Tag Archives: justice

Suspected US Coalition Airstrikes In Syria Kill Scores of Civilians

by ArnoldMidgett Posted on July 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Suspected airstrikes by the United States-led coalition in Syria recently killed at least 56 civilians, including 11 children, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The death toll from airstrikes targeting two villages near the Islamic State-controlled city of Manbij could be as high as 200, which would make it the coalition’s deadliest attack in two years.

In an interview with the non-profit journalism outlet Syria Direct on Tuesday, a local citizen journalist said the school housed displaced people and that 124 dead had been counted so far. A day earlier, 21 people were killed in raids also believed to be carried out by coalition aircraft north of Manbij. The airstrikes coincided with a ground offensive launched by ISIS against the US-backed Syria Democratic Forces, according to the New York Times.

In a statement, Amnesty International stated that the United States needs to do more to prevent civilian casualties. “The bombing of al-Tukhar may have resulted in the largest loss of civilian life by coalition operations in Syria,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty’s interim deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program. “There must be a prompt, independent and transparent investigation to determine what happened, who was responsible, and how to avoid further needles loss of civilian life. Anyone responsible for violations of international humanitarian law must be brought to justice and victims and their families should receive full reparation.”

United States Central Command (CENTCOM) has not commented on the latest reports of civilian deaths. The Pentagon’s estimates of civilian casualties from its anti-ISIS campaign have long been at odds with those of reputable monitoring groups.

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Suspected US Coalition Airstrikes In Syria Kill Scores of Civilians

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"Please Don’t Let Hate Infect Your Heart": Read Slain Baton Rouge Officer’s Heartbreaking Facebook Post

by RIATerrenc Posted on July 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On July 8, three days after Alton Sterling was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police outside a convenience store, Montrell Jackson reflected on the challenge of being a black man and a police officer in the city he loved.

“These are trying times,” he wrote in a Facebook post, confirmed by the Associated Press and NPR. “Please don’t let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better.”

More than a week later, Jackson, 32, became one of at least three police officers killed in an altercation with a gunman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At least four other officers were injured. The suspected shooter, identified as 29-year-old ex-Marine Gavin Eugene Long, attacked authorities just 10 days after a shooting near a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas left five officers dead and nine other people injured. Jackson’s half-brother Kedrick Pitts told NPR on Sunday that the post came in light of the recent Sterling’s death and described Montrell as a well-known officer who “loved the thrill and loved being there for others.”

“He felt hurt. He wants justice for their family also. But he just asked every to respect everyone, to continue to love everyone, and he just wanted everyone to get through this together. He didn’t want any hatred going on, especially killing,” Pitts said. “He was a police officer. He wanted peace.”

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"Please Don’t Let Hate Infect Your Heart": Read Slain Baton Rouge Officer’s Heartbreaking Facebook Post

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One Megadonor Is Crippling the Pro-Life Movement—and No One Knows Who It Is

by HalinaMackersey Posted on July 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back in January, as the Supreme Court was preparing for its most important abortion case in a generation, some four dozen social scientists submitted a brief explaining why they believed key portions of Texas law HB 2 should be struck down. The brief was a 58-page compendium of research on everything from the relative dangers of abortion versus childbirth to the correlation between abortion barriers and postpartum depression. “In this politically challenged area, it is particularly important that assertions about health and safety are evaluated using reliable scientific evidence,” the researchers declared.

Six months later, the material they submitted clearly helped shape Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion in Whole Women’s Health v Hellerstedt, which found critical elements of HB 2 unconstitutional. This decision also handed a resounding though less noticed victory to private donors who’ve spent more than a decade quietly pouring at least $200 million dollars into the scientists’ work, creating an influential abortion-research complex that has left abortion opponents in the dust.

The research initiative dates back at least to the early 2000s and became more urgent after the high court held in 2007 that in cases of “medical and scientific uncertainty,” legislatures could have “wide discretion” to pass laws restricting abortion. Since then, a primary objective of abortion rights supporters has been to establish a high level of medical certainty—both about the safety of the procedure and about what happens when a woman’s reproductive options are drastically curtailed or eliminated.

There’s little or no publicly funded research on this controversial subject in the United States, so for years basic information was lacking—from how often patients have complications to what happens to women who want abortions but can’t obtain them.

Into this breach stepped the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for the late wife of one of the richest men in the world. Established in the 1960s, the philanthropic behemoth (which ranked fourth among family foundations in 2014 in terms of giving) is known for its focus on abortion access, training, and, more recently, prevention. It’s also known for its secrecy, often appearing under grant acknowledgements only as “an anonymous donor.”

The Buffett Foundation helped finance the development of the abortion drug RU-486 back in the 1990s. From 2001 to 2014, it contributed more than $1.5 billion to abortion causes—including at least $427 million to Planned Parenthood worldwide, $168 million to the National Abortion Federation—a track record that led one abortion foe to call Warren Buffett the “sugar daddy of the entire pro-abortion movement.” In the past 15 years, it has also made research a core part of its strategic efforts, funding such organizations as the Guttmacher Institute, a policy think tank and advocacy group that tracks demographic and legislative trends ($40 million), and Gynuity Health Projects, which focuses on medication abortion ($29 million) and work by academics abroad. Other foundations supporting research on a smaller scale have included the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the John Merck Fund, and the Educational Foundation of America. (Hewlett is also a funder of ProPublica.)

Buffett’s main academic partner (receiving at least $88 million from 2001 to 2014) has been the University of California-San Francisco, a medical research institution with a strong reproductive health infrastructure. (Abortion opponents’ perspective is a bit different: “America’s abortion training academy,” one National Right to Life official recently called it). Historically, “it’s very unusual for foundations to fund research,” Tracy Weitz, former director of the UCSF’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health project (ANSIRH, pronounced “answer’), told ProPublica in 2013. But over the last 10 or 12 years, “there’s been recognition in the philanthropic community that in order to make progress, either culturally or politically or in the service-delivery arena, there are research questions that we need to answer.”

Located in the state with the strongest record on reproductive rights, UCSF has been able to do pioneering studies without the kind of political interference that might be expected elsewhere. Indeed, California lawmakers have granted special protections for people who work in the reproductive health field, while state health agencies worked behind the scenes to facilitate a potentially controversial project that involved training non-doctors to perform abortions (see sidebar). The ANSIRH program was established in 2002 as part of UCSF’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health and lists more than two dozen separate abortion-related initiatives on its website on everything from mandatory ultrasound-viewing laws to abortion in movies and TV to reproductive health access for women in the military. The funder and recipient have been closely intertwined; Weitz left UCSF to become the Buffett Foundation’s director of US programs in 2014.

Well before the Texas case, foundation-backed researchers had already begun to churn out studies aimed at debunking some of the most common justifications for new abortion restrictions: that clinics were teeming with incompetent and unscrupulous doctors; that injured, abandoned patients were flooding emergency rooms; that the psychological damage caused by grief and regret after abortions often persists for years and ruins women’s lives.

Over the past three years, their findings have influenced a string of policy changes—prompting the Food and Drug Administration to revise its labeling guidelines for abortion drugs, persuading the Iowa Supreme Court to uphold a telemedicine program for medication abortion, and convincing the California Legislature to allow health care professionals besides doctors to perform first-trimester abortions.

Read about the four ways that research changed the abortion debate. Looker_Studio/Shutterstock

The proliferation of so-called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider laws, or TRAP laws, like HB2—which purport to protect women’s safety and health by imposing tough rules on clinics and doctors—provided the research effort with its greatest test, yet also an opportunity to put its findings to potent effect.

Buffett Foundation money underwrote the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, the small band of demographers, doctors, and public health specialists based at the University of Texas-Austin who came together in 2011, when lawmakers slashed family-planning funding, kicked Planned Parenthood out of the Medicaid women’s health program, and required sonograms 24 hours before an abortion. “We realized that this was going to have devastating impact on the reproductive health and safety network in the state,” said Daniel Grossman, an investigator for the project who also teaches at UCSF and replaced Weitz as ANSIRH’s director last year.

Then, in 2013, the legislature passed HB 2, an omnibus bill that required abortion clinics to upgrade their facilities to surgical-center standards, mandated doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, imposed new restrictions on medication abortion, and banned abortion after 20 weeks. The TRAP provisions shuttered almost half of the state’s 41 clinics practically overnight, with stark consequences, the project found. The abortion rate dropped by 13 percent and medication abortions by 70 percent. Travel distances and costs soared and wait times sometimes stretched for weeks, leading to a 27 percent increase in more dangerous (and more expensive) second-trimester procedures. Some women considered self-inducing. Some unhappily carried their pregnancies to term. Meanwhile, part of HB 2 was on hold pending the Supreme Court ruling; if it went into effect, another 8 to 10 clinics would shut and the few clinics that remained would be inundated. “They didn’t really seem to have the capacity to increase their services,” Grossman said. “It was really concerning.”

The 5-to-3 majority ruling in Hellerstedt read like a 38-page recitation of the researchers’ findings, declaring the Texas laws served no real medical purpose and created an undue burden on women’s constitutional rights. Within days, TRAP laws also toppled in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Alabama, and abortion rights groups announced plans to challenge other types of laws—for example, 72-hour waiting periods and bans on abortions after 20 weeks. “Abortion restrictions cannot rely on junk science,” said Stephanie Toti, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights (which has received more than $20 million in Buffett funding since 2001). “There has to be credible scientific evidence to support the law, and there has to be a determination that the benefits of the law outweigh the harm.”

Some abortion opponents have been quick to argue that the research is not credible, in some cases because the people who do it are biased. Justice Samuel Alito insisted the Texas Policy Evaluation Project’s analysis of clinic closures and capacity was unconvincing. “Research is fine when it illuminates an issue,” Randall O’Bannon, education and research director for National Right to Life, told a reporter for his organization’s news site. But the findings were “crafted to protect the interests of the abortion industry with scant attention to the legitimate health and safety issues of Texas women, let alone unborn babies.”

The anti-abortion movement has recently attempted to launch its own research initiative. The Charlotte Lozier Institute was established in 2011 as a policy think tank alternative to Guttmacher. The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists holds annual conferences at which researchers who oppose abortion discuss research they’ve done on links between abortion and breast cancer, depression, and drug abuse, in addition to holding workshops on how to serve as expert witnesses. But those operations are minuscule compared with those of Buffett and ANSIRH. “The pro-choice research seems to have almost unlimited funds,” Bowling Green State University’s Priscilla Coleman lamented at this winter’s AAPLOG conference. So far, researchers funded by abortion opponents lack the infrastructure to conduct the kind of data collection and analysis that academic institutions have done. “Picking the right groups to compare, following them for a long period of time, so that you can really see what the outcomes are— it’s long and it’s hard and it’s costly,” UCSF’s Rana Barar said.

Abortion opponents have often seen data and scientific evidence as almost beside the point, acknowledged Lozier’s president, Chuck Donovan. “For most people on the pro-life side of the debate, abortion is primarily an ethical, moral, for some a religious challenge.” As a result, “a statistical base, an analytical base has gone a little bit undernourished.” Individual researchers have been stymied by mainstream medical hostility, Steven Aden, senior counsel at the conservative legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, said this spring. “It is extraordinarily difficult to get even a solid study peer-reviewed and published.” And when it does happen, “because the politics are against them, they are subjected to a beat-down campaign, sometimes even when what they’re arguing is fairly straightforward.” Often the best those efforts could hope to achieve was to “generate uncertainty,” as Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, put it. Before Hellerstedt, that was often seen as enough: “The idea was if there’s uncertainty, the tie-breaker goes to the lawmakers,” Ziegler said.

Even before the Texas decision, abortion foes had begun to shift away from women’s health and safety, instead expanding restrictions (such as longer mandatory waiting periods and tougher parental consent laws) and renewing the focus on protecting fetuses: “The science of fetal development is a burgeoning area,” Aden said.

Researchers funded by the Buffett Foundation and others, meanwhile, have mounted projects that look at the impact of abortion restrictions in Georgia, Utah, Ohio, and Tennessee.

“The role of research and the nature of relevant research will be different in different contexts,” CRR’s Toti said. “But what the court made clear is that abortion restrictions are going to be evaluated on an evidence-based standard. States can no longer rely on speculation about the potential benefits of a law.” The question now, she said, is “what actual benefit does a regulation provide and how does that compare with the extent of the burden the law is going to impose on women.”

ProPublica’s Sarah Smith contributed research help.

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One Megadonor Is Crippling the Pro-Life Movement—and No One Knows Who It Is

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Monsters or Victims? Let the Viewer Decide.

by DinahRmfacmt Posted on July 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a trailer park outside St. Petersburg, Florida, where around 120 convicted sex offenders live and receive counseling, Tracy Hutchinson broke down on camera. Hutchinson, a convicted sex offender, had never told her story before, even in therapy. Now, she was revealing to Frida and Lasse Barkfors, a pair of Scandinavian filmmakers documenting the lives of the trailer park’s inhabitants, what her father had done to her: “We went down the hall to the bedroom, and he locked the door, and he said, ‘You know that you’re daddy’s girl, and I love you, and I just want to share this with you.”

Many years later, as an adult, Hutchinson sexually abused her son. He, in turn, abused a three-year-old child. Lasse, listening to her story from behind the camera, had tears in his eyes. Every few minutes, Frida gently asked a question. Otherwise, she just let Hutchinson talk.

“It was like a need in her almost, to tell her story, that no one had wanted to listen to before,” Frida says. “That we came in the park with an open mind and said that we just wanted to listen—was very unusual for them.”

The Barkfors’ documentary, Pervert Park, doesn’t flinch from the crimes of its subjects, but it refuses to define them solely by their offenses. The result is a provocative look at the lives of convicted sex offenders and the cycle of abuse—as well as at a counseling program that could offer a model for rehabilitation. (According to the film, less than 1 percent of the park’s residents have been convicted of another sex offense after completing the two-year program.)

“When we made the film, we were quite certain that no one wanted to see it,” Lasse says. That goes especially for American viewers, whom the pair expected to be particularly hostile to the notion of humanizing sex offenders. But Pervert Park will debut on PBS tonight (10 pm ET) after months collecting praise on the festival circuit. I caught up with the filmmakers to discuss how one tells such stories responsibly, and why it’s important that they be told.

Mother Jones: The idea for this film came from a newspaper article about Florida Justice Transitions. How did you pick it up from there?

Frida Barkfors: We started out believing we were going to make a film that was a little more anthropological about the place itself. We read this article about five years ago, and the park was described as this parallel society where the sex offenders didn’t want to reintegrate into society—and couldn’t. As soon as we got to the park, we realized that what’s stated in the article wasn’t really accurate. They did try really hard to reintegrate to society, and they had this housing program where they were trying to be contributing citizens.

MJ: What were your attitudes toward the sex offenders when you began?

Frida: We had completely bought into the mainstream media portrait and didn’t think there was much more to tell. Meeting the sex offenders was kind of a journey for us. In the beginning we were quite cautious. We wanted to stick together while we were shooting. But we got less and less scared, because we saw the people behind the crimes. It’s not like sex offenders are sex offenders only. The story’s much more complex. That provoked a lot of emotions and thought processes in us, and that’s what we wanted to share with the audience.

Lasse Barkfors: It’s also a very simple idea, in the end, to listen to someone who is seldom asked to speak. What happens if we see what they have to say? Is that useful for us?

MJ: You said you completely bought into the mainstream portrayal of sex offenders. And what would that be?

Frida: We see them as monsters controlled by their sexual lust, with a lack of morals. We see them as dangerous. But there’s a really fine line between the victim and the abuser, because there are so many abusers who are untreated victims. They were once these innocent victims. But they weren’t able to get treatment, so they acted out and became abusers themselves.

Lasse: Of course, the stories that always comes up in the media are the very harsh ones and the awful ones.

Frida: We see sex offenders as the worst of the worst. We talk mostly about these stories where they’re hiding in the bushes, waiting for a child to kidnap and molest and maybe even murder. But those incidents are extremely rare. We were trying to show the diversity of the sex offender label. From Patrick—who kidnapped a five-year-old girl in Mexico and raped her in the desert and left her there—to Jamie, who was looking for a 30-year-old sex worker and was caught in a sting when the prostitute wanted to include her 14-year-old daughter. It turned out to be a police officer. There are also stories of people in the park who have urinated in public and are now convicted sex offenders.

MJ: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your work?

Frida: People say we made a film about pedophiles. In fact, there’s no pedophile featured in our film. Not even Patrick is a pedophile, because being a pedophile is a sexual orientation. Being a sex offender means you have abused someone sexually, but it doesn’t mean that you have a lust to be together with kids. There are many pedophiles who will never act out because they know the emotions they have, the lust they have, are wrong. Then there’s the combination of a pedophile and a sadist, and that’s really dangerous. Those are the cases we read about in the newspaper, and those are the cases that we base our laws on.

MJ: Compassion for sex offenders is central to the film. But relating to them, especially those convicted of really violent crimes, had to be a challenge. How did you accomplish that?

Frida: That’s the core question for us. How can we listen to these people without minimizing their crimes? What we realized is that you can actually have empathy for a person at the same time that you despise their crimes. We have this tendency to paint people in good colors and bad colors, but it’s more than that. These people need treatment. Some of them are still minimizing, and some of them are still excusing, and they’re not completely healed, but I feel that a lot of them are working on becoming better people. So it’s very complex.

MJ: Why did you not include the voices of the victims?

Frida: There are so many films that are made from the classical victim perspective. We wanted to give a voice to the people who are normally not heard. And there are victims in our film. You can be a victim and an abuser at the same time. I think we show very clearly—for instance, in the interview with Tracy—how it’s passed on throughout generations.

MJ: Still, I’m sure some viewers would feel that giving voice to the abusers silences the victims.

Frida: I was once like that, so I understand. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to listen to their story.” But we’re trying to help widen the debate. Making this film, we worked very closely with victim organizations, lawyers, and defenders of victims of sexual abuse, and also psychologists and therapists. They all say this is crucial for victims to heal, the abuser’s story being told. That was the purpose: We made the film because we thought that it was helpful for everyone.

Lasse: These people walk around with this their whole life without telling anyone, because it’s so shameful. I think a lot of them really need to talk about it in order to move on.

Frida: After a screening, people have come up to us and said, “I am a victim of sexual abuse, and thank you for making this film. I now understand my abuser much better than I used to.” They struggle with a lot of emotions, but if they can understand their abuser, it’s easier for them to heal.

MJ: I suppose it would help answer the question, “Why did this happen to me?”

Frida: Don’t get me wrong—the victims have no responsibility whatsoever. I completely understand why we as a society don’t want to talk about the offenders, because we think that we’re protecting the victims. But that’s counterproductive.

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Monsters or Victims? Let the Viewer Decide.

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Alberta wildfire was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history

by VanColbygtoflcf Posted on July 7, 2016

Fort McMurray residents look over the damage as wildfire evacuees trickle back to their homes. REUTERS/Topher Seguin

Alberta wildfire was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history

By on Jul 7, 2016Share

The wildfire that ripped through Alberta, Canada’s Fort McMurray area in June devastated homes, boreal forests, and tar sands oil production. Now that the dust has settled, another scary aspect of the fire has emerged: the cost.

All told, the Fort McMurray wildfire cost $3.6 billion in Canadian currency (that’s $2.8 billion USD), the Insurance Bureau of Canada announced on Thursday, making it the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.

According to the bureau, the costs broke down as follows: 27,000 personal-property claims with an average claim of $81,000 each; 12,000 auto claims averaging $15,000; and more than 5,000 business claims which averaged over $250,000 (including the cost of work closures).

That’s more than double the expense of the previous most-costly-natural-disaster-in-Canadian-history, a 2013 flood in southern Alberta that cost $1.7 billion in insurance claims.

These billion-dollar disasters will be less “natural” in the future, with climate change fueling longer and more ferocious wildfire seasons.

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Alberta wildfire was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history

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Now Clinton and Sanders Are Fighting Over the Democratic Platform

by HelaineNqb Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee has written a stronger climate change section than the platform had in 2012, but it also rejected a series of more ambitious climate and energy amendments on Friday. That’s raised the ire of Bernie Sanders and his appointees to the drafting committee, like climate activist and author Bill McKibben.

The first draft of the platform, voted on by the 15-member drafting committee, is now complete, though it hasn’t been made publicly available. On July 8 and 9, in Orlando, the full 187-member platform committee will meet and debate further changes before approving and sending its draft on to the party convention, to be held in Philadelphia the last week of July.

Sanders slammed Hillary Clinton’s committee appointees for blocking progressive provisions and pledged to continue fighting for changes to the document. “Despite the growing crisis of climate change, Clinton’s delegates voted against a tax on carbon, against a ban on fracking,” said Sanders in a statement on Sunday. “We intend to do everything we can to rally support for our amendments in Orlando and if we fail there to take the fight to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia.”

How did the platform become a big deal this time?

Drama over the party platform is atypical. Usually the document is just a quietly produced, platitudinous summation of the presidential nominee’s policy vision. But if Sanders gets some of the changes he’s still pushing for, this year’s platform could look very different from the last one, adopted four years ago under a moderate incumbent president with a mixed record on environmental issues.

Sanders’ campaign is dedicated to pushing American politics leftward, so he and his team have been focused on influencing the platform. After making a stronger-than-expected primary showing, Sanders asked for seven appointments to the 15-person drafting committee. The party gave him five, Clinton got six, and the remaining four were appointed by party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Now that Sanders has lost the fight for the nomination, he and his supporters see the platform as their chief vehicle for having a lasting impact on the party’s direction.

Sanders and Clinton each appointed a climate expert to the drafting committee. Sanders chose McKibben, cofounder of climate action group 350.org (and a member of Grist’s board of directors). Clinton picked Carol Browner, who served as President Obama’s climate czar from 2009 to 2011.

Sanders’ other appointees were all progressives, of course. Clinton and Wasserman Schultz also chose fairly left-leaning slates. In analyzing the appointees, The Nation‘s John Nichols concluded that “the drafting committee has a progressive majority.” That led climate hawks to hope that some of the more aggressive proposals from the Sanders’ camp might pass. But that’s not how things have played out so far.

What they agreed on

The drafting committee members did come together on some critical climate-related decisions. The biggest and most important shift from the 2012 platform was dropping the call for “all-of-the-above” energy development, which reflected the priorities of Obama’s first term. The members also unanimously agreed to call for fully switching to clean energy by 2050.

The draft platform echoes the Paris Agreement in aiming to keep global warming below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) over pre-industrial levels, with the hope of staying below 1.5 C (2.7 F) if possible. It calls for a Department of Justice investigation into fossil fuel companies (read: ExxonMobil) accused of misleading the public about climate science. It backs elimination of fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code and extension of support for renewable energy development, such as the wind production tax credit.

Browner told Grist that the language supporting renewables was written in from the beginning and never even required an amendment. “There was a lot of stuff where there was common ground that was embedded in the conversation,” she said.

And some amendments proposed by McKibben on Friday were passed unanimously, such as a noncontroversial call for more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and a statement of opposition to electric utilities’ efforts to quash solar energy. As Browner put it, “The draft has everybody’s fingerprints.”

What they fought over—or, what the Sanders team lost

But while Sanders and progressive climate activists see the current draft platform as a modest step in the right direction, they are far from satisfied. The platform document sets strong big-picture goals for curbing climate change and boosting clean energy, but doesn’t include specific policies that would actually help meet those goals.

“In the draft, everyone agreed that there should be 100 percent clean energy by 2050, but every measure I put forward to actually get us there went down by the same 7-6 vote, with all the Clinton people voting in a bloc against,” said McKibben. Only one non-Sanders appointee, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who was chosen by Wasserman Schultz, crossed over to vote with the Sanders bloc on the controversial climate change amendments. One committee member was absent, and the chair did not vote.

The half-dozen McKibben amendments that went down to defeat included calls for:

a carbon tax,
a fracking ban,
a ban on fossil fuel extraction on public lands,
elimination of support through international lending institutions for fossil fuel projects abroad,
a declaration that eminent domain should not be used to take private land for fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and
a “climate test” for future domestic energy projects, which would reject ones that contribute to climate change—like the test Obama ultimately used to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

Only one of those was replaced with compromise language: The Clinton side offered and passed an amendment endorsing a gradual phaseout of fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

Climate Hawks Vote, a political action committee that endorsed Sanders, issued a statement praising the Exxon investigation amendment but also warning, “We’re fighting not just the Republicans, but also the incrementalists within the Democratic Party.”

The Clinton campaign says its reluctance to accept some of McKibben’s amendments reflects legitimate concerns about the policy implications, not mere political calculation. Not all experts agree that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions, for example. Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board had pointed out in her testimony to the committee a week earlier that a carbon tax does not guarantee emissions reductions, while direct regulation, such as Obama’s Clean Power Plan, does. Clinton supporters rejected a blanket prohibition on lending for foreign fossil fuel development projects on the grounds that the US relationship with any given developing country may have competing priorities, and they opposed the climate test for energy projects because they worried it could prevent necessary projects like transmission lines for electricity that may be partly generated from dirty sources.

There are also obvious political concerns about some of these proposals. A carbon tax, for example, would have no chance of passage in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but a call for such a tax would hand Donald Trump a potentially effective new weapon, letting him claim that Democrats want to raise energy prices.

It’s unlikely that Sanders’ supporters will be able to change many platform planks in Orlando or Philly. Essentially, they are calling for Sanders’ platform to become the party’s platform. But Sanders lost the primary race, and it stands to reason that the party platform would reflect the views of the candidate who won.

And that candidate has to consider not just the best climate policies in the abstract, but the ones that will help her win in November. “We’re going be facing a group of climate science deniers in Congress,” says Browner. “So what some of us are looking at is, How do we get a president elected and use the tools of government to continue to make real advances?”

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Now Clinton and Sanders Are Fighting Over the Democratic Platform

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Multiple Explosions Rock Ataturk Airport in Istanbul

by ylejity Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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At least ten people are dead after explosions hit Ataturk airport in Istanbul on Tuesday, Turkey’s Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has confirmed. The explosions reportedly took place outside the international terminal, the third largest airport in Europe.

Another Turkish official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told multiple media outlets that two suicide bombers attempted to enter the terminal but were stopped by police gunfire. The two suspects then blew themselves up.

A video posted by Yana (@yana_chizhanova) on Jun 28, 2016 at 12:02pm PDT

At least 20 people have been reported wounded.

This is a breaking news story. We will update as more news becomes available.

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Multiple Explosions Rock Ataturk Airport in Istanbul

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Sanders and Clinton teams fight over climate language in Democratic platform

by RaymonLinker Posted on June 28, 2016

Walking the plank

Sanders and Clinton teams fight over climate language in Democratic platform

By on Jun 28, 2016Share

The Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee has written a stronger climate change section than the platform had in 2012, but it also rejected a series of more ambitious climate and energy amendments on Friday. That’s raised the ire of Bernie Sanders and his appointees to the drafting committee, like climate activist and author Bill McKibben.

The first draft of the platform, voted on by the 15-member drafting committee, is now complete, though it hasn’t been made publicly available. On July 8 and 9, in Orlando, the full 187-member platform committee will meet and debate further changes before approving and sending its draft on to the party convention, to be held in Philadelphia the last week of July.

Sanders slammed Hillary Clinton’s committee appointees for blocking progressive provisions and pledged to continue fighting for changes to the document. “Despite the growing crisis of climate change, [Clinton’s delegates] voted against a tax on carbon, against a ban on fracking,” said Sanders in a statement on Sunday. “We intend to do everything we can to rally support for our amendments in Orlando and if we fail there to take the fight to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia.”

How did the platform become a big deal this time?

Drama over the party platform is atypical. Usually the document is just a quietly produced, platitudinous summation of the presidential nominee’s policy vision. But if Sanders gets some of the changes he’s still pushing for, this year’s platform could look very different from the last one, adopted four years ago under a moderate incumbent president with a mixed record on environmental issues.

Sanders’ campaign is dedicated to pushing American politics leftward, so he and his team have been focused on influencing the platform. After making a stronger-than-expected primary showing, Sanders asked for seven appointments to the 15-person drafting committee. The party gave him five, Clinton got six, and the remaining four were appointed by party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Now that Sanders has lost the fight for the nomination, he and his supporters see the platform as their chief vehicle for having a lasting impact on the party’s direction.

Sanders and Clinton each appointed a climate expert to the drafting committee. Sanders chose McKibben, cofounder of climate action group 350.org (and a member of Grist’s board of directors). Clinton picked Carol Browner, who served as President Obama’s climate czar from 2009 to 2011.

Sanders’ other appointees were all progressives, of course. Clinton and Wasserman Schultz also chose fairly left-leaning slates. In analyzing the appointees, The Nation’s John Nichols concluded that “the drafting committee has a progressive majority.” That led climate hawks to hope that some of the more aggressive proposals from the Sanders’ camp might pass. But that’s not how things have played out so far.

What they agreed on

The drafting committee members did come together on some critical climate-related decisions. The biggest and most important shift from the 2012 platform was dropping the call for “all-of-the-above” energy development, which reflected the priorities of Obama’s first term. The members also unanimously agreed to call for fully switching to clean energy by 2050.

The draft platform echoes the Paris Agreement in aiming to keep global warming below 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels, with the hope of staying below 1.5 C if possible. It calls for a Department of Justice investigation into fossil fuel companies (read: ExxonMobil) accused of misleading the public about climate science. It backs elimination of fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code and extension of support for renewable energy development, such as the wind production tax credit.

Browner told Grist that the language supporting renewables was written in from the beginning and never even required an amendment. “There was a lot of stuff where there was common ground that was embedded in the conversation,” she said.

And some amendments proposed by McKibben on Friday were passed unanimously, such as a noncontroversial call for more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and a statement of opposition to electric utilities’ efforts to quash solar energy. As Browner put it, “The draft has everybody’s fingerprints.”

What they fought over — or, what the Sanders team lost

But while Sanders and progressive climate activists see the current draft platform as a modest step in the right direction, they are far from satisfied. The platform document sets strong big-picture goals for curbing climate change and boosting clean energy, but doesn’t include specific policies that would actually help meet those goals.

“In the draft, everyone agreed that there should be 100 percent clean energy by 2050, but every measure I put forward to actually get us there went down by the same 7-6 vote, with all the Clinton people voting in a bloc against,” said McKibben. Only one non-Sanders appointee, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who was chosen by Wasserman Schultz, crossed over to vote with the Sanders bloc on the controversial climate change amendments. One committee member was absent, and the chair did not vote.

The half-dozen McKibben amendments that went down to defeat included calls for:

a carbon tax,
a fracking ban,
a ban on fossil fuel extraction on public lands,
elimination of support through international lending institutions for fossil fuel projects abroad,
a declaration that eminent domain should not be used to take private land for fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and
a “climate test” for future domestic energy projects, which would reject ones that contribute to climate change — like the test Obama ultimately used to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

Only one of those was replaced with compromise language: The Clinton side offered and passed an amendment endorsing a gradual phaseout of fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

Climate Hawks Vote, a political action committee that endorsed Sanders, issued a statement praising the Exxon investigation amendment but also warning, “We’re fighting not just the Republicans, but also the incrementalists within the Democratic Party.”

The Clinton campaign says its reluctance to accept some of McKibben’s amendments reflects legitimate concerns about the policy implications, not mere political calculation. Not all experts agree that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions, for example. Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board had pointed out in her testimony to the committee a week earlier that a carbon tax does not guarantee emissions reductions, while direct regulation, such as Obama’s Clean Power Plan, does. Clinton supporters rejected a blanket prohibition on lending for foreign fossil fuel development projects on the grounds that the U.S. relationship with any given developing country may have competing priorities, and they opposed the climate test for energy projects because they worried it could prevent necessary projects like transmission lines for electricity that may be partly generated from dirty sources.

There are also obvious political concerns about some of these proposals. A carbon tax, for example, would have no chance of passage in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but a call for such a tax would hand Donald Trump a potentially effective new weapon, letting him claim that Democrats want to raise energy prices.

It’s unlikely that Sanders’ supporters will be able to change many platform planks in Orlando or Philly. Essentially, they are calling for Sanders’ platform to become the party’s platform. But Sanders lost the primary race, and it stands to reason that the party platform would reflect the views of the candidate who won.

And that candidate has to consider not just the best climate policies in the abstract, but the ones that will help her win in November. “We’re going be facing a group of climate science deniers in Congress,” says Browner. “So what some of us are looking at is, How do we get a president elected and use the tools of government to continue to make real advances?”

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The Lawyers Who Helped Make Gay Marriage the Law of the Land Are Just Getting Started

by LourdesWilhite Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last June, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. A year later, President Obama has christened Stonewall Inn the first national monument to LGBT rights, and the nation is engaged in a conversation—and new legal battles—involving transgender equality, another piece of the puzzle. I caught up with Memphis-based civil rights attorney Maureen Holland, part of the winning legal team in Obergfell, to discuss the eventful past year, the Pulse massacre, and her next big legal project.

Maureen Holland

Mother Jones: After the Obergefell ruling, there was substantial resistance, including Kim Davis the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to grant marriage licenses. Several states proposed bills that would let businesses deny services to LGBT customers on religious grounds. Were you surprised by the level of pushback?

Maureen Holland: It did not surprise me. Many southern states pushed back after the Loving 1967 interracial marriage case was decided, so we recognized there might be resistance. But I think the pushback was overshadowed by the overwhelming support for the decision. For some time, I was continually getting comments about how many lives were positively affected.

MJ: Since then, there’s been a growing number of federal lawsuits by people alleging their civil rights were violated when they were denied marriage benefits, or fired after coming out to their employers as gay.

MH: Employment protections are the next step in the gay-rights fight. In February 2015, before Obergefell, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that its offices would accept claims from people alleging sexual orientation-based discrimination in the workplace. After Obergefell, many people believed their cases would finally be heard if they filed claims—so they did. But the EEOC has to review the claims, decide which ones it wants to take action on, deny the claim, or tell the claimant they can sue in federal court. In recent months, we’ve seen people filing lawsuits who finally got their right-to-sue letters for claims they filed right after Obergefell. I don’t know if any organization is keeping track of the number of cases.

MJ: You’re now working on a case on behalf of a gay cop in Memphis who says he was harassed while working as his department’s LGBT liaison. You argue that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is covered under the Civil Rights Act’s ban on gender discrimination in the workplace. Can you explain the logic?

MH: Sexual orientation discrimination is essentially discriminating against somebody because they’re not conforming to the norms of their sex. Men should talk a certain way. Women should wear a certain attire at work. That kind of discrimination is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. And discriminating against someone because they’re a man dating a man but you think they should date women is the same type of discrimination. So we think it is illegal as well. That argument would also extend to discrimination based on gender identity.

MJ: Which brings me to my next question: In Obergefell the Supreme Court found that gay marriage is a protected right under the Constitution, but it didn’t say sexual orientation is a protected class, like race and gender. Is there any language in that opinion that suggests your strategy will succeed?

MH: There’s language in any court opinion—called dicta—that you can draw implications from and use to extend the finding to other contexts. The dicta in Obergefell is clear: The Court adopts the idea that “psychologists and others recognize that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.” In my complaint for the Memphis officer, I use this and other quotes as the framework for the argument that the Obergefell ruling was not just about marriage.

MJ: This notion that sexual orientation is immutable sounds like a clear indication that it should be a protected class. The Constitution’s equal protection clause was meant to protect people from discrimination based on attributes they can’t change.

MH: Exactly. But we don’t have case law that says it with that level of clarity in regard to sexual orientation. That’s why people are bringing these cases.

MJ: Let’s pivot to transgender rights. We’re in the midst of a big national debate about that. Why now?

MH: It’s the next conversation we had to have about LGBT rights. Gender identity—what is that? What does it mean? How do our laws apply to individuals who transition? The Obergefell decision opened up space for a more national conversation.

MJ: President Obama repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. His Department of Justice stopped enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act before the Obergefell decision. And 11 states are now suing his administration over bathroom guidelines it issued for transgender students.

MH: I think President Obama has become a great advocate for LGBT rights. He’s talked about his transition in thinking on same-sex marriage, and the fact that we got to see him do that openly and honestly has been helpful. He has issued executive orders that give protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to public-sector employees. All these things speak well to his willingness to not just say it, but to do things that are meaningful to protect LGBT people.

MJ: When might the Supreme Court take up the question of whether sexual orientation and gender identity are constitutionally protected?

MH: It could happen the year after next. They have to accept a case that asks the question, first. But there are a number of those moving into the Court of Appeals. It also depends on the decisions of the Courts of Appeal. The Supreme Court tends to take cases when there’s a difference in opinion in the circuits—not just because they think a case is interesting. That’s what happened in Obergefell.

MJ: I’m curious about your thoughts on what happened in Orlando.

MH: I was heartbroken. It was hard to see—as a member of the LGBT community myself—people targeted because of their identity, when a year prior we had celebrated Obergefell. No one should be targeted because of who they love, and that message needs to continue to be said, and protections need to be in place. I spoke at a vigil for Orlando here in Memphis the day it happened. The crowd came out, and I think they were afraid to be who they are because they knew they could be targeted. You want to live in a community where you don’t have to be afraid to go outside or go to work and be who you are. And that’s what I hope the future will be. We’re not there yet.

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The Lawyers Who Helped Make Gay Marriage the Law of the Land Are Just Getting Started

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Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

by LadonnaCuriel Posted on June 22, 2016

The Chemical Bothers

Republicans in Congress passed a law giving EPA more power

By on Jun 22, 2016 11:27 amShare

Congress has done something that’s practically unheard of. It handed the Environmental Protection Agency broad new powers. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama is signing the legislation into law.

In early June, the Senate passed a sweeping bill that revamps how federal regulators handle chemical safety, after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) lifted a last-minute hold on a vote. Because the House already passed the same reconciled version, the bill is headed to President Obama’s desk, where he is expected sign it into law.

Which means a Republican-controlled Congress managed to do something that no Congress since 1976 had been able to do: Overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act, a flawed, unenforceable law that gave the EPA just 90 days to study whether a new chemical was dangerous. It didn’t even allow the EPA to regulate asbestos-containing products, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in 1989.

The new bill means the EPA can finally evaluate cancer-linked substances like BPA and styrene used in plastics and formaldehyde found in fabrics and cars. It establishes uniform standards for evaluating about 20 chemicals at a time, and means more funding can be directed toward studying high-priority problem chemicals, especially those used near drinking water.

In extreme cases, the law might lead to a ban on certain chemicals. In others, it might mean more warning labels or limited use.

For a little perspective on just how great a task the EPA now has ahead, there are some 64,000 unregulated chemicals on the market.

No law, much less one coming from a conservative Congress, is perfect. And the industry won at least one key fight: States won’t be able to restrict or ban chemicals if they’re under review by the EPA. That’s why the Environmental Working Group opposed the bill, and why New York’s attorney general said he was disappointed in it. But most health and green groups accepted the compromise bill as an overall win.

This was a rare instance in which the manufacturers and chemical industries were on the same side as environmental and public health advocates: Everyone knew the current system was broken and needed to be fixed, and still it took many years to reach a compromise. Even the Senate’s resident science denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.) endorsed the bill.

But don’t expect to see this kind of cooperation on other public health issues, from lead-poisoned water to any of the threats posed by climate change. For that, we’ll need a very different Congress — and we can’t afford to wait another 40 years to get it.

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