Global Newswire

Study: More Than 2,000 Convicted Then Exonerated in 23 Years

Submitted by anonymous on May 21, 2012 - 7:06am

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities.

There is no official record-keeping system for exonerations of convicted criminals in the country, so academics set one up. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled.

The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.

They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American.

Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.

Entrapment of Cleveland 5 and NATO 3 Is Nothing New

Submitted by anonymous on May 20, 2012 - 8:45pm

by Jake Olzen

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

A Sea of Robin Hoods Tell the G8, It's Time to Tax Wall Street!

Submitted by anonymous on May 20, 2012 - 11:32am

by Harriet Rowan

Thousands of nurses from around the world descended upon Daley Plaza, in the heart of Chicago on May 18, to demand that the richest nations in the world put an end to austerity politics and start asking the people who collapsed the global economy to do more to "heal the world."

Wearing red National Nurses United (NNU) scrubs calling for "an economy for the 99%" and zippy green Robin Hood hats, made for them in Europe, the nurses were joined by Occupy Chicago and thousands of community activists in what may be one of the most colorful demonstrations in days of protests marking the G8 meeting at Camp David and the NATO Summit in Chicago.

The Police, the iPhone and Your Right to Record

Submitted by anonymous on May 19, 2012 - 7:34am

by Tim Karr

World Press Freedom Day came and went earlier this month. While it’s important to take a day to recognize our right to speak and share information, threats to our First Amendment freedoms happen all the time, everywhere.

It’s a threat that will become very real on the streets of Chicago this weekend, as a new breed of journalists and onlookers attempt to cover the protests surrounding the NATO summit.

Just ask Carlos Miller. The photojournalist has been arrested three times. His “crime?” Photographing the police. Most recently, in January, Miller was filming the eviction of Occupy Wall Street activists from a park in downtown Miami.

In twist that’s become too familiar to many, the journalist became the story as police focused their crackdown on the scrum of reporters there to cover the eviction. Miller came face to face with Officer Nancy Perez, who confiscated his camera and placed him under arrest.

A New Politics That Rejects Austerity and Wars of Whim

Submitted by anonymous on May 18, 2012 - 5:00pm

by John Nichols

There's something sick about a politics that tells children to give up their lunch money so that billionaire speculators can avoid paying taxes. And that sickness will only be cured by a new politics.

That new politics begins this week in Chicago.

When National Nurses United and the union's allies rally May 18 in Chicago on behalf of a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street speculation, the lie of austerity will be exposed.

The proponents of austerity--from Madison to Washington to Berlin to Athens--would have us believe that nations, states and communities must sacrifice public education, public services and healthcare in order to balance budgets. Yet, the same politicians who preach that there is no money for vaccinations and school lunches can always find the money for corporate tax breaks, payouts to defense contractors and wars of whim.

Politicians in both parties tell austerity lies.

But the people are pushing back.

Israel and the Neocons Mounting Pre-Emptive Strike on History

Submitted by anonymous on May 18, 2012 - 9:46am

Applying the Six-Day War to Iran
by Ray McGovern

With the 45th anniversary of the Six-Day War of June 1967 coming early next month, pro-Israel pundits like syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer are again promoting Israel’s faux-narrative on the reasons behind Israel’s decision to attack its neighbors.

The Krauthammers of our domesticated, corporate media seem bent on waging pre-emptive war against an accurate historical rendering of the actual objectives behind that Israeli offensive that overwhelmed Arab armies and seized large swaths of Arab territory, land that hard-line Zionists refer to as “Greater Israel,” i.e. rightly theirs.

With its surprise attacks on June 5, 1967, Israel rapidly defeated the armies of its Arab neighbors. It gained control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

The Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1979 as a result of the Camp David peace accord, a land-for-peace swap that U.S. President Jimmy Carter demanded and that then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin deeply resented.

The Shortwave Report 05/18 Listen Globally!

Submitted by anonymous on May 17, 2012 - 6:34pm

Dear Radio Friend,
The latest Shortwave Report (May 18) is up at the website http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml in 3 forms- (new) HIGHEST QUALITY (128kb)(27MB), broadcast quality (16MB), and quickdownload or streaming form (6MB) (28:59) Links at page bottom
(If you have access to Audioport there is a highest quality version posted up there {35MB} http://www.audioport.org/index.php?op=producer-info&uid=904&nav=&)

This week's show features stories from Spanish National Radio, NHK World Radio Japan, Radio Havana Cuba, and the Voice of Russia.

Preying on Poverty: How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks

Submitted by anonymous on May 17, 2012 - 3:41pm

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

BTL:"Climate Impacts Day" Connects Dots Between Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather

Submitted by anonymous on May 17, 2012 - 10:33am

"Climate Impacts Day" Connects Dots Between Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather

Interview with Laura Bozzi, an organizer with Connecticut 350.org, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

On May 5, all around the world, environmental activists held what they called “Connect the Dots” events to draw a link between recent extreme weather events and climate change. The “Climate Impacts Day” action was a project of 350.org, the climate organization that is pushing to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million – from the current 392 parts per million. Climate scientists assert that 350 is the upper limit above which life on earth will fundamentally change.

Story continues
http://www.btlonline.org/2012/seg/120525bf-btl-bozzi.html

How the US Press Lost Its Way

Submitted by anonymous on May 16, 2012 - 6:10pm

exposing the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. How did the U.S. news media lose its way over the past four decades, a question addressed by Robert Parry at a conference on information and secrecy.

By Robert Parry

Editor’s Note: From May 10 to May 12, journalist Robert Parry participated in a conference entitled, “From the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks: A Transatlantic Conversation on the Public’s Right to Know,” sponsored by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies in Heidelberg, Germany.

The conference consisted of media figures, legal scholars and freedom-of-information advocates – and included Neil Sheehan, the New York Times correspondent who got the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg, and Barry Sussman, the Washington Post editor who oversaw the newspaper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal.

Parry spoke on the last day and offered the following observations:

Much of this conference has focused on the glory days of American journalism in the 1970s. And rightly so. My talk, however, will deal with the more depressing question of why things then went so terribly wrong.

Big Idea: To Fight Inequality, Link Worker Pay to Corporate Taxes

Submitted by anonymous on May 16, 2012 - 12:11pm

by Mark Schmitt

With both presidential candidates promising major reform of the federal tax system, we’ll start to hear variations on the phrase, “If you want more of something, tax it less, and if you want less of something, tax it more.” There’s more to taxes than just raising money to support public services and determining who deserves to pay. The tax code sets some basic priorities for the economy and society, so a better way to think about taxes is to ask, “How can we improve the tax code to get the kind of economy we want?”

White House & Dems Back Banks over Protests: Newly Discovered Homeland Security Files Show Feds Central to Occupy Crackdown

Submitted by anonymous on May 14, 2012 - 9:09pm

by:
Dave Lindorff

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with 'anti-terrorism' funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

Colonized by Corporations

Submitted by anonymous on May 14, 2012 - 8:36am

by Chris Hedges

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

The Left, Labor and Occupy

Submitted by anonymous on May 14, 2012 - 4:54am

 

 

[BTW, please do not post non-Local postings to the Local Newswire. Keep repeating this and we'll find another place than the proper one on the Global Newswire.]


May 2012

Trotskyism vs. Social Democracy and Anarcho-Liberalism

The Left, Labor and Occupy


Occupy protesters in Portland picket Terminal 6 on December 12. (Photo: Rick Bowmer/AP)

Six months after Occupy Wall Street began – when a few hundred people sparked worldwide protest with a march and sit-in in lower Manhattan against political corruption and corporate greed – OWS was back. And four months after Occupy encampments were brutally evicted around the country, the police were there to greet them. Demonstrators chanted “this is what democracy looks like” as cops dragged scores out of Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan. More accurate would have been “this is what a police state looks like.” At the same time, the sharpening internal contradictions within the Occupy movement were also on display.

BTL:Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike Marks Renewed Emphasis on Nonviolent Resistance

Submitted by anonymous on May 13, 2012 - 8:04am

Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strike Marks Renewed Emphasis on Nonviolent Resistance

Interview with Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian American activist and author of “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment”, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Even as Israeli government leaders continue to press their case for military action against Iran, targeting their nuclear capability, they continue to ignore the issue of Palestinian rights as their occupation of the West Bank marks its 45th year. In President Barack Obama's last meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, neither man even raised the Palestinian issue. But Palestinians themselves are moving ahead with campaigns of nonviolent resistance, including prisoner hunger strikes, promotion of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign and other creative responses.

Story continues
http://www.btlonline.org/2012/seg/120518bf-btl-qumsiyeh.html

Party ends badly for U.S. trade reps and federal agents

Submitted by anonymous on May 12, 2012 - 3:25pm

May 12, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DALLAS PARTY ENDS BADLY FOR U.S. TRADE REPS AND FEDERAL AGENTS

Dozens of rogue "delegates" disrupt Trans-Pacific Partnership gala with "award," "mic check," mass toilet paper replacement, projection

Click here for video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5curJyngiDI&feature=youtu.be

Two dozen rogue "delegates" disrupted the corporate-sponsored welcome gala for the high-stakes Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations yesterday with a fake award ceremony and "mic check." Other activists, meanwhile, replaced hundreds of rolls of toilet paper (TP) throughout the conference venue with more informative versions (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tcpp/7181916698/in/photostream), and projected a message on the venue's facade.

World Week for the Abolition of Meat: 21-27 May 2012

Submitted by meat-abolition on May 12, 2012 - 9:44am

 

World Week for the Abolition of Meat: 

21-27 May 2012

U.S. House Democrats Support Ending Federal Interference in Medical Marijuana States

Submitted by anonymous on May 12, 2012 - 6:47am

The Democrats find their backbone and vote for a much needed change that voters support across party lines. US Rep. Tim Johnson (R - Urbana), continuing his three decade plus support of medical marijuana, was one of a few Republicans to vote in support of this measure to curb big government's interference with healthcare and limit the abuse of federal power in the name of an utterly failed and costly policy. Of course, you did NOT read about this news in the News-Gazette about this action on a much needed change in law to limit the power of the federal government that enjoys majority support...

U.S. House Democrats Support Ending Federal Interference in Medical Marijuana States

by Morgan Fox

Nearly Three-Quarters of Democrats Break with Administration Policy, Vote to Prevent Federal Agencies from Targeting Individuals in Compliance with State Medical Marijuana Laws

FCC: Break Up the Big Media Monopoly

Submitted by anonymous on May 11, 2012 - 9:28pm

by Carl Gibson

Houston rapper Pimp C of UGK had a phrase that he frequently used for Texas rappers whom he felt inadequately represented his state.

“You embarrassin’ us.”

The same could be said for today’s spineless, weak-kneed, irrelevant mainstream media.

In a functioning democracy, the media is the people’s voice, and the entity responsible for holding power accountable. Without a free media fairly scrutinizing the decisions of political and economic power brokers and bringing important events to light, elected officials and corporate CEOs would be corrupt and unaccountable to the people.

It doesn’t take a genius to look around and see that power is clearly corrupt, the voice of the people is being silenced, and that the media has become the voice of the power they’re supposed to hold accountable.

The 'Global May Manifesto'

Submitted by anonymous on May 11, 2012 - 1:09pm

A global movement wants a better world. Such a world is possible, and here's how …
by Global Spring Movement

We are living in a world controlled by forces incapable of giving freedom and dignity to the world's population. A world where we are told "there is no alternative" to the loss of rights gained through the long, hard struggles of our ancestors, and where success is defined in opposition to the most fundamental values of humanity, such as solidarity and mutual support. Moreover, anything that does not promote competitiveness, selfishness and greed is seen as dysfunctional.

But we have not remained silent! From Tunisia to Tahrir Square, Madrid to Reykjavik, New York to Brussels, people are rising up to denounce the status quo. Our effort states "enough!", and has begun to push changes forward, worldwide.

This is why we are uniting once again to make our voices heard all over the world this 12 May.