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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.


This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

US surveillance court didn't reject a single spy order last year

"For years, critics have claimed that the US' Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a pushover: it's allegedly so reluctant to reject spying orders that it's little more than a speed bump for the FBI and NSA. True or not, that reputation isn't about to change any time soon. Reuters has obtained a Justice Department memo showing that FISC didn't reject any of the 1,457 surveillance order requests it received in 2015, even in part. That's no different than in 2014, but it suggests that the court isn't any less forgiving in an era of tighter government controls."

US surveillance court didn't reject a single spy order last year

A Mockery of Justice for the Poor - The New York Times

"In the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court held in 1963 that the state or local government had to provide a lawyer to any defendant facing prison time who could not afford his or her own. This was no minor decision. Approximately 80 percent of all state criminal defendants in the United States qualify for a government-provided lawyer.



Yet despite this constitutional guarantee, state and county spending on lawyers for the poor amounts to only $2.3 billion — barely 1 percent of the more than $200 billion governments spend annually on criminal justice.



Worse, since 1995, real spending on indigent defense has fallen, by 2 percent, even as the number of felony cases has risen by approximately 40 percent.



Not surprisingly, public defense finds itself starved of resources while facing impossible caseloads that mock the idea of justice for the poor.



In Fresno, Calif., for instance, public defenders have caseloads that are four times the recommended maximum of around 150. In Minnesota, one public defender followed by a reporter estimated that he had about 12 minutes to devote to each client that day. There is no way these lawyers can manage the cases being thrown at them.



In New Orleans, caseloads are so high that the parish’s public defender office has started to refuse to take cases, including murder cases. Public defender offices in other states, including Florida, Missouri, New York and Pennsylvania, have taken similar steps when caseloads have grown too heavy.



To make things worse, 43 states now require indigent defendants to pay at least a portion of their lawyers’ fees, even though these defendants are by definition indisputably poor.



The situation in South Dakota highlights the insanity of this. South Dakota charges a defendant $92 an hour for his public defender, owed no matter the outcome of the case. If a public defender spends 10 hours proving that her client is innocent, the defendant still owes the lawyer $920, even though he committed no crime and his arrest was a mistake.



Failure to pay is a crime. Someone who qualifies as indigent may be acquitted, only to be convicted of being too poor to pay for the legal services the Constitution requires the state to provide.



This is not justice."



A Mockery of Justice for the Poor - The New York Times

Friday, April 29, 2016

The Racist Roots of a Way to Sell Homes - The New York Times





"From the 1930s through the 1960s, most African-Americans could not get mortgages because the government had deemed neighborhoods where they lived ineligible for federal mortgage insurance, the Depression-era innovation that made mortgages widely affordable.



The situation exposed black families to hucksters who peddled homeownership through contracts for deed, in which a home seller gives a buyer a high-interest loan, coupled with a pledge to turn over the deed after 20 to 40 years of monthly installment payments. These contracts enriched the sellers by draining the buyers, who built no equity and were often evicted for minor or alleged infractions, at which point the owner would enter into a contract with another buyer. In the process, families and neighborhoods were ruined.



Contracts for deed are making a comeback. They are increasingly being used by investment firms that have bought thousands of foreclosed homes and want to sell them to lower-income buyers “as is,” according to a recent report in The Times by Alexandra Stevenson and Matthew Goldstein. Many of the homes are in Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. In one example in the article, investors who bought foreclosed homes at an average price of $8,000 issued a contract on one in Ohio in 2011 for $36,300 at 10 percent interest.



Contracts for deed make gouging possible, because unlike traditional mortgages, there is no appraisal or inspection to ensure that the loan amount is reasonable. They also let an investor swiftly evict buyers for missed payments, rather than giving them time to catch up, as required under a mortgage. And they usually require the buyer to pay hefty upfront fees. Unlike a rental security deposit, however, the fee is almost never refundable.



Contracts for deed are similar in some ways to the subprime lending that contributed to the housing bust in this century. Investors in the contracts include some of the Wall Street players who inflated the mortgage bubble, including Daniel Sparks, the former Goldman Sachs executive, whose department was betting on a crash in 2007 even as the bank was selling toxic mortgage securities. The stated rationale for contracts for deed is that low-income buyers cannot qualify for mortgages — the same line that was used to justify subprime lending.



What became evident from the crash was that many subprime borrowers who were wiped out — and who were disproportionately black and Hispanic — could have qualified for better terms and were misled.



Even for buyers truly unable to get mortgages, contracts for deed nearly always inflict harm. The exception is a few programs where public agencies or nonprofits use interest-free contracts to sell homes to needy families and then help them refinance into traditional mortgages. Federal housing agencies could foster that approach by selling more of their foreclosed properties to nonprofits."



The Racist Roots of a Way to Sell Homes - The New York Times

Thursday, April 28, 2016

American Injustice - KING: Black boy sexting with white girl ends in child porn charge - NY Daily News

Levar Allen is a 17-year-old standout three-sport student athlete at Parkway High School in south Bossier City, La.

An award-winning wrestler, football and basketball player, Levar is beloved at school and in the community. He's never been in trouble with the law a day in his life — until now.

Levar did what millions of kids in America are doing — he exchanged naked text messages with a 16-year-old classmate.

First, she sent Levar a nude video and then he sent her one in return. Call it gross, but a recent study found that 54% of kids under the age of 18 have done so before.

Parents may hate it, but when it's consensual, it's definitely safer than in-person intercourse.

But Levar lives in the deep South.



He's black. And it appears his biggest mistake wasn't doing what the majority of American teens have done. His biggest mistake was doing so with a white girl.

Her parents called the police when they discovered what was happening.



Of course, they arrested Levar and he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile and possession of child pornography for the video he still had of her on his phone.



Yes, she's 16 and he's 17.

Yes, she sent him a video first.

Yes, this was consensual.

Yes they attend the same high school together.



Yes, this is a bogus symptom of the mass criminalization of black folk in the New Jim Crow.

When pressed on whether or not race played a role, Lt. Bill Davis, who is also white, seemed offended and told KSLA-TV, "I have nothing to say about that. It doesn't matter what your race, what your religion, what your ethnicity, don't do child pornography! Plain and simple." 




Except a 16-year-old and 17-year-old in the same school consensually sending each other sexual videos of themselves isn't child pornography.

In Louisiana, the law states that anyone under the age of 17 found to be sexting any person of any age can be charged with a misdemeanor. It's not widely prosecuted. If a 17 year old, even if they are in high school together, does the very same thing, with a 16 year old, they can be charged with with child pornography. The law lacks the nuance it deserves and ultimately criminalizes common youth misbehavior between peers.

Now, this young man faces the prospect of having a criminal record and his mother is having to scrape together every single dime she can find, $4,000 already, just to defend him from these outrageous charges.







Levar Allen's mother claims her son was discriminated against after the 17-year-old, found sexting a fellow teenager who is white, was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.BOSSIER PARISH SHERIFF'S OFFICE

Levar Allen's mother claims her son was discriminated against after the 17-year-old, found sexting a fellow teenager who is white, was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.


KING: Black boy sexting with white girl ends in child porn charge - NY Daily News


John Boehner on Ted Cruz: 'Lucifer in the Flesh' - The Atlantic





"Former House Speaker John Boehner seems to be enjoying his retirement—and wouldn’t you, after what he went through in Washington? One reason for his buoyant mood, besides the chance to cut grass, is the opportunity to stay far, far away from Senator Ted Cruz.



Asked about Cruz during an appearance at Stanford University on Wednesday, Boehner called him “Lucifer in the flesh,” according to the The Stanford Daily.



“I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” Boehner added. He said he would not vote for Cruz in a general election, though he would vote for his fellow tangerine-tinted Republican Donald Trump."



John Boehner on Ted Cruz: 'Lucifer in the Flesh' - The Atlantic

Prisons Are Using Military-Grade Tear Gas to Punish People | The Nation

Mount Olive Correctional Center

"In Bahrain, it took an asthmatic man’s life. Bahrain bought it from South Korea, where it’s been used on dissidents for decades. In Egypt, it choked 37 men to death in the back of a police truck. Egypt got it from the USA. It’s tear gas, and it’s becoming a staple of life in American prisons.


Tear gas is mostly known in the United States as a “crowd control weapon” for dispersing unwanted demonstrators. Beloved of US SWAT teams and riot cops, ubiquitous in police arsenals, it played a key role in suppressing civilians during the protests of the Arab Spring. From Ferguson in 2014 to Rio de Janeiro this year, it’s become notorious for its risks and health effects: miscarriages, lung damage, blunt-force trauma, asphyxiation. So why are we using it on captives?

“They started out by using MK9, which is a form of pepper spray. Then they put a fogger attachment on it, to pipe it into the cell. Then they upped it to Sting-Ball grenades. They threw two grenades into the cell—a cell that’s approximately 80 square feet.

"They threw two grenades into the cell—a cell that’s approximately 80 square feet." 
“After that, they used a pepper-ball gun. That’s a 37-millimeter rifle that shoots these little concentrated balls of pepper-spray mixture in the cell. They did all of this back to back to back, without stopping. And then they go in and they use physical force, and they taser, and they put him in a restraint chair.”

That’s how Mountain State Justice staff attorney Aaron Moss describes one inmate’s experience—which he saw on video—at West Virginia’s maximum-security Mount Olive Correctional Complex. Internal documents from Mount Olive, reviewed by The Nation, confirm that its head warden has declared “martial law” in parts of the facility, superseding standard use-of-force regulations by decree. His declaration authorized the use of “less-lethal” weapons, including grenade launchers, at staff discretion.

The War Resisters League, through a letter-writing campaign run in its prison newsletter, obtained testimony from 18 states on the use of tear gas and pepper spray against inmates—in men’s and women’s prisons, maximum- and medium- security facilities, across the country. For unrestrained use of force on restrained inmates, Mount Olive might be the most well-documented example.

“The guards have said under this protocol they are free to use chemical agents at their own discretion—5-7 people are sprayed a week,” says Fred Douty, a Mount Olive inmate, in a letter to WRL. Douty himself was sprayed on at least one occasion; he says a prison nurse diagnosed him days later with first-degree chemical burns.

Prisons Are Using Military-Grade Tear Gas to Punish People | The Nation

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars - The New Yorker

 "On January 24, 2013, the Florida Department of Corrections received a grievance letter from an inmate named Harold Hempstead, who was imprisoned at the Dade Correctional Institution. The letter was brief and its tone was matter-of-fact, but the allegations it contained were shocking, raising troubling questions about the death of a mentally ill inmate named Darren Rainey, who had collapsed in a shower seven months earlier, on June 23, 2012—a case that I wrote about in the magazine this week. According to Hempstead’s letter, the death had been misrepresented to disguise the abuse that preceded it. The reason Rainey collapsed in the shower, Hempstead alleged, was that he had been locked in the stall by guards, who directed scalding water at him. Hempstead’s cell was directly below the shower. That night, he had heard Rainey yelling, “I can’t take it no more,” he recalled. Then he heard a loud thud—which he believed was the sound of Rainey falling to the ground—and the yelling stopped. Hempstead concluded his letter by calling for an investigation."



A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars - The New Yorker

Monday, April 25, 2016

Virginia Just Gave 200,000 People the Right to Vote | The Nation



 
On Friday, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, flanked by veteran civil-rights leaders, announced what he called a “landmark” restoration of voting rights for convicted felons.


Sunday, April 24, 2016

LOUISIANA POLICE SHOOT 6-YR.-OLD BOY IN THE HEAD MULTIPLE TIMES, KILLING HIM in News Forum

cops-shot-6-year-old

"In breaking news, another tragic incident of police murder has just occurred over night, leaving a 6-year-old boy dead.

The shooting took place in Marksville, Louisiana. Now, the father of that 6-year-old is in critical condition as well.



The Advocate reports, that the 6-year-old, Jeremy David Mardis, of Effie, “was killed by multiple gunshot wounds to the head and torso. He was pronounced dead at the scene, Avoyelles Parish Coroner L.J. Mayeaux said Wednesday. The boy was a student at Lafargue Elementary in Effie.”



The shooting took place on Martin Luther King Drive in Marksville. It happened “at the end of a pursuit and involved multiple citymarshals from Ward 2,” according to Louisiana State Police spokesman Trooper Daniel “Scott” Moreau.



The police are saying that the driver was attempting to get away from officers, who followed in what became a high speed chase.



The Associated Press reports that the coroner explains that Few hit a dead end. He then backed out to try to get away. But that’s when officers unloaded on him and his 6-year-old son."



LOUISIANA POLICE SHOOT 6-YR.-OLD BOY IN THE HEAD MULTIPLE TIMES, KILLING HIM in News Forum

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List of Worst U.S. Presidents - ICTMN.com

Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List 

of Worst U.S. Presidents

2/20/12
This article was originally published on Presidents' Day 2012.
Unlike the statement in Indian Country Today Media Network’s “Best Presidents for Indian country” story, it’s a bit easier identifying the “worst” presidents for Indian country. Five tend to stand out with the majority of the rest huddled together after that. Here are our nods to the presidents who did more harm than good for Native Americans while in office.
Portrait of Andrew Jackson (Copyright Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)
Portrait of Andrew Jackson (Copyright Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images)

Andrew Jackson:A man nicknamed “Indian killer” and “Sharp Knife” surely deserves the top spot on a list of worst U.S. Presidents. Andrew Jackson “was a forceful proponent of Indian removal,” according toPBS.Others have a less genteel way of describing the seventh president of the United States.
“Andrew Jackson was a wealthy slave owner and infamous Indian killer, gaining the nickname ‘Sharp Knife’ from the Cherokee,” writes Amargi on the websiteUnsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice. “He was also the founder of the Democratic Party, demonstrating that genocide against indigenous people is a nonpartisan issue. His first effort at Indian fighting was waging a war against the Creeks. President Jefferson had appointed him to appropriate Creek and Cherokee lands. In his brutal military campaigns against Indians, Andrew Jackson recommended that troops systematically kill Indian women and children after massacres in order to complete the extermination. The Creeks lost 23 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama, paving the way for cotton plantation slavery. His frontier warfare and subsequent ‘negotiations’ opened up much of the southeast U.S. to settler colonialism.”
Jackson was not only a genocidal maniac against the Indigenous Peoples of the southwest, he was also racist against African peoples and a scofflaw who “violated nearly every standard of justice,” according to historianBertram Wyatt-Brown. As a major general in 1818, Jackson invaded Spanish Florida chasing fugitive slaves who had escaped with the intent of returning them to their “owners,” and sparked the First Seminole War. During the conflict, Jackson captured two British men, Alexander George Arbuthnot and Robert C. Ambrister, who were living among the Seminoles. The Seminoles had resisted Jackson’s invasion of their land. One of the men had written about his support for the Seminoles’ land and treaty rights in letters found on a boat. Jackson used the “evidence” to accuse the men of “inciting” the Seminoles to “savage warfare” against the U.S. He convened a “special court martial” tribunal then had the men executed. “His actions were a study in flagrant disobedience, gross inequality and premeditated ruthlessness… he swept through Florida, crushed the Indians, executed Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and violated nearly every standard of justice,” Wyatt-Brown wrote.


Read more athttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/20/indian-killer-andrew-jackson-deserves-top-spot-list-worst-us-presidents-98997


Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List of Worst U.S. Presidents - ICTMN.com

S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants' - Greenwich Citizen - Discussion on Topix


ADVANCE FOR THE STORY SLUGGED: SOUTH KOREA TORTURED CHILDREN - In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates, child inmates line up for morning assembly at the Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea. An Associated Press investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized.


S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants' - Greenwich Citizen - Discussion on Topix

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy | Southern Poverty Law Center

South Carolina removed this Confederate flag in July 2015.

"After being indoctrinated online into the world of white supremacy and inspired by a racist hate group, Dylann Roof told friends he wanted to start a “race war.” Someone had to take “drastic action” to take back America from “stupid and violent” African Americans, he wrote.



Then, on June 17, 2015, he attended a Bible study meeting at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston and murdered nine people, all of them black.



Dylann Roof, the suspect in the massacre of nine African Americans in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015.

Dylann Roof, the suspect in the massacre of nine African Americans in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015. (Corbis)

The act of terror shocked America with its chilling brutality.



But Roof did not spark a race war. Far from it.



Instead, when photos surfaced depicting the 21-year-old white supremacist with the Confederate battle flag — including one in which he held the flag in one hand and a gun in the other — Roof ignited something else entirely: a grassroots movement to remove the flag from public spaces.



In what seemed like an instant, the South’s 150-year reverence for the Confederacy was shaken. Public officials responded to the national mourning and outcry by removing prominent public displays of its most recognizable symbol.



It became a moment of deep reflection for a region where the Confederate flag is viewed by many white Southerners as an emblem of their heritage and regional pride despite its association with slavery, Jim Crow and the violent resistance to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.



The moment came amid a period of growing alarm about the vast racial disparities in our country, seen most vividly in the deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of police.



Under intense pressure, South Carolina officials acted first, passing legislation to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, where it had flown since 1962. In Montgomery, Alabama — a city known as the Cradle of the Confederacy — the governor acted summarily and without notice, ordering state workers to lower several versions of Confederate flags that flew alongside a towering Confederate monument just steps from the Capitol.



Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy | Southern Poverty Law Center

A Word About North Carolina

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Imperial Wizard of Georgia KKK dies after shootout with police

Imperial Wizard of Georgia KKK dies after shootout with police

"According to Georgia police, J.J. Harper was well-known in Georgia for his role in the local chapter of the KKK:

Law enforcement confirmed Harper's involvement in the white supremacy movement.

"Yes, he was. He had a membership drive on the courthouse steps," said Deputy David Grantham with the Dooly County Sheriff's Office.

During the standoff, Harper told officers and various news outlets that "someone was going to die today".

Harper shot multiple rounds at officers before walking back inside his home.

Agents confirm they fired a round at Harper before a gunshot was heard inside the home.

Police were called to the home after a domestic dispute. Harper kept police at bay for roughly eight hours, telling those on site that "someone is going to die today."

Monday, April 18, 2016

Sheriff Tom Dart's Efforts to Flood Chicago's Jails With Sunlight

"Prisoners are brutalized by correctional officers with scandalous frequency. A recent abuse scandal in Los Angeles County ultimately sent former Sheriff  Lee Baca to jail. In Texas, “the state prison system’s inspector general has referred nearly 400 cases of staff sex crimes against inmates to prosecutors. An analysis by The Marshall Project found that prosecutors refused to pursue almost half of those cases.” In Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s list of misdeeds is too long to summarize in a sentence. In New York, the union for prison guards has helped dozens of abusive members to keep their jobs. Last year, human rights groups “called for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Florida state prisons, contending that ‘immediate intervention’ is necessary to stop the widespread abuse, neglect, torture and deaths of inmates in the Florida Department of Corrections.”

And in Cook County, Illinois? There is brutal inmate abuse there, too. But Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is making efforts as aggressive as any I’ve seen to confront and improve on the status quo. In recent years, he installed 2,400 fixed-position video cameras and purchased handheld cameras and body cameras for guards.

Then, last week, he took a very unusual step: “He decided to release videos in cases where a civilian oversight board has sustained allegations of excessive force without waiting for Freedom of Information Act requests,” the Washington Post reports.

He declared, “The public has a right to know when officers abuse the public trust.” If you follow police reform efforts you’ve probably guessed who opposes his approach:

The local union called the videos' release “nothing but a political move.”

“Posting these videos on public websites is not only a violation of privacy of our officers, but it’s infringing on their right to a fair trial. The 'transparency' of these videos only goes one way,” Teamsters Local 700 said in a statement. “It’s not a true outlook of what happens at the jail on a daily basis, which are only small clips of the entire alleged incidents.”

There is a grain of truth to what the correctional officer’s union says. This is a political move. The sheriff wants to fire guards who abuse inmates. The union fights to save the jobs of guards who abuse inmates. And insofar as it can wage the fight behind closed doors, it can more easily prevail. But the political calculation changes if the public is permitted to see the behavior in question. Suddenly it’s a lot harder to keep guards on the job after particularly egregious brutality."

Sheriff Tom Dart's Efforts to Flood Chicago's Jails With Sunlight

'Scapegoated?' The police killing that left Asian Americans angry – and divided

'Scapegoated?' The police killing that left Asian Americans angry – and divided

"This is a story and a case that will go down in the history of New York and of race relations in the US,” said Cathy Dang, the executive director of CAAAV, a pan-Asian community group in New York that has been at the forefront of Asian American organizations opposing the pro-Liang movement. Dang and her allies see support for Liang as being driven by a desire for Chinese Americans to be treated as equal to whites in the racial hierarchy.

“The question is: do we really want to become the oppressor?” she asked."

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Lead (HBO)

Sunday, April 17, 2016

No, John Kasich, women are not to blame for rape | Angelina Chapin | US news | The Guardian

‘Why can Republican men understand logic in scenarios that might affect their own safety, but not when it’s applied to female victims?’It’s a fundamental lack of empathy that makes men say women should avoid parties, where they’d never say drunk driving victims should avoid roads







No, John Kasich, women are not to blame for rape | Angelina Chapin | US news | The Guardian

Why Americans Can’t Vote - The New York Times



"The state of the nation’s underfunded, patchwork election system and obsolete balloting machinery may not arouse voters the way candidates can with charges of rigged elections. But voters in Arizona who lined up for the state’s presidential primaries last month learned just how difficult and unfair voting can be even without criminal malfeasance.



Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, had slashed the number of polling places to 60, from 200 in 2012, claiming a need for budget savings and leaving thousands of voters waiting long hours into the night, with some giving up in despair.



The Justice Department is investigating this electoral disaster, including charges that minority voters were particularly harmed. Critics blame the Supreme Court for weakening the Voting Rights Act, which used to subject regions with a history of discrimination, Maricopa County among them, to prescreening by the Justice Department before they could make major changes in voting procedures. Had that provision remained operational, the Maricopa fiasco might have been averted.



Arizona’s problem is a good early warning of troubles to come in deeply flawed voting systems everywhere in the country. Come Tuesday in New York, untold numbers of primary voters interested in crossing party lines will discover that it’s too late, that they should have switched parties by last Oct. 9, a little publicized deadline under “closed primary” voting procedures that serve to guard the major parties’ power.



This is but one of many confusions, Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, warns. Politicians in Albany scheduled four separate balloting days this year for state and federal offices. New York lags behind more electorally advanced states in its refusal to allow voters the convenience of same-day registration, early voting and easier absentee balloting. The Republican ballot names the candidates while the confusing Democratic ballot asks voters to choose a candidate as well as delegates pledged to either of the two candidates.



Beyond New York, newly restrictive election laws enacted in 17 states have imposed tighter procedures for identification, registration and early voting. In Wisconsin this month, primary voters were arbitrarily rejected or forced to endure a maze of three separate waiting lines for registration, identification and balloting. Similar restrictions elsewhere will be facing their first test in November.







Aside from bad laws, frayed infrastructure and limited funding also afflict the voting process. Unconscionably long lines in the 2012 election led to an investigation by the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration, whose report contained recommendations on cutting a voter’s wait to no more than 30 minutes. That remains a distant ideal in a crazy-quilt voting system variously managed and mismanaged by the 50 states and some 8,000 local jurisdictions."





Why Americans Can’t Vote - The New York Times

Saturday, April 16, 2016

272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants? - The New York Times





WASHINGTON — The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance.



But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard.



Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. But this was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved African-Americans had belonged to the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today as Georgetown University.



Now, with racial protests roiling college campuses, an unusual collection of Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists is trying to find out what happened to those 272 men, women and children. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival?



More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognized their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say.



At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The college relied on Jesuit plantations in Maryland to help finance its operations, university officials say. (Slaves were often donated by prosperous parishioners.) And the 1838 sale — worth about $3.3 million in today’s dollars — was organized by two of Georgetown’s early presidents, both Jesuit priests.



Some of that money helped to pay off the debts of the struggling college.





272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants? - The New York Times

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Need Better Answers on the 1994 Crime Bill | The Nation

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders



Louis asked Clinton whether the bill—which included the Violence Against Women Act, an assault-weapons ban, and funding for community policing, as well as harsh mandatory federal sentencing and eliminating inmate education programs—“was a net positive or do you think it was a mistake?” Clinton did what any politician would: She equivocated. When Louis pushed her, using a South Carolina voter’s question about why she wouldn’t admit it was a mistake, she went beyond previously stated positions and said, grudgingly, “I’m sorry for the consequences that were unintended and that have had a very unfortunate impact on people’s lives.”



Clinton went on: “I’ve seen the results of what has happened in families and in communities. That’s why I chose to make my very first speech a year ago on this issue, Errol, because I want to focus the attention of our country and to make the changes we need to make. And I also want people… especially I want—I want white people to recognize that there is systemic racism. It’s also in employment, it’s in housing, but it is in the criminal-justice system, as well.”



This is a fine answer—except I don’t get why Clinton won’t express more heartfelt regret over not just the crime bill’s unintended consequences but some of its founding premises. The provision eliminating funding for inmate education haunts me. It represented an awful repudiation of the idea of rehabilitation. Coupled with increased sentences and funds for prison construction, it’s hard to forgive.



Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Need Better Answers on the 1994 Crime Bill | The Nation

Thursday, April 14, 2016

We Need to Build a Voting-Rights Movement | The Nation

Voters stand in line



As I have been saying to everyone racism in America is permanent, it is the glue that holds the class structure together. The day an immigrant arrives from Ireland, Italy or Russia they are told that they are white and better than Black people. After the election of 2008 the powers that be noticed that Black people voted at a higher rate than White people. The numbers were significant. Since then there has been an open, concerted effort by Republicans to reduce primarilyAfrican America votes and those of young people. The Republican Supreme Court has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Scalia and Alito most vehemently have tried to limit the right to vote. This happened in the 1890s. My great grandfather and his father saw their votes taken away. My grandfather was given Latin to read so he would fail a literacy test only given to Blacks.



"The spring of 1966 was a harrowing yet hopeful period in America’s electoral history. In March of that year, the Voting Rights Act survived a Supreme Court challenge from the attorney general of South Carolina. Civil-rights campaigners could finally breathe at least a tentative sigh of relief as public officials across the country began initial preparations for the first federal election following passage of the landmark law for which King and countless others had toiled for years.





Fast-forward 50 years, and the scene is just as harrowing, but—tragically—far less hopeful. Voter-suppression tactics in 2016 are spreading like a virus in our body politic. In the first presidential primaries since the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the VRA and opened the floodgates for passage of voter-suppression laws in states, the impacts are already evident. Whereas voting rights were ascendant in 1966, voter-suppression tactics are spreading in 2016. Whereas Congress was moving in the right direction in 1966, in 2016, it’s often conspicuously absent.



The challenge this year—the 50th anniversary of the implementation of the VRA—isn’t just protecting free and open access to the ballot; it is also rekindling the fire that forced federal action on voting rights. This means reigniting a national movement for restoration of the Voting Rights Act, vigorous federal enforcement of electoral rights, and a reversal of anti-democratic state voter-suppression laws. With our country at a political turning point, time is of the essence."



We Need to Build a Voting-Rights Movement | The Nation

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Racism at Harvard: months after protests began, students demand concrete change

Racism at Harvard: months after protests began, students demand concrete change

"For 80 years the family crest of the brutal slaveholder Isaac Royall Jrserved as the official seal of the prestigious Harvard Law School.

Royall, whose endowment founded HLS in 1817, once instructed that 77 enslaved Africans be burned alive at the stake for an insurrection on his family’s Antigua sugar plantation.

In March, student protesters at Harvard notched a decisive victory in their fight to “decolonize” their campus, when administrators announced they would retire the Royall family seal, citing “the prospect that its imagery might evoke associations with slavery”.

Two months later, many of the students who pushed for the change say the decision is bittersweet. The removal of the seal sends a message, they say, but it doesn’t do enough to address the currents of racism on campus.

Portraits of black Harvard Law School professors defaced after campus rally

“In terms of our broader goals of anti-racism on campus it represents probably the easiest thing they could have done,” said Alexander Clayborne, a third-year law student and one of the organizers of the Royall Must Fall campaign to have the seal removed. “It’s the thing they can do that’s probably going to create the least amount of institutional change.”

NYTimes: Chicago Police Dept. Plagued by Systemic Racism, Task Force Finds

NYTimes: Chicago Police Dept. Plagued by Systemic Racism, Task Force Finds

The New York Times Editorial Board - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com



In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on the promise of “two for the price of one”: If he was elected, Americans would also get Hillary Clinton, lawyer and activist Democrat, working for them in the White House.



Mrs. Clinton advocated for some of the most significant initiatives of her husband’s presidency, which were most often the product of compromise in a divided Congress. Indeed, many Democrats revere Mr. Clinton as the leader who brought the party back from the political wilderness by eschewing ideological purity in favor of a more incremental, politically centrist philosophy.



That legacy and experience lies at the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s approach as “a progressive who gets things done.” And the 1994 crime bill, which has emerged as a hot-button issue in the current campaign, is a good example in both its substance and the style of the Clinton manner of policy making.



The crime bill was a bipartisan legislative response to a surge in murders and other violent crimes linked to the drug trade that affected all Americans, but especially minority communities. The multipart legislation created programs to keep small-time drug offenders out of prison, financed drug treatment programs and put more cops on the streets in troubled communities. It also included a ban on certain types of assault weapons long sought by gun-control advocates, which has since expired. It played a part in reducing crime rates, but it also contributed to a rise in the prison population — of both violent criminals and low-level offenders — though it wasn’t solely responsible for the phenomenon known as mass incarceration.





Hillary Clinton Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Photo by: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mrs. Clinton has said she regrets her past statements promoting the crime bill as a way to bring “to heel” the era’s young “super-predators.” Bill Clinton has reflected on the crime bill’s legacy, and expressed regret at the havoc that harsher punishments and stricter sentences created in poor and minority communities.



It’s puzzling that Mrs. Clinton hasn’t addressed in detail the trade-offs and the consequences, good and bad, of that legislation. That’s a problem, because even though Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill (it contained certain provisions he supported), some of his supporters view the bill as the type of compromise that they reject.



The New York Times Editorial Board - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

Mothers of Black Victims Emerge as a Force for Hillary Clinton - The New York Times

The mothers of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and a half-dozen other black women who had lost children in clashes with the police or in gun violence, were flown in from around the country and invited to gather around a table. They were joined by Hillary Clinton, who asked them, one by one, to tell her their stories.



“She took her pad and her ink pen, she wrote her own notes, and she asked us what did we need,” said Maria Hamilton, whose son Dontre was shot 14 times by a white Milwaukee police officer in 2014.



Mrs. Clinton appeared “visibly hurt” as the mothers spoke, said Lucia McBath, whose 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was fatally shot after playing loud music in his car in 2012.



The gathering, held without aides or journalists present, stretched into a nearly three-hour dinner over pork chops and gravy, fried okra and rice. After dessert of apple pie, Mrs. Clinton encouraged the women to organize and travel the country with her campaign.





“You are the mothers of the children who are dying in the streets,” Mrs. Clinton told the group, Ms. McBath recalled. “You have a lot of power individually,” she said. “But collectively, you need to come together. The country needs to hear from you.”



Since then, these mothers, many of whom did not know one another before the Clinton campaign flew them to Chicago to convene, have blanketed the primary states, appearing with Mrs. Clinton in churches and barbershops from Ohio to South Carolina. They starred in an ad that aired in Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. And the campaign has paid their travel expenses so they could attend the Democratic presidential debates.





Mothers of Black Victims Emerge as a Force for Hillary Clinton - The New York Times

Mothers of Black Victims Emerge as a Force for Hillary Clinton - The New York Times

"The mothers of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and a half-dozen other black women who had lost children in clashes with the police or in gun violence, were flown in from around the country and invited to gather around a table. They were joined by Hillary Clinton, who asked them, one by one, to tell her their stories.



“She took her pad and her ink pen, she wrote her own notes, and she asked us what did we need,” said Maria Hamilton, whose son Dontre was shot 14 times by a white Milwaukee police officer in 2014.



Mrs. Clinton appeared “visibly hurt” as the mothers spoke, said Lucia McBath, whose 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was fatally shot after playing loud music in his car in 2012.



The gathering, held without aides or journalists present, stretched into a nearly three-hour dinner over pork chops and gravy, fried okra and rice. After dessert of apple pie, Mrs. Clinton encouraged the women to organize and travel the country with her campaign.

“You are the mothers of the children who are dying in the streets,” Mrs. Clinton told the group, Ms. McBath recalled. “You have a lot of power individually,” she said. “But collectively, you need to come together. The country needs to hear from you.”



Since then, these mothers, many of whom did not know one another before the Clinton campaign flew them to Chicago to convene, have blanketed the primary states, appearing with Mrs. Clinton in churches and barbershops from Ohio to South Carolina. They starred in an ad that aired in Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. And the campaign has paid their travel expenses so they could attend the Democratic presidential debates."





Mothers of Black Victims Emerge as a Force for Hillary Clinton - The New York Times

Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill? - The New York Times





"Yet the historical record reveals a different story. Instead of being the unintended consequence of the democratic process at work, punitive crime policy is a result of a process of selectively hearing black voices on the question of crime.



There’s no question that by the early 1990s, blacks wanted an immediate response to the crime, violence and drug markets in their communities. But even at the time, many were asking for something different from the crime bill. Calls for tough sentencing and police protection were paired with calls for full employment, quality education and drug treatment, and criticism of police brutality.



It’s not just that those demands were ignored completely. It’s that some elements were elevated and others were diminished — what we call selective hearing. Policy makers pointed to black support for greater punishment and surveillance, without recognizing accompanying demands to redirect power and economic resources to low-income minority communities. When blacks ask for better policing, legislators tend to hear more instead.



Selective hearing has a deep history. In the Progressive Era, W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells called for state authorities to offer blacks the same social investment that reformers used to manage crime in white immigrant communities. But while whites received rehabilitation and welfare programs, black citizens found themselves overpunished and underprotected.



During the 1960s, blacks argued for full socioeconomic inclusion and an end to discriminatory policing, which they argued was a root cause of that decade’s urban unrest. Instead, they got militarized police forces and riot tanks in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.



In the ashes of the war on poverty, the trend accelerated. The penal system ballooned, while social supports directed toward the poorest and most vulnerable declined precipitously. Black leaders argued for full employment in the press and on the floor of Congress, urged vetoes of draconian legislation and drafted their own bills to support community-led anti-crime programs — and all to little avail.



Flash forward to the Clinton era. As soon as Chuck Schumer, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others introduced their bipartisan crime bill in September of 1993, groups representing black communities pushed back. The N.A.A.C.P. called it a “crime against the American people.”



While supporting the idea of addressing crime, members of the Congressional Black Caucus criticized the bill itself and introduced an alternative bill that included investments in prevention and alternatives to incarceration, devoted $2 billion more to drug treatment and $3 billion more to early intervention programs. The caucus also put forward the Racial Justice Act, which would have made it possible to use statistical evidence of racial bias to challenge death sentences.



Given the history of selective hearing, what followed was no surprise. Black support for anti-crime legislation was highlighted, while black criticism of the specific legislation was tuned out. The caucus threatened to stall the bill, but lawmakers scrapped the Racial Justice Act when Republicans promised to filibuster any legislation that adopted its measures.



In final negotiations, Democratic leadership yielded to Republicans demanding that prevention (or “welfare for criminals” as one called it) be sliced in exchange for their votes. Senator Robert Dole insisted that the focus be “on cutting pork, not on cutting prisons or police.” The compromise eliminated $2.5 billion in social spending and only $800 million in prison expenditures.



This presented black lawmakers with a dilemma: Defeating the bill might pave the way for something even more draconian down the line, and lose critical prevention funding still in the bill. Ultimately, 26 of the 38 voting members supported the legislation. But those who broke ranks did so loudly: As Representative Robert C. Scott of Virginia explained, “You wouldn’t ask an opponent of abortion to look at a bill with the greatest expansion of abortion in the history of the United States, and argue that he ought to vote for it because it’s got some highway funding in it.”



Mr. Scott had it right: The bill allocated federal funds for up to 75 percent of the cost of new prisons, defined 60 new capital offenses, constricted inmates’ access to higher education and introduced 100,000 more police officers. Less than a quarter of the funding went to prevention programs. Over two decades later, this legislation continues to shape the lives of millions of African-Americans, overwhelmingly for the worse. This legislation further entrenched the idea that vulnerable urban communities are best managed through harsh punishment and heightened surveillance.



Making our neighborhoods places of mobility and fortune, not disinvestment and confinement, means that the voices of the people most affected must be heard and heeded. As we debate how to switch course, our popular understanding of the rise of “get tough” laws should not layer selective memory atop selective hearing of the past by justifying black incarceration with trite references to black voices."



Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill? - The New York Times

Dems debate legacy of 1994 crime bill Chris Hayes talks to New York City Councilmember Jumaane Williams and Jeremy Travis, President of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice about the legacy of the 1994 crime bill. - All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC



All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

SAISD Police Officer Body Slams 12-Year-Old Middle School Girl On Concre...

The video shows Kehm struggling with the 12-year-old girl before body-slamming her to the ground. He then appears to handcuff her before having her stand and leading her away. She had been fighting with another girl before Kehm body-slammed her.

Kehm first told the district that the girl’s fall was accidental, then that she had been fighting an arrest in some way, Martinez said.

“Our conclusion was the action wasn’t warranted,” he said.

The district is supposed to be notified whenever a student is restrained, and officers are strongly discouraged from using physical force unless absolutely necessary in the case of “imminent danger”, Martinez said.

“It never should have gotten to this point,” he said.

Martinez also faulted school staff for not calling the parents of the two fighting students or taking other action before the incident. An assistant principal has been placed on paid leave, he said.

According to state records, Kehm had been a school police officer for just over a year.

 

Bill Clinton engages Black Lives Matter protester Former President Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife today in Pennsylvania, got frustrated with a Black Lives Matter activist interrupting his speech. - All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC



All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC

‘Ghetto,’ by Mitchell Duneier - The New York Times





But the outrage was misplaced. The problem isn’t Sanders’s intended use of “ghetto” as a place where many poor black people live, police brutality reigns and, as he later went on to say, “institutional racism” persists in 2016 — a reality shaped by the past. The problem is the pervasive use of “ghetto” as an ahistoric cultural signifier of all things bad, broke and black: ghetto schools, ghetto jobs, ghetto names, ghetto music.



Although others have talked about the ghetto as a term of endearment, kinship and empowerment — Langston Hughes’s 1931 poem “Negro Ghetto,” or Pras’s 1998 hip-hop anthem “Ghetto Supastar” — the tally of negative uses divorced from historical context has grown so commonplace that some big-city politicians and leading academics have called for removing it from official use.



That would be a mistake, argues Mitchell Duneier, a Princeton sociologist of the black urban experience, in “Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea,” a stunningly detailed and timely survey of scholarly work on the topic. Contrary to contemporary understanding, Jews — not African-Americans — are the original “ghettoized people,” he writes, noting that most of his students these days have no clue. “The link between blacks and the ghetto has been around for less than 10 percent of the term’s 500-year ­history.” Recovering this forgotten history is critical because the “troubled legacy” of the old ghetto endures.



‘Ghetto,’ by Mitchell Duneier - The New York Times

Monday, April 11, 2016

Hillary Clinton: 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration - NY Daily News

"Hillary Clinton on Saturday conceded her husband’s 1994 crime bill had the unintended consequence of mass incarceration.

NYC PAPERS OUT. Social media use restricted to low res file max 184 x 128 pixels and 72 dpi



Speaking before the Daily News editorial board, Clinton said the bill did a lot of good things like adding more cops to the streets and creating a ban on assault weapons.... But she said it also led states to enact policies that resulted in more people, especially people of color, being imprisoned for nonviolent crimes.



“That was not as apparent at the time, but part of being a responsible decision maker is to keep track of what’s happening,” she said. “And now I think it’s clear there were some consequences that we do have to address.”



Clinton talked about the need to crack down on gun violence, invest in police retraining, incentivize states to enact prison diversion programs and sentencing reforms, and push for the restoration of prison education programs.



In addition, she wants to do more to “demilitarize the police.” She said post 9/11, police departments both big and small were given military equipment.



Clinton, who recently apologized for having used the term “superpredators” when describing who the crime bill targeted, said she used the term “only once. Never did it again.”



Hillary Clinton: 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration - NY Daily News

Sunday, April 10, 2016

How Anxious are Americans Over Immigration - The Atlantic

How Anxious are Americans Over Immigration - The Atlantic

"Are Americans’ fears about immigration rooted in economic concerns, or cultural anxieties?

A new PRRI / The Atlantic poll suggests the answer to that question is helping to shape the presidential race. The poll asked voters whether it bothers them when they come in contact with immigrants who speak little or no English. It found that 64 percent of Donald Trump supporters say immigrants who speak little or no English bother them. Only 46 percent of Ted Cruz supporters share that belief. The findings suggest that people who back Cruz are likely less culturally anxious about immigration than those who back Trump."

Teaching Neuroscience in Prison - The Atlantic

Teaching Neuroscience in Prison - The Atlantic

"Formerly, in accordance with the Catholic doctrine of the “indissolubility” of marriage, the divorced and remarried were officially shunned. They remained in the pew while most others in the church went forward to the Communion rail. But that shunning is history. “It is important that the divorced who have entered a new union should be made to feel part of the Church,” Francis declares. How that feeling is expressed in practice is to be determined, he writes, not by “a new set of general rules, canonical in nature and applicable to all cases,” but by “a responsible personal and pastoral discernment of particular cases.”

The Pope—to the disappointment of many liberals, no doubt—is not replacing an old set of harsh and restrictive rules with a new set of flexible and merciful rules. Rules, actually, are not the point. It is true that this document does little explicitly to uproot the structures of misogyny and homophobia that have long corrupted the Catholic tradition, but it does give a fresh impetus to change on these issues. Francis’s watchword is mercy, but mercy adheres, first, not in alterations of doctrine but in the new way that Catholics are invited to think of doctrine. When human experience, with all of what the Pope calls its “immense variety of concrete situations,” is elevated over “general principles,” a revolution is implicit. Francis explains: “It is true that general rules set forth a good which can never be disregarded or neglected, but in their formulation they cannot provide absolutely for all particular situations.”

A Fair Chance After a Conviction - The New York Times

The Obama administration has worked diligently over the last five years to ease the marginalization of more than 70 million Americans with criminal records that can shut them out of jobs, housing, higher education or the consumer credit system — sometimes for minor offenses in the distant past or arrests that never led to conviction. By addressing this problem, Mr. Obama is pushing the country to re-evaluate longstanding policies that trap people with criminal records at the very edges of society, driving many of them right back to prison.



A Fair Chance After a Conviction - The New York Times

Thursday, April 07, 2016

NYTimes: A Conversation With Asian-Americans on Race

NYTimes: A Conversation With Asian-Americans on Race

"In this installment of our “Conversations on Race” series for Op-Docs, Asian-Americans talk about how stereotypes unfairly confine them — particularly the one that brands them a “model minority.” As the subjects of our film explain, this perception not only devalues the experiences of other racial minorities, but it also renders the diverse experiences of Asian-Americans invisible."

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

North Carolina GOP now in full-on delusional damage control after losing PayPal over HB2

"Within hours of news Tuesday that PayPal had pulled the plug on a 400-job facility in Charlotte because, it said, the state's new law "perpetuates discrimination," the Republican Party started a mad display of Yosemite-Sam style finger pointing.
First, the state's GOP Vice-Chairman Michele Nix questioned whether PayPal was ever even worthy of North Carolina. "

Sunday, April 03, 2016

When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 6 - The New York Times

A majority of whites believe that job opportunities are equal for whites and blacks, according to a PBS poll, but rigorous studies show that just isn’t so.



Back in 2014, I did a series of columns called “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” to draw attention to inequities, and I’m revisiting it because public attention to racial disparities seems to be flagging even as the issues are as grave as ever.



When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 6 - The New York Times

Saturday, April 02, 2016

The San Francisco Police Department's Bigotry Problem - The Atlantic

The San Francisco Police Department's Bigotry Problem - The Atlantic

"San Francisco police officers sent dozens of racist and homophobic text messages in the past several months, even as another group of officers was being investigated by prosecutors for having traded similar messages,” the New York Times reports. The newly disclosed texts include “derogatory references to blacks, Asians, lesbians, gays and transgender people,” and come as the federal government investigates “complaints that some officers routinely behave in a racially biased manner.”

Friday, April 01, 2016

Extended interview with Michelle Alexander | MSNBC



Extended interview with Michelle Alexander | MSNBC

Is Donald Trump Self-Destructing? - The New Yorker


Is Donald Trump Self-Destructing? - The New Yorker

Retired lawyer sues Israeli airline after she was asked to move seat

'Ready for the challenge': Ferguson's new police chief takes over department

'Ready for the challenge': Ferguson's new police chief takes over department

"The invaluable experience Moss will take to Ferguson comes from his service as public service aide, patrolman, homicide detective and, most recently, senior officer in charge of community and media relations. He has worked closely with minority and youth groups in depressed areas of the city. It was not uncommon to see him in the departure lounge at Miami international airport, leading groups of young people on cultural outreach trips to Europe.

“He is an expert in police community relations, and that is what that community needs now,” Rodolfo Llanes, the Miami police chief, told the city’s Herald newspaper last month when Moss was shortlisted for the Ferguson job. Moss’s close friend John Rivera, president of the Dade County police benevolent association, described him simply as “a class act”.