WelcomeTo My World
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Together we could stand up for Davontae Sanford
Vincent Smothers, #295527
Ionia Correctional Facility
1576 W. Bluewater Highway
Ionia, MI 48846
'Positive reinforcement encourages and perpetuates behavior. Attention is power. Whatever we give our attention to increases.'
Monday, 29 August 2011
(CALL IN MONDAYS) justice for Aiyana Jones
@Pastor Omar Wilks
we want to make it our duty to contact the Wayne County Prosecutor office each (Monday) to call for the arrest of the police who murdered 7 year old Aiyana Jones in Detroit Michigan on May 16, 2010. Your phone calls has the power to make a ...difference. When you call, it is suggested that you say: "I am calling in regards to the Aiyana Jones case. There is no good reason why prosecutor Kym Worthy has not put out the arrest warrant already for Officer Joseph Weekley and those who participated in the unjustified killing of Aiyana. i am calling to request that prosecutor Kym Worthy put out the warrant immediately and arrest the officers involved" we ask those who are participating in this call in campaign to call the Prosecutors Office (Kym Worthy) on Mondays bet. the hours of 10am-2pm tele: 313-224-5777
http://facebook.com/OmarWilks
http://facebook.com/OmarWilks
The Write Step - One
Davontae Sanford, a developmentally disabled 16-year-old, sits in prison after his lawyer says he was coerced to confess to killing four people in a rumored drug house on Detroit's east side. An admission from a confessed hit man could finally win him a new trial.
Vincent Smothers, who had already confessed to killing at least seven people, including the wife of a Detroit police sergeant, also has admitted to being responsible for the September 2007 drug house killings on Runyon, according to police and Sanford's appeals lawyer.
We're hoping to get his plea withdrawn so he can go to trial in light of this new evidence, this was a false confession made by an adolescent who is a special-ed student and who reads on a third-grade level
We believe that if we can get enough people to write and mail letters to Vincent Smothers pleading with him to confess to the murders in court, he may have a change of heart and speak on Davontaes behalf.
Vincent Smothers, #295527
Ionia Correctional Facility
1576 W. Bluewater Highway
Ionia, MI 48846
http://mdocweb.state.mi.us/OTIS2/otis2profile.aspx?mdocNumber=295527
Together we could stand up for Davontae, write Vincent Smothers direct and make a plea for assistance on Davontae's behalf.
Vincent Smothers, #295527
Ionia Correctional Facility
1576 W. Bluewater Highway
Ionia, MI 48846
'Positive reinforcement encourages and perpetuates behavior. Attention is power. Whatever we give our attention to increases.'
You can read this request and then forget, or you can take hold of your pen and make a difference, which will you choose? -
Welcome To My World http://irishgreeneyes-welcometomyworld.blogspot.com/?spref=tw
Welcome To My World
irishgreeneyes-welcometomyworld.blogspot.com
http://ning.it/ronuXm
THE WRITE STEP FOR DAVONTAE SANFORD - Black Talk Radio Network™
blacktalkradionetwork.com
Davontae Sanford, a developmentally disabled 16-year-old, sits in prison after his lawyer says he was coerced to confess to killing four people in a rumore..
Juvenile Incarceration
While United States citizens in Iraq are committing atrocities on incarcerated Iraqi civilians, at home here in the United States, we have our own incarceration problems.
Recently (particularly with the Bush administration, but with prior administrations too), the United States has decided to renege on international agreements and treaties when it deems those agreements to be an obstruction to U.S. current policies and political objectives. This is true in the arenas of environmental and trade issues, and in the United States' treatment of young people.
The United States is unlike most other countries with the death penalty which have abolished it for juvenile offenders. More than 72 countries with the death penalty do not execute juveniles. There are only 6 countries known to have executed juvenile offenders in the 1990s. Those countries are: the United States, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Nigeria. According to the United Nations (1998), the US policy on executing juvenile offenders violates international laws and treaties signed or ratified by the United States (Juvenile Crime, Adult Adjudication, and the Death Penalty: Draconian Policies Revisited). Clearly, most of the world agrees that putting young people on death row is wrong. At one time, so did the United States.
In addition to the execution of juveniles, some of the other U.S. youth incarceration issues include concerns over abuse and overcrowding in California's Youth Authority as well as the increasing practice of allowing more juveniles to be tried in adult criminal courts. From 1992 through 1997, forty-four states and the District of Columbia passed laws making it easier for juveniles to be tried as adults
Davontae Sanford, a developmentally disabled 16-year-old, sits in prison after his lawyer says he was coerced to confess to killing four people in a rumored drug house on Detroit's east side. An admission from a confessed hit man could finally win him a new trial.
Vincent Smothers, who had already confessed to killing at least seven people, including the wife of a Detroit police sergeant, also has admitted to being responsible for the September 2007 drug house killings on Runyon, according to police and Sanford's appeals lawyer.
We're hoping to get his plea withdrawn so he can go to trial in light of this new evidence, this was a false confession made by an adolescent who is a special-ed student and who reads on a third-grade level
We believe that if we can get enough people to write and mail letters to Vincent Smothers pleading with him to confess to the murders in court, he may have a change of heart and speak on Davontaes behalf.
Together we could stand up for Davontae, write Vincent Smothers direct and make a plea for assistance on Davontae's behalf.
Vincent Smothers, #295527
Ionia Correctional Facility
1576 W. Bluewater Highway
Ionia, MI 48846
'Positive reinforcement encourages and perpetuates behavior. Attention is power. Whatever we give our attention to increases.'
You can read this request and then forget, or you can take hold of your pen and make a difference, which will you choose?
Download The Write Step Flyer
In Partnership with Black Talk Radio
Scotty Reid - Owner/Campaign Host
March for Mary!
Wednesday, August 31st at 4pm
Gather at 320 Tompkins Avenue
( G Train to Bedford /
Nostrand or C Train to Kingston-Throop )
...
At 4PM March to 1168 Fulton Street (768 Dean Inc.)
Join us at Mary Lee Ward's house as we continue the campaign to keep her secure in her home. The purported owner, Mr. Shameem Chowdhury (of 768 Dean Inc.), has refused to negotiate and will move ahead with plans to evict Ms. Ward, an 82 year-old Bed-Stuy great-grandmother who has lived in her home for the past 44 years.
Ms. Ward, beloved in her community, is a victim of predatory lending. She was in line to become yet another casualty of the foreclosure crisis except that...
She’s not giving up!
And neither are we!
We seek a just settlement that recognizes Ms. Ward as the rightful owner of her home. We also seek to reconcile the history of deceptive lending practices that have stripped neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy of their community wealth and power.
We are Organizing for Occupation (O4O), an all-volunteer network of concerned NYC residents who believe that the only means of realizing the human right to a home is through direct action.
Join the Campaign!
Contact: 212.213.3920 / www.o4onyc.org
--Mumia is Innocent! Stop the Frame Up! Free Mumia!--
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC
, www.FreeMumia.com, info@FreeMumia.com
The Failure of Welfare Reform Is 'Exhibit A' That the Right's Punish-the-Poor Philosophy Doesn't Work
By Lizzy Ratner, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/152191/the_failure_of_welfare_reform_is_%27exhibit_a%27_that_the_right%27s_punish-the-poor_philosophy_doesn%27t_work
Fifteen years ago, on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton perched at a podium in the White House Rose Garden and signed the bill that would become known as welfare reform. Flanked by three former welfare recipients and looking glazed and smooth as a donut, he swept aside six decades of social welfare policy with a single triangulating stroke of his pen, reversing a course that had been set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal. In the process, he handed the law's right-wing backers their first emboldening victory in a far bigger, dirtier, and still raging campaign to unravel the government safety net.
"Today we are ending welfare as we know it," Clinton declared, the words "A New Beginning" emblazoned on the podium beneath him in case anyone missed the point. From that moment on, needy families would face a strict five-year lifetime limit for welfare assistance. They would have to comply with stringent work requirements. Handouts would be replaced by a hand up, self-destruction would yield to self-sufficiency, and dependency would give way to the starchy respectability of personal responsibility.
Or, as Clinton promised, "Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life."
Exactly 15 years later, a handful of welfare recipients gathered in Harlem, just a few blocks from Clinton's post-presidency redoubt, to describe exactly what Bubba's "second chance" has meant for them. They had been brought together by Community Voices Heard, a grassroots group of low-income people forged in the fires of welfare reform, and their stories crisscrossed the spectrum of welfare experiences. They were several women and one man, they were white, black and Latina, they were young and they were older -- and their verdict was as swift and final as a guillotine.
"It's a failure. It's a total failure," said Melissa McClure, a reedy-voiced 50-something with a Louise Brooks bob who successfully managed gift stores before falling on hard times and applying for welfare in early 2007.
"If I had a worst nightmare, this would be it," said Ketny Jean-Francois, a Haitian-born single mother who spent four years in the welfare meat-grinder before managing to land a spot in a nursing program -- against welfare reform rules -- and then a job.
The lone man of the group, Bill, a single 49-year-old with a host of physical and psychological ailments, struggled to find the words before spitting out, "It's definitely not achieving the goals of helping out," he said. "The official line is, 'If you're not working, we want to see you working. If you have children, we want to help you so you [don't] come back.' But if that's really the goal -- no."
Failure. Nightmare. Not achieving its goals. None of these descriptions are part of the official line peddled by welfare reform's sponsors and backers. If you hear anything these days, it's how dramatically welfare caseloads have dropped in the last 15 years -- 57 percent! -- and how salutary it's been for the country. "We renewed the American spirit by emphasizing personal responsibility in place of generational dependency on government," boasted E. Clay Shaw Jr., former Republican congressman and drafter of 1996's welfare reform law, in a recent Politico editorial.
Indeed, far from questioning the law's fundamental merits and efficacy, many Republicans (and a few Democrats) have taken to complaining that the law hasn't gone far enough, that its implementation has been too lax and its lessons not fully adequately exported. "The job is not finished," Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and Ways and Means Committee chairman, said in a statement. "[O]ther programs can and should be reformed to follow suit." And yet, to listen to the people who know welfare reform best, to the "Reformed," the reality of the 1996 law is not only a far cry from the compassionate conservative triumph it's trumpeted to be, it's a crucible for the failures of the stingy, starve-the-beast, punish-the-poor philosophy so in vogue among the Tea Bag brigades.
A hand up? More like a slap down, say those who've been through the system. The famously touted welfare-to-work programs are little more than exercises in make-work and are often exploitative to boot. Childcare remains persistently scarce. Job training is poor to non-existent. And on the increasingly rare occasions when people do find jobs, these jobs are often low-wage gigs that fail to hoist them out of poverty.
Meanwhile, life on welfare has become shorter and harsher. Cash grants have stagnated or even fallen in a number of states, with the median benefit for a family of three now clocking in at $429 a month, just 28 percent of the federal poverty level, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Time limits have also gotten shorter. And while caseloads have certainly plummeted, it's fairly clear that a hefty portion of this drop can be attributed to steep new barriers to entry -- and time limits, of course. How else to explain the fact that at the height of the Great Recession only 28 percent of Americans living in poverty received welfare assistance while 75 percent got welfare help in 1995? In 13 states, welfare rolls actually declined during the recession, according to an Urban Institute report.
All of which suggests that for all the braying triumphalism, our nation's great welfare reform experiment is little more than an elaborate shell game, a confidence trick in which poor people get shuffled this way and that while their lives remain essentially unchanged. Or get harder.
Take the case of Bill, the lone man at the Community Voices Heard gathering, who wore a charm bracelet of Catholic saints around his wrist and asked to keep his last name on the down-low since most of his family doesn't know his situation. Bill is a college graduate who spent years working in and around the computer world until the recession hit (he made only $6,000 in 2008). Eviction was followed by homelessness. Eventually he landed on Public Assistance, which immediately put him to work in New York's notorious workfare program.
The city's workfare program is the twisted, and nationally celebrated, brainchild of former New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and a small cadre of conservative think-tank gurus. It requires public assistance recipients to spend 35 hours a week doing a mix of job search and work activities -- or face losing part or all of their benefits. These work activities, grouped under the condescending title of the Work Experience Program (WEP), include jobs like sweeping streets, cleaning parks, doing security, filing -- low-skilled, formerly union jobs for which the WEP workers are not paid, per se, because they are actually working off their benefits. Hence the comparisons to indentured servitude. Alternatives like education and training courses are generally forbidden, and exemptions for disabilities or disease are difficult to obtain. The reason: a "work-first" ethic so unrelenting that Giuliani's most notorious welfare commissioner, Jason Turner, famously explained, "It's work that sets you free." (Apparently he skipped the chapter in his high school history book about the Holocaust.)
"Work-first," however, has not set many welfare recipients free. It certainly didn't help Bill.
Bill is a man of many ailments, something that is apparent to the casual observer almost upon meeting him. Smart and sensitive, he is beset by the tics and torments of a man with serious depressive and anxiety disorders. He also underwent major surgery for a tear in his stomach in 2010. But within weeks of the operation, unable to bend, lift, or twist and suffering from pain and panic attacks, he was required to go back to his welfare-mandated job search and work activities. All so he could continue to receive $45 a month in cash assistance.
"It's like trying to trip a handicapped person," said Bill, who was recently judged disabled enough to qualify for Social Security Disability insurance and Supplemental Security Income- - though not before suffering a year in the workfare trenches. "But I have to stress that there are so many people that are in a much, much worse situation, and they're making them [work].... I saw guys nodding off in wheelchairs!"
Such stories reverberate throughout the archives of welfare reform, but even the stories that aren't so patently bad aren't so pretty either. Everyone has something to tell. For Ketny Jean-Francois, it was working a WEP assignment for the sanitation department in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, a swath of asphalt and misery famous for its brisk drug and prostitution trades. Each day she would head to her assignment picking up condoms, needles and "doodoo" (as she delicately put it) in the protective company of one of her male co-workers, but that only seemed to encourage the johns, who would invariably stop her "guard" to ask her going rate.
As for Cheina Goncalec, a petite 27-year-old with two young kids who moved to New York in search of work, her story revolved around her stint as a security guard at a West Harlem community center, a WEP experience that consisted of fending off the occasional cursing, threatening gym-goer without any self-defense training whatsoever. But that was just icing. There was the constant abuse by welfare agency workers, and the arbitrary closing of her case. And the welfare agency's refusal to let her substitute education or training for WEP, even though "the only way to get out of welfare is getting a good job," she said. And there was the fact that after a year and a half spent doing "job search" and WEP, she was no closer to finding a permanent job -- or climbing out of poverty.
Given such snags in a program widely touted as one of the jewels of welfare reform -- so "successful" that it's been used as a model for the creation of workfare programs in places as far-flung as Israel and London -- it would seem like it might be long past time to re-evaluate. There are certainly plenty of smart ideas. And since the welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is set to be reauthorized in September, this would be the perfect time to debate, tweak, even radically reshape it.
Perhaps the most desperately needed change is a philosophical one, a shift in purpose and focus from welfare reform as an experiment in punitive behavior modification and deterrence to welfare as a genuine anti-poverty program. From this, everything else would follow: welfare caseworkers caring and experienced enough to help applicants get the services they need (beginning with access to welfare) rather than deterring them; higher cash grants which would allow recipients to live rather than simply subsist; access to quality child care; programs and alternatives for people with barriers to employment; training programs that are tiered to meet recipients where they're at -- and prepare them for quality jobs; and above all, subsidized employment programs that would train and then place recipients in bona fide, living-wage paying jobs.
"During the Great Depression, they put people to work doing what they knew to do," said Melissa McClure, offering an example of the kind of jobs program she'd like to see. "All that and you were paid, and it was promoting you into a better position."
And yet, what are the chances? The government couldn't -- or, more accurately, wouldn't -- even maintain the TANF Emergency Fund, which provided subsidized jobs to some 240,000 unemployed people and was one of the few effective jobs programs created during the Great Recession; instead, it let its funding expire last September. And with Congress divided between slack do-nothings and rabid ideologues, the fight over "reform" has moved from the fringes of a fraying society to the center, from the question of entitlements to the poor to entitlements more broadly.
Welfare reform, it turns out, was just the warmup. It was a test-case and a prophecy, "a new beginning" after all. And as the first hard yank on the threads holding together the country's safety net -- its social contract to provide for the needy -- it should have been a clarion warning. Welfare reform was an attack on all of us.
Lizzy Ratner is a journalist in New York City. From 1998 to 2000, she was a welfare rights advocate in New York City.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152191/
Sunday, 28 August 2011
Michelle Obama
@ Lady Gray
"Many endured beatings and bullets - and decades behind bars ... It is because ...of them that I stand before you as 1st Lady of the United States." -Michelle Obama #ImpactAfrica (on BET now)See more
THE WRITE STEP FOR DAVONTAE SANFORD
Davontae Sanford, a developmentally disabled 16-year-old, sits in prison after his lawyer says he was coerced to confess to killing four people in a rumored drug house on Detroit's east side. An admission from a confessed hit man could finally win him a new trial.
Vincent Smothers, who had already confessed to killing at least seven people, including the wife of a Detroit police sergeant, also has admitted to being responsible for the September 2007 drug house killings on Runyon, according to police and Sanford's appeals lawyer.
We're hoping to get his plea withdrawn so he can go to trial in light of this new evidence, this was a false confession made by an adolescent who is a special-ed student and who reads on a third-grade level
We believe that if we can get enough people to write and mail letters to Vincent Smothers pleading with him to confess to the murders in court, he may have a change of heart and speak on Davontaes behalf.
Together we could stand up for Davontae, write Vincent Smothers direct and make a plea for assistance on Davontae's behalf.
Vincent Smothers, #295527
Ionia Correctional Facility
1576 W. Bluewater Highway
Ionia, MI 48846
'Positive reinforcement encourages and perpetuates behavior. Attention is power. Whatever we give our attention to increases.'
You can read this request and then forget, or you can take hold of your pen and make a difference, which will you choose?
Singer Jamelia: Why do we still vilify single mothers?
Click to play
Padmini Staple felt pressured to give up her daughter for adoption in 1965
As one of 1.8 million single mothers living in Britain, Jamelia feels they are still demonised in the media and stigmatised with a sense of shame, shared with single mums in the past.
"It's like the club that no-one wants to join," says Jamelia who is raising her two daughters, 10-year-old Teja and five-year-old Tiani, as a single parent.The 30-year-old pop and R&B singer-songwriter's daughters have two different fathers, which she is "not proud of".
Teja's father was her first love, but Jamelia found herself in a domestically abusive situation. She gave birth to Teja when she was 19, and having a child gave her the strength to leave.
With the father of her second child Tiani, she remembers getting to a point in their relationship where they were just being horrible to each other.
Continue reading the main story 
Find out more
- Jamelia presents Shame about Single Mums on Monday 29 August at 21:00 BST on BBC Three
"I was brought up by a single mum and I always dreamed of having the perfect nuclear family for my own children, but things didn't turn out that way," she says.
"Like any mum I love my children to bits, but now that I'm on my own I feel judged by others and disappointed with myself for not doing it the right way."In the past, single mothers were often treated as outcasts in society, ostracised and pressured into giving up their baby for adoption because of the shame of giving birth outside of marriage.
Jamelia feels there is a social stigma that has never completely gone away and feels compelled to overcompensate as a parent.
"Your child doesn't have that mummy and daddy situation which is in every single story book... even if it's the prince and the princess in the palace, the king and the queen," she says.
"I don't want my child to feel as if she's missed out. I want her to feel like she's had as full and as round an upbringing as any child in any environment.
"I do it all and I don't care how tired I am, how much effort it takes, I don't care how it impacts on me or even my health."
Professor Michael Lamb, head of the department of social and developmental psychology at Cambridge University, has spent 30 years studying what happens to children brought up in single parent families and says single mothers are effective parents.
"Most single mothers are raising their children as well as most two parent or married or cohabiting mothers," he says.
Silent fear
A hundred years ago, the only option for an unmarried, pregnant woman who had no means of supporting herself was the workhouse.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
End Quote Padmini StapleIt was my baby, but in my head I knew that I had to give her up”
During World War II the number of women having babies out of marriage increased and there were more women raising children on their own with their husbands away at war.
However it was still thought of as shameful to be an unmarried mother.Micheline's mother was a fashion designer from Leeds who came to London in the summer of 1940. She met Micheline's father, an airman in the Free French Air Force, in a dance hall.
"She was an extremely proper person," says Micheline, "so although she was out dancing and merry-making she was not the kind of girl who would go and have sex with anybody.
"My father said he would marry her as soon as the war was over and she believed him. He came back in 1945 after I'd been born, stayed for a week and disappeared forever.
"She just changed magically from being Miss O'Sullivan to Mrs O'Sullivan... she just managed to keep a low profile because the anxiety was if you had a baby and you weren't married somebody somewhere might come and take it away from you."
Micheline's father was an airman in the Free French Air Force during World War II
Micheline and her mother lived a secluded, hermit-like existence, staying away from anyone in authority. Micheline still feels uncomfortable talking about their situation. Because of this silent fear, there is no way of knowing how many other single mothers had to hide their babies away during the post-war years.
By 1961, around 5% of mothers were lone mothers.
The swinging 60s, although often thought of as a time of sexual liberation and free love, were far from enlightened for many women.
There were very few birth control options available at the time, no sex education and abortion was illegal until 1967. Women could not go on the pill unless they were married.
Padmini Staple was 16 when she discovered she was pregnant in 1965. She had to leave college and was sacked from her Saturday job for being unmarried and pregnant.
'A kiss goodbye'
Her father took her to a mother and baby home in Newcastle and left her at the door with her bag. She stayed at the home, only leaving to go to hospital to give birth to her baby daughter on her own.
She remembers instantly bonding with her child: "I can remember falling in love, because the moment I clapped eyes on her I didn't want to give her up. I felt the longing to have her, to hold her, to keep her.
"It was my baby, but in my head I knew that I had to give her up."
Some say the media has "caricatured" single mums such as the Little Britain character Vicky Pollard "I kissed her goodbye and hugged her and told her it was for the best," says Padmini.
Padmini went on to have a son but never forgot the daughter she had to give up, and 33 years later managed to track her down in New Zealand. They are still in touch.
It was not until the 1970s and 80s that single mothers had more choices and greater freedom.
By the 1990s there were 1.3 million single parents in the UK, but the political climate had also changed and single mums began to be stereotyped in the media, often depicted as living off the state.
Journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer says the media has been guilty of "caricaturing" single mums, but stresses that we should not pretend that lone parenting is a "positive lifestyle choice".
"It's not a bad one, but it's not the best one, so why don't we encourage people for the best one," she says.
Jamelia believes that media stereotypes and past attitudes to single mothers are part of the reason why single parents still feel stigmatised.
"What single mothers deserve more than anything," she says, "is respect."
Jamelia: Shame about Single Mums will be broadcast on Monday 29 August at 21:00 BST on BBC Three
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Take Action for Rikers’ Island Prisoners! Demand the City Create an Emergency Evacuation Plan
We can’t let Bloomberg get away with this!
(1.) Demand the city create an emergency evacuation plan by 5pm today to evacuate prisoners at Rikers Island in the event that other areas in Zone B or C around Rikers Island are evacuated.
Call NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs at (212) 788-2485
lgibbs@cityhall.nyc.gov
Twitter: @NYCMayorsOffice
(2.) Call on NY1 to investigate the status of the “contingency plan” for Rikers Island prisoners:
http://www.ny1.com/content/
Tel.: 212-691-6397
(3.) Submit evacuation plan demand to city’s website:
-Go to http://nycsevereweather.
-Copy and paste this text (or write your own!):
Title: Evacuation plan needed
The city has no evacuation plan for Rikers Island, despite its low elevation and its nearly 13,000 prisoners. Please do not let these individuals, or the ones at the nearby floating Vernon C. Bain Correction Center, suffer.
(4.) Please repost:
http://solitarywatch.com/2011/
Locked Up and Left Behind: New York's Prisoners and Hurricane Irene
James Ridgeway and Jean Casella | August 26, 2011 at 5:31 pm | Tags: Bloomberg, evacuation, Hurricane Irene, Rikers Island | Categories: New York, politics of punishment |
*****************************
Here is the FB event posted at: https://www.facebook.com/
Here the URL to the blog and weblink
: http://tinyurl.com/3vnkzco
Locked Up and Left Behind: New York's Prisoners and Hurricane Irene
"We are not evacuating Rikers Island," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg announced a host of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter's question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.
New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city's evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B--all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.
According to the New York City Department of Corrections' own website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island's 400 acres are built on landfill--which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its ten jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness.
We were not able to reach anyone at the NYC DOC for comment--but the New York Times's City Room blog reported: "According to the city’s Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another."
For a warning of what can happen to prisoners in a hurricane we need only look back at Katrina, and the horrific conditions endured by inmates at Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans. According to a report produced by the ACLU:
[A] culture of neglect was evident in the days before Katrina, when the sheriff declared that the prisoners would remain "where they belong," despite the mayor's decision to declare the city's first-ever mandatory evacuation. OPP even accepted prisoners, including juveniles as young as 10, from other facilities to ride out the storm.As floodwaters rose in the OPP buildings, power was lost, and entire buildings were plunged into darkness. Deputies left their posts wholesale, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests ...Prisoners went days without food, water and ventilation, and deputies admit that they received no emergency training and were entirely unaware of any evacuation plan. Even some prison guards were left locked in at their posts to fend for themselves, unable to provide assistance to prisoners in need.
Friday, 26 August 2011
Obesity set to rise in the UK
Nearly half of all in the United Kingdom could be obese in fewer than twenty years.
That is the worst-case scenario presented in a new report commissioned by the British government.
The report says the number of obese Britons could reach 26 million by 2030.
Al Jazeera's Tim Friend reports.
Tentative settlement approved in Mitrice Richardson case
Matrice Richardson
From NBC LA
By theGrio
http://soc.li/8Ki99CV
A settlement was pending Tuesday in the wrongful death lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department by the parents of Mitrice Richardson.
The county Board of Supervisors approved a settlement in a closed-door meeting last Tuesday, subject to all parties signing a final agreement, according to county counsel Roger Grabo.
NBC LA: Mother Accused of Throwing Baby From Building Faces Arraignment
"The settlement is not final,'' Grabo said, declining to say more.
The county would pay Latice and Michael Richardson about $900,000, according to the Los Angeles Times, which cited sources with knowledge of the pending deal.
Click here to read the entire article...
Mississippi still burning - The Student Printz - University of Southern Mississippi
Mississippi still burning - The Student Printz - University of Southern MississippiIn 1964, Phil Ochs wrote a song he called “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.” In it, he lamented the presence of the Klan and the refusal of the people of Mississippi to denounce the demons within...
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Monday, 22 August 2011
Ola Al Jablawi ,A Precious child we’ll never know.SHE COULDNT HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2 OR 3 YEARS OLD
Who are YOU to decide?
There’s only one authority.
Over life, over death, over all, that will ever be?
Where have all the children gone?
The one’s hand chosen by the CREATOR.
Does he hang his head and weep,
for the child kidnaped,tortured,murdered,&then returned to the street.
WHO,could have done this
to the child he loves so deep?
Where have all the children gone?
The ones whos only crime was wanting to bear witness,&dies?
Where have all the children gone?
…and who are YOU to show no worth? To a child WHO WANTS TO SEE FREEDOMS BIRTH?
Where’s the love? Where’s YOUR shame? PRECIOUS creator place your hand on thee
do not let your children be beat, it is up to all of us, that this child shall not die in vain.LET HER NAME BE FREEDOM.SO IT WILL BE.for now "FREEDOM" is with her creator,and wrapped not in bloody shrouds but his loving hands.
Precious child, we’ll never know, shot dead in the street like a dog.SHE COULDNT HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2 OR 3 YEARS OLD.
Pain so deep, no need to be, prayers to our CREATOR, our CREATOR above--
Change the hearts, of blinded weak, and show the love, from "FREEDOM" above
SYRIA SAYS SHE BELONGS TO US,PRECIOUS indeed, the life she gave,Now with Allah above
So that all of your children……………will live on!
IM JUST A AMERICAN,WHOM MANY SAY WE DONT CARE.I DID NOT KNOW HER NAME,BUT HOW THE BABY TOUCHED MY SOUL.I DONT KNOW HER NAME BUT "FREEDOM" IS WHAT I CALL THE BABY NOT MORE THAN 2 OR 3!
HER NAME WAS "FREEDOM" SHOT DOWN LIKE A DOG,SHE COULDNT HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2 OR 3 YRS OLD.
Where have all the children gone?
Where have all the children gone?
REST IN HEAVENLY PEACE SWEET "FREEDOM"
BY:ANGEL,ISAIAH,KEMIEAH,DANIEGH,&LYDIA
WHALEY GORE'E SHERRILL
IM JUST A AMERICAN,WHOM MANY SAY WE DONT CARE.I DID NOT KNOW HER NAME,BUT HOW THE BABY TOUCHED MY SOUL.I DONT KNOW HER NAME BUT "FREEDOM" IS WHAT I CALL THE BABY NOT MORE THAN 2 OR 3 YEARS OLD!
VIDEO OF THIS BEAUTIFUL LITTLE GIRLS MURDER.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-UrNg4_nBas%26feature%3Dshare&h=5AQDfAbaqAQDLdOtFkVWeOfNHfxGwsPtMugOvOYGGOIv75g
On one video, a voice shrieks, "She's just a child. He killed her, the evil Bashar al-Assad," a reference to the nation's president. On another, a voice says, "Look, these are Bashar al-Assad's reforms."
Her name was Ola Al Jablawi
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The chronology below briefly describes their lives. More information is available at the Civil Rights Memorial Center.
1955
May 7, 1955 · Belzoni, MississippiRev. George Lee, one of the first black people registered to vote in Humphreys County, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote. White officials offered Lee protection on the condition he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused and was murdered.
August 13, 1955 · Brookhaven, Mississippi
Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens of people watched. The killer was never indicted because no one would admit they saw a white man shoot a black man. Smith had organized blacks to vote in a recent election.
August 28, 1955 · Money, Mississippi
Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old boy on vacation from Chicago, reportedly flirted with a white woman in a store. Three nights later, two men took Till from his bed, beat him, shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury found the men innocent of murder.
October 22, 1955 · Mayflower, Texas
John Earl Reese, 16, was dancing in a café when white men fired shots into the windows. Reese was killed and two others were wounded. The shootings were part of an attempt by whites to terrorize blacks into giving up plans for a new school. (photograph unavailable)
1957
January 23, 1957 · Montgomery, AlabamaWillie Edwards Jr., a truck driver, was on his way to work when he was stopped by four Klansmen. The men mistook Edwards for another man who they believed was dating a white woman. They forced Edwards at gunpoint to jump off a bridge into the Alabama River. Edwards’ body was found three months later.
1959
April 25, 1959 · Poplarville, MississippiMack Charles Parker, 23, was accused of raping a white woman. Three days before his case was set for trial, a masked mob took him from his jail cell, beat him, shot him and threw him in the Pearl River.
1961
September 25, 1961 · Liberty, MississippiHerbert Lee, who worked with civil rights leader Bob Moses to help register black voters, was killed by a state legislator who claimed self-defense and was never arrested. Louis Allen, a black man who witnessed the murder, was later also killed.
1962
April 9, 1962 · Taylorsville, MississippiCpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., a military police officer stationed in Maryland, was on leave to visit his sick wife when he was ordered off a bus by a police officer and shot dead. The police officer may have mistaken Ducksworth for a “freedom rider” who was testing bus desegregation laws.
September 30, 1962 · Oxford, Mississippi
Paul Guihard, a reporter for a French news service, was killed by gunfire from a white mob during protests over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi.
1963
April 23, 1963 · Attalla, Alabama
William Lewis Moore, a postman from Baltimore, was shot and killed during a one-man march against segregation. Moore had planned to deliver a letter to the governor of Mississippi urging an end to intolerance.
June 12, 1963 · Jackson, Mississippi
Medgar Evers, who directed NAACP operations in Mississippi, was leading a campaign for integration in Jackson when he was shot and killed by a sniper at his home.
September 15, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama
Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were getting ready for church services when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing all four of the school-age girls. The church had been a center for civil rights meetings and marches.
September 15, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama
Virgil Lamar Ware, 13, was riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle when he was fatally shot by white teenagers. The white youths had come from a segregationist rally held in the aftermath of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.
1964
January 31, 1964 · Liberty, MississippiLouis Allen, who witnessed the murder of civil rights worker Herbert Lee, endured years of threats, jailings and harassment. He was making final arrangements to move north on the day he was killed.
March 23, 1964 · Jacksonville, Florida
Johnnie Mae Chappell was murdered as she walked along a roadside. Her killers were white men looking for a black person to shoot following a day of racial unrest. (photograph unavailable)
April 7, 1964 · Cleveland, Ohio
Rev. Bruce Klunder was among civil rights activists who protested the building of a segregated school by placing their bodies in the way of construction equipment. Klunder was crushed to death when a bulldozer backed over him.
May 2, 1964 · Meadville, Mississippi
Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were killed by Klansmen who believed the two were part of a plot to arm blacks in the area. (There was no such plot.) Their bodies were found during a massive search for the missing civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.
June 21, 1964 · Philadelphia, Mississippi
July 11, 1964 · Colbert, Georgia
Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a Washington, D.C., educator, was driving home from U.S. Army Reserves training when he was shot and killed by Klansmen in a passing car.
1965
February 26, 1965 · Marion, Alabama
March 11, 1965 · Selma, Alabama
Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was among many white clergymen who joined the Selma marchers after the attack by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Reeb was beaten to death by white men while he walked down a Selma street.
March 25, 1965 · Selma Highway, Alabama
Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a housewife and mother from Detroit, drove alone to Alabama to help with the Selma march after seeing televised reports of the attack at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She was driving marchers back to Selma from Montgomery when she was shot and killed by a Klansmen in a passing car.
June 2, 1965 · Bogalusa, Louisiana
Oneal Moore was one of two black deputies hired by white officials in an attempt to appease civil rights demands. Moore and his partner, Creed Rogers, were on patrol when they were blasted with gunfire from a passing car. Moore was killed and Rogers was wounded.
July 18, 1965 · Anniston, Alabama
Willie Brewster was on his way home from work when he was shot and killed by white men. The men belonged to the National States Rights Party, a violent neo-Nazi group whose members had been involved in church bombings and murders of blacks.
August 20, 1965 · Hayneville, Alabama
Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal Seminary student in Boston, had come to Alabama to help with black voter registration in Lowndes County. He was arrested at a demonstration, jailed in Hayneville and then suddenly released. Moments after his release, he was shot to death by a deputy sheriff.
1966
January 3, 1966 · Tuskegee, AlabamaSamuel Leamon Younge Jr., a student civil rights activist, was fatally shot by a white gas station owner following an argument over segregated restrooms.
January 10, 1966 · Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, a wealthy businessman, offered to pay poll taxes for those who couldn’t afford the fee required to vote. The night after a radio station broadcasted Dahmer’s offer, his home was firebombed. Dahmer died later from severe burns.
June 10, 1966 · Natchez, Mississippi
Ben Chester White, who had worked most of his life as a caretaker on a plantation, had no involvement in civil rights work. He was murdered by Klansmen who thought they could divert attention from a civil rights march by killing a black person.
July 30, 1966 · Bogalusa, Louisiana
Clarence Triggs was a bricklayer who had attended civil rights meetings sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. He was found dead on a roadside, shot through the head. (photograph unavailable)
1967
February 27, 1967 · Natchez, MississippiWharlest Jackson, the treasurer of his local NAACP chapter, was one of many blacks who received threatening Klan notices at his job. After Jackson was promoted to a position previously reserved for whites, a bomb was planted in his car. It exploded minutes after he left work one day, killing him instantly.
May 12, 1967 · Jackson, Mississippi
Benjamin Brown, a former civil rights organizer, was watching a student protest from the sidelines when he was hit by stray gunshots from police who fired into the crowd.
1968
February 8, 1968 · Orangeburg, South CarolinaApril 4, 1968 · Memphis, Tennessee