An American doctor exposed to Ebola in Sierra Leone will be admitted to a National Institutes of Health hospital in Maryland for care, the agency said Saturday. The unnamed physician will be observed and enrolled in a clinical study in the coming days. His admission to the Bethesda center is a precaution, and doesn't mean the physician was infected with the deadly virus while volunteering in West Africa, officials added.
[JURIST]
A jury for the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York [official website] on Monday found the Jordan-based Arab Bank [corporate website] liable for providing material support to Hamas [official website]. The plaintiffs were 300 victims injured in attacks by Hamas against Israel. The jury found that Arab Bank conducted business with leaders and members of Hamas, financing a number of attacks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem [Bloomberg report] in the early 2000s. A separate trial will be conducted to determine damages. Arab Bank plans to appeal [press release] to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals [official website], claiming the court made significant errors regarding numerous aspects of the trial. [MORE]
If giving money to panhandlers makes you queasy but refusing them makes you feel like Ebeneezer Scrooge, one California city thinks it has a solution for you. There are now 14 bright orange parking meters scattered around Pasadena that will collect money for organizations that help the homeless, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The goal of the group behind the meters — the Real Change Movement — is “to help provide homes for the homeless through small change and credit card donations,” according to a release on the organization’s website. It hopes the meters will become “symbols of help and hope.”
But one local activist called the meters “asinine” and told the Times he is skeptical they will help the city’s homeless on balance. “If we would get serious about addressing the actual economic and social issues that we find so offputting, we wouldn’t need meters,” anti-homelessness advocate Paul Boden told the newspaper.
Compared to other cities that have criminalized panhandling, the meters are a mild response to taxpayer discomfort with the indigent. But the reality for beggars doesn’t square with the stereotypes. A Pasadena official interviewed by the Times cited a San Francisco panhandler survey that found 44 percent of those soliciting handouts admitted to buying drugs or alcohol with the money, and suggested that the survey supports the city’s belief that the meters will help raise money for the homeless. But as ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes detailed last year, that survey disproves many popular myths about panhandlers: 94 percent used their money to buy food, fewer than one in three are drug addicts or alcoholics, most make less than $25 a day, and a quarter are military veterans.
By discouraging panhandling, Pasadena’s meters could end up pushing homeless people into other parts of town or over the city line into other communities. That is not the intention of the Real Change Movement, according to its website, and the movement’s stated goal of funding housing puts it in line with the expert consensus about what works to rehabilitate the homeless. Activists and federal housing officials alike have shifted their focus in recent years to prioritize putting homeless people in permanent housing. A shelter bed can provide food, safety, and rare opportunities for social contact and community for a night or two. But a permanent place to live is the springboard that homeless people need to start rebuilding stable lives and finding gainful employment. It costs three times more to leave someone on the street for a year than it does to simply give them a house, given the medical and incarceration costs homeless people incur on the many cities that treat them as a criminal nuissance.
Combined with support services and social workers, permanent housing is the key to helping homeless people turn their lives around. Despite the consensus around that tactic, however, funding is often lacking. Washington, D.C.’s anti-homelessness working group announced earlier this month that it expects a 16 percent surge in homeless families seeking shelter this winter but has not been able to increase its bed capacity by nearly enough to keep up. Even in cities where permanent housing programs take root and thrive, like Atlanta, a small bureaucratic dispute over funding can dissolve years of rehabilitative work. Homelessness mitigation efforts nationwide took a hit from the federal budget cuts known as sequestration last year, which squeezed funding to one of the most effective federal anti-homelessness programs.
The success or failure of Pasadena’s well-intentioned parking meters effort will depend on how much money it actually produces for housing the homeless. Examples from similar campaigns in other cities suggest that the campaign could thrive or flop. A similar effort in Denver reportedly raised $30,000 a year for the city’s advocacy organizations, according to the Times, but Orlando’s meters took three years to raise enough money to even offset the $2,000 the city spent installing the things.
For a department that's still trying to figure out how to recover from the #MyNYPD debacle, the New York Police Department should be commended on their perseverance to learn the Twitterverse — and now they're doing it in the classroom with course materials and everything.
The New York Post got its hands on the NYPD's new social media handbook which, among other things, coaches officers to use humor to gain followers and interest.
“Tasteful humor is good,” it says.
It goes on to offer tips on how to make people LOL in 140 characters or less, citing real tweets from San Francisco cops as examples.
One reads: “Officers just arrested a naked man in the bison paddock in GG [Golden Gate] Park. The bison seemed unimpressed.”
By contrast, it tells cops not to post boring, jargon-filled tweets, such as, “Officers responded to an apartment on the 2500 block of Turk St. regarding a burglary.”
Top brass is expected to tweet at least four time a day.
On September 11, 2014, MSNBC aired footage from 9/11 for hours, and after 13 years of being furious at the US government instead of the people who murdered 3000 people on that day, it was almost a relief to learn that video of it still disturbs. No matter what happened before or afterwards, 9/11 was mass murder.
The victims of 9/11 were victimized more than once. No matter how many warhawks deny it wholesale, or self-righteously preen like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, blowback creates terrorism. To suggest otherwise is to believe that the enemies of the United States are not recognizable human beings with motivations, goals, and feelings of their own.
In response to 9/11, the US brutalized civil liberties, created a domestic spy utopia, and started two different wars in the Middle East. US foreign policy created the terrorists, and it has been busy guaranteeing that there will be plenty more for the next generation of Americans.
Now, you see, we’re at war with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL/IS, whichever you like). Or rather, as new White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said on Friday, "So I think what you could conclude from this is the United States is at war with ISIL in the same way we are at war with al-Qaeda and its affiliates all around the globe." It sounds okay to use violence, when faced with violent, theocratic propagandists like ISIS. Maybe just this time – maybe it’s really, honestly, truly vital to national security this time. Except only warhawks who are covering their eyes and ears should accept that it will be as easy as just going to war against the baddies – with all predicted, stable outcomes to follow. We don’t know how to go to war justly, or rightly – if there is such a thing.
It’s time to sit out from the world stage for a while. It’s time to bring more troops home, not start sending them out again.
And let the terrorists win?! Never. And never learn. God knows how long it will take for people to realize that the arrogance involved in any government action is multiplied beyond measure when that is translated to an international scale. Experts can worry over ISIS, and plan our war against them. Experts gave us the easy, short war in Iraq. Experts swore we needed to arm rebels and overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Somehow, our experts – and anyone else easily swayed into war – seem unable to believe that anything the US can do to other countries will make the people of them righteously angry.
Meanwhile, the wound of 9/11 can never, ever heal.
America being spoiled and safe should be a good thing. We should feel a horror when that safety is violated as it was on 9/11. The US should have that safety, for all the good, honest people who live within it borders. However, other countries should have that same. Not only do they not have that, the US has all too frequently been the cause of homes destroyed, populations displaced, countries destabilized, and thousands upon thousands injured or killed.
It happens again and again, and too many people believe that because our government does not target civilians with the same honest coldness as Al Qaeda or ISIS, that lets us off the moral hook.
Why should it? Never mind the power-hungry and the people with their own selfish interests who lead us into war. What do so many normal people not get about the fact that bombs probably feel about the same as hijacked planes, and falling buildings? Why can’t we get over the attack on the American embassy in Iran in 1979, but the 1953 joint British and American-backed coup that lead to that is barely a footnote in school books? Why was Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) for years almost the only person trying to teach the most basic third grade-style lesson in empathy – namely, that we would never, ever get over it if other countries treated us the way our governments treat them?
To use a liberal, college-y sort of term, we have privilege in the US. We are pretty damn safe and healthy. There’s violence, crime, and certainly some thuggish domestic state action – especially against the poor and other "less important" groups. But this ain’t a war zone. That’s good. If we could simply enjoy having a (relatively, debatably) free country it would be wonderful. We can’t. And we shouldn’t, because our government has been, for the past 100 years or so, periodically taking that safety away from other nations and people. We get to have that comfort, and they do not. We are a teenage nation that throws violent tantrums, then goes into hysterics if we are slapped back. The mildness of that metaphor is not meant suggest that 9/11 wasn’t a big deal. It being a big deal would have been okay. What happened afterwards, and the staggering inability of America to learn from its mistakes, and from other people’s anger, is the bit that isn’t.
And it’s keeping on. The war on terror, be it against ISIS or Al-Qaeda is both the catalyst for and the fever dream of conspiracy theorists. It’s so convenient. It never needs to end, and as we prepare to slip back into Iraq – not that we ever really left – we see that it never will.
Lucy Steigerwald is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and a columnist for VICE.com. She previously worked as an Associate Editor for Reason magazine. She is most angry about police, prisons, and wars. Steigerwald blogs at www.thestagblog.com.
The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit [official website] on Friday reinstated Wisconsin's voter photo identification law after the three-judge panel issued an order [order, PDF] staying the injunction issued [JURIST report] by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin [official website]. stating that the state may require photo identification during the November elections. During the hearing, the panel rejected [AP report] the argument that the law was discriminatory. The court reasoned that because the Supreme Court of Wisconsin [official website] revised [order, PDF] the procedures after the district court's decision to make it easier for persons who have difficulty affording any fees to obtain the birth certificates or other documentation needed under the law, or to have the need for documentation waived, the likelihood of irreparable injury is reduced. Therefore, the balance of equities and thus the propriety of federal injunctive relief was changed, warranting a stay of the injunction.
Last Valentine’s Day, Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp after firing four times through a locked bathroom door in the middle of the night. He thought Steenkamp was still in bed next to him. He thought she was an intruder, he said, offering up the flimsiest of defences for the indefensible. It was as if Pistorius knew he didn’t need to come up with a plausible explanation and so he did not even try.
Since the trial began in March, we’ve watched and waited and hoped for justice. It has been a bit surreal, given the facts of the case, to imagine an outcome where justice would not be served. Or it has been a bit surreal to accept that we live in a world where a man can justify shooting an unarmed woman through a locked door. Then again, this is also a world where an armed police officer can shoot an unarmed young black man. Whether in South Africa or Ferguson, Missouri, the rules most of us live by hardly seem to apply to white men.
Today, we have a clearer understanding of what justice means for certain groups of people, which is to say that justice can mean far too little. Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa has found Pistorius guilty of culpable homicide rather than premeditated murder. Hers is a verdict that raises the question – what does a man have to do to be found guilty of murdering a woman?
Among her comments, Judge Masipa, who has acquitted herself well throughout the trial, noted that Pistorius’s defence of his crime can “reasonably possibly be true”. The evidence against Pistorius for premeditated murder was “purely circumstantial”. He did, however, act negligently because “a reasonable person with a similar disability would have foreseen that the person behind the door would be killed, and the accused failed to take action to avoid this”. Those words are hollow because a reasonable person never would have been in such a situation in the first place.
We might be able to say that this is a failure of prosecution, that the prosecutors did not do enough to prove that Pistorius committed premeditated murder. Those words feel flimsy right now. A woman is dead at the hands of her intimate partner. She is dead under the most implausible of circumstances because what would an intruder be doing, locked in a bathroom in the middle of the night? We know, because of details that emerged after she was killed, that Steenkamp and Pistorius had volatile moments in their relationship. We know Pistorius had a penchant for modern weaponry. We know a woman is dead, and still what we know is not enough.
Among the other counts Judge Masipa adjudicated, Pistorius was convicted of the negligent handling of a firearm after he misfired a gun in a restaurant last year. One cannot help but feel that interrupting a meal and interrupting a woman’s life are offences held in somewhat equal regard in this world. Now we will have to wait until 13 October for sentencing to find out what the judge sees as a fitting punishment for this lesser crime. That punishment, too, will not be enough.
What makes this all the more offensive is how Pistorius has, essentially, framed his defence as a fear of blackness. By evoking an unseen intruder he has exploited the complex and fraught racial history of South Africa to help justify his crime. As Margie Orford wrote, in these pages, “This imaginary body of the paranoid imaginings of suburban South Africa has lurked like a bogeyman at the periphery of this story for the past year. It is the threatening body, nameless and faceless, of an armed and dangerous black intruder.”
Pistorius would have us believe that he thought his girlfriend was safely in bed next to him. He would have us believe this mythical black intruder was locked in his bathroom. He would have us believe this mythical black intruder was whom he was killing when he fired through a closed door four times, as if somehow that would be justifiable. Though early this morning I may not understand this world we live in, Oscar Pistorius understands it and what he can get away with, perfectly.
A judge who was the plaintiff in a landmark Maryland racial-profiling case has been sworn in as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Friday's investiture ceremony for Judge Robert Wilkins was attended by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan. The D.C. Circuit hears some of the nation's highest-profile cases and is considered a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.
Wilkins, who is black, filed a lawsuit against the Maryland State Police in 1993 that led to sweeping changes in the way the agency conducts traffic stops.
Wilkins was a U.S. District judge in Washington before he was nominated to the appeals court by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate.
U.S. consumers have made a lot of progress in paring down the extreme debt loads that helped make the 2008 financial crisis such an epochal disaster. Fresh data from the Federal Reserve, though, offer an important caveat: Millions of the poorest families are still very deep in the hole — and might be getting deeper.
The triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, released by the Fed last week, confirms an overall improvement in the state of U.S. household finances. The average debt burden for all families stood at about 105 percent of pretax income in 2013, down from about 125 percent in 2010 and the lowest level since the 2001 survey.
The improved finances, along with more recent signs that consumers are feeling comfortable about borrowing again, has given some economists cause for optimism: The more progress households make in getting out from under their debts, the logic goes, the greater the chances that renewed spending will boost growth.
African-American elementary students in California were chronically truant at nearly four times the rate of all students during the last school year, according to a state report released Friday.
The report by the California Attorney General's office is the first time the data has been broken down according to race and income levels. Officials say such data is needed to address the problem.
Poverty and suspensions are contributing factors. [poverty is a symptom of white supremacy]
Overall, more than 250,000 elementary school students missed 10 percent or more of the 2013-2014 school year or roughly 18 or more school days.
The absences were highest at the kindergarten and first-grade levels when children learn to read, according to experts.
The study found 37 percent of black elementary students sampled were truant, more than any other subgroup including homeless students, and about 15 percentage points higher than the rate for all students.
Statewide, an estimated 73,000 black elementary students were truant last school year.
Atlanta Hawks general manager Danny Ferry has taken an indefinite leave after the release of an audio recording of him reading a racist scouting report in June, the team announced Friday.
Ferry was on a conference call with the Hawks' ownership group when he discussed Luol Deng. Apparently reading a report written by an external scout, Ferry said, "He's got some African in him. And I don't say that in a bad way. But he's like a guy who would have a nice store out front but sell your counterfeit stuff out of the back."
Chris Broussard makes a living by giving his views on sports on national TV on ESPN, and during the first of two stops in Flint on Friday, he had a lot to say.
But sports were only a small part of his message: He was more focused on speaking about systemic racism, the need for a reconstruction of the black male image, and the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Mo..
Broussard spoke at the Flint Big Brothers Big Sisters Anniversary gala at Art Van Furniture, and he will speak again on Saturday, Sept. 13, at Charity United Methodist Church, located at 4601 Clio Road, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
"If you look at the history of the country, it's really clear that everything that could be used -- religion, science, the law, not to mention physical weapons, propaganda, the press, literature -- all of it was used to put a negative stigma and a negative image to black men," Broussard said during an interview. "While it's come a long way, we still have not eradicated that image."
As evidence for those image issues, Broussard cited unarmed black men such as Ferguson teen Mike Brown who have been killed by police, and blacks who are incarcerated for drug use at higher rates than whites. Blacks are 13 percent of drug users and sellers in the United States, he said, but 74 percent of the people sent to prison for drug-related crimes.
"That means that we're sending black people to jail and prison for something you're not sending white people to jail and prison for. That's unjust," he said. "We know that there are as many drugs done on a college campus as there are in the projects, but the entire focus is on the 'hood.'"
"...Statistics show that a black man with an associate's degree has the same opportunity to get a job as a white man with a high school diploma. So there's challenges even for blacks without a record, with a good education," he said. "So when you put a record on it for smoking marijuana, which a kid in the suburbs does but there's no record of that, that's a problem, because that makes it hard for this brother to get a good job, and to get a good education, and to be good marriage material, and to be the type of father that he would like to be and be the authority that a father needs."
Such a disparate prison system makes organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters so necessary, he said, and puts the children in its program at risk.
But systemic racism isn't the only issue -- Broussard said that popular hip-hop music shows an embrace of that negative image, which misleads people who don't have regular interaction with blacks.
Addressing both systemic racism and blacks' own behavior is the only way to honestly address the problem, Broussard said.
At a time when President Obama has delayed taking executive action to potentially stop deportations, an analysis of federal deportation data obtained by the Associated Press found that the government is “on pace to remove the fewest number of immigrants since 2007,” with deportations on track to dip 15 percent from the previous year.
Between October 2013 and July 2014, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deported 258,608 immigrants at a rate of about 862 per day. As Dara Lind at Vox points out, if ICE “stays on that pace” through the end of the 2014 fiscal year (September 30), it could mean that deportations would be down 15 percent from 2013 when 1,010 immigrants a day were deported and down 23 percent from 2012 when the rate was 1,120 deported immigrants a day.
The AP stated two “principle reasons” that could have contributed to the decline in deportations, including the release of a series of ICE memos directing agents to focus their “deportation efforts on criminal immigrants or those who posed a threat to national security or public safety” as well as the influx of recent migrants across the southern border overwhelming temporary facilities that has led to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “release many people into the U.S. interior with instructions to report back to authorities later.”
ICE removal statistics indicate that about two-thirds of deportations come from the border, where migrants apprehended and detained were sent back without a court proceeding. Border deportations can also ensnare immigrants who didn’t recently cross the border, but live within 100 miles of the border, regardless of how long they have lived in the United States.
The President plans to move forward with an executive action on immigration, an event that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) optimistically said Thursday could happen by the end of the year. “We want people who are concerned about this to be hopeful that, by Thanksgiving and Christmas, there will be more security in their lives because of some discretion that the President will execute,” Pelosi said. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Thursday that the President would go as far as he can under the law to enact promised immigration legislation that could include deportation reprieve and work authorization. The action could be similar to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created in 2012 for some immigrants brought to the country as children.
Four percent of Americans currently mention terrorism as the most important problem facing the U.S. Although low on an absolute basis, it is the highest percentage naming this issue since May 2010. Mentions of terrorism have been near 1% for the past four years.
Relatively few Americans -- usually less than 0.5% -- mentioned terrorism as the most important problem facing the U.S. prior to 9/11. But that changed quickly after the 9/11 attacks. Mentions jumped to 46% the month after the attacks, the highest percentage Gallup has found for terrorism since it began asking Americans monthly to name the most important problem facing the nation in March 2001.
Mentions of terrorism have spiked several times since 2001, generally in reaction to new threats or potential attacks. The most recent surge, to 8% in early 2010, came after the "Christmas Day bomber" failed to blow up a commercial U.S. flight. Each spike since 2001 has been smaller than the one before, and mentions have been lower in the months afterward.
The current increase in mentions of terrorism follows a great deal of media attention about Iraq, Syria, and the terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), most notably the group's beheading of two U.S. journalists. President Barack Obama will speak to the nation about these threats on Wednesday, and many analysts predict he will outline a new counterterror strategy. [MORE]
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