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Dec 5

70 Comments

Unarmed Man Shot At By NYPD Has Been Charged With Assault Because Bullets Hit Bystanders

35-year-old Glenn Broadnax (Ken Murray / New York Daily News)

35-year-old Glenn Broadnax (Ken Murray / New York Daily News)

Glenn Broadnax, a 35-year-old black man from Brooklyn, was unarmed on the night of September 14 when NYPD officers shot at him in the middle of Times Square, striking two bystanders.

 

Instead of apologizing, the New York Times reports that the city has charged Broadnax ”with assault, on the theory that he was responsible for bullet wounds suffered by two bystanders.” Read more

Dec 4

Anti-Drone Protests In Pakistan Force US Military To Halt Cargo Shipments

Supporters of Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party protest in Karachi against drone strikes in late November. (Fareed Khan / AP)

Supporters of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party protest in Karachi against drone strikes in late November. (Fareed Khan / AP)

The US military has suspended all cargo shipments out of Afghanistan due to a non-violent blockade imposed by activists protesting the US drone program in neighboring Pakistan.

Read more

Dec 4

4 Comments

Nearly 1 in 4 US Writers Has Self-Censored For Fear of Government Surveillance

A recently released survey of American writers conducted by PEN America Center in October found that government surveillance is having a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

PEN surveyed over 500 US writers about the impact of NSA surveillance revelations on their work and found that self-censorship is rampant due to anxieties about being spied on. Those surveyed admitted to purposely steering clear of writing, speaking about and even researching certain topics. Read more

Dec 2

6 Comments

US Media Whitewashes Israel’s Plan To Ethnically Cleanse 40,000 Of Its Arab Citizens

With the Israeli government moving closer towards implementation of a  massive ethnic cleansing campaign known as the Prawer-Begin Plan, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to spin the “Jewish and democratic state” as anything other than a racist experiment. But that hasn’t stopped mainstream US outlets from performing language wizardry in an attempt to distort the latest atrocity about to be committed by America’s greatest ally. Read more

Nov 30

Inmate firefighters, who are paid $1 an hour as part of California's conservation prison-camp program, work the Rim Fire threatening Yosemite. (Jae C. Hong / AP)
8 Comments

US Prisoners Are Fighting Wildfires For 50 Cents An Hour

Inmate firefighters, who are paid $1 an hour as part of California's conservation prison-camp program, work the Rim Fire threatening Yosemite. (Jae C. Hong / AP)

Inmate firefighters, who are paid $1 an hour as part of California’s conservation prison-camp program, work the Rim Fire threatening Yosemite. (Jae C. Hong / AP)

Across the western United States—from Colorado and Wyoming, to Montana and Washington—there is a growing reliance on prison labor to combat the rising threat of climate change-induced wildfires, which have grown in length, frequency and intensity in recent years.

Inmates in California and Nevada are being paid $1 an hour to fight the wildfires. That’s twice as much as prisoners serving time at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis, who made 50 cents an hour fighting 13 forest fires in Arizona last year. Read more

Nov 15

Renisha McBride Poster
5 Comments

Renisha McBride’s Killer Charged With Second-Degree Murder And Manslaughter

RenishaMcBride

Theodore Wafer, 54 (Source: Detroit Free Press)

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced at a news conference earlier today that 54-year-old Theodore Wafer of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, will be charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and felonious use of a firearm for the shooting death of 19-year-old Renisha McBride, a black Detroit woman who is believed to have been seeking help following a car accident.

Wafer insists his shotgun discharged accidentally and that, having mistook McBride for an intruder, he was acting in self-defense.

However, Worthy pointed out that there were no signs of forced entry and that Wafer had opened his front door before firing at McBride through a locked screen door.

“There is no duty to retreat when you’re in your own house, but someone who claims self-defense must have an honest and reasonable belief of imminent death or imminent rape or bodily harm,” Worthy told reports. Based on the evidence, “We do not believe [Wafer] acted in lawful self-defense,” she said. Read more

Nov 15

14 Comments

VIDEO: Children Wade Through Swamps Of Raw Sewage In Streets of Central Gaza

This is absolutely sickening. Sewage treatment has long been a problem in the Gaza Strip thanks to the illegal blockade, enforced by Israel, Egypt and the United States. But the recent crackdown by the Egyptian military on cross-border smuggling tunnels—one of the few lifelines that’s kept the besieged strip from descending into complete catastrophe—has led to a disastrous fuel shortage, leaving residents with little to no electricity and  bringing to a halt operations at Gaza’s largest waste water treatment plant.

“This is the start of a catastrophe and unless the world listens to our cries, a real disaster may hit Gaza and its people,” Gaza municipality’s Sa’ad El-Deen Al-Tbash told Reuters. ”This is a humanitarian, not a political issue. Gaza’s children did nothing to deserve being stuck in sewage.”

This is utterly insane. No child—or any human being for that matter—should have to wade through pools of literal shit to get from one place to another. I don’t care who’s running the Gaza Strip, there is NO excuse for the man-made humanitarian crisis that the people of Gaza have been forced to endure over the last six years.

The lack of electricity is disrupting people’s daily lives in ways that are unimaginable to those of us lucky enough to take such a luxury for granted.

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