continues to abuse the grand jury process. I don't have anything to contribute to this, or any other grand jury. While I miss home, they can continue to hold me in jail, with all the harmful consequences that brings. I will not give up. Thank you all so very much for your love and solidarity through letters and contributions," shared Chelsea. She faces another 16.5 months in jail. Donate to Chelsea's legal defense here. Write her a letter at: Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, A0181426, William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center, 2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, VA 22314.

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!

484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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Words of Wisdom

Louis Robinson Jr., 77
Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.

"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill. All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No. We aren't going for this. Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did. It happened. It doesn't feel good."

[On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant.html

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How to buy a gun in the U.S. and New Zeland:

New Zealand to Ban Military-Style Semiautomatic Guns, Jacinda Ardern Says

By Damien Cave and Charlotte Graham-McLay, March 20, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/business/boeing-safety-features-charge.html

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Free Chelsea Manning (again)!

U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent back to jail after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. She could be jailed for up to 18 months this time.

As she was being taken back into custody on March 8th, she declared, "I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech." Here's how to offer your support.

Podcast: Randy Rowland, GI resister

"I was the reluctant guy who's bit by bit by bit, just had to face the facts that things weren't the way I had been raised to believe that they were. It wasn't like I planned to be a resister or a troublemaker or anything of the sort," explains Randy Rowland, an organizer of the "Presidio 27 Mutiny."

This Courage to Resist podcast is the first in series to be produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans for Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous
individuals featured. Listen to Randy's story here.
D O N A T E

to Support Resistance to War &

Empire

We shared our new 75 second promotional video on Facebook this week. Yes, FB is kind of evil, but we still reach a lot of folks that way. Please check it out, share with friends, and "like" our FB page.

During Sunday's Objector Church online meetup, James Branum discussed the heroism of US Army Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds (1919–1985). MSgt Edmonds was the ranking US NCO at the Stalag IX-A POW Camp when he was captured in Germany during WWII. At the risk of his life, he prevented an estimated 200 Jews from being singled out from the camp for Nazi persecution and likely death. Watch the video here.

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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Statement: Academic Institutions Must Defend Free Speech

The International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity issued the following statement on 23 December, signed by 155 distinguished academics and human rights advocates.

Sign on and show your support: https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/academic-institutions-must-defend-free-speech?just_launched=true

Petition Text

Statement issued by the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity:

We, the undersigned, oppose the coordinated campaign to deny academics their free speech rights due to their defense of Palestinian rights and criticism of the policies and practices of the state of Israel. Temple University in Philadelphia, USA and the University of Sydney, Australia have been under great pressure to fire, respectively, Marc Lamont Hill and Tim Anderson, both senior academics at their institutions, for these reasons. Steven Salaita and Norman Finkelstein have already had their careers destroyed by such attacks. Hatem Bazian, Ahlam Muhtaseb, William Robinson, Rabab Abdulhadi and others have also been threatened.

The ostensible justification for such action is commonly known as the "Palestinian exception" to the principle of free speech. One may freely criticize and disrespect governments – including one's own – religions, political beliefs, personal appearance and nearly everything else except the actions and policies of the state of Israel. Those who dare to do so will become the focus of well-financed and professionally run campaigns to silence and/or destroy them and their careers.

We recognize that much of the free speech that occurs in academic and other environments will offend some individuals and groups. However, as has been said many times before, the answer to free speech that some may find objectionable is more free speech, not less. We therefore call upon all academic institutions, their faculty and students, as well as the public at large, to resist such bullying tactics and defend the free speech principles upon which they and all free societies and their institutions are founded.

https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/academic-institutions-must-defend-free-speech?just_launched=true

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Updates from the Committee to Stop FBI Repression

Justice for Rasmea Odeh! Justice for Palestine!

The Committee to Stop FBI Repression strongly supports Rasmea Odeh's right to speak in Berlin about the Palestinian liberation struggle. We stand with the many other organizations who condemn the German, Israeli, and U.S. governments' attacks on Rasmea and their attempts to silence her by revoking her visa and prohibiting her from political activity (see article about the March 15 incident).

The actions of these governments blatantly reflect their racist anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim views. But we want to draw attention to the underlying reason for their targeting of Rasmea. The attack on her right to speak is deeply tied to U.S. and German support for the Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism in Palestine. Moreover, the attack on Rasmea reflects these countries' imperialist strategies for control of the Middle East. By the same token, these governments are clearly acting out of fear - fear that when Palestinian women and activists like Rasmea speak up, it chips away at such countries' grasp on Palestine and the surrounding region.

The attacks on Rasmea and Palestine also relate to political repression taking place across the globe. Germany, the U.S. and Israel are attempting to silence Rasmea for the same fundamental reasons that the Duterte government has murdered and attacked activists and human rights defenders in the Philippines; that the U.S. government is trying to forcibly install a new government in Venezuela; and that the NYPD's Strategic Response Group is surveilling and harassing leaders and activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. The imperialists who are in power are clearly afraid that people like Rasmea might inspire others to rise up and fight back against the racist and oppressive system in place.

We want to send a message to these imperialist powers, to say that fighting back is exactly what we plan to do. It is imperative that we fight back against this unjust system that tries to silence Palestinian women like Rasmea. We demand that Rasmea Odeh be permitted to speak in Germany, and we demand an end to state repression against all Muslim women, and all Palestinians who have boldly raised their voices against the imperialist and colonialist powers that are oppressing people across the world.

Activists are not terrorists! We stand in solidarity with Rasmea and all Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation.

-- NYC Committee to Stop FBI Repression

Copyright © 2019 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!

Our mailing address is:

Committee to Stop FBI Repression

PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN  55414

Add us to your address book

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Racism-Antiracism Board Game

Dear Friends,                                                                   May 1, 2019

                       I have just produced this game. Race for Solidarity, it is now available at:  https://www.thegamecrafter.com/ .   An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who have always fought back.   I had hoped the game would be less expensive and have done all I could to lower the price by taking the minimum of $1 for each game sold, to be spent on promotion and publicity. The price could be reduced by $10, but would sacrifice the historical richness of the over 200 cards.

                       Would you be so kind as to send this message to your friends via, E mail, Facebook etc?  Those in the field of education could be very interested.   If you have any suggestions on ways to help me promote this game please let me know. Thank you.

In Solidarity,

Nayvin Gordon                 gordonnayvin@yahoo.com

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Hi Bonnie. Courage to Resist is working closely with our new fiscal sponsor, the Objector Church, on a couple projects that we're excited to share with you.

Objector Registry launches as draft registration of women nears

The first ever Objector Registry (objector.church/register) offers a declaration of conscience for anyone to assert their moral opposition to war, regardless of age, gender, or religious affiliation. This serves to create a protective record of beliefs and actions with which to oppose a later forced draft. Given last week's release of the report by the Congressionally mandated commission on military service, this free registry is coming online just in time. Please sign up yourself and share with friends!

You're invited to join us online weekly

This is a great way to find out more about the Objector Church and why we might be the religious humanist interfaith peace and justice community you have been looking for! Our live meetups are lead by Minister James Branum from Oklahoma City. This Sunday at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern, if your not excited by the NFL's "big game", pop online and check us out at objector.church/meetup

COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist

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COURAGE TO RESIST

New "Refuse War" Shirts

We've launched a new shirt store to raise funds to support war resisters.

In addition to the Courage to Resist logo shirts we've offered in the past, we now have a few fun designs, including a grim reaper, a "Refuse War, Go AWOL" travel theme, and a sporty "AWOL: Support Military War Resisters" shirt.

Shirts are $25 each for small through XL, and bit more for larger sizes. Please allow 9-12 days for delivery within the United States.

50% of each shirt may qualify as a tax-deductible contribution.

Courage to Resist -- Support the Troops who Refuse to Fight!

484 Lake Park Ave. #41, Oakland, CA 94610, 510-488-3559

couragetoresis.org -- facebook.com/couragetoresist

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To: Indiana Department of Corrections

Kevin "Rashid" Johnson Should Have Access to His Personal Property

Petition Text

1. IDOC regulation 02-01-101-VIII must be respected! Kevin Johnson (IDOC# 264847) must be allowed to select from his property the items that he most immediately needs. He has been left without any of the material he requires for contacting his loved ones, his writing (this includes books), his pending litigation, and for his artwork.

2. Kevin Johnson (IDOC# 264847) should be released into General Population. Prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture. Moreover, he has not committed any infractions.

Why is this important?

Kevin "Rashid" Johnson (IDOC# 264847) – a Virginia prisoner – was transferred to Indiana on November 4. His transfer was authorized under the Interstate Corrections Compact, commonly used to ship prisoners out of state. Virginia is one of several states that make use of this practice as a tool to repress and isolate prisoners who speak up for their rights.

These transfers are extremely disruptive, and serve as an opportunity for prison officials to violate prisoners' rights, especially regarding their property. This is exactly what has been done to Rashid.

Rashid has 24 boxes of personal property. These are all of his possessions in the world. Much of these 24 boxes consist of legal documents and research materials, including materials directly related to pending or anticipated court cases, and his list of addresses and phone numbers of media contacts, human rights advocates, outside supporters, and friends.

At Pendleton Correctional Facility, where Rashid is now being kept prisoner and in solitary confinement, only one guard is in charge of the property room. This is very unusual, as the property room is where all of the prisoners' belongings that are not in their cells are kept. The guard in charge, Dale Davis, has a dubious reputation. Prisoners complain that property goes missing, and their requests to access their belongings – that by law are supposed to be met within 7 days, or if there are court deadlines within 24 hours – are often ignored, answered improperly, or what they receive does not correspond to what they have asked for.

Despite having a need for legal and research documents for pending and anticipated court cases, his requests to receive his property have not been properly answered. The property officer, Dale Davis, is supposed to inventory the prisoners' property with them (and a witness) present, according to IDOC regulation 02-01-101-VIII; this was never done. When Rashid did receive some property, it was a random selection of items unrelated to what he asked for, brought to the segregation unit in a box and a footlocker and left in an insecure area where things could be stolen or tampered with.

On December 19th, Rashid received notice that Davis had confiscated various documents deemed to be "security threat group" or "gang" related from his property. Rashid has no idea what these might be, as (contrary to the prison regulations) he was not present when his property was gone through. Rashid does not know how much or how little was confiscated, or what the rationale was for its being described as "gang" related. None of Rashid's property should be confiscated or thrown out under any circumstances, but it is worth noting that the way in which this has been done contravenes the prison's own regulations and policies!

Dale Davis has been an IDOC property officer for 8 years. He has boasted about how he does not need any oversight or anyone else working with him, even though it is very unusual for just one person to have this responsibility. Prisoners' property goes "missing" or is tampered with, and prisoners' rights – as laid out by the Indiana Department of Corrections – are not being respected.

Rashid is not asking to have all of his property made available to him in his cell. He is willing to accept only having access to some of it at a time, for instance as he needs it to prepare court documents or for his research and writing.

After two months in Indiana, he has still not been supplied with his documents containing the phone numbers and addresses of his loved ones and supporters, effectively sabotaging his relationships on the outside. Rashid is not asking for any kind of special treatment, he is only asking for the prison property room to follow the prison's own rules.

We ask that you look into this, and make sure that Mr. Johnson's right to access his property is being respected, and that something be done about the irregularities in the Pendleton property room. We ask that the rules of the Indiana Department of Corrections be respected.

Sign the petition here:
https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/kevin-rashid-johnson-should-have-access-to-his-personal-property?bucket&source=facebook-share-email-button&time=1547257147&fbclid=IwAR3rjpTZog631Oxv6oqjZmaJQv1GLIMHMuhDaP4g0Xu_EajWwW6X1faBPbE

FOR UPDATES CHECK OUT RASHID'S WEBSITE AT RASHIDMOD.COM

you can also hear a recent interview with Rashid on Final Straw podcast here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/tag/kevin-rashid-johnson/

Write to Rashid:

Kevin Rashid Johnson's writings and artwork have been widely circulated. He is the author of a book,Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense, New Afrikan Black Panther Party, (Kersplebedeb, 2010).

Kevin Johnson D.O.C. No. 264847

G-20-2C Pendleton Correctional Facility

4490 W. Reformatory Rd.

Pendleton, IN 46064-9001

krj.nabpppc@gmail.com

www.rashidmod.com

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Get Malik Out of Ad-Seg

Keith "Malik" Washington is an incarcerated activist who has spoken out on conditions of confinement in Texas prison and beyond: from issues of toxic water and extreme heat, to physical and sexual abuse of imprisoned people, to religious discrimination and more. Malik has also been a tireless leader in the movement to #EndPrisonSlavery which gained visibility during nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018. View his work at comrademalik.com or write him at:

Keith H. Washington
TDC# 1487958
McConnell Unit
3001 S. Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78102

Friends, it's time to get Malik out of solitary confinement.

Malik has experienced intense, targeted harassment ever since he dared to start speaking against brutal conditions faced by incarcerated people in Texas and nationwide--but over the past few months, prison officials have stepped up their retaliation even more.

In Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at McConnell Unit, Malik has experienced frequent humiliating strip searches, medical neglect, mail tampering and censorship, confinement 23 hours a day to a cell that often reached 100+ degrees in the summer, and other daily abuses too numerous to name.  It could not be more clear that they are trying to make an example of him because he is a committed freedom fighter. So we have to step up.

Phone zap on Tuesday, November 13

Mark your calendars for the 11/13 call in, be on the look out for a call script, and spread the word!!

Demands:

- Convene special review of Malik's placement in Ad-Seg and immediately release him back to general population

- Explain why the State Classification Committee's decision to release Malik from Ad-Seg back in June was overturned (specifically, demand to know the nature of the "information" supposedly collected by the Fusion Center, and demand to know how this information was investigated and verified).

- Immediately cease all harassment and retaliation against Malik, especially strip searches and mail censorship!

Who to contact:

TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier

Phone: (936)295-6371

Email:  exec.director@tdcj.texas.gov

Senior Warden Philip Sinfuentes (McConnell Unit)
Phone: (361) 362-2300

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Background on Malik's Situation

Malik's continued assignment to Ad-Seg (solitary confinement) in is an overt example of political repression, plain and simple.  Prison officials placed Malik in Ad-Seg two years ago for writing about and endorsing the 2016 nationwide prison strike. They were able to do this because Texas and U.S. law permits non-violent work refusal to be classified as incitement to riot.

It gets worse.  Malik was cleared for release from Ad-Seg by the State Classification Committee in June--and then, in an unprecedented reversal, immediately re-assigned him back to Ad-Seg. The reason?  Prison Officials site "information" collected by a shadowy intelligence gathering operation called a Fusion Center, which are known for lack of transparency and accountability, and for being blatant tools of political repression.

Malik remains in horrible conditions, vulnerable to every possible abuse, on the basis of "information" that has NEVER been disclosed or verified.  No court or other independent entity has ever confirmed the existence, let alone authenticity, of this alleged information. In fact, as recently as October 25, a representative of the State Classification Committee told Malik that he has no clue why Malik was re-assigned to Ad-Seg.  This "information" is pure fiction.

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Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

By Michael Barbaro, May 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/podcasts/the-daily/kevin-cooper-death-row.html?emc=edit_ca_20180530&nl=california-today&nlid=2181592020180530&te=1

Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher

The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.

On today's episode:

• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.

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Last week I met with fellow organizers and members of Mijente to take joint action at the Tornillo Port of Entry, where detention camps have been built and where children and adults are currently being imprisoned.

I oppose the hyper-criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers. Migration is a human right and every person is worthy of dignity and respect irrespective of whether they have "papers" or not. You shouldn't have to prove "extreme and unusual hardship" to avoid being separated from your family. We, as a country, have a moral responsibility to support and uplift those adversely affected by the US's decades-long role in the economic and military destabilization of the home countries these migrants and asylum seekers have been forced to leave.

While we expected to face resistance and potential trouble from the multiple law enforcement agencies represented at the border, we didn't expect to have a local farm hand pull a pistol on us to demand we deflate our giant balloon banner. Its message to those in detention:

NO ESTÁN SOLOS (You are not alone).

Despite the slight disruption to our plan we were able to support Mijente and United We Dream in blocking the main entrance to the detention camp and letting those locked inside know that there are people here who care for them and want to see them free and reunited with their families.

We are continuing to stand in solidarity with Mijente as they fight back against unjust immigration practices.Yesterday they took action in San Diego, continuing to lead and escalate resistance to unjust detention, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and to ICE.

While we were honored to offer on-the-ground support we see the potential to focus the energy of our Drop the MIC campaign into fighting against this injustice, to have an even greater impact. Here's how:

Call out General Dynamics for profiteering of War, Militarization of the Border and Child and Family Detention (look for our social media toolkit this week);

Create speaking forums and produce media that challenges the narrative of ICE and Jeff Sessions, encouraging troops who have served in the borderlands to speak out about that experience;

Continue to show up and demand we demilitarize the border and abolish ICE.

Thank you for your vision and understanding of how militarism, racism, and capitalism are coming together in the most destructive ways. Help keep us in this fight by continuing to support our work.

About Face: Veterans Against the War is a 501(c)(3) charity,

and welcomes your tax deductible contributions

Please make a one time or monthly donation to sustain this work.

In Solidarity,

Ramon Mejia

Field Organizer, About Face: Veterans Against the War

P.O. Box 3565, New York, NY 10008. All Right Reserved. | Unsubscribe

To ensure delivery of About Face emails please add webmaster@ivaw.org to your address book.

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Major George Tillery

MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION

SEX FOR LIES AND

MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY

April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.

These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.

Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony

For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.

Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms.

In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.

Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence.

The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.

This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense.

Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support.

Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years

The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court.

During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison.

Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying." For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners.

Major Tillery Needs Your Help:

Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence.

Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment.

Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed.

Major Tillery and family

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.

Go to JPay.com;

code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:

The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.

Call: 215-686-8000 or

Email: justice@phila.gov

Write to:

Security Processing Center

Major Tillery AM 9786

268 Bricker Road
Bellefonte, PA 16823

For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org

Call/Write:

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

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

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

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On Monday March 4th, 2019 Leonard Peltier was advised that his request for a transfer had been unceremoniously denied by the United States Bureau of Prisons.

The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee appreciates and thanks the large number of his supporters who took the time to write, call, email, or fax the BOP in support of Leonard's request for a transfer.

Those of us who have been supporting Leonard's freedom for a number of years are disappointed but resolute to continue pushing for his freedom and until that day, to continue to push for his transfer to be closer to his relatives and the Indigenous Nations who support him.

44 years is too damn long for an innocent man to be locked up. How can his co-defendants be innocent on the grounds of self-defense but Leonard remains in prison? The time is now for all of us to dig deep and do what we can and what we must to secure freedom for Leonard Peltier before it's too late.

We need the support of all of you now, more than ever. The ILPDC plans to appeal this denial of his transfer to be closer to his family. We plan to demand he receive appropriate medical care, and to continue to uncover and utilize every legal mechanism to secure his release. To do these things we need money to support the legal work.

Please call the ILPDC National office or email us for a copy of the postcard you can send to the White House. We need your help to ask President Trump for Leonard's freedom.

DONATE



©2019 ILPDC | 116 W Osborne Avenue Tampa, FL 33603

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Free Leonard Peltier!

Art by Leonard Peltier

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1, P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

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Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations!

Charity for the Wealthy!

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1) How Big Tobacco Got a New Generation Hooked
It's using the slick, high-tech disguise of vaping.
By Alex Bogusky, May 3, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/vaping-juul.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Juul promotes itself as a health-conscious company, even as it develops potentially more addictive vaping products.CreditCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

Twenty years ago, as a creative director, I helped create a commercial for the Truth campaign to introduce its effort to prevent cigarette smoking by young people. The spot was simply footage of tobacco executives all testifying, "I believe nicotine is not addictive." All we did was add a laugh track.

The effect of my campaign and others was to help a generation of young people see the tobacco companies as they really were. Companies that lied not just to the government but the public, with misleading ad campaigns aimed at teenagers, their "growth market."

Now they're doing it again, but in a new, slick, high-tech guise that is harder to combat. And ad agencies, which had mostly left Big Tobacco's side, are aiding the effort, lured back in by increasing fees for the work and decreasing fears the public will judge them for it.

While teenage cigarette smoking rates have recently fallen below 5 percent, America is now contending with an epidemic of young people using e-cigs, vapes and other "nicotine delivery devices," as the tobacco industry christened them years ago in secret memos, searching for an official alternative to describing their products as cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says vaping rose by nearly 80 percent among high school students from 2017 to 2018, erasing previous progress in reducing tobacco use among teenagers.

Vapes began as enigmatic underground products that might subvert Big Tobacco, but today the old corporate giants are major stakeholders in the market. Among them are Altria, which owns Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, yet also holds 35 percent of the vaping giant Juul; Reynolds American, which owns Vuse; and Imperial Tobacco, which owns Blu.

The vaping industry exploits everything Big Tobacco was already good at. Grow the tobacco, extract the nicotine, provide it in concentrations even higher than found in cigarettes, put it in sleek packages and market it relentlessly.

According to Juul — a brand so popular that "juuling" has become its own verb — one of its "pods" has more nicotine in it than an entire pack of cigarettes on average.

The sticks' fruity and minty flavors, the "vaping trick" competitions that resemble bubble gum blowing contests of yore and the range of custom colors to choose from, like you would with an iPhone, attracts the exact clientele you'd expect: Students "hit the Juul" on the way to class and raise their hands for a bathroom break to get a fix. It looks like a USB drive and leaves no lingering foul odor — many teenagers are reveling in the confusion it causes among adults. (Just search #doitforjuul, as a primer).

The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, has called the use of e-cigarettes and vapes by about two million middle and high school teenagers annually a dangerous epidemic. And last year, the agency warned vaping manufacturers that if they didn't prove they could keep their products away from underage users, then they'd face penalties.

But the tobacco companies have largely shrugged at the ultimatum.

They are driving awareness and sales via a loophole big enough for the entire industry. Because the research on it isn't yet sufficient, vape brands aren't authorized by the F.D.A. to explicitly market their products for their ability to help smokers quit, or "cessation." So Juul, which controls roughly three-fourths of the American vaping market in the United States, instead simply runs ads in which people happen to describe getting rid of their cigarette habit by switching to Juul.

And, yes, since there's plenty of nicotine per puff, you can easily switch from cigarettes. Still, your nicotine addiction isn't going anywhere.

For grown men and women, that's an alternative vice of their choice. But the chairman of a National Academies committee that produced a report evaluating e-cigarettes said that vaping's "adverse effects clearly warrant concern" for young adult users. But in a sea of paid influencer posts, magazine profiles of vapers, and mass-marketed ads, it can be hard for teenagers to fully appreciate the implications: vape liquids contain additives that can form carcinogenic compounds and researchers are concerned about long-term effects.

And now we know Juuling leads to smoking. In one British study, teenagers using these products who weren't smokers became four times more likely to go on to smoke cigarettes.

If Juul were serious about marketing to adults, it could use pinpointed digital marketing to make sure that those seeing its ads are over 21. Stanford researchers found the company's launch marketing "was patently youth-oriented."

Traditional tobacco products have strict regulations. But since Juul is a nicotine delivery device with no tobacco leaf, it is largely free to market as aggressively as possible. You won't hear cigarette ads on the radio. You could hear from Juul. You can't see cigarette ads on your televison. But you might see one for Juul, or any of the others.

The quiet truth is these brands have to lure young users to grow fast and satisfy investors. You'll even see Juul signage placed near kids' eye level in stores — a ploy right out of the tobacco playbook.

There was a longstanding taboo that kept most in the advertising world from working with cigarette brands. But the tobacco companies are reaching out to their old ad friends under new pretenses — like the Philip Morris-funded Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. But selling vapes hasn't meant they've stopped selling cigarettes. If anything, with vaping it's getting closer to its core goal: nicotine addiction no matter the vehicle.

Ad agencies have an important choice to make. Big Tobacco can pay big fees. But tobacco-related disease takes years off consumers' lives. Can you say to your friends and family with pride in your chest that you work for Big Tobacco? If that gives you pause, then ask if it's really worth the money.

My agency, Crispin Porter Bogusky, is joining other ad agencies in the Quit Big Tobacco campaign led by the global health organization Vital Strategies in a pledge to not work for the tobacco industry, in any capacity, adjacent or direct. Oddly enough, as I drafted this essay, we were invited to propose an advertising campaign for a vaping product. The answer will be no. Still, if they're audacious enough now to approach an agency known for its anti-tobacco stance, we can be sure they're coming after us all. But there's no need to sell clouds of nicotine when there's so many other better products making the future.

Alex Bogusky is a co-founder and the chief creative engineer of the advertising agency Crispin Porter Bogusky.

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2) Syrup Is as Canadian as a Maple Leaf. That Could Change With the Climate.
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, May 3, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/climate/climate-change-maple-syrup.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

This season's maple syrup being bottled at Fulton's Pancake House and Sugarbush in Pakenham, Ontario.CreditCreditChristinne Muschi for The New York Times

PAKENHAM, Ontario — By 9:30 a.m. the line for Fulton's Pancake House and Sugarbush had snaked out the door and down the driveway toward the parking lot, like the day a new iPhone goes on sale.

But the restaurant, roughly 40 miles southwest of Ottawa, isn't brand-new. It's in its 50th year, and its star attraction, maple syrup, is much older. It was invented by Native Americans long before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

"Maple is a social crop," said Shirley Fulton-Deugo, the owner. "It's the first crop of the year and a sign that spring is here."

Fulton's sits on 400 wooded acres in Eastern Ontario, and Mrs. Fulton-Deugo is a fourth-generation maple syrup producer. Her children help her run the business, and three of her grandchildren are already making their own syrup and selling it under the label Triple Trouble.

But should the Triple Trouble generation have grandchildren one day, it's not clear they'll be able to take over the family business. A growing body of research suggests that warming temperatures and loss of snowpack linked to climate change may significantly shrink the range where it's possible to make maple syrup.

In fact, climate change is already making things more volatile for syrup producers. In 2012, maple production fell by 54 percent in Ontario and by 12.5 percent in Canada overall, according to data from the Canadian government, because of an unusually warm spring.

Canada produces roughly 70 percent of the world's maple syrup. That was worth about $370 million in 2017.

Warm weather can hurt syrup production because the process depends on specific temperature conditions: daytime highs above freezing with nighttime lows below freezing. This specific variation — which tends to happen as winter turns to spring, and fall into winter — causes pressure differences in the trees that allow the sap to flow. And it's the sap that the farmers boil to create maple syrup.

To release the sap, maple producers make a small hole in the tree and insert a tap that allows it to spill out. But there's only a small window of time when conditions are right.

"You're really only talking six to eight weeks," said Mark Isselhardt, a sugar maple expert at the University of Vermont. "Everyday that you don't get sap flow has the potential to really impact the total yield for that operation."

But because of climate change, some years those key temperatures are more elusive.

Instead of six or eight weeks to produce syrup in 2012, the Fultons had just 13 days. "We started the 8th of March and finished the 21st of March," Mrs. Fulton-Deugo said.

"That type of condition will happen more often and it can have an impact like the impact it had in 2012," said Daniel Houle, a biologist at the Quebec Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks.

In addition to the shorter tapping window, spring is also arriving earlier. The phenomenon is called season creep and it means that fall ends later as well.

That creates more headaches for producers, and not only in Canada, because the timing of putting in taps is crucial. "I'm in my sixties," said Helen Thomas, executive director of the New York Maple Producers Association and a syrup producer. "When I was a kid, my dad had the rule that you tapped around March 15th." This year, they were tapping in late January.

At first glance, the scene at Fulton's sugarbush corresponds perfectly with the bucolic picture typically associated with maple syrup. There are sleigh rides and children, their faces stained with maple taffy, squirming with energy across from the sugar camp where the alchemy that transformed maple sap into syrup was performed.

Production techniques, though, are thoroughly modern. For now, that has helped the farm to adapt.

While many imagine sap collecting into metal buckets attached to trees, the Fultons and most other syrup producers now use plastic taps connected to long lines of food-grade plastic tubing. The tubes zigzag through acres of forest from tree to tree before pouring out into a collection tank. Because the system is cleaner than older methods, it allows producers to tap earlier without fear that the trees will plug the holes, the way a scab covers a cut, before the sap begins to flow. On the Fulton's sugarbush, the taps were in the trees weeks before the sap ran.

To help coax the sap out of the trees, producers use vacuum pumps. "We've seen that you get basically double the amount of sap when you use vacuum," Mr. Isselhardt said.

But the weather conditions still need to be right. And, of course, you still need trees.

Maples need to be about 40 years old before they can be tapped, though they don't come into their prime, according to Ms. Thomas, until they're about 90 years old. "If I planted maple trees today, it would be my grandchildren that would be harvesting the sap from them," she said.

But a recent study suggests that the changing climate is a threat to that process of growth and renewal. Andrew B. Reinmann, an ecologist at the City University of New York, along with colleagues at Boston University and the United States Department of Agriculture, looked at what happens to trees when snowpack declines.

Snowpack is important because, when temperatures dip, it acts as a blanket over the ground that prevents the soil, and the tree roots that reside in it, from freezing. By scraping off snow from some of the forest plots at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire during the first four to six weeks of winter, Dr. Reinmann and his colleagues were able to mimic the delayed snowfall that is predicted by century's end in the National Climate Assessment.

"After the first year of snow removal, growth rates of the sugar maple trees declined by 40 percent or so, and growth rates remained suppressed between 40 and 55 percent below their growth rates prior to the start of the experiments," Dr. Reinmann said.

Dr. Reinmann has also been running a separate experiment where he heats up the soils to see if the increase in warmer temperatures linked to an earlier spring would offset losses from frost damage. So far, his results suggest that it doesn't.

Diane M. Kuehn, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, has researched the perceptions of climate change by maple syrup producers. "What I heard frequently from people was that they're not concerned about themselves during their lifetime," she said, "But they are concerned about future generations and their families."

That appeared to be on the mind of Mrs. Fulton-Deugo. "Most sugar makers are family farms and those family farms hold this land and hold this space for the next generation," she said.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science. @kendrawrites

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3) You Can't Tax the Rich Without the I.R.S.
If no one is around to root out offshore accounts, tax cheats won't be punished.
"Businesses and the wealthy benefit the most from this state of affairs. The largest corporations in America used to be audited every year. That started to change when the cuts began, and today, the audit rate has fallen by half. It's a similar story for individuals making $10 million or more a year: With twice the chance of escaping I.R.S. scrutiny, the ultrarich are much less likely to lose at the game of audit roulette....The top 0.5 percent of highest-earning Americans account for about a fifth of the income that's hidden from the I.R.S., according to one University of Michigan study, or more than $50 billion a year in today's dollars. It's much easier to enforce the tax laws for the bottom 90 percent of earners. Wages are reported straight to the I.R.S., and computers can easily check that tax returns accurately report that income. This means that inadequate enforcement of the tax laws necessarily has a regressive effect, liberating those at the top from scrutiny while the masses continue to be tracked by machines. With its budget slashed, the I.R.S. has pulled back across the board — except for one area where it's been easier to keep the numbers from falling so much: audits of the poor. More than one-third of all audit targets claim the earned-income tax credit, one of the nation's largest anti-poverty programs. By the hundreds of thousands, I.R.S. computers spit out letters that require low-income taxpayers to prove their eligibility. The counties with the highest audit rates aren't found in the hedge fund precincts of Connecticut or the lobbyist enclaves of Northern Virginia. No, they're rural, mostly African-American counties in the Deep South."
By Jesse Elsinger and Paul Kiel, May 3, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/sunday-review/tax-rich-irs.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Tyler Comrie

The hot policy in Democratic circles these days is raising taxes on the rich. Senator Elizabeth Warren has a plan to tax "ultramillionaires," as she calls them. Senator Bernie Sanders wants to expand the estate tax. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has floated raising the top income tax rate to 70 percent for those making over $10 million a year.

But before this country raises taxes, it should grapple with something much more prosaic but equally important for tackling inequality: saving the Internal Revenue Service.

Already, wealthy people and corporations easily get around today's rules. However tough any new laws might seem, they'd soon be undercut.

Slowly and quietly over the past eight years, the I.R.S. has been eviscerated. It's lost tens of thousands of employees. It has fewer auditors now than at any time since 1953. In real dollars, the agency's budget has dropped by almost $3 billion since 2010.

Businesses and the wealthy benefit the most from this state of affairs. The largest corporations in America used to be audited every year. That started to change when the cuts began, and today, the audit rate has fallen by half. It's a similar story for individuals making $10 million or more a year: With twice the chance of escaping I.R.S. scrutiny, the ultrarich are much less likely to lose at the game of audit roulette.

The top 0.5 percent of highest-earning Americans account for about a fifth of the income that's hidden from the I.R.S., according to one University of Michigan study, or more than $50 billion a year in today's dollars.

It's much easier to enforce the tax laws for the bottom 90 percent of earners. Wages are reported straight to the I.R.S., and computers can easily check that tax returns accurately report that income. This means that inadequate enforcement of the tax laws necessarily has a regressive effect, liberating those at the top from scrutiny while the masses continue to be tracked by machines.

With its budget slashed, the I.R.S. has pulled back across the board — except for one area where it's been easier to keep the numbers from falling so much: audits of the poor. More than one-third of all audit targets claim the earned-income tax credit, one of the nation's largest anti-poverty programs. By the hundreds of thousands, I.R.S. computers spit out letters that require low-income taxpayers to prove their eligibility. The counties with the highest audit rates aren't found in the hedge fund precincts of Connecticut or the lobbyist enclaves of Northern Virginia. No, they're rural, mostly African-American counties in the Deep South.

There's nothing easy about auditing the rich. Even when the I.R.S. has evidence of flat-out cheating, such as when it discovers a hidden Swiss bank account, it can take years of work to prove its case. Taking such time clashes with one of the core ways the I.R.S. evaluates its managers and agents: how efficiently they open and close audits. As one senior manager put it to us, "If you're not churning out the exams, you have to explain why you're not."

But more often, the affairs of the superwealthy are infernally complicated and the I.R.S. doesn't have black-and-white proof of evasion. Instead, the agency runs up against what's called "aggressive" planning in the tax world. To the rich, a tax return is just an opening offer to the government. If they don't get audited, that's great. If they do, well, they're ready for a fight.

In 2009, the I.R.S. decided to take a bold, new approach to auditing the superwealthy. The agency's idea was to bring specialists together and form a kind of green-eyeshade-wearing Delta Force. It would finally do something it — surprisingly — hadn't been doing before: look at the entirety of a taxpayer's empire. That meant examining how his partnerships, limited liability companies, foundations, gifts and overseas operations interact with one another. The ultrarich weave all these together so they end up with an ultralow effective tax rate. "We hadn't really been looking at it all together, and shame on us," Steven Miller, a former acting commissioner of the I.R.S., told us.

Because of budget cuts and lobbying, this elite force never came together. The agency hoped to have a staff of about 240 expert auditors by 2012. But by 2014 it had 96, and by last year the number had fallen to 58. Initially spooked by the group's ambition, tax professionals who counsel the wealthy now speak of the effort with a kind of pity.

Criminal tax enforcement has also faltered. More than 150 million income tax returns were filed in 2017, but the I.R.S. brought fewer than 800 cases in which someone was charged with making legal income but criminally evading taxes. That's one reason tax cheats can get away with brazen behavior for so long — until they attract the attention of federal investigators for other reasons. That's what happened to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and the celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti, who was charged with failing to file taxes at all for several years. (Mr. Avenatti denies the charges.)

So, what to do? One 2020 candidate already has a bold proposal to resuscitate the I.R.S. It's a plan to pump tens of billions into the agency, enough to fund a second army of agents. That candidate's name is Donald Trump.

Of course, it was Mr. Trump's party that gutted the agency, costing the country, we estimate, more than $100 billion in lost revenue. The president's 2020 budget, however, did propose adding $15 billion over 10 years to the I.R.S. enforcement budget, a move that would more than double the agency's overall budget. The administration estimated this would produce revenue of at least $47 billion. The question arises: Has the administration genuinely had a change of heart? Or is this merely a neat trick to make deficit projections appear smaller?

So far, this is all just talk. It is, though, one of the few areas where Mr. Trump and Democrats are in substantive agreement. Democrats in the House recently proposed a $400 million I.R.S. budget increase next year.

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, Ms. Warren does mention the I.R.S. in her wealth tax proposal. She calls for an unspecified but "significant increase in the I.R.S. enforcement budget" and a minimum audit rate for taxpayers subject to her "ultramillionaire" tax.

Raising taxes on the rich is a more compelling cause than increasing the operating budget of a bureaucracy most American voters probably hate thinking about. But the boldest tax plan of all starts with salvaging the I.R.S.

Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel are reporters at ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization.

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4) Shrimp From 5 U.K. Rivers Have One Thing in Common: Cocaine
By Palko Karasz, May 3, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/world/europe/uk-shrimp-cocaine.html

The Stour River, in the eastern coastal county of Suffolk, was one of five English waterways where researchers found cocaine in shrimp.CreditCreditNick Ansell/Press Association, via Associated Press

LONDON — Researchers seeking evidence of chemical "micropollution" in five rural English rivers have found pesticides in many of the freshwater shrimp they tested. And cocaine in all of them.

The presence of the illegal drug was unexpected because the sites where the researchers gathered their samples, in the eastern coastal county of Suffolk, were miles away from any large city, said the study's lead author, Thomas Miller, a researcher at King's College London.

"Although we know that pharmaceuticals, pesticides and so on are in our rivers, most studies in the world don't look at what's inside wildlife," Dr. Miller said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Drugs and other chemicals that are flushed into the sewage systemhave presented regulators with a puzzle for years. At the low concentrations in which they generally reach waterways, the substances have been found unlikely to affect human health, but their presence is hard to ignore. Recent concerns about plastic waste in rivers and oceans have helped focus attention on the species that live in those waters as victims of pollution.

Last month, researchers working on another project identified a small stream in Belgium so highly polluted that its waters could probably act as a pesticide, The Guardian reported.

In 2016, researchers found a cocktail of drugs, including Prozac, in salmon in Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle.

The team working on the shrimp study, published online this week in the journal Environment International, said that they had not identified the source of the drugs and that there was little potential for any effect from the low concentrations of cocaine that they had detected.

But some of the compounds they commonly found — which included fenuron, a pesticide no longer authorized for use in Europe — could "be of concern for the environment" or potentially "pose a risk for wildlife," Dr. Miller said in a statement on Wednesday.

Future studies will examine the chemicals' effects and give a better idea of the risks, he said, adding that such studies needed to be done more routinely to gain a better picture of the effect of pollution on wildlife.

Some varieties of pharmaceutical pollution have been found to affect behavior in both salmon and shrimp, The Atlantic has reported.

"The impact of 'invisible' chemical pollution — such as drugs — on wildlife health needs more focus in the U.K. as policy can often be informed by studies such as these," Nic Bury of the University of Suffolk, a co-author of the study, said in the statement.

Dr. Miller said that pending further research and policy changes, the public could already act to reduce the presence of drugs in waterways. The best thing, he said, was to return unwanted drugs to pharmacies that offered a take-back program.

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5) Nearly $300 Million in Tax Breaks Awarded to 4 Companies With Close Democratic Ties
By Matthew Haag, May 2, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/nyregion/nj-tax-breaks-george-norcross.html

Three companies were awarded lucrative tax credits to move into this building in Camden, N.J. CreditCreditHannah Yoon for The New York Times

NEWARK — The backlash over New Jersey's lucrative corporate tax incentives grew on Thursday when it was disclosed that four politically connected companies received nearly $300 million in tax breaks based on questionable claims that they would otherwise move out of state.

The four companies all had close ties to George Norcross, a powerful Democratic leader in the southern part of the state.

A state official revealed that three of the companies had indicated that they were considering moving to Philadelphia in order to qualify for tax breaks to stay in New Jersey, but in fact did not have viable offers to go there.

The fourth business identified a potential relocation site in Philadelphia four days before the state approved its $40 million tax credit in 2014, the official said.

The revelations about those companies, which all sought to move to the city of Camden with sizable tax credits, under a 2013 law known as the Economic Opportunity Act, were made public during a daylong hearing by a panel of investigators appointed by Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat.

The task force is examining whether $11 billion in economic development programs have delivered significant economic benefits or have been a boon to politically connected firms and companies.

An investigation by The New York Times found that lawmakers allowed a real estate lawyer, Kevin D. Sheehan, whose influential law firm has close ties to Democratic politicians and state legislators, to edit drafts of the 2013 law that unlocked sizable tax breaks for his firm's clients.

The testimony on Thursday by current and former officials at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, which oversees the tax credit programs, raised serious concerns about the law, the lack of oversight in reviewing applications and the way some tax credits were awarded.

A former president of the authority, Tim Lizura, also acknowledged that many last-minute changes to the law were made by Mr. Sheehan. The Times found that those alterations were done without any public disclosure.

Companies had been awarded $4.9 billion under the 2013 legislation by moving to New Jersey or remaining in the state and creating and retaining jobs.

The hearing was the second held in recent months by the task force, which in April referred evidence to federal prosecutors for possible criminal charges. It is not immediately known whether the evidence might lead to charges or what might result from Thursday's testimony.

But a member of the task force said companies could be held criminally liable.

"There is real criminal exposure for companies that lie to the E.D.A.," said Pablo Quiñones, a special counsel on the task force.

For several hours, another special counsel, Jim Walden, displayed some of the specific edits of the bill on a large screen. Some changes, he noted, were intended to allow specific companies, such as Subaru of America, to claim hundreds of millions of dollars in additional tax breaks.

Several companies had business ties with Mr. Sheehan's firm, Parker McCay, Mr. Walden said.

Mr. Sheehan did not register with the state as a lobbyist for the Economic Opportunity Act, and his firm told The Times that its work on the legislation did not amount to lobbying.

"Parker McCay was asked by policymakers, including those in the Legislature, to review this legislation and offer input and suggestions on ways it could be strengthened to help Camden and other localities in South Jersey, which have historically lost out to North Jersey in receiving economic benefits from the state," the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Beside his work on the bill, Mr. Sheehan also helped the four businesses who were considering a move to Philadelphia — Cooper Health System; Conner Strong & Buckelew; the Michaels Organization; and N.F.I. — assemble their tax credit applications, Mr. Walden said.

Cooper Health was awarded nearly $40 million in tax credits to relocate to Camden. It submitted an application on Nov. 7, 2014, and stated that none of its employees were at risk of losing their jobs and wrote "TBD" in response to a question about whether it was considering leaving the state, according to a copy of its application shown during the hearing.

The next month, a Cooper Health executive told the state that it had located a property in Philadelphia. Four days later, the Economic Development Authority approved its tax credit submission.

A Cooper Health spokesman said on Thursday that the company was truthful in its application and had hired more employees than it had proposed. A representative for Conner Strong & Buckelew said that suggestions made during the hearing were inaccurate and that the company was seriously considering a move out of state to consolidate its offices.

The building that Cooper Health eventually moved into had been owned by the Economic Development Authority, according to records obtained by The Times. The agency sold the site in late December 2014 to a nonprofit organization, which sold it that same day to a real estate investment group, documents show.

Intersecting nearly every piece of the testimony on Thursday, even though their names were rarely mentioned, were the Norcross brothers.

Parker McCay's chief executive is Philip Norcross, whose brother is George Norcross, an insurance executive at Conner Strong and the chairman of the board of trustees of Cooper Health System.

A third brother, Donald Norcross, is a former Democratic state senator who represented Camden and had been a sponsor of the 2013 law; he is now a United States representative.

Conner Strong, the Michaels Organization and N.F.I. submitted tax credit applications on the same day in October 2016. They collectively sought $245 million to relocate together to a new 18-story tower on the Camden waterfront. Without the tax credit, they were considering moves to office towers in Philadelphia, the companies claimed.

But by the time they applied for the credits, the offers to lease space in Philadelphia had expired, according to David Lawyer, an official with the Economic Development Authority who had reviewed the applications for the task force.

The companies later submitted new leases, but those offers should also have raised red flags, Mr. Lawyer said.

The companies had proposed new lease configurations in Philadelphia, with far different office layouts that had employees scattered on different floors, he said.

Matthew Haag covers the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He previously was a general assignment and breaking news reporter at The Times and worked as an education reporter at The Dallas Morning News. @matthewhaag

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6) AOC Says She Follows Democratic Leadership on Issue of US Intervention in Venezuela
teleSUR/ov-LA-MH, May 4, 2019
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/AOC-Refuses-To-Condemn-Venezuela-Coup-20190504-0029.html

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

U.S. Representative for New York's 14th congressional district, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, said Wednesday she would follow the Democratic Party's leadership in regards to Venezuela, declining to answer a question on whether she sees President Nicolas Maduro as the legitimate President of the Bolivarian Republic.

Ocasio Cortez, sometimes referred to as AOC, was asked in an interview with the National Review if she sees President Maduro as legitimate, for which she replied, "I defer to caucus leadership on how we navigate this."

The leadership of the Democratic Party in U.S. Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have both officially recognized right-wing opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido, as "interim president" of Venezuela after he illegally self-declared as such back in January, offering a bipartisan consensus on Donald Trump's efforts for regime change.

In contrast, her follow progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar has repeatedly denounced the U.S. economic war on Venezuela and the U.S.-backed coup attempt.

Earlier in March When Omar was asked if she recognized Juan Guaido as President of Venezuela, she replied, "absolutely not." Again this week. Ilhan Omar sent out tweets and made comments in interviews in which she rejected the latest failed coup attamept against President Maduro and slamming U.S. policy against Venezuela.

Presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, has also been very clear in opposing sanctions and war, on Saturday tweeting, "The new Cold War is getting hotter. We need leaders with foresight to see how in Venezuela, Syria & other places, potential military conflict btwn US-Russia can quickly escalate into war—nuclear war, the greatest danger we face today."

Some argue that AOC has come under pressure from the Democratic leadership in an effort to silence her earlier objection to the Trump interventionist policies in Venezuela.

Back in March AOC was quoted as saying that she was "very concerned about U.S. interventionism in Venezuela, and I oppose it, especially when we talk about a figure like U.S. Special Envoy Elliott Abrams here. I think it's – he's pled guilty to several crimes related to Iran-Contra."

She went on to add that, "I am generally opposed to U.S. interventionism as a principle, but particularly under this administration and under his leadership I think it's a profound mistake."

Critics on the left also point to other instances in which her stances on foreign policy are far from clear. As a way of tribute to war hawk John McCain, Cortez wrote that he was "an unparalleled example of human decency and American service".

On Palestine, she has also been largely silent, whilst other progressive congresswomen have spoken up. The editor of the right-wing Israeli outlet Hamodia, praised AOC saying; "She hasn't made any similarly Israel-negative references, has strongly declared her affirmation of Israel's legitimacy…"

Disclosure: The title of this article has been changed and more reporting was added to this article in order to clarify the comments made by the U.S. congresswoman and the context of her recent and past statements on the topic of the article.

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Fragile Cease-Fire Takes Hold Between Israel and Gaza After Weekend Attacks
By Isabel Kershner, May 6, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/world/middleeast/cease-fire-israel-gaza.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Israeli tanks stationed near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel, on Monday.Credit

JERUSALEM — A tentative cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militant groups in Gaza appeared to have taken hold Monday morning, bringing a short but deadly bout of cross-border fighting to an end as abruptly as it had started. At least 22 Palestinians, including militants and children, were killed in Gaza over the weekend, and four Israeli civilians died in the fighting.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Gaza groups that fired about 600 projectiles at southern Israel on Saturday and Sunday, had indicated a readiness to restore the fragile truce that went into effect nearly five years ago but has been interrupted repeatedly by violence. A Hamas-run television channel reported in the early hours of Monday that a new cease-fire had been reached, and would come into effect at 4:30 a.m.

According to Arab news reports, the understanding was brokered by Egypt and the United Nations, and includes measures to ease the acute economic crisis in the impoverished Gaza Strip, home to two million people. It came with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

At least nine militants and as many Palestinian civilians, including two children, were killed by Israeli forces on Sunday alone, according to Health Ministry officials in the Hamas-run coastal territory. It was the worst violence between the two sides since a 50-day war in 2014.

The Israeli military said it had struck 350 militant targets over the weekend. It resumed wartime tactics that included the targeted assassination of individuals and bombing multistory buildings it said were used for military purposes.

The remains of a building in Gaza City after it was hit by Israeli air strikes on Sunday.

The Israeli government did not overtly confirm a renewed cease-fire, as is customary in such situations, with officials reluctant to go public about understandings or agreements with groups that Israel classifies as terrorist organizations.

But in an acknowledgment of the restoration of calm, the Israeli military announced the lifting, from 7 a.m., of all restrictions on public gatherings in communities within a 25-mile radius of Gaza. Roads in the vicinity of the border and most schools reopened.

Then, in a statement issued around 11 a.m., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to the end of this round of battle, if not the general state of war.

"Over the last two days, we struck Hamas and Islamic Jihad with great force," he said. "We hit over 350 targets. We struck at terrorist leaders and operatives and we destroyed terrorist buildings. The campaign is not over, and it demands patience and sagacity. We are prepared to continue. The goal has been — and remains — ensuring quiet and security for the residents of the south. I send condolences to the families and best wishes for recovery to the wounded."

Israeli commentators said that Israel had also been eager to cut short the fighting, with Memorial Day and Independence Day celebrations coming this week, and a stream of international singers arriving to compete in the Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv this month. In hosting the international contest, Israel intends to showcase itself as a tourist destination.

The exact terms of the cease-fire were not publicized, but in the past they have included measures like an extension of the fishing zone off the Gaza coast in the Mediterranean waters controlled by Israel, assurances for the smooth transfer of Qatari money into the territory and other measures to ease the blockade imposed by Israel, with Egypt's help. Both countries restrict the movement of people and goods in and out of the enclave, citing security grounds and the need to stop weapons smuggling.

Shortly before the cease-fire came into effect, Abdul Latif Al-Kanoo, a Hamas spokesman, said, referring to Israel, "Any truce that does not obligate the occupation to lift the siege on our people in Gaza will be fragile and collapse once again."

This latest round of fighting appeared to have been set off by events on Friday, when two Israeli soldiers were wounded by a Gaza sniper and four Palestinians were killed.

Two of the Palestinians were shot by Israeli forces during weekly protest along the fence dividing the territory from Israel, according to Gaza health officials. The others, who were identified as Hamas militants, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in retaliation for the sniper attack. Starting Saturday morning, Hamas and Islamic Jihad unleashed an unusually heavy barrage of rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel.

Perennially simmering tensions along the border have burst into at least eight brief but increasingly fierce rounds of fighting over the past year, sometimes lasting little more than a day. These exchanges appear to have replaced the broader wars that occurred in 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2014, with neither side showing any appetite now for a full-scale showdown.

Mr. Netanyahu, who also serves as Israel's defense minister, is in the process of forming a new, right-wing governing coalition after his party's victory in the general elections in April.

Opposition leaders from the political center and left have repeatedly criticized him as lacking a more decisive and strategic policy toward Gaza.

Yair Lapid, of the centrist Blue and White party, accused Mr. Netanyahu of "a complete surrender" to Hamas.

Mr. Netanyahu was also criticized by a senior politician in his own Likud party.

"The cease-fire, given the circumstances under which it was reached, lacks achievements for Israel," the politician, Gidon Saar, who is considered a rival for the party leadership, wrote on Twitter. "The time ranges between the rounds of violent attacks on Israel and its citizens are getting shorter, and the terrorist organizations in Gaza use the periods in between to get stronger. The campaign has not been prevented, but postponed."

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Let Prisoners Vote
By Aubrey Menarndt, May 8 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/opinion/let-prisoners-vote.html

Preparing in April for voting by prisoners in North Macedonia's presidential election.Credit

As the Democratic candidates debate whether current and former prisoners should be allowed to vote, it's worth recalling that many other countries make it easy for incarcerated people to do it.

I've represented the United States throughout the world as an international elections monitor, visiting polling stations, talking to elections officials and helping international teams assess whether elections are free and fair.

The United States is an outlier. Its suppression of voting rights for more than people with current or former felony convictions violates human rights and weakens our democracy.

I wish our lawmakers who wrongly approve of this could see what I've seen — especially undercutting a constitutional amendment restoring the franchise for people with former felony convictions.

In Europe, prisoners' voting rights are protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. Twenty-six European countries at least partially protect their incarcerated citizens' right to vote during their prison terms. Eighteen countries grant prisoners the vote regardless of their offense.

In 2005, Britain tried to withdraw voting rights for prisoners, but the European Court of Human Rights struck that down as a violation of human rights.

In 2002, the Canadian Supreme Court also protected its prisoners' right to vote. South Africa has repeatedly reaffirmed the voting rights of its felons, and in 2010, Kenya guaranteed the same.

In democracies the world over, being incarcerated does not strip someone of citizenship and the voting rights that come with it. Instead, while people are being punished for their crimes, they are encouraged to take their duties as citizens in a democracy seriously.

In North Macedonia, the day before elections are held for the general public, polling stations are set up inside the country's 13 prisons, and inmates voluntarily line up to vote in turn. Ballots are brought from each prisoner's home voting district so that they can vote in their proper municipality. Ahead of the country's recent referendum, election administrators even created a program to renew expired voting documents for incarcerated people.

In Ukraine's presidential elections last month, prisons held voter-education programs so that inmates could learn about each of the candidates' policy platforms.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where citizens live with the trauma of ethnic cleansing, prisoners can vote unless their crimes pertain to the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. Those who have been convicted of unrelated crimes cast their ballots in prison polling stations. But as in North Macedonia, their votes count in the district of their permanent residence.

Portugal's prisoners have the right to vote unless they have been convicted of a crime that targets the state or democratic order, like terrorism or political violence (Germany and Norway have similar rules). Portuguese prisoners can exercise their voting rights by requesting and then remitting their ballot by mail. In Ireland and Lithuania, prisoners also vote by mail.

In election assessments, observers do not merely look for stuffed ballot boxes or irregularities in vote counting — we try to understand whether a country is doing its best to make sure that all of its citizens who want to are able to cast a vote. Seeing other countries' election processes through American eyes has given me insight into our country's failure at making the election process as accessible as possible and the politicization of what in other places are routine features of election administration.

In my travels, I've never seen an election held on a weekday — other countries know that workers need time off to vote. I've also never seen a significant line in a non-American polling station — the number of polling stations needed are calculated based on population and are allocated accordingly.

I've seen election officials go to great lengths to collect a single vote. In the Republic of Georgia, I once watched a team of election administrators build a makeshift bridge over a stream to reach the remote farm home of an elderly homebound voter.

In the United States, only Vermont and Maine allow prisoners to vote. Twelve American states still disallow former felons from ever voting, even once they have completed their prison sentence and are no longer on probation or parole. This type of total restriction exists in very few democracies worldwide. Armenia and Chile have similar laws, and Belgium disenfranchises felons whose sentence was longer than seven years. The United Nations has said that the American policy is discriminatory and violates international law.

The United States' restriction of felons' voting rights is especially problematic given the country's disproportionate incarceration of black people, especially black men.

The Prison Policy Institute calculates that the United States' prison system costs taxpayers $182 billion annually — that's larger than the G.D.P. of 134 countries. Prisoners, who have an inside view into these oftentimes opaque systems, should be voting on the laws and elected officials who govern their existence.

This disagreement over felon voting rights gets to the heart of what we believe to be the purpose of prison. Do we, like Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind. who is running for president, believe that prison is simply meant to be a punishment that includes the restriction of rights? Or do we want our prisons to be places for rehabilitation where those who have violated our laws can learn to be good citizens once more?

Prison should be rehabilitating, re-educating and providing prisoners with the skills they need to reintegrate into society upon their release. Engaging in civic duties such as voting should be model behavior we teach in prisons and encourage in our citizens.

For the United States to continue to be a democratic leader in the world, we must reaffirm our commitment to the suffrage of all our citizens and expand our voting rights in line with the standards set by our fellow democracies.

Aubrey Menarndt (@AubreyMenarndt) consults on democracy and governance issues throughout the world

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Sandra Bland, It Turns Out, Filmed Traffic Stop Arrest Herself
By David Montgomery, May 7, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us/sandra-bland-video-brian-encinia.html?fallback=0&recId=1KxZxaU5G4AIB7GCEaxAHyMYq3t&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=CA&recAlloc=top_conversion&geoCountry=US&blockId=most-popular&imp_id=349751321&action=click&module=Most%20Popular&pgtype=Homepage

In a cellphone video recorded by Sandra Bland, Trooper Brian Encinia could be seen drawing his stun gun and heard saying, "I will light you up. Get out. Now."Credit

AUSTIN, Tex. — As Trooper Brian Encinia angrily threatened her with a stun gun from just outside her car window, Sandra Bland recorded the encounter on her cellphone, shown in a newly released, 39-second video that has prompted Ms. Bland's family to call for a renewed investigation into her arrest and death nearly four years ago.

Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old African-American from the Chicago area, was taken into custody in southeast Texas following the confrontational 2015 traffic stop and was found hanging in a jail cell three days later in what was officially ruled a suicide. The case, which drew international attention, intensified outrage over the treatment of black people by white police officers and was considered a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The video surfaced for the first time publicly Monday night in an investigative report on the Dallas television station WFAA that included interviews with Ms. Bland's family and supporters, who accused officials of concealing information that they say should have been made public early in the investigation.

The authorities released the trooper's dashcam video days after Ms. Bland's death but the fact that Ms. Bland recorded the encounter from the front seat of her car was not widely known, though the authorities said the cellphone video's existence had been reported and no attempt had been made to conceal it.

In a statement, the Texas Department of Public Safety said the cellphone video was referred to "multiple times" in the department's investigative report on the incident and the video had been made available to the parties involved in a lawsuit filed by the family.

Cannon Lambert, a lawyer who represents the Bland family, said the video, by showing Ms. Bland with a cellphone in her hand, seriously undercut the trooper's claim that he feared for his safety as he approached the woman's vehicle.

[Here's what you need to know about the .]

"What the video shows is that Encinia had no reason to be in fear of his safety," Mr. Lambert, who represented the family in a $1.9 million legal settlement, said in a telephone interview. "The video shows that he wasn't in fear of his safety. You could see that it was a cellphone, He was looking right at it."

Mr. Encinia said during internal interviews with Department of Public Safety officials that he had been worried about his safety. "My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time," he told department interviewers.

Mr. Encinia was indicted on a charge of perjury — the only criminal charge arising from the case — after grand jurors accused him of making a false statement in his claim that he removed Ms. Bland from her car to more safely conduct a traffic investigation. But the charge was later dismissed on a motion by prosecutors in exchange for the trooper's promise that he would never again work in law enforcement.

The prosecuting team concluded that Mr. Encinia's permanent ban from law enforcement was the best option because there was no certainty of obtaining a conviction on the perjury charge, one of the prosecutors said at the time.

Ms. Bland's death in a largely rural part of southeast Texas unified African-American leaders throughout the state, leading to the enactment of the Sandra Bland Act in 2017, which requires training in de-escalation techniques for all police officers, sets up protections in custody for people with mental health and substance abuse issues and requires that independent law enforcement agencies investigate jail deaths.

The new video recycled the tense roadside confrontation that millions of online viewers had already seen from the officer's dashcam video and another one shot by a bystander. The main difference was the perspective — in the video newly made public, Ms. Bland is directly facing Mr. Encinia.

"Get out of the car," the officer shouts as he thrusts a Taser toward her. "I will light you up. Get out. Now."

Ms. Bland was pulled over near the campus of Prairie View A & M University in Waller County, where she had been planning to begin a new job, after the trooper said she failed to signal a turn. But the traffic stop became heated, and Mr. Encinia ordered Ms. Bland out of the car.

After the trooper told her to "get off the phone," Ms. Bland responded: "I'm not on the phone. I have a right to record. This is my property."

"Put your phone down," Mr. Encinia repeated. "Put your phone down right now."

The video was released by WFAA in partnership with the nonprofit Investigative Network. Its chief reporter, Brian Collister, said the video had been in the hands of law investigators until it was obtained by his news organization. Members of Ms. Bland's family called on Texas officials to re-examine the case after Mr. Collister showed them the video, according to the WFAA report.

"Open up the case, period," Ms. Bland's sister, Shante Needham, told the station. "We know they have an extremely, extremely good cover-up system."

Mr. Lambert, the family's lawyer, told The Times that the release of the video raised questions about prosecutors' decision not to press ahead with the perjury case, saying the recording undercut Mr. Encinia's claim that he feared for his safety.

"So if the video showed that he had no basis of being in fear of his safety, and he lied about that, then you would think they would be using that video," he said, calling prosecutors' decision not pursue the case "extremely troubling."

A team of five special prosecutors was assigned to the grand jury investigation. One of the team members Shawn McDonald, a Houston lawyer, said on Monday that he was not involved in the decision to drop the charges and pushed back at Mr. Lambert's criticism of the team's performance.

"For him to come back three years later is frankly quite ridiculous," said Mr. McDonald, who added that he was "proud" of the investigation into the case.

Mr. McDonald said he first saw Ms. Bland's video more than three years ago. "It was her cellphone so it was taken as evidence when we investigated the case," he said.

Evidence typically was not released, he said, though a decision was made to release the trooper's video shortly after the case began unfolding in an effort "to be transparent because of the concern everyone had with her arrest and subsequent suicide."

Chip Lewis, a Houston lawyer who represented Mr. Encinia in the investigation, said his client was in a new career "wholly unrelated" to law enforcement, but he offered few details. "He's working in the private sector, supporting his wife and family and living a quiet life," Mr. Lewis said.

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Cuba Rations Staple Foods and Soap in Face of Economic Crisis
By The Associated Press, May 11, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/world/americas/cuba-rationing-sanctions.html

Cubans waiting to buy rice in a state store in downtown Havana on Friday.Credit

HAVANA — The Cuban government has begun widespread rationing of chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis.

Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez told the state-run Cuban News Agency on Friday that the rationing would begin in order to deal with shortages of staple foods. She blamed the hardening of the American trade embargo by the Trump administration.

Economists have given equal or greater blame to a plunge in aid from Venezuela, where the collapse of the state-run oil company has led to a nearly two-thirds cut in shipments of subsidized fuel that Cuba used for power and to earn hard currency on the open market.

“We’re calling for calm,” Ms. Díaz said, adding that Cubans should feel reassured that at least cooking oil would be in ample supply. “It’s not a product that will be absent from the market in any way,” she added.

Cuba imports roughly two-thirds of its food at an annual cost of more than $2 billion, and brief shortages of individual products have been common for years. In recent months, a growing number of products have started to disappear for days or weeks at a time, and long lines have sprung up within minutes of the appearance of scarce products like chicken or flour.

Many shoppers find themselves still standing in line when the products run out, a problem the government has been blaming on “hoarders.”

“The country’s going through a tough moment,” said Lazara García, a 56-year-old tobacco factory worker, in response to the rationing. “This is the right response. Without this, there’ll be hoarders. I just got out of work and I was able to buy hot dogs.”

At the Havana shopping center where Ms. García bought the hot dogs, cashiers received orders on Friday to limit powdered milk to four packets per person, sausages to four packs per person and peas to five packets per person.

Manuel Ordoñez, 43, who identified himself as a small-business owner, said the measures would do nothing to resolve Cuban’s fundamental problems.

“What the country needs to do is produce,” he said. “Sufficient merchandise is what will lead to shorter lines.”

Limited rationing has already begun in many parts of the country, with stores restricting the number of items like bottles of cooking oil that a shopper can purchase. The policy announced by Ms. Díaz appears to go further and apply the same standards across the country of 11 million people.

The Cuban economy crashed with the fall of the Soviet Union, plunging the island into a more than decade-long period of misery and hunger that ended with the arrival of subsidized Venezuelan oil in the early 2000s.

The latest shortages and rationing appear to mark the end of a phase of relative prosperity, but conditions are nowhere close to the deprivation of what is known as Cuba’s “special period.” Cuba’s leaders say that while tough times lie ahead, there will be no return to the worst days of the post-Soviet depression because the island has diversified its economy and built trade ties with countries around the world.

Food stores in Cuba are government-run, with products highly subsidized and others wildly overpriced by global standards. Every Cuban receives a ration book that allows him or her to buy small quantities of basic goods like rice, beans, eggs and sugar each month for payment equivalent to a few United States cents.

Cubans with enough money can buy more basic goods at “liberated” prices that are still generally below the world average. At the highest of Cuba’s three tiers, brand-name goods, including high-quality rice and fancy jams, can be purchased often for two to three times the price in their country of origin.

Ms. Díaz said chicken would now be sold in limited quantities in every type of store — with cheaper chicken limited to 11 pounds per purchase and the more expensive variety capped at two packages per purchase. Low-priced soap, rice, bean, peas and eggs would now be sold only in limited quantities per person and controlled through the national system of ration books, she said.

Sales of those products at higher prices do not appear to be affected for the moment. The measures can be expected to have a serious impact on private business owners who often buy cheaper goods at state stores in the absence of access to a wholesale market. Cuba maintains a total monopoly on wholesale commerce, imports and exports, with virtually no access for the country’s small but growing private sector.

Ms. Díaz provided a grim series of statistics on food production by the state-run sector, which has found itself struggling to find the cash it needs to pay for basic inputs. She said that in March Cuba produced 900,000 fewer eggs than the 5.7 million needed daily to satisfy national demand.

That deficit shrank to 600,000 by mid-April, she said. The production of pork, the most-consumed meat in Cuba and a normally affordable staple of most people’s diets, is hundreds of tons below target.

Ms. Díaz said importing food from American producers had become more complicated under President Trump, forcing Cuba to search for products that were more expensive and difficult to import.

“Selling limited quantities will lead to equal distribution, so that the greatest number of people can buy the product, and we can avoid hoarding,” she said.

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She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested.
By Manny Fernandez, May 10, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/us/texas-border-good-samaritan.html

A Border Patrol agent on patrol in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. Four volunteers with a nonprofit were convicted after leaving water and canned food for migrants hiking through the area.Credit

MCALLEN, Tex. — Teresa L. Todd pulled over one recent night on a dark West Texas highway to help three young Central American migrants who had flagged her down. Ms. Todd — an elected official, government lawyer and single mother in a desert border region near Big Bend National Park — said she went into “total mom mode” when she saw the three siblings, one of whom appeared to be very ill.

Struggling to communicate using her broken Spanish, Ms. Todd told the three young people to get out of the cold and into her car. She was phoning and texting friends for help when a sheriff’s deputy drove up, followed soon by the Border Patrol. “They asked me to step behind my car, and the supervisor came and started Mirandizing me,” said Ms. Todd, referring to being read her Miranda rights. “And then he says that I could be found guilty of transporting illegal aliens, and I’m, like, ‘What are you talking about?”

Ms. Todd spent 45 minutes in a holding cell that night. Federal agents obtained a search warrant to examine her phone, and she became the focus of an investigation that could lead to federal criminal charges.

As the Trump administration moves on multiple fronts to shut down illegal border crossings, it has also stepped up punitive measures targeting private citizens who provide compassionate help to migrants — “good Samaritan” aid that is often intended to save lives along a border that runs through hundreds of miles of remote terrain that can be brutally unforgiving.

Earlier this year, federal agents raided the home of a volunteer who provides meals, housing and other aid to migrants in the Texas border city of Brownsville. In Arizona, four volunteers with , a nonprofit based in Tucson, were convicted on misdemeanor criminal charges after leaving water and canned food for migrants hiking through the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Five other volunteers also faced charges, including one felony case now pending in Federal District Court in Tucson.

“I honestly don’t feel like I ever did anything wrong: I stopped to help some kids,” said Ms. Todd, 53, who serves as both the city attorney of Marfa, Tex., and the county attorney of Jeff Davis County, an elected position. “It’s been pretty transformative for me, to be perfectly honest. To have devoted my life to public service, and then to be Mirandized, detained and investigated as if I’m a human smuggler. The whole thing was really, really, very surreal. It was like a ‘Twilight Zone.’”

Teresa L. Todd was detained by Border Patrol agents after pulling over to help a group of migrants in Texas. “I honestly don’t feel like I ever did anything wrong,” she said.

Ms. Todd has not been charged with a crime, though the three migrants from El Salvador were held for some time as material witnesses, suggesting that federal prosecutors were contemplating using them in a criminal case against her. A spokesman for the Border Patrol said the incident remains “an active case,” but declined further comment, as did the United States attorney’s office.

Federal agents at the border in some cases work closely with nonprofit shelters and volunteers to coordinate housing and transportation logistics for migrants in border cities who have recently been released from Border Patrol custody. But often, volunteers who aid illegal border crossers before they are in custody are treated far differently.

For Ms. Todd, it started at about 10 p.m. on Feb. 27, just outside the funky desert community of Marfa. Ms. Todd was busy that night: She had attended a planning and zoning meeting at Marfa City Hall, had a late dinner at the Hotel Saint George and was driving back home to nearby Fort Davis. Suddenly, a young man in a white shirt ran out of a ditch and started waving at her.

“I have two teenage boys,” Ms. Todd said. “I have a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old, and he looks about the same size as my 15-year-old son, and so I literally think, ‘Oh my God, it’s like this kid on the side of the road.’ I turn around and go back, because I can’t leave a kid on the side of the road.”

He was a bit older than a teenager, she learned, as he and his siblings started telling her what had happened.

The three Salvadoran migrants were a family — Carlos, 22, his brother, Francisco, 20, and their sister, Esmeralda, 18. They had fled their home country years ago and were living with an aunt in Guatemala. Worsening gang violence forced them to leave — two of Carlos’s friends were murdered, and a gang leader wanted Esmeralda to be his girlfriend, according to court documents. The trio headed for the United States and crossed the border in a remote stretch of desert with a group of migrants and smugglers. But Esmeralda became sick and had trouble keeping up.

The others in the group pushed ahead, but her brothers stayed by her side. The three of them became lost as they hiked north, and they ran out of food and water, according to statements they provided to the federal public defender’s office. Esmeralda’s condition had worsened by the time they flagged down Ms. Todd.

“I can tell she needs immediate medical attention,” Ms. Todd recalled. “She’s having a really hard time walking.”

She had the siblings get in her car and started to contact friends — one who works for a refugee services nonprofit and another who is a lawyer for the Border Patrol.

Moments later, a sheriff’s deputy from neighboring Presidio County pulled up behind her, lights flashing. The deputy and Ms. Todd know one another, but he was immediately suspicious, she said, asking whether she thought the migrants’ backpacks smelled like dope. The deputy alerted Border Patrol, whose agents read Ms. Todd her rights.

Ms. Todd, who routinely puts misdemeanor lawbreakers behind bars as a county attorney, was put in a holding cell at a nearby Border Patrol station. Her purse and other personal items were confiscated.

“I walk in and a guy says, ‘Are you the driver?’ I said, ‘No, I’m the lady who stopped to help these kids,’” Ms. Todd said. “They seemed to think there was something very nefarious going on, when I literally got flagged down on the side of the road and tried to be a good Samaritan.”

She was held in a large holding cell for about 45 minutes, and then released and driven back to her car, which was still on the side of the highway. She had been detained for a total of about three hours.

Days later, back at work at Marfa City Hall, she was visited at her office by an agent with federal Homeland Security Investigations and a Texas Ranger. The federal agent handed her a search warrant for her phone, and she surrendered it. One of the friends she had texted that night told Ms. Todd that agents had also questioned her and examined her phone.

The three migrants Ms. Todd had helped are now in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in El Paso and could face deportation. “All three remain in ICE custody pending disposition of their immigration cases,” an ICE spokeswoman said in a statement.

The episode has both angered and perplexed Ms. Todd and her friends and co-workers in Jeff Davis County. William Kitts, the Jeff Davis sheriff and a county government colleague of Ms. Todd’s, said numerous residents have assisted migrants, providing them with water or giving them a ride to his office. None have been prosecuted, and Sheriff Kitts said Ms. Todd shouldn’t be tried, either.

The sheriff said he believes that Esmeralda would have died had Ms. Todd not stopped to help her. According to court records, she was taken by Border Patrol agents to Big Bend Regional Medical Center in Alpine, Tex., and was treated for four days for starvation, dehydration, infected wounds from cactus spines and rhabdomyolysis, a serious condition that can lead to kidney failure.

“Harboring is a big jump for them to make in my book,” Sheriff Kitts said of the threatened criminal charges against Ms. Todd. “There’s a human component to this. We’ll let Congress and the politicians fight it out, but if somebody’s hungry or thirsty or needs some help, we’re going to help them.”

Kenneth Magidson, who served as the top federal prosecutor in Houston and in the South Texas border region from 2011 to 2017, said the government has begun taking “a harsher approach” to prosecuting such cases since President Trump took office. “Providing drinks of water or someone needs immediate medical assistance and you take them to a hospital — you’re stretching it,” he said. “You have to look at the entire context of the case. Was it at the person’s house? Were they spending the night? It’s more than just giving somebody on the side of the road some water.”

Ms. Todd said she plans to work with her congressional representatives on legislation exempting good Samaritans from federal prosecution.

“There is something bigger at stake than just me here, because this does send a message to try to chill people from helping others,” Ms. Todd said.

One day last week, she received one good surprise: The authorities returned her iPhone. “They took it at 11:30 in the morning and said I would have it back by 3 in the afternoon, 5 at the latest,” she said. “And 53 days later, I got my phone back.”

Venezuelan Embassy’s Power Cut Off in Tense Washington Standoff
By Patricia Mazzel and Zach Montague, May 9, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/venezuela-embassy-protests.html

Greisy Correa, left, and Michelle Valoz outside the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

A chaotic political standoff with international diplomatic implications began unfolding quietly weeks ago on a leafy side street in the upscale Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, as a group of American activists moved into the five-story Venezuelan Embassy and made themselves at home.

They were there, they said, to keep the United States from going to war.

With some 100 Venezuelan diplomats still working inside during the day, the activists from Code Pink and other antiwar groups brought their things to spend the night, sleeping on couches to keep the building occupied around the clock. They said they were guests, invited by the government of President Nicolás Maduro, and their mission was to oppose any American military intervention in the troubled South American nation.

Appointees of Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader recognized by the United States and some 50 other countries as Venezuela’s interim president, had pledged to take over the embassy, a move those now occupying the facility fear could lead to a reciprocal siege of the American Embassy in Venezuela, and an armed conflict.

Late last month, local Venezuelans who support Mr. Guaidó learned of the occupation and descended on the building, demanding that the activists, whom they view as unlawful trespassers, get out.

In the ensuing days, tense clashes between the occupiers and the Venezuelans, who are camped in tents surrounding the building, have escalated, prompting nine arrests by the Secret Service. Late on Wednesday, the power company shut off electricity to the embassy, thrusting its occupants into darkness. The protesters outside cheered.

The extraordinary stalemate has challenged local authorities and the Trump administration, turning the inoperative embassy into a stand-in for the much larger crisis vexing Venezuela, as Mr. Maduro’s supporters maintain control in spite of efforts by the opposition and the United States.

“We are in a lawless kind of situation,” said Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of Code Pink.

The occupying groups, which call themselves the Embassy Protection Collective, plan to rally outside of the building on Saturday. The gathering seems likely to also draw out more Venezuelans to demonstrate in opposition.

The antiwar activists have been alone in the embassy building since late April, when the American visas for the shoestring embassy staff expired, forcing the diplomats to go home.

“I do not support U.S. intervention, which is why I’m even more upset about the situation,” said Dilianna Bustillos, 30, a senior manager at Oracle who has been outside the embassy for eight days. “I think it’s hypocritical for an American group of people to be against intervention and then be in our embassy squatting.”

The occupiers have filled windows in the upper floors with block-letter posters spelling out “COUP FAIL.” Washington police and the Secret Service have set up a barrier separating the pro-Guaidó camp from Maduro sympathizers and other activists across the street.

The former ambassador is long gone, recalled months ago by Mr. Maduro. Even before the rest of the diplomats left, the embassy had stopped providing services like passport renewals. Carlos Vecchio, the ambassador and recognized by the White House, has showed up at the embassy steps twice in the past week, but has not been let in.

Francisco Márquez, Mr. Vecchio’s political adviser, said that once the United States recognized Mr. Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutional leader, those inside the embassy lost their legitimacy as guests of Mr. Maduro. The State Department has also said it considers their presence to be “unauthorized.”

“There’s no doubt of who has authority over the embassy,” Mr. Márquez said. “We literally have foreigners trespassing on Venezuelan territory. They’re actually committing a crime.”

No one has gone in to forcibly remove anyone. Ms. Benjamin said doing so would violate an international treaty that protects the sovereignty of diplomatic missions. Mr. Márquez said the treaty applies to the recognized government in question — that is, Mr. Guaidó’s — and would not protect Code Pink and the other groups.

When Pepco, the power utility, sent an employee to go into a manhole on Wednesday night and cut the building’s electricity, Ms. Benjamin questioned whether Pepco had faced political pressure from the Trump administration. She said the electrical bill has been paid through the end of May.

Mr. Márquez said Pepco acted after Mr. Vecchio reached out to the utility and explained the situation. Ben Armstrong, a Pepco spokesman, declined to comment, “out of respect for customer privacy and public safety.” The embassy still has running water, according to Ms. Benjamin.

Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who has called on the occupiers to leave the building, compared the shut-off electricity at the embassy to .

“Now they know what life is like for the people of #Venezuela under #Maduro,” Mr. Rubio .

At the peak of the embassy occupation, some 50 people were inside, sleeping on the floor, sharing cooking duties and engaging in art and music activities. But only about 15 people remain in the building, Ms. Benjamin said. The others have been unable to return ever since protesters arrived and effectively blockaded most entrances.

Two activists have been arrested in recent days for trying to deliver food. One tossed bread and lettuce onto the embassy patio, Ms. Benjamin said. Another tried to toss a cucumber. An attempt to bring in food via a window rope-and-pulley contraption proved unsuccessful.

“Every time we’ve tried to bring food in, we have been physically attacked by the opposition,” Ms. Benjamin said, accusing the Secret Service of siding with the Venezuelan protesters. The Secret Service said it was not interfering with the delivery of food or supplies into the building.

“They’re not hostages — they can come outside and eat,” said Gabriela Febres, a Venezuelan who has been at the site for 10 days. “They can protest, but so can we, and that’s what we’re doing. They can protest all they want, but not inside the building. They can go to the Capitol and express their dislike with Trump at the Capitol with their senators.”

On Thursday, Ms. Benjamin scheduled a news conference to denounce the cutoff of electricity. But those gathered outside the embassy blared a loud horn and banged empty pots and pans, making it nearly impossible for her to speak. Later in the afternoon, at least 30 people were scattered outside; that number typically swells to more than twice that in the evening and on weekends when people are off work. Speakers on a sound booth out front periodically play music.

Mr. Guaidó’s supporters have covered a wall with pictures of prominent anti-Maduro activists, including several whose deaths they blame on the government. A handwritten poster out back laid out, in Spanish, a code of conduct urging people to respect the embassy site and “be assertive, not offensive.” Ms. Benjamin accused those assembled outside of shoving her and making sexist and racist comments; the Venezuelans said one of the activists shoved a pregnant woman.

“We’re not trying to hurt anyone by doing what we’re doing,” said Ms. Bustillos, who is now preparing to enter her ninth day outside the embassy. “We’re just asking them to please come out.”

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