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Cleveland Police Are Gearing up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention

by edwinputilin54 Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Republican National Convention imminent, the Cleveland Police Department is finalizing its security plan for what is expected to be a volatile few days. The city announced last Friday that it was updating its plan following last week’s mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, and though it shared scant detail, the Cleveland PD is set to be outfitted with plenty of heavy gear.

The RNC is designated as a National Special Security Event by the US Department of Homeland Security, which entitled Cleveland to a $50 million federal grant toward its security plan. According to bids the city has posted to its website and reports from local news outlets, so far Cleveland has spent the money on:

2,000 sets of riot gear
2,000 steel batons
325 sets of tactical armor
300 patrol bicycles, with accompanying riot gear
25 rifle scopes
10,000 flexible handcuffs

Other supplies include bulletproof helmets, pepper spray, two-point slings (used to carry rifles) and inmate mattresses. The Cleveland PD also asked the Chicago Police Department to loan them three bearcats, and Taser International is loaning the department 300 body cameras that can be attached to riot suits. The city also put out a bid for tear gas, according to the Washington Post, and recently upped its protest insurance coverage from $9.5 million to $50 million.

This approach by the city isn’t unusual per se; Tampa bought similar kinds of equipment (though less of it) ahead of the RNC there in 2012. But Cleveland is the first city to host a political convention with its police department under a consent decree with the federal government. The Cleveland PD has been under the oversight of a federal monitoring team charged with enforcing the decree since October 2015, due to a history of excessive force and other abuses. Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department lawyer who supervised the agency’s Cleveland PD investigation, told the Marshall Project, “You would want a department to provide security that has systems that are in place where there is better accountability and better supervision.” In a report issued in June, the team monitoring the Cleveland PD under the decree characterzied the police department’s ability to investigate officer misconduct as “dire.” Cleveland’s consent decree calls for changes to the department’s use of force policy and internal review protocol, but those changes are still in progress.

Joycelyn Rosnick, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild’s Cleveland office, told Mother Jones the group has concerns about the equipment and tactics that the Cleveland PD plans to deploy. The police department’s purchase of 10,000 flexible handcuffs, she said, indicates “they are preparing for mass arrests.” She also cautions about potential escalation: Earlier this year, a coalition of international civil liberties groups released a report on the health impacts of crowd-control weapons commonly used by law enforcement. The report focused on how projectile weapons such as rubber bullets or bean bags can cause severe injuries, including ruptured organs and even death. The report also found that chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray can cause permanent disabilities such as blindness and respiratory problems.

Rosnick also notes that wearing riot gear is a display of force that could chill people’s First Amendment right to protest. (Cleveland officials have said that officers will only wear riot gear if it becomes necessary.) And she wonders whether the Cleveland PD has sufficient training or will show adequate restraint. “The police department that was found to use excessive force a couple months ago,” she said, “is still the department we have today.”

Jane Castor, who was chief of the Tampa Police Department when that city hosted the RNC in 2012, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the Tampa PD’s approach to security—which included officers working in standard uniforms, passing out food and water to protesters, and arresting people only as a last resort—resulted in just two convention-related arrests and zero lawsuits from protesters after the convention. Cleveland is expected to see many more protesters than Tampa did, however.

Militarization of police departments has returned to the spotlight since the country erupted with protests last week following two high-profile fatal shootings by cops. Baton Rouge police officers used tear gas, pepper spray, and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) to disperse protesters during demonstrations over the police shooting death of Alton Sterling. And officers in St. Paul, MN, used smoke bombs to disperse a crowd that had blocked a highway.

Watchdogs are working to prepare protesters for what may come. Matthew Barge, the attorney appointed to lead the federal oversight effort, told the Marshall Project that the public could report instances of police abuse at the RNC on the monitoring team’s website. “We are not going to be bashful about reviewing what happens at the RNC,” he said.

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Cleveland Police Are Gearing up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention

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This Salvadoran Woman Served 4 Years for Having a Miscarriage

by AishaMcLean5884 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Maria Teresa Rivera didn’t realize she was pregnant in 2011 when she went into early labor. The 28-year-old factory worker in El Salvador, who already had one son, started bleeding heavily late one night, so her family called an ambulance to drive her to the hospital. The next day, Rivera was taken to jail.

Her crime? Having a miscarriage.

Rivera is one of a number of women in El Salvador incarcerated not for abortion, which is illegal, but as a result of miscarriages. An abortion rights group in the area has identified 17 people convicted of homicide, with sentences upward of 40 years, after facing obstetric emergencies such as miscarriage or stillbirth.

After serving four of her 40-year prison sentence for aggravated homicide, Rivera’s conviction was overturned by a judge and she walked free this spring. But the prosecution appealed her release, and this week a three-judge panel will decide whether to hold a new hearing or throw out the charges for good.

Only six countries in the world, including El Salvador, ban abortion in all cases, even when the pregnancy is the result of rape or threatens the life of the mother. Nicaragua, Chile, the Dominican Republic, the Vatican city-state, and Malta are the only other places with similar prohibitions. In January, El Salvador’s deputy health minister told women to avoid getting pregnant for two years because of worries over the effects of Zika virus.

“A woman who procures herself an abortion is running a very high risk,” Carmen Barroso, the former regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in the Western Hemisphere, told Mother Jones. “She’ll run the risk to her life because she’ll have to have an unsafe abortion because they are so limited in availability. It is tragic.”

The ban in El Salvador got international attention in 2013, when the country’s highest court rejected the abortion request of a young woman, known only as Beatriz, with a potentially life-threatening pregnancy, ruling the “rights of the mother cannot be privileged over those” of the fetus. The fetus suffered from anencephaly, a severe congenital disorder where the fetus’ brain and skull stop growing, giving it little chance of surviving outside the womb. The woman survived after getting a controversial caesarian section.

Despite the ban, more than 19,000 illegal abortions were reported in El Salvador between 2005 and 2008, according to the Ministry of Health’s Information, Monitoring, and Evaluation Unit, an estimate that advocates say is low. Nearly a third of abortions performed were on adolescents, who make up a large percent of the region’s unplanned pregnancies. According to the World Health Organization, 9 percent of maternal deaths in Central America are the result of illegal abortions.

As a result of the criminalization, women in El Salvador frequently face legal scrutiny for abortion-related crimes. According to research done by a Salvadoran advocacy group, between 2000 and 2011 about 130 women were criminally prosecuted for ending their pregnancies. That number doesn’t include cases where the allegations were dropped or cases involving minors, whose records are sealed. Almost 50 women were convicted of either illegal abortion or different degrees of homicide, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years.

Then there are the cases of the 17 women who are part of “Las 17,” as they’re known, who are all, like Rivera, young, impoverished, and accused of losing their pregnancies on purpose. Guadalupe Vasquez, a housekeeper, was only 17 years old when she became pregnant from rape. She decided to keep the baby but lost it during labor. After her employer sent her to the hospital, she was reported to the police and eventually sentenced to 30 years behind bars.

Many of the women, including Rivera, were reported to the police by medical staff at the hospital. In some cases, neighbors or friends called law enforcement.

“I felt the need to go to the bathroom, I pushed, and it was the baby that came out into the latrine,” Rivera said in a video from prison. She passed out from loss of blood and was in the hospital when she woke up. “Then they took me to this place,” she said.

Rivera was convicted “despite the complete lack of evidence of any wrongdoing,” according to an analysis of Las 17 cases by a Salvadoran lawyer and a Harvard sociologist. The analysis also concluded that Salvadoran courts systematically discriminated against the women by aggressively pursuing “the mother’s prosecution instead of pursuing the truth.”

“In stark contrast to the courts’ findings, our analysis concludes that the legal and medical facts in the majority of these cases correspond with medical emergency—not with homicide,” they wrote.

Rivera successfully appealed her conviction and has spent the last two months walking free.

“What worries me is leaving my son alone again,” Rivera, who grew up in orphanages, told Rewire after being released in May. “I was forced to abandon him for four and a half years, and he suffered greatly during that time.”

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This Salvadoran Woman Served 4 Years for Having a Miscarriage

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Civil Rights Groups Move to Expose Government Spying on Black Lives Matter

by AudreaDEIhfkzevp Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Against a backdrop of surveillance of the Black Lives Matters movement ahead of the Republican National Convention, two civil rights organizations are aiming to further expose government tracking of the movement’s members. On Tuesday, New York City-based groups Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a joint Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seeking documents, video and audio recordings, and other information on policies and protocols related to the surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.

The request covers surveillance conducted in 11 cities that have seen large-scale protests over the police shooting or in-custody deaths of black people, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, Oakland, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where protests erupted in Ferguson after the killing of black teenager Michael Brown in August 2014. (The request cites Mother Jones‘ reports on the Department of Homeland Security tracking protesters at a Freddie Gray-related rally, and the monitoring of social media activity by prominent Black Lives Matter activists Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie by a private cyber security firm.)

The groups filed the request because they believe surveillance of Black Lives Matter is more systematic than is currently understood and jeopardizes the activists’ First Amendment rights, says Rashad Robinson, the director of Color of Change. “The government has done a real coordinated effort about what’s happening among activists, but nobody is monitoring what the government is doing,” Robinson says. “The more information we have, the better we can go about the kind of pushback and systemic change necessary to stop it.”

You can read the full FOIA request here.

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Civil Rights Groups Move to Expose Government Spying on Black Lives Matter

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Check Out This Good Read About Bad Sex

by WandaRoygqir Posted on July 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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We all know that a “sex object” is an old, degrading stereotype of a woman as nothing more than an objectified plaything for randy men. So why would Jessica Valenti—a feminist blogger and social commentator—choose Sex Object as the title of her troubling new memoir?

One reason is that Valenti has endured a lot of bad sex—the just-get-it-over-with sex, the drunk sex, the unsatisfying hand jobs—and she shares every demeaning detail. When it’s not bad sex, it’s the boldest kind of sexual harassment. A stranger on the subway cums on the back of Valenti’s jeans. Another stranger in a car asks for directions and grabs Valenti’s shoulder while shaking his dick at her. Like an index of trolling, back pages of the book list the vile insults strangers on the internet launched from the safe anonymity of their screens.

This all makes for exhausting reading. How is it possible that Valenti could experience one more miserable episode of violation? The answer is that she can, when she goes to bed with another selfish guy who treats her like a sex object and ignores any desires she might have. And on. And on.

And yet, just when you start rolling your eyes and wondering why she keeps getting herself into these situations, you realize that all the repetition actually makes an important point: This dreary and repetitive sex is what life is actually like for lots of women. Valenti doesn’t sugarcoat—she’s not here to make you feel better—because this is a book that isn’t just for her core audience of women.

“I do hope that more men read it,” Valenti tells Mother Jones. “I’ve heard from men, progressive-minded guys, ‘I understood this on a logical level, but I didn’t necessarily understand how unrelenting it all felt,’ which is a big part of the way that sexism impacts our lives. It’s about that cumulative impact; it’s about that no escape from it.”

For Valenti, who has more than 117,000 Twitter followers and writes about modern feminism for the Guardian, the harassment comes 24/7. When asked how she deals with the constant flow of abuse online—the cutting tweets, the hate-filled emails, the comments sections that debate her attractiveness—she laughs. “Xanex, mostly,” she jokes. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

“I’m forever changed by it, I’m fucked up by it, I’m not coping in the most extraordinary way, because I can’t imagine that any person could or would,” she says. “It’s a really strange and terrible thing to deal with.”

The sheer amount of nastiness and vitriol does sometimes make her want to simply quit logging on, Valenti says. But the more serious consequence is how the fear of harassment discourages young writers from diverse backgrounds from contributing online. “I can’t tell them, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, do it anyway, it’s fine.’ But I feel like we’re losing out on this whole generation of writers from marginalized communities because they don’t want to put up with the harassment and threats, and I can’t blame them,” she says. “But it means that the art that’s out in the world, the culture that we’re creating, is limited because of that.””

The good news is that at the same time, the web provides an expansive outlet for the feminist movement. Valenti herself is a co-founder of the blog Feministing, and she’s optimistic about the explosion of women’s personal stories online. “When men write about their personal lives, and especially their sex lives, it’s brave and amazing and an objective tale of a universal human experience, but when women do it, it’s navel-gazing or it’s frivolous or silly or not real writing—not worthy in any way, which I think obviously has a lot to do with misogyny,” she said. “But I think, being an optimist, that it’s turning around a little bit. Online feminism…really started with women’s personal stories—LiveJournals, Tumblrs. That’s very much the heart of what’s happening right now.”

But Sex Object isn’t all hard truths men need to hear. Valenti examines her feelings about motherhood in a gut-wrenchingly honest, complex way. She writes about both of her abortions, her PTSD after a complicated and dangerous labor that resulted in the premature birth of her daughter, and her feelings of guilt as her young daughter wrestled with selective mutism—a childhood anxiety disorder in which her daughter would only speak in certain situations and with select people.

“My daughter is now five, and I continue to be interested in the way becoming a mother also lends itself to feeling dehumanized or objectified in a weird way,” Valenti said. “The cultural expectations around motherhood…feel like you need to be a mother first before you’re a human being. The idea around selflessness is a nice idea, and of course you want to be selfless, but it does sort of indicate this lack of sense of self that I think is troubling.”

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Check Out This Good Read About Bad Sex

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The Marines Are Taking the "Man" out of 19 Job Titles

by BebeHernsheim0 Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Marine Corps will rename 19 job titles to make them gender neutral, as the military works to integrate women into more combat roles.

The word “man” will be cut from many of the titles and replaced with the word “Marine,” a Marine Corps spokeswoman confirmed to Mother Jones, adding that an official announcement would be made Friday. Jobs like “basic infantryman” will now be called “basic infantry Marine.”

Some names will remain the same, a Marine official told the Marine Corps Times, which first reported the title changes Monday. “Names that were not changed, like rifleman, are steeped in Marine Corps history and ethos,” the official said.

But that hasn’t appeased some male soldiers. “On one hand, the name changes from ‘man’ to ‘person’ or whatever they want to call it doesn’t really matter. They could call mortarmen bakers for all I care,” Marine rifleman Sgt. Geoff Heath told the Washington Post. “But on the other, it’s a direct reflection on society’s crybaby political correctness.”

The title changes come after the Pentagon last year announced that the military would open all its combat jobs, including in special operations, to women for the first time. Of all the services, the Marine Corps has been the most resistant to integration, releasing a study that found all-male units performed better than mixed-gender units. But Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the study was “not definitive,” and in January this year Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told the Marine Corps and Navy to review its job titles and descriptions.

Other military branches may not make similar changes. The Air Force and Army do not plan to revise their gender-specific job titles, officials from both branches confirmed to Mother Jones. “It is important to note the suffix ‘man’ itself is really derived from the word ‘human,'” Army spokesman Wayne V. Hall said. “This is why you still see the Air Force use ‘airman’ for all their personnel, or ‘policeman’ or ‘Congressman’ and even ‘woman.'”

Here’s a list of the Marine Corps title changes, via Stars and Stripes.

Old
New
Basic infantryman
Basic infantry Marine
Riverine assault craft crewman
Riverine assault craft Marine
Light-armor vehicle crewman
Light-armor vehicle Marine
Reconnaissance man
Reconnaissance Marine (to include three other recon-related jobs that include the word “man”)
Infantry assaultman
Infantry assault Marine
Basic field artillery man

Basic field artillery Marine

Field artillery fire control man
Field artillery fire control Marine
Field artillery sensor support man
Field artillery sensor support Marine
Fire support Marine
Fire support Marine
Basic engineer, construction and equipment man
Basic engineer, construction and equipment Marine
Basic tank and assault amphibious vehicle crewman
Basic tank and assault amphibious vehicle Marine
M1A1 tank crewman
Armor Marine
Amphibious assault vehicle crewman
Amphibious assault vehicle Marine
Amphibious combat vehicle crewman
Amphibious combat vehicle Marine
Antitank missileman
Antitank missile gunner
Field artillery operations man
Field artillery operations chief

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The Marines Are Taking the "Man" out of 19 Job Titles

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

by LannyIsabel51 Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Do the birds get what they want?” Perdue executive Bruce Stewart-Brown asked. We were surrounded by 20,000 squawking chickens in a vast indoor facility in Maryland. I was in the midst of reporting a Mother Jones deep-dive on the meat industry’s over-use of antibiotics crucial to human medicine, and how Perdue had moved decisively away from that practice.

At the time, Stewart-Brown’s rhetorical question sounded a bit silly, coming from a company that slaughters and packs 650 million chickens per year, making it the nation’s fourth-largest poultry company. Yet as I found during my reporting, Perdue isn’t just any chicken producer. Unlike all of the other industry giants, the company had quietly begun to move away from antibiotics around a decade ago.

Now Perdue has announced an animal welfare program that seems as ambitious as its move away from drugs. The company has committed itself to following the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s “five freedoms” for farm livestock, the most notable of which are the “freedom from discomfort,” “freedom to express (most) normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind,” and “freedom from fear and distress.”

“Our goal is to double the rate of play/activity by our chickens in the next three years,” the company states in a newly released “Commitment to Animal Welfare.” Moreover, acknowledging that modern chickens have been bred to grow rapidly, causing leg injuries and making it very difficult to walk late in their lives, Perdue says it’s considering moving to “breeds of birds that grow slower.”

In concrete terms, the facilities that house Perdue’s birds will eventually be outfitted with windows, giving them access to sunlight, and be less densely stocked, giving the birds more room. The company so far hasn’t released details on how much more space birds will get (the current industry standard is eight-tenths of a square foot per bird). As for the windows, the company plans to install windows in 200 of the 6,000 existing poultry houses that supply it. They’ll be used as a kind of controlled experiment, to “compare bird health and activity to enclosed housing.” If the windows prove effective in increasing activity among the flock, “we will establish annual targets for retrofitting houses with windows,” Perdue states. All new chicken houses will be required to have windows.

New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom got a look at one of the the window-equipped chicken houses, run by an operation that contracts for Perdue:

Sunlight floods the floor at one end of the chicken house here at Ash-O-Ley Acres, and spry little Cornish game hens flap their wings and chase one another. At the other end of the barn, where the windows are covered as part of a compare-and-contrast demonstration, the flock is largely somnolent and slow to move.

In addition to responding to long-simmering animal-welfare complaints about factory-scale farming, Perdue is also openly discussing another highly controversial topic: Big Poultry’s reliance on nominally independent farmers to grow their chickens, under contract terms that largely favor giant processing companies like Perdue. (See my piece on a particularly presumptuous contract term that Perdue quickly nixed when I exposed it.)

Normally, when a big chicken company decides it wants to change something about the enormous barns where its birds are grown, it merely changes the terms of its contracts, forcing farmers to upgrade their facilities or risk losing their market. In this case, Perdue will pick up the cost of retro-fitting the 200 pilot houses, a company spokeswoman told me. As the windows program expands, the company says it will continue to pick up at least part of the cost. “We’ll determine how it will get paid for,” the spokeswoman said, “whether we will pay for it directly or compensate the grower through a premium for upgraded housing or…a cost-share or financing approach.”

And the company’s “Commitment to Animal Welfare” document even includes a pledge to “do a better job listening to farmers and communicating with them.” Rather than set pay solely based on factors like efficiency and output, contracts will include incentives for “care of the birds and welfare performance,” the document states. A Perdue spokeswoman added that the company is consulting with farmers to figure out the best way to compensate them for making the birds’ lives better.

Of course, as with all voluntary corporate initiatives, Perdue sets the terms of the program and controls the information that emerges from it. As Maryn McKenna notes on the National Geographic website, “For most of its initiatives, the company has not disclosed a timeline.” But as I discovered in my reporting, Perdue’s anti-antibiotics effort proved to be the real deal, and it has pulled the bulk of the poultry industry in the same direction. Perhaps its animal-welfare reforms will do the same.

Leah Garces, executive director of Compassion in World Farming, which released a video in 2014 exposing harsh welfare conditions on a Perdue-contracted farm, thinks they just might. “Just as Perdue led the way on antibiotics, they are laying out the inevitable direction of the market,” she said. “I’m confident every poultry company today is thinking hard about steps they also need to take to improve the lives of chickens in order to keep up.”

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

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Watch: What Medical Care is Like Inside a Private Prison

by OrvalMoseley652 Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started a job as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. During his four months on the job, Bauer would witness stabbings, an escape, lockdowns, and an intervention by the state Department of Corrections as the company struggled to maintain control. Read Bauer’s gripping firsthand account here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of a six-part video series produced by Mother Jones senior digital editor James West. In the third episode, a prisoner who lost his legs and fingers to gangrene talks about the lack of medical care in the prison. Bauer talks about the segregation unit and wrestles with the conditions of prisoners on suicide watch.

Also: Watch episodes one and two.

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Watch: What Medical Care is Like Inside a Private Prison

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Facebook’s Ban on Gun Sales is Being Enforced by a Few Dedicated Users

by MarianaWhiddon Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Friends, I need your help,” Greg Evers wrote to his Facebook followers last Wednesday. “Over the last 48 hours as I have taken on Washington and the liberal Obama/Clinton policies of Gun Control I have become the target of a well organized liberal machine.” He implored his supporters, “I need your help combating those who would tear our constitution to shreds.”

Evers, a Republican candidate for Congress from Florida, had just launched the “Homeland Defender Giveaway” on his Facebook campaign page, offering an AR-15 rifle to one randomly chosen resident of his district. The gun, similar to the assault rifle recently used to kill 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, “proudly displays the 2nd amendment sic on the right side of the receiver,” read a press release from the Evers campaign.

Evers didn’t get the response he was expecting. The “well organized liberal machine” he referred to is the disparate collection of individuals who have taken it upon themselves to flood Facebook with reports of suspected gun sales and get the site to take down posts promoting unlicensed firearms transactions. Several of them took issue with Evers’ AR-15 giveaway, seeing it as callous move in the wake of the Orlando massacre.

“I want it to be hard to get a gun. I’m opposed to how easy it is to take out 50 people in a two-minute period. And I’m pissed off at how little our government has done about it,” says Mike Monteiro, a web design director in San Francisco whose Twitter feed has become a repository for his and others’ handiwork in getting groups where gun are sold kicked off of Facebook for violating the site’s rules. He estimates that he and his “army of little miscreants” have gotten at least 400 groups banned.

“We found something simple that we could do,” Monteiro says. “I don’t know how big of an effect it’s having. Probably very fucking little, but it’s at least something.” He is unapologetic about reporting Evers to Facebook. “He was offering a free AR-15,” he notes. “I love that we pissed off some Congressman. I hope we ruined his dinner.”

In January, when Facebook banned private sales of guns and ammunition, it was assumed buying a gun on the site would become significantly more difficult. For years the social network had unintentionally facilitated unregulated weapons sales. (There were some limits. In 2014, Facebook restricted posts discussing firearms sales to users over 18 and warned sellers to abide by state and federal laws.) Now, six months after the ban went into effect, it’s clear that Facebook continues to host a bustling arms marketplace, where everything from handguns to rifles are easy to procure, often without a background check.

A Facebook group flagged for violating the site’s ban on private gun sales

The anti-gun Facebook vigilantes readily recount their scores. Malachi Smith says that he’s gotten 93 groups removed, and has “30+ reports in the queue for review right now. My success rate is over 80%,” he wrote in an email. Chris Tacy has taken 74 groups down. Jough Dempsey claims 18 takedowns, including that of a group with 11,000 members. Some discuss their numbers as if they’re setting exercise records. “I have to stop for the day, but hit pers best, 48,” tweeted John Sibley, who has also written a guide to “chasing guns from Facebook.” Gun violence prevention advocates affiliated with groups like Everytown for Gun Safety have reported thousands more removals.

A few months after it implemented its gun-sale ban, Facebook rolled out a feature that makes it easier for users to report posts or pages that describe “the purchase or sale of drugs, guns or regulated products.” But enforcement of the ban is entirely reliant on user reporting. Monteiro and others recount Facebook telling them that flagged groups had not violated its community standards, only to see that determination reversed as more people reported the same groups. One group called Sell Guns for Cash was not removed after being flagged, nor was another group with posts showing images of firearms with prices on them. “When we found out that Facebook had this policy, we thought it was great. We were going to use it to get rid of this stuff. But it’s frustrating how inconsistently it’s being supported,” says Monteiro.

Overzealous gun-group flaggers sometimes hit the wrong targets. The gun-sale ban only affects sales between individuals, not sales by federally licensed firearms dealers. But Facebook has no way of vetting licensed gun sellers. According to Monteiro, pages for brick-and-mortar gun shops have been taken down wrongfully at times.

Gun-selling Facebook groups have found ways to circumvent the site’s restrictions. In March, Forbes reporter Matt Drange found that some groups were becoming private to avoid scrutiny. Others switched from “closed” to “secret,” a status that’s all but invisible to users not already in the group or invited by current members. Some sellers use codes when listing weapons for sale.

These workarounds may indicate something more significant than loopholes in the site’s policy. Chuck Rossi, Facebook’s director of engineering, has become an advocate for gun groups within the company and has helped reinstate gun groups. As also reported by Drange at Forbes, some of the groups Rossi has helped rescued from removal have continued to be forums for private gun deals. Rossi also became the leader of a secret group of administrators for gun pages called “Admin Contact.” According to Forbes, in February Rossi wrote to the group’s members: “I am 100% laser focused on getting your groups back to you so you have a chance to get them to comply with the new policy. It is my sole freaking purpose in life until it is done.” His efforts have helped many groups get out of what’s known as “Facebook jail.”

In a statement to Mother Jones, a Facebook spokesperson emphasized that “The purchase, sale or trade of firearms, ammunition and explosives between private individuals isn’t allowed on Facebook… When a reported post violates Facebook’s policies, that post will be removed, however the group it appeared in will not necessarily be taken down.”

“I report these sites because I’m really, really, really fucking angry. Why isn’t Facebook policing their backyard?” says one flagger, who wishes to remain anonymous. “Why is it still so easy to get a gun? Why can they sell and swap in the open using dirty loopholes? It was maddening to see people pricing, bargaining, and exchanging weapons in the open. The goal of this was to do something—anything.”

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Facebook’s Ban on Gun Sales is Being Enforced by a Few Dedicated Users

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5 Surprising Animals You Didn’t Realize Were Pollinators

by AllisonPTJ Posted on June 25, 2016

You’ve probablyheard a lot about the important role honey bees play in pollinating flowers, fruits and vegetables. But did you know that bees aren’t the only animals that are busy transferring the pollen that makes it possible for plants to reproduce? Here are five other important creatures that make it possible for our gardens to grow, farms to thrive and Mother Nature to stay happy and healthy.

Longhorn Beetle -Beetles, the largest order of insects in the world, pollinate as they move from flower to flower, where they consume nectar, pollen and flower parts. Though not as important as flies, butterflies, and bees, they still play an important role in pollination, especially in the tropics. With that said, it’s estimated that there are 52 native plant species pollinated by beetles in North America north of Mexico. There are no crops in the U.S. known to be pollinated by beetles except for the nativepaw paw. The long-horned beetle, Cerambycidae, is one of many beetles that help flowers reproduce.

Mexican Long-nosed Bat – A bat is actually a mammal, not an insect or a rodent, and bats generally play an important role pollinating fruit trees and flowers. At sometimes almost four inches long, the Mexican Long-nosed Bat is relatively large compared with most bats found in the U.S. It can be dark gray to “sooty” brown, and itslong muzzle featuresan obvious nose “leaf” at the tip. It has a very long tongue so it can dip three inches deep into a flower to slurp up the nectar. Found in Mexico and Texas, these bats help agave or century plants stay alive.

“They are very strong, highly maneuverable fliers,” reports, Texas Parks and Wildlife, “and like hummingbirds, are able to hover in flight while they feed. A mutual relationship exists, with the bats depending on the plants for food, and the plants benefiting from the bats as pollinators.”

Crested Honeycreeper – This bird,(Palmeria dolei), lives onthe Hawaiian Island of Maui. It is different from other pollinators in that it only pollinates one plant: the one it eats to survive. It’s the `ōhi`a plant, and until recently the plant itself was threatened because it was being overrun by wild pigs. The Fish and Wildlife Service has now protected the crested honeykeeper under the Endangered Species Act, setting aside a 7,500 -acre natural reserve and fencing two thousand acres to keep the pigs out. That’s been important because while the bird once lived on 485 square miles of terrain spread out over both Mauri and Noloka’i, it now lives on only 5 percent of its former Maui territory, and no birds at all remain on Molokai. If you ever get to Maui, you could identify this bird by its series of large white feathers running down its head, just above its bill and its bright orange plumage. Orange and silver accents on the wings and legs make this a beautiful bird.

Miami Blue Butterfly – As you might imagine, this little butterfly lives in south Florida, specifically on a few of the Florida Keys. Though it pollinates flowers, its ability to continue to perform that service is threatened by its very survival. The insects habitat and range are being destroyed by development and population growth, agriculture, and climate change.

“Collection of the butterfly is also a significant threat,” reports the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ”Impacts from increasing threats are likely to result in extinction.”

Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly – You may never have thought of flies as pollinators, but this one is. It’s found in the Delhi Sands area of the “Inland Empire” region of California, from north of Sacramento to Los Angeles. It’s the first and only fly to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Like butterflies, honeybees and other pollinators, the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly feeds on nectar from flowers. Thisfly is important, in part, because it will protect many other species also living in the dunes, notes the Xerces Society, including not only the flowers it pollinates, butthe western meadowlark and the burrowing owl, mammals like the Los Angeles pocket mouse, butterflies and other insects, and numerous reptiles.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has pulled together this list of other pollinators if you want to appreciate how many there are!

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Surprising Animals You Didn’t Realize Were Pollinators

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Watch: What It’s Like to Become a Guard at a Private Prison

by JadaWentworth49 Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started a job as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. During his four months on the job, Bauer would witness stabbings, an escape, lockdowns, and an intervention by the state Department of Corrections as the company struggled to maintain control. Read Bauer’s gripping firsthand account here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of a six-part video series produced by Mother Jones senior digital editor James West. In the first episode, Bauer gets a job with CCA and begins four weeks of training at Winn Correctional Center, which one former guard describes as “hell in a can.” Bauer also explores why a dangerous job that pays $9 an hour is attractive in an area with few employment options.

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Watch: What It’s Like to Become a Guard at a Private Prison

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