Tag Archives: top stories

Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing.

by ShennaMcmullin Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

There is an eerie feel to this grove of lodgepole pines that I can’t quite put my finger on as entomologist Diana Six tromps ahead of me, hatchet in hand, scanning the southwestern Montana woods for her target. But as she digs the blade into a towering trunk, it finally hits me: the smell. There’s no scent of pine needles, no sharp, minty note wafting through the brisk fall air.

Six hacks away hunks of bark until she reveals an inner layer riddled with wormy passageways. “Hey, looky!” she exclaims, poking at a small black form. “Are you dead? Yeah, you’re dead.” She extends her hand, holding a tiny oval, maybe a quarter of an inch long. Scientists often compare this insect to a grain of rice, but Six prefers mouse dropping: “Beetle in one hand, mouse turd in another. You can’t tell them apart.” She turns to the next few trees in search of more traces. Pill-size holes pock their ashen trunks—a sign, along with the missing pine scent, of a forest reeling from an invasion.

These tiny winged beetles have long been culling sickly trees in North American forests. But in recent years, they’ve been working overtime. Prolonged droughts and shorter winters have spurred bark beetles to kill billions of trees in what’s likely the largest forest insect outbreak ever recorded, about 10 times the size of past eruptions. “A doubling would have been remarkable,” Six says. “Ten times screams that something is really going wrong.”

Mountain pine, spruce, piñon ips, and other kinds of bark beetles have chomped 46 million of the country’s 850 million acres of forested land, from the Yukon down the spine of the Rocky Mountains all the way to Mexico. Yellowstone’s grizzly bears have run out of pinecones to eat because of the beetles. Skiers and backpackers have watched their brushy green playgrounds fade as trees fall down, sometimes at a rate of 100,000 trunks a day. Real estate agents have seen home prices plummet from “viewshed contamination” in areas ransacked by the bugs. And the devastation isn’t likely to let up anytime soon. As climate change warms the North American woods, we can expect these bugs to continue to proliferate and thrive in higher elevations—meaning more beetles in the coming century, preying on bigger chunks of the country.

BEETLEMANIA

From 2000 to 2014, bark beetles destroyed large swaths of forests in the American West—and they’re not done yet.

In hopes of staving off complete catastrophe, the United States Forest Service, which oversees 80 percent of the country’s woodlands, has launched a beetle offensive, chopping down trees to prevent future infestations. The USFS believes this strategy reduces trees’ competition for resources, allowing the few that remain to better resist invading bugs. This theory just so happens to also benefit loggers, who are more than willing to help thin the forests. Politicians, too, have jumped on board, often on behalf of the timber industry: More than 50 bills introduced since 2001 in Congress proposed increasing timber harvests in part to help deal with beetle outbreaks.

But Six believes that the blitz on the bugs could backfire in a big way. For starters, she says, cutting trees “quite often removes more trees than the beetles would”—effectively outbeetling the beetles. But more importantly, intriguing evidence suggests that the bugs might be on the forest’s side. Six and other scientists are beginning to wonder: What if the insects that have wrought this devastation actually know more than we do about adapting to a changing climate?

A BUG’S LIFE

An adult mountain pine beetle lays her eggs under the bark. On her way, she disperses fungi that turn the trees’ tissue into food for her babies, eventually killing the tree.

Though they’re often described as pesky invaders, bark beetles have been a key part of conifer ecosystems for ages, ensuring that groves don’t get overcrowded. When a female mountain pine beetle locates a frail tree, she emits a chemical signal to her friends, who swarm to her by the hundreds. Together they chew through the bark until they reach the phloem, a cushy resinous layer between the outer bark and the sapwood that carries sugars through the tree. There, they lay their eggs in tunnels, and eventually a new generation of beetles hatches, grows up, and flies away. But before they do, the mature beetles also spread a special fungus in the center of the trunk. And that’s where things get really interesting.

Six focuses on the “evolutionary marriage” of beetle and fungi at her four-person lab at the University of Montana, where she is the chair of the department of ecosystems and conservation sciences. Structures in bark beetles’ mouths have evolved to carry certain types of fungi that convert the tree’s tissue into nutrients for the bug. The fungi have “figured out how to hail the beetle that will get them to the center of the tree,” Six says. “It’s like getting a taxi.” The fungi leave blue-gray streaks in the trees they kill; “blue-stain pine” has become a specialty product, used to make everything from cabins to coffins to iPod cases.

A healthy tree can usually beat back invading beetles by deploying chemical defenses and flooding them out with sticky resin. But just as dehydration makes humans weaker, heat and drought impede a tree’s ability to fight back—less water means less resin. In some areas of the Rocky Mountain West, the mid-2000s was the driest, hottest stretch in 800 years. From 2000 to 2012, bark beetles killed enough trees to cover the entire state of Colorado. “Insects reflect their environment,” explains renowned entomologist Ken Raffa—they serve as a barometer of vast changes taking place in an ecosystem.

Under the microscope, Diana Six picks up a dead mountain pine beetle in her Missoula lab. Shawn Gust

Typically, beetle swells subside when they either run out of trees or when long, cold winters freeze them off (though some larvae typically survive, since they produce antifreeze that can keep them safe down to 30 below). But in warm weather the bugs thrive. In 2008, a team of biologists at the University of Colorado observed pine beetles flying and attacking trees in June, a month earlier than previously recorded. With warmer springs, the beetle flight season had doubled, meaning they could mature and lay eggs—and then their babies could mature and lay eggs—all within one summer.

That’s not the only big change. Even as the mountain pine beetles run out of lodgepole pines to devour in the United States, in 2011 the insects made their first jump into a new species of tree, the jack pine, in Alberta. “Those trees don’t have evolved defenses,” Six says, “and they’re not fighting back.” The ability to invade a new species means the insects could begin a trek east across Canada’s boreal forest, then head south into the jack, red, and white pines of Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, and on to the woods of the East Coast. Similarly, last year, the reddish-black spruce beetle infested five times as many acres in Colorado as it did in 2009. And in the last decade, scientists spotted the southern pine beetle north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time on record, in New Jersey and later on Long Island. As investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk put it in his 2011 book on the outbreaks, we now belong to the “empire of the beetle.”

In a weird way, all of this is exciting news for Six: She is not only one of the world’s foremost experts in beetle-fungi symbiosis, but proud to be “one of the few people in Montana that thinks bark beetles are cute.” (She’s even brewed her own beer from beetle fungi.) As a child, she filled her bedroom in Upland, California, with jars of insects and her fungus collection. But as a teenager, she got into drugs, quit high school, and started living on the streets. Nine years later, she attended night school, where teachers urged her to become the first in her family to go to college. And when she finally did, she couldn’t get enough: classes in microbiology and integrated pest management led to a master’s degree in veterinary entomology, then a Ph.D. in entomology and mycology and a postdoc in chemical ecology, focused on insect pheromones.

Entomologist Diana Six, who has devoted her career to bark beetles, believes that the bugs might hold clues to saving our forests in the face of climate change. Shawn Gust

Six, 58, has light-green eyes ringed with saffron, and long silvery-blond hair streaming down shoulders toned from fly-fishing and bodybuilding. As several fellow researchers stress to me, she is the rare scientist who’s also a powerful communicator. “I think about what it means to be a tree,” she told a rapt audience at a TEDx talk about global forest die-offs. “Trees can’t walk. Trees can’t run. Trees can’t hide,” she continued, her sonorous voice pausing carefully for emphasis. “And that means, when an enemy like the mountain pine beetle shows up, they have no choice but to stand their ground.”

To a tree hugger, that might seem a grim prognosis: Since trees can’t escape, they’ll all eventually be devoured by insects, until we have no forests left. Especially since, with our current climate projections, we might be headed toward a world in which beetle blooms do not subside easily and instead continue to spread through new terrain.

But Six has a different way of looking at the trees’ plight: as a battle for survival, with the army of beetles as a helper. She found compelling evidence of this after stumbling across the work of Forest Service researcher Constance Millar, with whom she had crossed paths at beetle conferences.

Millar was comparing tree core measurements of limber pines, a slight species found in the eastern Sierras of California that can live to be 1,000 years old. After mountain pine beetles ravaged one of her study sites in the late 1980s, certain trees survived. They were all around the same size and age as the surrounding trees that the beetles tore through, so Millar looked closer at tree ring records and began to suspect that, though they looked identical on the outside, the stand in fact had contained two genetically distinct groups of trees. One group had fared well during the 1800s, when the globe was still in the Little Ice Age and average temperatures were cooler. But this group weakened during the warmer 1900s, and grew more slowly as a result. Meanwhile, the second group seemed better suited for the warmer climate, and started to grow faster.

Pine beetles have increasingly attacked fragile whitebark pine trees, whose cones are an important food source for grizzly bears, Clark’s nutcrackers, red squirrels, and other animals in the Yellowstone area. Maddie Oatman

When beetle populations exploded in the 1980s, this second group mounted a much more successful battle against the bugs. After surviving the epidemic, this group of trees “ratcheted forward rapidly,” Millar explains. When an outbreak flared up in the mid-2000s, the bugs failed to infiltrate any of the survivor trees in the stand. The beetles had helped pare down the trees that had adapted to the Little Ice Age, leaving behind the ones better suited to hotter weather. Millar found similar patterns in whitebark pines and thinks it’s possible that this type of beetle-assisted natural selection is going on in different types of trees all over the country.

When Six read Millar’s studies, she was floored. Was it possible, she wondered, that we’ve been going about beetle management all wrong? “It just hit me,” she says. “There is something amazing happening here.”

Last year, Six and Eric Biber, a University of California-Berkeley law professor, published a provocative review paper in the journal Forests that challenged the Forest Service’s beetle-busting strategies. After scrutinizing every study about beetle control that they could get their hands on, they concluded that “even after millions of dollars and massive efforts, suppression…has never effectively been achieved, and, at best, the rate of mortality of trees was reduced only marginally.”

Six points to a stand of lodgepoles in the University of Montana’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest. In the early 2000s, school foresters preened the trees, spacing them out at even distances, and hung signs to note how this would prevent beetle outbreaks. This “prethinned” block was “the pride and joy of the experimental forest,” Six remembers. But that stand was the first to get hit by encroaching pine beetles, which took out every last tree. She approached the university forest managers. “I said, ‘Boy, you need to document that,'” Six says. “They didn’t. They just cut it down. Now there’s just a field of stumps.”

Six and Biber’s paper came as a direct affront to some Forest Service researchers, one of whom told me that he believes changing forest structure through thinning is the only long-term solution to the beetle problem. Politicians tend to agree—and beetle suppression sometimes serves as a convenient excuse: “It is perhaps no accident that the beetle treatments most aggressively pushed for in the political landscape allow for logging activities that provide revenue and jobs for the commercial timber industry,” Six and Biber wrote in the Forests review.

Take the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act, proposed in 2013 by then-Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and championed by then-Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). The bill sought to designate “Revenue Areas” in every national forest where, to help address insect infestations, loggers would be required to clear a certain number of trees every year. Loggers could gain access to roadless areas, wilderness study areas, and other conservation sites, and once designated, their acreage could never be reduced. The zones would also be excluded from the standard environmental-review process.

Six and other scientists vehemently opposed these massive timber harvests—as did environmental advocates like the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife, the latter warning that the harvests would take logging to “unprecedented and unsustainable levels.” The bill passed the House but died in the Senate last year. But Daines, now a senator and one of 2014’s top 10 recipients of timber money, vows to renew the effort so as to “revitalize Montana’s timber industry” and “protect the environment for future generations.”

This summer, Six plans to start examining the genes of “supertrees”—those that survive beetle onslaughts—in stands of whitebarks in Montana’s Big Hole Valley. Her findings could help inform a new kind of forest management guided by a deeper understanding of tree genes—one that beetles have had for millennia.

If we pay close enough attention, someday we may be able to learn how to think like they do. University of California-Davis plant sciences professor David Neale champions a new discipline called “landscape genomics.” At his lab in Davis, Neale operates a machine that grinds up a tree’s needles and spits out its DNA code. This technology is already being used for fruit tree breeding and planting, but Neale says it could one day be used in wild forests. “As a person, you can take your DNA and have it analyzed, and they can tell you your relative risk to some disease,” Neale says. “I’m proposing to do the same thing with a tree: I can estimate the relative risk to a change in temperature, change in moisture, introduction to a pathogen.”

Signs of beetle invasion on a whitebark pine tree in Montana’s Big Hole Valley Maddie Oatman

Right now, foresters prune woodlands based on the size of trees’ trunks and density of their stands. If we knew more about trees’ genetic differences, Neale says, “maybe we would thin the ones that have the highest relative risks.” This application is still years off, but Neale has already assembled a group of Forest Service officials who want to learn more about landscape genomics.

Six, meanwhile, places her faith in the beetles. Whereas traditional foresters worry that failing to step in now could destroy America’s forests, Six points to nature’s resilience. Asked at TEDx how she wants to change the world, she responded, “I don’t want to change the world. We have changed the world to a point that it is barely recognizable. I think it’s time to stop thinking change and try to hold on to what beauty and function remains.”

Diana Six in her lab at the University of Montana Shawn Gust

This story was supported by a Middlebury College Fellowship in Environmental Journalism.

From: 

Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bark Beetles Are Decimating Our Forests. That Might Actually Be a Good Thing.

The Government Is Finally Doing Something to End the Rape-Kit Backlog

by AudreaMoralez Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Across the country, an estimated 400,000 rape kits—the DNA swabs, hair, photographs, and detailed information gathered from victims of sexual assault and used as evidence for the prosecution to convict rapists—have never been tested. Testing kits can be expensive, and in many jurisdictions, a lack of funds has resulted in kits being consigned to dusty shelves, stored in abandoned police warehouses, or stowed away in forensic labs—sometimes for years. As a result, survivors may never see their rapists prosecuted, and repeat offenders continue to commit crimes.

But now a new, $41 million Department of Justice program could finally help localities end this backlog. The money from Congress “goes a long way towards solving the problem,” says Linda Fairstein, a former sex crimes prosecutor who serves on the board of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit established by Law and Order:SVU actress Mariska Harigtay that does research and advocacy work on the rape-kit backlog.

Last week, the Department of Justice began accepting applications from states, counties, and municipalities that want to use the federal dollars to tackle their rape kit backlogs. Officials in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, and Houston tell Mother Jones that they’re planning on applying for some of the funds. “The grant shows an investment on all levels, national to local,” says Doug McGowen, a coordinator in the sexual assault response unit in Memphis, Tennessee.

Continue Reading »

View this article: 

The Government Is Finally Doing Something to End the Rape-Kit Backlog

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Government Is Finally Doing Something to End the Rape-Kit Backlog

Obama Just Officially Decided White House Emails Aren’t Subject to the Freedom of Information Act

by BradleyNigg Posted on March 17, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Civil liberties advocates are adding another strike to the Obama administration’s record on transparency: on Monday, the White House announced that it is officially ending the Freedom of Information Act obligations of its Office of Administration. That office provides broad administrative support to the White House—including the archiving of emails—and had been subject to FOIA for much of its nearly four-decade history.

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration decided that its OA would reject any FOIA requests, freeing it from the burden to release emails regarding any number of Bush-era scandals. When President Obama took office in 2009, transparency advocates were hopeful that he’d strike down the Bush policy—especially after he claimed transparency would be a “touchstone” of his presidency. In a letter that year, advocates from dozens of organizations urged Obama to restore transparency to the OA.

He never did, and Monday’s move from the White House makes the long-standing policy official. Coincidentally, March 16th was Freedom of Information Day, and this week marks the annual Sunshine Week, which focuses on open government.

View this article: 

Obama Just Officially Decided White House Emails Aren’t Subject to the Freedom of Information Act

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama Just Officially Decided White House Emails Aren’t Subject to the Freedom of Information Act

This Man Is Missing a Chunk of His Brain. The Missouri Supreme Court Says It’s Okay to Execute Him.

by XiomaraElisha Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Cecil Clayton, a mentally ill Missouri man facing execution on Tuesday, was denied a crucial avenue to clemency this weekend: The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Clayton is competent to be executed. But he’s missing one-fifth of his frontal lobe.

Clayton, 74, was sentenced to death in 1997 for murdering a police officer. Twenty-five years before that, he suffered a horrific accident that caused the removal of significant parts of his brain, transforming his brain chemistry and personality. His lawyers are aiming to secure him a stay of execution and a hearing to evaluate his competency to be executed, but Missouri law makes it highly difficult to do so after the trial.

In a 4-3 decision, the state’s highest court found that Clayton’s lawyers had not presented a sufficiently compelling case for the state to delay his execution and hold a hearing to evaluate his competency. The majority argued that though Clayton suffers from debilitating dementia, paranoia, schizophrenia, and a host of other conditions, “there is no evidence that he is not capable of understanding ‘matters in extenuation, arguments for executive clemency, or reasons why the sentence should not be carried out.'”

In their dissent, the three judges in the minority wrote that Clayton’s lawyers presented reasonable grounds that his “mental condition has deteriorated and he is intellectually disabled.” They noted that he is “incompetent to be executed and…is entitled to a hearing at which his competence will be determined.” And they contended that the “majority’s decision to proceed with the execution at this time and in these circumstances violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”

A few options remain for Clayton. On Monday, Clayton’s lawyers filed a petition to the US Supreme Court to stay the execution. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D) also can stay the execution and order a competency hearing. Clayton is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection—a method his attorneys claim could cause him a “prolonged and excruciating” death—at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday.

See original article here – 

This Man Is Missing a Chunk of His Brain. The Missouri Supreme Court Says It’s Okay to Execute Him.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Man Is Missing a Chunk of His Brain. The Missouri Supreme Court Says It’s Okay to Execute Him.

What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

by KittyU90zfgqpe Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

On March 20, Europe will experience a total solar eclipse for a few hours in the morning. The last time an eclipse of this scale happened in Europe was in 1999. Back then, Germany got less than 1 percent of its power from solar energy. Today, Germany is the world’s most solar-dependent country, drawing nearly 7 percent of its electricity from the sun. So when the passing moon blots out the sun, will the country’s lights go out too?

Over the last couple months, that question has gotten plenty of attention in the German media. In September, Der Spiegel reported that some power companies were afraid the eclipse would leave the power grid “dangerously unstable.” In February, the business weekly Wirtschafts Woche warned that factories could suddenly lose power if electric supply doesn’t keep pace with demand.

Still, the view among most energy experts is that the eclipse will come and go with no noticeable effect for consumers. That’s because the country’s utility companies have spent months preparing for what is essentially an unprecedented test of the futuristic German grid, which is a model for clean energy advocates in the United States.

“Some of the hype ahead of the eclipse served to focus minds,” said Andreas Kramer, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam. Power companies “relish the upcoming opportunity to show how they can handle that challenge professionally.”

So what’s the big deal, exactly? The sun goes down every night, of course, and Germany is quite accustomed to cloudy days (it gets about as much sunshine as Alaska). The difference with a solar eclipse is the speed at which sunlight will disappear from, and then return to, the power system. All electric grids operate on the fundamental principle that supply and demand must always be in perfect equilibrium, second-by-second. That dynamic becomes complicated when so much of your power comes from a source like solar, over which grid operators have zero control. And it’s especially tricky when the fluctuation is so rapid and extreme.

Typically, Germans can rely on coal-fired power plants to pick up the slack at night, when power demand is relatively low anyway. But those can take many hours to fire up, and the eclipse is expected to make solar output dip nearly three times faster than normal, according to a recent analysis by clean energy market research firm Opower.

“It’s fair to say that this is the most dramatic intersection ever between a solar eclipse and solar energy,” Opower analyst Barry Fischer said.

Generally speaking, a byproduct of the clean energy revolution is an increasing need to replace the old grid model—which relied almost exclusively on a small number of big, inflexible power plants—with a highly flexible suite of interconnected options. So the eclipse is a chance to test just how responsive and adaptive Germany’s new grid can be. The outcome will be a valuable lesson for US grid managers who are looking to a much more solar-heavy future.

Take a look at the bite the eclipse will take out of Germany’s solar production, according to Opower:

Opower

The exact change will depend the weather that day; if it’s already cloudy, the drop will be less drastic. (The current forecast for Munich—which is in Bavaria, the province with the most solar—is partly cloudy on that day.)

The temporary hole left by the eclipse will be filled by natural gas plants, which fire up relatively quickly, and possibly by the release of extra hydropower. And utilities have the option of communicating directly with heavy power-users—big manufacturing facilities, for instance—and asking them to slow down production for an hour to ease the burden. It’s a bit like an orchestra conductor calling on an array of instruments in real time to keep up a steady flow of music.

Moreover, Kramer pointed out that the eclipse won’t happen all at once; it’s not like flipping a switch. As the moon’s shadow moves across the country, the impact on solar will be phased in and out geographically.

A final option is energy storage, where solar power from the previous day could be kept in giant batteries and released during the eclipse. Utility-scale storage is still in its infancy, and it won’t be on the table next week. But a spokesperson for Germany’s solar energy trade association said that solution could be up and running in time for the next major eclipse…in 2048.

View original post here:  

What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

How a Confused Mom Drove Through a White House Checkpoint and Ended Up Dead

by Janelle32J Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

By Jennifer Gonnerman | Thurs Mar. 11, 2015 03:00 PM ET

At 2:13 p.m. on October 3, 2013—10 months before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, nine months before Eric Garner was choked in Staten Island—a 34-year-old African American woman drove into a checkpoint in Washington, DC. Her car, a Nissan Infiniti, had Connecticut license plates; her one-year-old daughter sat in the back. Maybe the driver knew this checkpoint leads to the White House. Or maybe not. She did soon appear to realize, however, that she was somewhere that she did not belong: Secret Service officers began hollering at her—”Whoa! Whoa!”—and she turned her car around. When she attempted to drive out of the checkpoint area, an off-duty Secret Service officer placed a section of metal fencing in front of her, even as he held on to what appeared to be a cooler and a plastic bag. She pressed on the gas, knocking the officer and barricade to the ground, and zoomed down Pennsylvania Avenue.

A Secret Service officer blocks Miriam Carey’s car with a metal fence. Photo: US Attorney General

There was less traffic than usual this afternoon; the federal government had shut down after Congress had failed to approve a budget on time. Despite the relative quiet, a sense of unease pervaded the capital: 17 days earlier, a former Navy reservist had killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. Maybe the lingering memory of this mass murder helps explain what happened next. Maybe not. Either way, the driver was now “weaving through traffic and ignoring red lights,” according to a later government account, with Secret Service in hot pursuit. Soon she arrived on the west side of the US Capitol, where she drove the wrong way around Garfield Circle “almost hitting another vehicle head-on.”

She stopped next to a curb, and six officers on foot surrounded her Infiniti. Guns drawn, they yanked on the doors, demanding she step out. Instead, she put the car in reverse, slammed into a police cruiser behind her, then lurched forward onto a sidewalk, forcing officers to scatter. Three officers—two from the Secret Service, one from the Capitol Police—fired eight rounds at her. But she kept going, careening down First Street NW, turning right on Constitution Avenue, police cruisers tailing her, lights spinning and sirens screaming.

Soon she encountered a raised barrier. With nowhere else to go, she pulled the steering wheel to the left, rode onto a grassy median, and plowed into a parked car. Then she shifted into reverse, forcing a Capitol police officer to dart out of the way. That officer and a Secret Service officer each fired nine rounds at the Infiniti. Finally the vehicle stopped, its tires atop the median. The driver was taken to a hospital; her baby was somehow unharmed.

A damaged Capitol Hill police car is surrounded by crime scene tape after a collision on October 3, 2013.* Evan Vucci/AP

Only seven minutes had elapsed from the moment the car chase began until it ended, and throughout the rest of the day, CNN broadcast footage of it over and over. Within hours, the whole country knew the driver’s name. Hundreds of law enforcement officers raced to her condo in Connecticut, with hazmat suits, bomb-sniffing dogs, body armor, assault weapons, and a bomb-detecting robot. Reports of “shots fired” had sent Capitol Hill into a frenzy, sparking a temporary lockdown, and terrifying politicians and staffers alike. At 4:38 p.m., Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Minority Whip, stood up on the floor of the House to express “our gratitude to the Capitol Police.” Members of Congress rose from their seats to applaud, giving the officers a 35-second standing ovation.

Ninety minutes earlier, at a hospital nearby, a doctor had declared the Infiniti’s driver dead.

At first, October 3, 2013, looked like it was going to be a slow-news day. Senate and House leaders were still bickering about who was to blame for the government shutdown, now three days old. Samantha Power, then the newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on the Today Show to talk about, as the tagline read, “balancing diplomats and diapers.” The trial of a lawsuit brought by Michael Jackson’s family had just ended, with a jury deciding that the concert promoter (which had hired Dr. Conrad Murray) was not responsible for the singer’s death. And then, at 2:30 p.m., a story pushed the cable TV networks into overdrive.

“Gunshots have been reported on Capitol Hill,” Wolf Blitzer told CNN’s viewers. “There are at least two dozen police vehicles and multiple emergency response vehicles arriving on the scene…This situation is unfolding even as we speak…We’re here on Capitol Hill ourselves, and we can hear the sirens going off…This is a serious situation, clearly, and we have no clue as to what exactly, what exactly happened.” A witness reported that he could make out “the sulfur smell of gunshots.” Blitzer described it as “an extremely tense situation.”

Soon one CNN correspondent after another filled the screen. “This is early information. As we know, sometimes early information is not correct,” Jake Tapper said, then reported that “gunfire was exchanged.” In fact, no gunfire was exchanged; the Infiniti driver did not have a gun. Tapper also said that “one officer was injured at the Capitol.” This was true: A Capitol Police officer had been injured, though not by gunshots or because he was hit by a car; rather, he had driven into a concrete barrier during the chase and crumpled his own cruiser.

Shortly after 4 p.m., a clearer picture emerged. “It basically looked like a car chase that went really bad,” said Evan Perez, who covers the Justice Department for CNN. “And it appears that none of the shots were fired by any suspect.”

Even after these revelations, after it was confirmed that the driver was not a terrorist and had not been armed, CNN did not dial down the fear and panic. Instead, many of its on-air personalities continued to play to their viewers’ anxiety—and applaud the actions of the police. Dana Bash, CNN’s chief congressional correspondent, told viewers that the Capitol Police “got a standing ovation on the House floor, and they deserved that and much, much more.”

Carey did not try to “ram” through any White House gate or White House barrier. The only barrier she banged into was the metal barricade that an off-duty Secret Service officer placed in front of her car—not to stop her from getting close to the White House, but to prevent her from leaving the checkpoint area.

Eight and a half hours of coverage culminated at 11 p.m. with a “CNN Special” titled Capitol Scare. Tapper filled viewers in on the “frantic car chase” that “left lawmakers on lockdown” and the “Capitol police officer who was hurt while trying to keep others safe.”

Some 1,300 miles away, in a very different sort of newsroom in Texas, another media personality had a completely different take on the events of the afternoon. Two hours after the car chase ended, Alex Jones, America’s best-known conspiracy theorist, stood in front of a video camera and delivered a six-minute rant: “A woman drove around a roundabout not knowing how to get out of there, so they killed her! And that’s what they do in America now…This is a crazy police state, with a system where they’re power-mad and out of control…It is insane…It’s just total mental illness.” He pivoted to face a flat-screen behind him, where CNN showed footage of the chase. “There they are, breathlessly just hyperventilating over the fear, and the great job they did killing the woman with the kid in the car…This is really making me sick…I’m actually sad for the dead lady….This is nuts. She’s dead, and they’re up there talking about what heroes they are.”

In the late afternoon of October 3, 2013, Valarie Carey was at her apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, getting ready to go out for the night, when her cellphone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, so she let the call go straight to voicemail. Soon the same thing happened again. And again. She ignored the calls, until she saw one with a Connecticut area code—her sister lived there; maybe it was her?—and she picked it up. A man on the other end of the line identified himself as a reporter. As she recalls, he told her: “Turn your TV to CNN.”

That’s how she found out that her sister Miriam, a dental hygienist and mother of one, had been in a car chase near the Capitol. Staring at the screen, Valarie, who’s a former NYPD police officer, thought the car looked like her sister’s. The baby who’d been removed from the backseat had her face blurred to conceal her identity, but Valarie saw enough to think the girl resembled her niece. What was going on? The whole thing made zero sense: Her sister and niece lived in Stamford, Connecticut. What were they doing in DC?

“I can’t talk to you right now,” she told the reporter, and hung up.

As she flipped back and forth between stations, trying to get more information, her phone kept buzzing.

Photo courtesy Valarie Carey

“Call me. It’s about Miriam,” somebody texted her at 5:17 p.m.

“Who ARE you?” she wrote back.

“I’m a reporter with abc news. Do you have a minute?”

“No I do not.”

At 6 p.m., in Washington, DC, Cathy Lanier, the chief of the DC police, held a press conference. When asked the name of the woman driving the Infiniti, she refused to reveal it. (“We would make next-of-kin notification before we released that information,” she said.) By then, however, Valarie’s cellphone was already blowing up. Throughout the evening, reporters kept texting her, trying to confirm that the driver of the Infiniti was definitely her sister.

“Hey Val! What did you find out. This is david in new haven.”

“Have cops reached out to you to tell u it was Miriam. We want to respect your family and don’t want to report anything until police speak with you. Please let me know.”

“Can you confirm that you’re Marian’s sister? We haven’t reported her name yet on CNN.”

Reporters had good reason to be extra cautious about publicly identifying the driver. Two weeks earlier, CBS and NBC had mistakenly named the wrong guy on Twitter as the mass murderer in the Navy Yard shootings. From what Valarie could see on the television, switching from station to station, it seemed her sister was dead. But how could she be sure? No law enforcement official had called to notify her of her sister’s death—or to tell her anything at all.

At 6:43 p.m., she wrote back to the ABC reporter who kept sending text messages: “So are you saying my sister is dead?”

“Police said the suspect is dead,” he wrote, “we want to make sure it’s Miriam.”

Meanwhile, three miles across Brooklyn, Idella Carey, 68, was babysitting one of her granddaughters inside her apartment when she got a call from a reporter about her daughter Miriam. Soon Idella’s telephone was ringing nonstop, and she could hear a swarm of strangers outside her front door. Terrified, she retreated to a bedroom and huddled there with her granddaughter. Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Amy Carey-Jones, another of Miriam’s sisters, had run out of power on her cellphone; as soon as she plugged it in, it began ringing too. The first call came from a reporter, who, she recalls, told her: “Turn on the TV.”

Miriam at age 7. Photo courtesy Valarie Carey

The Pink Houses—a housing project in one of the poorest parts of Brooklyn—popped up in the news last November after an NYPD officer killed a young man there by firing his gun inside a darkened stairwell. Three decades earlier, the Pink Houses were Miriam Carey’s home. Her mother, Idella, raised five daughters there; Miriam was the fourth. After high school, Miriam enrolled in a dental-hygienist program at a community college in the Bronx, then went on to Brooklyn College. Photos from the early 2000s show Miriam with her older sisters Amy and Valarie, now all adults, out together at night, each wearing a stylish outfit and radiant grin.

One especially memorable party, a Kwanzaa celebration, took place at Valarie’s apartment near the end of 2005. Valarie served champagne and apple martinis, and laid out a book for guests to record their resolutions. In careful, slanted print, Miriam wrote:

Miriam at age 11. Photo courtesy Valarie Carey

Goals 2006

Complete spring semester at Brooklyn College

Buy a car

Better money management

Take anesthesia course at NYU in March

Go on a vacation

She finished her degree—a bachelor’s in science—in 2007, and before long moved to Stamford, Connecticut, where she bought her own condo, decorating it with framed copies of her diplomas. Her apartment, 1-C, was located on the first floor of an aging brick building in a complex called Woodside Green. A dental practice in Hamden later hired her, announcing in its newsletter: “We are excited to have Miriam!” Finding a decent guy proved harder. “I need to start doing reference and back ground checks on men lol,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “its 2010 and the BS is getting tired.”

By 2011, however, she had found a boyfriend, and in early 2012, she discovered that she was pregnant. One week after her 33rd birthday on August 12, 2012, she gave birth to a girl. Soon pictures of the baby started popping up on her Facebook page. “She was ecstatic about her daughter because she had waited so many years,” says Melony Nunez, a childhood friend. “She was crazy about the baby, absolutely crazy about her.”

Miriam (left) with sisters Amy (center) and Valarie at a New Year’s Eve party in 2007. Photo courtesy Valarie Carey

Before long, however, things began to go awry. Shortly after 9 p.m. on November 29, Miriam called the Stamford Police. “I have some people prowling outside of my window,” she said. “They’ve been prowling outside of my window for all day.”

The 911 operator said, “They’re what outside your window? Loitering?”

“Loitering and actually trying to videotape me though my window.”

The operator asked, “Why are they trying to videotape you?”

“Because they’ve been stalking me for the past several months.”

“And why are they stalking you?”

“I don’t know. I mean they have special interests and items…”

The operator sent officers to her condo, but they found nobody loitering or videotaping or stalking. The call was classified as an EDP or “Emotionally Disturbed Person.”

Eleven days later, Miriam’s boyfriend called 911 from her home and told the police that they “need to take her somewhere to get help.” When officers arrived, she told the cops that she wanted her boyfriend out of her apartment. When an officer asked her why, she said “it was because Stamford and the state of Connecticut is on a security lock down,” an officer later wrote in a report. “She stated that President Obama put Stamford in lock down after speaking to her because she is the Prophet of Stamford. She further stated that President Obama had put her residence under electronic surveillance and that it was being fed live to all the national news outlets.”

In the hours after her death, reporters raced to uncover every detail about Miriam’s life, tracking down relatives, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, former employers, neighbors of her sister, neighbors of her mother, a neighbor of her boyfriend. The public learned all sorts of details, relevant or not: The tires on her Infiniti had been stolen several months earlier; she had once been fired from a dental-hygienist job; her condo had cost almost $250,000; discharge papers from a 2012 mental-health evaluation were found in her home. The same questions hung over every news story: Why had she driven with her baby to DC? And why had she turned into a checkpoint that leads to the White House? Had she been trying to target the president?

The day after her death, her sister Amy told reporters that Miriam had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis” after the birth of her daughter. This condition is extremely rare, affecting only 1 or 2 out of every 1,000 women who give birth, and it’s considered temporary as long as it’s treated. Symptoms include delusions, paranoia, hyperactivity, hallucinations. Miriam had been “very compliant with her medication,” her sister Amy said; she had “worked very closely with her doctor to taper off” and was not “walking around with delusions.” Indeed, one day before the car chase, she had gone to her job at a dental office and seemed fine. Whether or not she was delusional when she drove to DC, nobody seemed to know for certain.

Her sister Amy told reporters that Miriam had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis.” One day before the car chase, she had gone to her job at a dental office and seemed fine. Whether or not she was delusional when she drove to DC, nobody seemed to know for certain.

As quickly as Miriam popped onto the radar of the national media, she disappeared. Calls to her family members stopped; her name dropped out of the papers; reporters moved on to the next tragedy. Despite her sisters’ efforts to raise questions about her death—was it totally necessary to gun her down? Had there really been no other options?—there was virtually no debate in the mainstream media about whether her shooting was justified. As Talking Points Memo put it: “If you try to ram through the White House security barrier with a car, I think there’s little question the Secret Service immediately goes into attempted assassination, car bomb mode and proceeds accordingly. If you flee toward the US Capitol and resist arrest, I think you’ve probably signed your death warrant unless you very clearly surrender.”

The notion that Miriam Carey tried to “ram through the White House security barrier” ran through virtually all the coverage of her car chase, including many headlines:

“Attempt to Ram White House Gate Ends With Conn. Woman Dead.“

“Woman Who Tried to Ram Car Through White House Barrier Had Delusions About President Obama.“

“Woman Killed After Trying to Ram White House Barrier Buried in N.Y.“

The only problem with these stories was that they weren’t quite true: Carey did not try to “ram” through any White House gate or White House barrier. The only barrier she banged into was the metal barricade that an off-duty Secret Service officer placed in front of her car—not to stop her from getting close to the White House, but to prevent her from leaving the checkpoint area. This distinction did not get made in the mainstream media, however, before most reporters had moved on. And her case didn’t receive scrutiny even after the Secret Service found itself embroiled in scandal last fall. (An exception was this fine piece by the Washington Post’s David Montgomery.) Nor did it receive much attention yesterday, when it was revealed that on March 4th two Secret Service agents drove their own government-issued car into a White House barricade allegedly after a night of drinking.

Also Read: What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?

After Miriam’s death, the progressive voices one might have expected to take up her cause—Al Sharpton, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus—remained silent. And in a strange reversal, media outlets on the opposite end of the political spectrum embraced her: conservative, libertarian, conspiracy-minded. Alex Jones’s rage in the hours after her shooting was shared by the American Spectator, which soon ran a piece with the headline: “Why Is This Not a National Tragedy? A troubled young mother is shot dead and our ruling class applauds.” The media outlet that pursued Miriam’s story with the most zeal was WorldNetDaily (WND), a conservative news site, which published more than 50 pieces about her.

Perhaps it is inevitable that any tragedy that grabs the attention of the national media will eventually spawn a hundred conspiracy theories, but there was something about Carey’s story—the media mishaps, the fact that even her family did not know why she was in DC, the reports of her having delusions about the president—that became catnip for a certain sort of internet junkie. On blogs, in homemade YouTube videos, in the comment sections of news sites, myriad theories popped up to explain why she had driven into a White House checkpoint: She got lost and made a wrong turn; she had to get a message to Obama; she was mad about the government shutdown; she was mad about Obamacare; she was a “targeted individual” with her mind controlled by the government; her car was remote controlled; she had cleaned Obama’s teeth in the past and knew him. And then there was the inevitable claim that the whole event was a “false flag,” intended to distract the public from some other, more nefarious government activity occurring at the same time. But perhaps the most creative theory was the one pushed by James David Manning, a Harlem pastor with a deep dislike of Obama. His theory: Someone had Miriam “assassinated” so that nobody would discover the truth about her daughter in the backseat—that the baby was “Obama’s love child.”

One afternoon last August, Miriam’s mother and sisters Valarie and Amy gathered in Valarie’s apartment, and they invited me to join them. Ten months had passed since Miriam’s death; in Valarie’s foyer, a shrine to Miriam greeted visitors with the smell of lilies. I sat down in the living room, where a framed portrait of President Obama hung near the entrance to the kitchen. Soon the family’s lawyer, Eric Sanders, a former NYPD officer and Valarie’s friend, showed up too. (Sanders has filed a claim—the precursor to a lawsuit—on the family’s behalf against the federal government, the Secret Service, and the Capitol Police.) Valarie offered glasses of ginger ale and set out some mixed nuts. The mood was friendly, but wary too; the family did not seem especially eager to talk to another reporter, but they did have a few things they wanted to say.

As it happened, on this same day at a church in St. Louis, thousands of people were gathering for the funeral of 18-year-old Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer had sparked two weeks of angry protests. The fact that Eric Holder, the US attorney general, had already traveled to Missouri and met with Brown’s parents had not gone unnoticed. “I just find it interesting that nobody in Washington has commented on Miriam,” Valarie says. “But you can leave from your capital and travel to a location where a young man was shot. These are the people who are there to protect the capitol—the Capitol Police, the Secret Service—and you don’t hear any comment from President Obama. You don’t hear any comment from Eric Holder. And this woman was unarmed, she was a law-abiding citizen, she was a professional.”

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1686350-miriam-carey-amended-legal-claim.js”, width: 300, height: 400, sidebar: false, container: “#DV-viewer-1686350-miriam-carey-amended-legal-claim” ); Miriam Carey’s Amended Legal Claim (PDF)
Miriam Carey’s Amended Legal Claim (Text)

Read the Carey family’s legal claim.

Miriam Carey’s death certificate lists the manner of death as “homicide,” but her family has yet to receive a full account of exactly what occurred. In the absence of answers, Valarie and Sanders have come up with their own theory (as outlined in the family’s legal claim): Miriam turned into the White House checkpoint by mistake; an off-duty Secret Service officer who happened to be there overreacted, grabbed a metal barricade, and “threw himself in front of her vehicle”; she panicked and tried to drive around the officer to escape; there wasn’t enough room, so she bumped into him. The family’s legal claim refers to this off-duty officer as “an unidentified aggressive Caucasian Male,” and posits that once Miriam banged into him with her car, he became “completely agitated,” jumped into a car, and the chase began. (Footage does show an officer at the Capitol four minutes later who appears to match the description of the one who blocked her car at the checkpoint; the Secret Service has released no details about any personnel involved in the incident.)

A tourist from Oregon who saw Miriam’s Infiniti enter the White House checkpoint did later tell a reporter that “the Secret Service guy was just having a cow,” that he was “yelling at her and banging on the car.” A surveillance photo, released by the US Attorney in DC, shows Miriam’s Infiniti knocking into the off-duty officer, in his shorts and holding a cooler, as he jams the metal barricade into her car. Maybe Miriam didn’t realize he was a cop, notes Valerie. “His actions were very aggressive,” she says. “Where in your police training does it state to take a metal barricade and block a moving vehicle? I’m sure it doesn’t.” Analyzing the car-chase video, Valarie says, “What I saw was that my sister was afraid, and she was trying to get away, because there was something in her mind that that guy said to her that incited her to flee.”

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1686389-the-autopsy-report-of-miriam-iris-carey.js”, width: 300, height: 400, sidebar: false, container: “#DV-viewer-1686389-the-autopsy-report-of-miriam-iris-carey” ); The Autopsy Report of Miriam Iris Carey (PDF)
The Autopsy Report of Miriam Iris Carey (Text)

Read Miriam Carey’s autopsy report.

As devastating as Miriam’s death had been, in some ways the months that followed were even more upsetting. The family says it never received official notification of her death. No letter explaining what happened, no condolence note from any elected official in Washington. When Miriam’s autopsy report was made public last April, her family learned that she had been shot once in the arm, once in the head, and three times in the back.

Last July, nine months after her death, the US Attorney’s Office in DC and the Metropolitan Police Department finally announced that they had finished reviewing her shooting, only to conclude there was not enough evidence to bring charges against the officers. This was not surprising; proving that officers used excessive force and “willfully deprived an individual of a constitutional right” is extremely difficult. But the news still stung. “When an injustice is committed against you or your family,” Valarie wrote on Twitter that day, “it cuts DEEP and sharp like a hot knife.”

Of all the Carey family members, Valarie spends the most time on the internet, tracking everything that anyone is saying about her sister. In the days after Miriam’s death, Valarie says, strangers sent her messages through Facebook and Twitter along the lines of: “I have information about your sister. She was being mind-controlled. I’m being mind-controlled, too.” One woman in California even emailed a packet of mind-control information to the family, addressed to the funeral home. When I ask to see it, Valarie disappears into the back of her apartment, then returns with a thick envelope.

In the months that followed, when protesters took to the streets to rally on behalf of people killed by the police—Eric Garner and Michael Brown and others—Miriam’s name did not show up on their posters.

She pulls out a stack of papers and spreads them on the sofa. One page shows the results of a Google search for “GOVT MIND CONTROL TECHNOLOGY.” Another is a collage made with a photocopier, which features a picture of Miriam, a photo of officers aiming their guns at her car, and hand-scrawled messages, like: “Miriam Carey was not crazy. She was under a microwave attack.” The envelope also includes one highly unusual condolence note: “IN MEMORIES OF MIRIAM CAREY FROM THE (TI) TARGETED INDIVIDUAL COMMUNITY,” it states. “WE ARE HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND LEADERS WHO FIGHTS AGAINST ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE HARASSMENT AND TORTURE USED ON THE MINDS OF HUMANS — MAY HER SOUL REST IN PEACE…SHE WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.”

On the first anniversary of Miriam’s death—on an unusually warm afternoon this past autumn—a charter bus traveled from Brooklyn to Washington, DC, arriving at Garfield Circle at 1:30 p.m. Miriam’s mother, two sisters, and a slew of friends, relatives, and supporters exited. They walked toward the US Capitol, each holding up a poster with a picture of Miriam and a message: “Miriam Carey Mattered” or “Why was Miriam Carey Killed???” For the next 30 minutes, they held a “silent protest” on the steps of the Capitol, then chanted Miriam’s name five times, once for each bullet that hit her.

Miriam’s name on the buzzer at the Stamford condo where she lived.

Afterward, everyone walked the route that Miriam had driven, beginning on the sidewalk here, where officers had first discharged their weapons at her. The family’s attorney led the way down 1st Street SW and along Constitution Avenue before stopping near 2nd Street SE. “This is where the last shots were fired at Miriam,” he says, pointing toward the middle of the street. “This is where she died.” Everyone turned to study the strip of grass in the center of the road, not far from a sign directing drivers to I-95. There was nothing to mark the spot, nothing that made this median seem any different from any other one in America.

In the months that followed, when protesters took to the streets to rally on behalf of people killed by the police—Eric Garner and Michael Brown and others—Miriam’s name did not show up on their posters. There was, however, one place where her name did still appear. Inside the entryway to the building in Stamford where she last lived, next to a row of buzzers, one name-label still read: “MCarey 1C.” A year after her death, her condo appeared unoccupied, and the shades remained closed. Her daughter, now two years old, had moved in with her father. And Miriam’s bullet-marked body lay buried at a cemetery on Long Island, sealed inside an orchid-gray steel casket.

Family and friends of Miriam Carey protest her death on the West Front of the Capitol on October 3, 2014. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Correction: A previous caption for this image misstated that the damage to the police car was inflicted by Miriam Carey’s car. The damage was in fact the result of a separate collision.

Visit site – 

How a Confused Mom Drove Through a White House Checkpoint and Ended Up Dead

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Nissan, ONA, Oster, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How a Confused Mom Drove Through a White House Checkpoint and Ended Up Dead

Cruz the Politician Champions the Death Penalty. Cruz the Private Lawyer Did Something Else.

by BenLansford Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In December, when a mentally ill Texas man convicted of murder was poised to be executed—and a number of prominent conservatives were calling to postpone the killing—Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declined to criticize the pending execution. “I trust the criminal-justice system to operate, to protect the rights of the accused, and to administer justice to violent criminals,” Cruz declared. This was not shocking. As a politician and public officeholder, he has long supported capital punishment. While running for Senate in 2012, Cruz repeatedly mentioned his win as Texas solicitor general in a case before the Supreme Court that preserved the death penalty for a Mexican citizen convicted of raping and murdering two Houston teenage girls.

Yet as a lawyer in private practice two years earlier, Cruz had argued that the criminal-justice system, in at least one instance, had gone awry and nearly killed the wrong man. This happened when Cruz was assisting the case of a Louisiana man wrongfully convicted of robbery and murder who spent 18 years in prison—14 of them on death row—before being freed. As an attorney for this man, Cruz argued that local prosecutors could not be trusted, that institutional failures in the justice system had nearly led to his client’s execution, and that this fellow was owed $14 million in restitution because of these miscarriages of justice. But after his experience in this dramatic case—which included coauthoring a passionate brief presented to the Supreme Court—Cruz the politician would still offer a full-throated endorsement of the criminal-justice system and capital punishment.

This case began long before Cruz, fresh off his stint as Texas solicitor general, joined the Houston office of the high-powered Morgan Lewis law firm in 2008 to build its appellate and Supreme Court practice. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1984, a prominent New Orleans businessman was shot and killed outside his home. A month later John Thompson, a 22-year old African American father of two, and Kevin Freeman were arrested and charged with the murder. Afterward, Thompson was charged with attempted armed robbery that had occurred three weeks following the murder. (Thompson was arrested for the attempted theft after the father of the three victims showed them a photo of Thompson that had appeared in the newspaper in connection with the murder case and his children said they believed Thompson was the fellow who had tried to rob them.)

Continue Reading »

Read article here:

Cruz the Politician Champions the Death Penalty. Cruz the Private Lawyer Did Something Else.

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cruz the Politician Champions the Death Penalty. Cruz the Private Lawyer Did Something Else.

Missouri Is About to Execute a Man Who’s Missing Part of His Brain

by CandelaAbendrot Posted on March 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Cecil Clayton, 74, who had parts of his brain removed after an accident 40 years ago, is scheduled to be put to death on Tuesday. He was convicted of first-degree murder after killing a cop in 1996. Unless Missouri’s Supreme Court, a federal court, or Republican Gov. Jay Nixon accepts the evidence that Clayton is mentally unfit for capital punishment, his execution will proceed.

Missouri law states that a person cannot be executed if, as a result of mental disease or defect, he or she is unable to “understand the nature and purpose of the punishment about to be imposed upon him.” However, state law offers no mechanism for the defendant to set up a competency hearing after trial. The fact that Clayton was tried and sentenced before receiving an evaluation is complicating efforts to save him from the executioner, and creating what his lawyers call a “procedural mess.”

In 1972, Clayton was a sober, religious husband and father working at a sawmill in Purdy, Missouri. One day, a piece of wood flew from his blade, piercing his skull and entering his brain. Doctors eventually had to remove nearly one-fifth of his frontal lobe—the part of the brain that is crucial to decision making, mood, and impulse control. Clayton was completely transformed: His IQ dropped to 76, and he developed serious depression, hallucinations, confusion, paranoia, and thoughts of suicide. He relapsed into alcoholism, and his wife divorced him.

Clayton was officially diagnosed with chronic brain syndrome in 1983, which includes psychosis, paranoia, depression, schizophrenia, and decreased mental function. The severity of his condition rendered him unable to work. In 1979, a doctor said he was “just barely making it outside of an institution.” In 1984, another doctor found him to be “totally disabled” and the government placed him on disability benefits.

Continue Reading »

See the original post: 

Missouri Is About to Execute a Man Who’s Missing Part of His Brain

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Presto, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Missouri Is About to Execute a Man Who’s Missing Part of His Brain

Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

by FaustinIllingwo Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared at the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A group of 24 brewers from across the country have come together to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and call for strong national action to address climate change.

The breweries, which include Smuttynose Brewing Company, Guinness and Allagash Brewing Company, have signed onto the Climate Declaration organized through the sustainable business group Ceres. The declaration pledges that each company will take its own action to reduce emissions from its business, and will also support political action at the national level.

Jenn Vervier, director of strategy and sustainability at New Belgium Brewery, which is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, said action on climate change makes a lot of sense for the brewery because it uses a lot of energy in heating, cooling and transportation, and uses a lot of water. Rising emissions, too, are expected to have negative effects for the beer industry because it relies on the cultivation of barley and hops, which are sensitive to changes in the climate.

New Belgium Brewery has already installed 300 kilowatts of solar at its brewery in Colorado, and it capture methane generated in its operations, which it then burns to generate 15 percent of its electricity.

Vervier said the advocacy for national climate action also makes sense for brewers. “Even if we were to be ourselves climate neutral, it’s such a small drop in the bucket,” she said. “It’s going to take a cleaner grid to lower the emissions from manufacturing.”

Julia Person, sustainability manager at the Craft Brew Alliance, which owns the brands Redhook, Widmer Brothers and Kona, said the commitment to addressing their impact also has clear economic benefits. The company lowered its greenhouse gas emissions 8 percent in 2014, she said, which saved it more than $250,000 in energy costs. It has also reduced the amount of water needed to produce a gallon of beer to 3.5 gallons—much lower than the craft brewery average of 6 to 8 gallons, Person said.

“It’s good for business, it’s not just good for the environment,” said Person. “We’re lowering our operating costs. It’s doing the right thing and having a benefit.”

Also signing the declaration: Aeronaut Brewing Company, The Alchemist, Aspen Brewing Company, Brewery Vivant, Bouy Beer Company, Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen, Deschutes Brewery, Fort George Brewery and Public House, Fremont Brewing Company, Georgetown Brewing Co., Guinness, Hopworks Urban Brewery, Ninkasi Brewing Company, Odell Brewing, Rockford Brewing Company, Smuttynose Brewing Company, Snake River Brewing Co., Standing Stone Brewing Co., and Wet Dog Café & Brewery.

The brewers hope that their advocacy reaches consumers, too. “Beer is near and dear to people’s hearts. It’s part of people’s everyday activity,” said Vervier of New Belgium. “I think when people see their favorite brands speaking out, it gives them courage to speak out. I think it makes it relatable for people.”

From:  

Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

Why Are US Taxpayers Subsidizing Right-Wing Israeli Settlers?

by GabrielMercier Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A few weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu’s delivered his controversial address to Congress, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Prime Minister was considering a campaign trip to Hebron, a right-wing settler community in the Israel-occupied West Bank. The proposed March 10 trip to Hebron, which would have been the first by an Israeli PM in more than a decade, raised eyebrows among Israel’s political class and inflamed tensions with Palestinian groups. Last week, Netanyahu called it off, citing security threats.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, few politicians have questioned why American taxpayers continue to subsidize the Hebron settlers, accused by international observers of human rights violations that include thefts, battery, and murder. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 45 percent of the settler community’s funding came from the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund, whose status as a tax-exempt nonprofit allows Americans to write off donations to the group.

“The Hebron Fund has supported, either directly or indirectly, a wide array of acts that are definitely not charitable,” says John Tye, the legal director for the global activist group Avaaz, which last week petitioned the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. “They are basically using a small group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to push Palestinians out of their homes. These settlers are arming themselves, they are engaged in military and paramilitary acts, some of them have connections to terrorism, and they are committing a wide range of crimes against Palestinians.”

The Hebron Fund declined to make anyone available for comment for this story, or to respond to my written questions.

Hebron, a community of some 200,000 Palestinians located about 30 miles south of Jerusalem, is home to several ancient Jewish holy sites. The modern Jewish occupation began in 1967, after the Six Day War. The Hebron Fund was founded in 1979 to support the settlers, who now number around 850.

After years of conflicts between Palestinians and settlers, the historic center of Hebron has come to be known as “The Ghost Town.” It is largely abandoned, with the doors of Arab shops welded shut by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the second intifada. Palestinians are forbidden from entering much of the area. In other parts of downtown Hebron, Jewish settlers live in buildings above Palestinian shops. The shopkeepers have stretched nets and metal grates over the streets to catch the garbage that settlers routinely throw from their windows:

Grates erected to catch garbage thrown by settlers living above ISM Palestine

The behavior of Jewish settlers in Hebron has been repeatedly denounced by human rights groups. In 2001, Human Rights Watch called Hebron “the site of serious and sustained human rights abuses,” including “a consistent failure by IDF to protect Palestinians from attacks by Israeli settlers.” In 2011, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wrote that settlers “have been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.”

In 2013, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed “deep concern” at the abusive treatment and harassment directed at a Palestinian activist in Hebron by settler groups and the IDF. Breaking the Silence, another Israeli human rights group comprised of IDF veterans, offers guided tours of Hebron—but only rarely, the group writes on its website, due to “the Hebron settlers’ violence towards our tours and the limited ability of the Hebron police to protect our tours from this violence.”

Just in the past two months, according to B’Tselem, vandals in the Hebron area have destroyed Palestinian olive groves in four locations.

At least one former member of a terrorist organization has joined the Hebron settlement. Baruch Marzel, a one-time spokesman for the extremist Kach Party, which is listed by the United States and Israel as a terrorist group, lives in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida outpost. In 2011, he helped organize a manhunt for a Palestinian man, Hani Jaber, who’d just been released from jail after serving 18 years for killing a Jewish settler. Posters appeared on Hebron walls with Jaber’s face and the words, “Rise up and kill him.”

Racist graffiti in Hebron: “Gas the Arabs.” JDL is the Jewish Defense League. Jill Granberg

At times, the Hebron Fund has specifically sought to raise money for controversial settler activities. In 2007, according to Salon, it held a fundraiser on a cruise ship in New York’s Hudson River to support a settler who’d taken property from a Palestinian family. A year and a half later, the Israeli government ruled that the house had been illegally seized from the family and ordered the settlers out. Once evicted, the settlers set fire to Palestinian houses, olive trees, and cars—25 people were wounded, including a man shot at close range.

The United States tax code does not provide detailed information about what can disqualify groups from nonprofit status, though precedent suggests that it includes illegal and discriminatory behavior. In 1974, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS was justified in revoking the nonprofit status of Bob Jones University over its refusal to admit black students.

The Hebron Fund has not released detailed financial information, making it impossible to determine whether it directly bankrolls prohibited activities. Yet Tye of Avaaz argues that the settlements’ finances are sufficiently fluid and dependent upon the Hebron Fund to make it inherently complicit in any abuses. “I can’t tell you precisely where every dollar has gone,” he says. “But when there is a doubt, the legal burden is on the Hebron Fund to produce documents that show how its money is spent.”

This isn’t the first time a group has asked the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. In 2009, a similar complaint was submitted by the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The IRS never responded.

Though Tye believes there’s already sufficient public evidence to revoke the fund’s nonprofit status, he at least wants the IRS to conduct a thorough investigation. A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment on the case, citing a federal law that bars the agency from discussing specific taxpayers.

Source: 

Why Are US Taxpayers Subsidizing Right-Wing Israeli Settlers?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Are US Taxpayers Subsidizing Right-Wing Israeli Settlers?