The Plan to Shut Down Gitmo - The New York Times

The Obama administration this week will begin the task of trying to persuade Congress to support its plan to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay before the president leaves office in January.



Republican lawmakers all too often have been reflexive and thoughtless in their opposition to closing Guantánamo, one of the most shameful chapters in America’s recent history. Closing the prison by the end of the year is feasible. It would make the United States safer, help restore America’s standing as a champion of human rights and save taxpayers millions of dollars.



The Plan to Shut Down Gitmo - The New York Times

Lack of Videos Hampers Inquiries Into Houston Police Shootings - The New York Times

Since 2005, the police have shot 268 people, 111 of them fatally, records show. The rate of shootings by police officers was higher in Houston between 2010 and 2014 than in New York or Los Angeles, and the Houston police killed more people than the Los Angeles police despite having half as many officers, according to police data. (Officers in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, killed civilians at a higher rate than the Houston police did over that period, records show.)



Despite the troubling statistics, the Houston police have largely avoided the intensive public scrutiny directed in recent months at other large departments, including those in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The reason, critics say, has been the lack of videotapes capturing the most questionable shootings of unarmed civilians.



Without videotaped evidence to contradict police accounts, shootings are far less likely to galvanize the public and to result in disciplinary action against the officers involved, criminologists say.



Lack of Videos Hampers Inquiries Into Houston Police Shootings - The New York Times

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Abortion Laws (HBO)

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Full Film | Video | Independent Lens | PBS

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Full Film | Video | Independent Lens | PBS: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution sheds light on the Black Panther Party — and all its reviled, adored, misunderstood, and mythologized history.

More Harm Than Good: How Children are Unjustly Tried as Adults in New Orleans | Southern Poverty Law Center

The Orleans Parish district attorney is prosecuting children as adults in unprecedented numbers. Although nothing in the law requires Louisiana prosecutors to charge children as adults, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro chooses to transfer children to adult court in almost every possible instance. He transfers children who have no prior delinquency record or played a minor role in the alleged crime. He transfers children who have a mental illness or developmental disability. He even transfers children accused of nonviolent offenses. Some of the children he transfers are found innocent of any crime – but only after enduring the stress and danger of the adult system.



Prosecuting children as adults is, in fact, Cannizzaro’s default practice. Between 2011 and 2015, his office has transferred more than 80 percent of cases involving 15- and 16-year-olds where there was an option to prosecute in either juvenile or adult court. Under state law, a judge has no say in these decisions. Discretion rests solely with each parish’s district attorney.



Cannizzaro has sent 200 children to adult court since assuming office in 2009, but it has not made us safer. Arrests for offenses eligible for transfer to adult court are up. Recent data also show that teenagers prosecuted in Louisiana’s juvenile justice system are less likely to reoffend than those prosecuted in the adult system. The district attorney’s practice is wrong for New Orleans’ children, their families and the community. It does more harm than good.



More Harm Than Good: How Children are Unjustly Tried as Adults in New Orleans | Southern Poverty Law Center

Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI

Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI

Why You Should Care About Apple’s Fight With the FBI

Kate Knibbs

The FBI wants Apple’s help to investigate a terrorist attack. Apple says providing this help is the real danger. We’ve reached a boiling point in the battle between tech companies and the government over encryption. And what happens will affect anyone who uses a smartphone, including you.

After the San Bernardino shootings, the FBI seized the iPhone used by shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI has a warrant to search the phone’s contents, and because it was Farook’s work phone, the FBI also has permission from the shooter’s employer, the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, to search the device. Legally, the FBI can and should search this phone. That’s not up for debate. If the FBI gets a warrant to search a house and the people who own it say okay, there’s no ambiguity about whether it can search the house.

But if the FBI comes across a safe in that house, the warrant and permission do not mean it can force the company that manufactures the safe to create a special tool for opening its safes, especially a tool that would make other safes completely useless as secure storage. That’s the situation that Apple’s dealing with here."

Georgia to Execute Ex-Navy Crewman Travis Hittson Who Killed Fellow Sailor - NBC News

Georgia to Execute Ex-Navy Crewman Travis Hittson Who Killed Fellow Sailor - NBC News

"A former Navy crewman is set to be executed Wednesday in Georgia for killing a fellow sailor whose remains were found buried in two states.

Travis Hittson, 45, is scheduled to receive an injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital at 7 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson. He was convicted in the April 1992 killing of Conway Utterbeck.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles, which is the only entity in Georgia authorized to commute a death sentence, rejected Hitton's request for clemency after a hearing on the matter Tuesday."

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

"Eventually his case attracted lawyers who managed to place before the United States Supreme Court the question of whether it is constitutional to put to death a defendant who has erased much of his brain.

The high court, however, refused to hear Rector's case, declining to explain or expand upon its decision in Ford v. Wainwright (1986) 477 U.S. 399, in which it had determined that it was unconstitutional to execute a defendant who is insane. Rector's lawyers had urged the Court to likewise hold that it is unconstitutional to execute a defendant who is incompetent.

But in Rector v. Bryant (1991) 501 U.S. 1239, the United States Supreme Court denied cert, meaning that it declined to hear the case, because five justices were not willing to consider it. As occurs in only a decided minority of such rejected-cert cases, one justice, Thurgood Marshall, filed a dissent to the denial of cert. In that dissent, Justice Marshall wrote:

The issue in this case is not only unsettled, but is also recurring and important. The stark realities are that many death row inmates were afflicted with serious mental impairments before they committed their crimes and that many more develop such impairments during the excruciating interval between sentencing and execution. Unavoidably, then, the question whether such persons can be put to death once the deterioration of their faculties has rendered them unable even to appeal to the law or the compassion of the society that has condemned them is central to the administration of the death penalty in this Nation. I would therefore grant the petition for certiorari in order to resolve now the questions left unanswered by our decision in Ford v. Wainwright."

NYTimes: Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration

"Tamir Rice would become to this young century what Emmett Till was to the last. In pictures, the boys resemble each other, the same half-smiles on their full moon faces, the most widely distributed photographs of them taken from the same angle, in similar light, their clear eyes looking into the camera with the same male-child assuredness of near adolescence. They are now tragic symbols of the search for black freedom in this country."

NYTimes: Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court Legacy

NYTimes: Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court Legacy

"From abortion rights to marriage equality and desegregation, Justice Scalia opposed much of the social and political progress of the late 20th century and this one. He wanted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision on women’s rights to privacy, he dissented on the decision that said anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional, and he dissented on decisions that it was unconstitutional to execute mentally disabled or teenage prisoners. He disapproved of the Miranda decision that requires police to read prisoners their rights."

The most openly racist Supreme Court Justice of our time as passed. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dies At 79

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dies At 79

Eric Garner's Daughter Endorses Bernie Sanders -- NYMag

This is huge for me. This occurred very close to where I grew up. This is the most important issue for African Americans, even if it is not number ! for white liberals. If their family members and neighbors were dying this issue would jump to the top of their list. Once again White Supremacy rears it's ugly head.



Eric Garner's Daughter Endorses Bernie Sanders -- NYMag

Ben Jealous draws distinctions in Democratic race | MSNBC

Ben Jealous draws distinctions in Democratic race | MSNBC

WATCH: "The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther" | Democracy Now!

WATCH: "The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther" | Democracy Now!

How Would You Do in Supermax? The Answer May Lie with Imagination and Grit

Solitary confinement has been linked to a variety of profoundly negative psychological outcomes, including suicidal tendencies and spatial and cognitive distortions. Confinement-induced stress can shrink parts of the brain, including the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, spatial orientation, and control of emotions. In addition to these measurable effects, prisoners often report bizarre and disturbing subjective experiences after they leave supermax. Some say the world regularly collapses in on itself. Others report they are unable to lead ordinary conversations, or think clearly for any length of time. The psychiatrist Sandra Schank2 puts it this way: “It’s a standard psychiatric concept, if you put people in isolation, they will go insane.”

Yet Perez pauses when he is asked how it felt to be confined for so long. “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “Because in a sense, you are confined, and in other senses, you’re free.” Perez says he left solitary confinement a better man than he entered it. He is now fully rehabilitated, and works for the Urban Justice Center, where he helps recently released inmates adjust to the world outside.

Perez calls himself an “anomaly,” and says he can only guess at the factors that made him succeed where so many others have failed. However he did it, what’s clear is that the process began with his own imagination.

How Would You Do in Supermax? The Answer May Lie with Imagination and Grit

Flint water crisis: Michigan officials ignored EPA warnings about toxicity | US news | The Guardian

The Environmental Protection Agency warned of an unfolding toxic water crisis in Flint but was “met with resistance” by Michigan authorities, a fiery congressional hearing into the city’s public health disaster has heard.

Expert advice was dismissed, prompting Michigan’s government to issue an apology to the people of Flint at the hearing for sidelining people who raised concerns over dangerous levels of lead in in the city’s water.

Congress was also told that flawed water testing practices, now eliminated in Flint, are happening unchecked across the US, risking a much wider public health crisis in other cities.

Flint water crisis: Michigan officials ignored EPA warnings about toxicity | US news | The Guardian

Republican Party suddenly wants to pretend to give a damn about Latino accomplishments?

The liberal bias alarm is sounding. Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, just became the first Latino candidate to win a presidential caucus or primary, and conservatives are complaining that the mainstream media is overlooking the achievement.

"Where is the media on this, right?" Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said Tuesday in an interview on Fox News Channel. "I mean, this is a big deal."



Republican Party suddenly wants to pretend to give a damn about Latino accomplishments?

Korean youth are sleeping out in the cold by a 'comfort woman' statue

SEOUL — Each night on a street of the South Korean capital, college students slide into their sleeping bags and hunker down for the night in subzero temperatures.

They're not homeless; they are making a statement. For more than a month, they have been sleeping rough to protest the Japanese government’s calls for the removal of a statue that memorializes thousands of Korean “comfort women” forced into prostitution by the Japanese empire.

Korean youth are sleeping out in the cold by a 'comfort woman' statue