After a public kiss, vacationing lesbian couple violently arrested in Hawaii by off-duty cop
Friday, October 30, 2015
Polish Court Turns Down U.S. Request for Roman Polanski’s Extradition
Polish Court Turns Down U.S. Request for Roman Polanski’s Extradition
"Judge Mazur sided with Mr. Polanski’s lawyers. “I’m terrified by the statements of some of my colleagues in the U.S.,” he said, citing an account last year that a Los Angeles judge thought Mr. Polanski should “cool his heels in jail” if he returned to the United States under a proposed deal in which the authorities would agree that the filmmaker had already served his punishment. (The deal did not happen.)
“If I were to behave like them, I’d lose the respect of all my subordinates here,” Judge Mazur said. “I do not find any logical, rational explanation as to why the U.S. is pursuing the extradition.”
Shaker Aamer Is Released From Guantánamo Prison After 13 Years
Shaker Aamer Is Released From Guantánamo Prison After 13 Years
"Held in direct violation to the US Constitution. "WASHINGTON — Shaker Aamer, whose detention at theGuantánamo Bay prison in Cuba attracted the attention of human rights lawyers, political leaders and rock stars, was freed on Friday after more than 13 years in captivity, British officials announced. Mr. Aamer, a Saudi citizen and British resident, was flown to London.
Mr. Aamer’s transfer, which was confirmed by the British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, ends one of the best-known cases at the American prison.
At its center was a charismatic, English-speaking detainee who has been the subject of intense dispute. Military officials have portrayed Mr. Aamer, 46, as a dangerous Islamist leader, while human rights advocates see him as a victim falsely accused of ties to terrorism. Now Mr. Aamer will be free to speak his mind in public."
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
Video recordings of police officers battering or even murdering unarmed black citizens have validated longstanding complaints by African-Americans and changed the way the country views the issue of police brutality. Police officers who might once have felt free to arrest or assault black citizens for no cause and explain it away later have been put on notice that the truth could be revealed by a cellphone video posted on the Internet.
This kind of public scrutiny is all to the good, given the damage police brutality has done to African-American communities for generations and the corrosive effect it has on the broader society. Yet the peeling away of secrecy on these indisputably unconstitutional practices is now being challenged by politicians who want to soft-pedal or even ignore police misconduct while attacking the people who expose it or raise their voices in protest against it. This trend is like something straight out of Orwell.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — the increasingly desperate presidential candidate who is going nowhere fast — took this posture on Sunday when he accused President Obama of encouraging “lawlessness” and violence against police officers by acknowledging that the country needed to take both police brutality and the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement seriously.
The president is absolutely right. This movement focuses on the irrefutable fact that black citizens are far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police. The more the country ignores that truth, the greater the civic discord that will flow from it.
The recent remarks of James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were not as racially poisonous as Mr. Christie’s, but they were no less incendiary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that heightened scrutiny of police behavior — and fear of appearing in “viral videos” — was leading officers to avoid confrontations with suspects. This, he said, may have contributed to an increase in crime.
There is no data suggesting such an effect, and certainly Mr. Comey has none. But his suggestion plays into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public. Justice Department officials who have made a top priority of prosecuting police departments for civil rights violations — and who dispute that heightened scrutiny of the police drives up crime — were understandably angry at Mr. Comey’s speculations.
His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers battering suspects in the first place.
A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times published a lengthy investigation into racial profiling and abusive police behavior in Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After reviewing tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters found that the police pulled over African-American drivers at a rate far out of proportion to their share of the local driving population. The police searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites — even though whites where significantly more likely to be caught with drugs and weapons.
Greensboro police officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for no reason and more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when the driver offered no physical resistance. A black Greensboro man who nearly lost his job as a result of asking an officer why he was being ordered out of his car during a nightmarish encounter said: “Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldn’t call one.”
This is the kind of treatment that some Americans routinely face at the hands of their police departments. Mr. Comey’s speculations about alleged pressure on officers to stand down shows that he hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
This kind of public scrutiny is all to the good, given the damage police brutality has done to African-American communities for generations and the corrosive effect it has on the broader society. Yet the peeling away of secrecy on these indisputably unconstitutional practices is now being challenged by politicians who want to soft-pedal or even ignore police misconduct while attacking the people who expose it or raise their voices in protest against it. This trend is like something straight out of Orwell.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — the increasingly desperate presidential candidate who is going nowhere fast — took this posture on Sunday when he accused President Obama of encouraging “lawlessness” and violence against police officers by acknowledging that the country needed to take both police brutality and the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement seriously.
The president is absolutely right. This movement focuses on the irrefutable fact that black citizens are far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police. The more the country ignores that truth, the greater the civic discord that will flow from it.
The recent remarks of James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were not as racially poisonous as Mr. Christie’s, but they were no less incendiary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that heightened scrutiny of police behavior — and fear of appearing in “viral videos” — was leading officers to avoid confrontations with suspects. This, he said, may have contributed to an increase in crime.
There is no data suggesting such an effect, and certainly Mr. Comey has none. But his suggestion plays into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public. Justice Department officials who have made a top priority of prosecuting police departments for civil rights violations — and who dispute that heightened scrutiny of the police drives up crime — were understandably angry at Mr. Comey’s speculations.
His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers battering suspects in the first place.
A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times published a lengthy investigation into racial profiling and abusive police behavior in Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After reviewing tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters found that the police pulled over African-American drivers at a rate far out of proportion to their share of the local driving population. The police searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites — even though whites where significantly more likely to be caught with drugs and weapons.
Greensboro police officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for no reason and more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when the driver offered no physical resistance. A black Greensboro man who nearly lost his job as a result of asking an officer why he was being ordered out of his car during a nightmarish encounter said: “Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldn’t call one.”
This is the kind of treatment that some Americans routinely face at the hands of their police departments. Mr. Comey’s speculations about alleged pressure on officers to stand down shows that he hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
Monday, October 26, 2015
NYTimes: The Law School Debt Crisis
NYTimes: The Law School Debt Crisis
"In 2013, the median LSAT score of students admitted to Florida Coastal School of Law was in the bottom quarter of all test-takersnationwide. According to the test’s administrators, students with scores this low are unlikely to ever pass the bar exam.
Despite this bleak outlook, Florida Coastal charges nearly $45,000 a year in tuition, which, with living expenses, can lead to crushing amounts of debt for its students. Ninety-three percent of the school’s 2014 graduating class of 484 had debts and the average was almost $163,000 — a higher average than all but three law schools in the country. In short, most of Florida Coastal’s students are leaving law school with a degree they can’t use, bought with a debt they can’t repay.
If this sounds like a scam, that’s because it is. Florida Coastal, in Jacksonville, is one of six for-profit law schools in the country that have been vacuuming up hordes of young people, charging them outrageously high tuition and, after many of the students fail to become lawyers, sticking taxpayers with the tab for their loan defaults.
Yet for-profit schools are not the only offenders. A majority of American law schools, which have nonprofit status, are increasingly engaging in such behavior, and in the process threatening the future of legal education.
Why? The most significant explanation is also the simplest — free money."
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Recommended read from Salon.com: Holocaust experts shame Netanyahu: "He is as bad a historian as he is a politician”
"JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stirred controversy by intimating the Holocaust may not have been Adolf Hitler’s idea, and that in fact, he had been led down the garden path by the then Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian.
Germany’s response: No, no, it was us.
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews and Hajj Amin al-Husseini went to him and said if you expel them they’ll all come here. So what should I do with them? He asked. Burn them, he said.” These were Netanyahu’s words before the World Zionist Congress on Tuesday night."
Israeli military kills Palestinian kids, United Nations whitewashes it - Salon.com
Israeli military kills Palestinian kids, United Nations whitewashes it - Salon.com
"Last week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon capitulated to pressure from the Obama administration and removed Israel’s armed forces from a child rights “blacklist.” The decision not only undermines a strong global tool necessary to protect children in armed conflict, but provides Israeli forces with tacit approval to continue committing egregious violations against children with impunity."
Why Palestinians Need an International Protection Force | The Nation
Why Palestinians Need an International Protection Force | The Nation
"It will ensure that lives are placed above politics, and defend a besieged population nearing its 50th year under brutal occupation."
"If elected president, Ben Carson won’t just continue to wage the perennially failing War on Drugs, like all of his predecessors in both parties since Richard Nixon—he would intensify the failed policy, because ..."
Ben Carson, Pot Prohibitionist - The Atlantic
"If elected president, Ben Carson won’t just continue to wage the perennially failing War on Drugs, like all of his predecessors in both parties since Richard Nixon—he would intensify the failed policy, because ... well, better to quote him directly.
Here is the hard-to-follow reasoning he offered in an interview with Glenn Beck:
Glenn Beck: Do you continue the War on Drugs?
Ben Carson: Absolutely.
Beck: You do?
Carson: I intensify it.
Beck: Let me ask you a question. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be working now.
Carson: Yeah, well, go down to the border in Arizona like I was a few weeks ago. I mean, it’s an open highway. And the federal government isn’t doing anything to stop it.
Beck: Okay. Legalize marijuana?
Carson: I disagree with it.
The implication seems to be that the federal government isn’t trying very hard to interdict drugs coming across the Mexican border, or that the double border-fence that Carson advocates would somehow make the War on Drugs a winning proposition."
Thursday, October 22, 2015
The Two Asian Americas - The New Yorker
The Two Asian Americas - The New Yorker. According to Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America,” published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act, signed into law on October 3, 1965, this swarm of circumstances undid Bagai. In the room in San Jose, he left a suicide note addressed, in an act of protest, to the San Francisco Examiner. The paper published it under the headline “Here’s Letter to the World from Suicide.” “What have I made of myself and my children?” Bagai wrote. “We cannot exercise our rights. Humility and insults, who is responsible for all this? Me and the American government. Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and bridges burnt behind.”
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Homophobia In Myanmar: The Cruel Legacy Of A Colonial-Era Law
Homophobia In Myanmar: The Cruel Legacy Of A Colonial-Era Law
"Like Malaysia, Myanmar -- also a former British colony -- still has Section 377 of the penal code on its books. The law criminalizes “carnal intercourse,” which includes same-sex intercourse. It is punishable by 10 years to life in prison. (Myanmar's famous politician and human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi has called for the repeal of Section 377 in the past.)"
Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo' Guzmán injured after narrowly evading capture | World news | The Guardian
"Guzmán, the world’s most wanted narcotics baron, was injured in the leg and face when he was nearly cornered by police, the Mexican government said. "
'Driving is a privilege, voting is a right': Alabama license-office cuts bite deep | US news | The Guardian
"A series of recent government maneuvers in Alabama may prevent some citizens from voting across large swathes of the state, particularly in poverty-stricken Black Belt counties.
The first of the moves happened a year ago, when Alabama enacted a law requiring voters to present government-issued identification at the polls. The second happened two weeks ago, when the state shut down dozens of driver’s license-issuing offices, leaving 28 counties with no means of issuing the most common form of ID.
The Republican governor, Robert Bentley, says the office closures are a cost-cutting measure. Opponents say they are an effort toward disenfranchisement that harkens back to Alabama’s painful past. A half-century ago, Bloody Sunday in Selma led to the Voting Rights Act, removing obstacles for black voters."
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