EPA Claims Filtered Flint Water Is Safe To Drink

NewsOne

Federal authorities involved in the investigation into the Flint water crisis claim filtered water in the city is now safe to drink.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and the local and state agencies, released a statement:

“The use of NSF verified filters makes water safe from lead for all populations. Pregnant and nursing women and children no longer need to drink bottled water to avoid lead exposure as long as they drink water that has passed through a filter rated to remove lead from drinking water.”

Despite authorities’ claims that filtered water is safe for human consumption, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver says that some homes’ faucets do not fit the filters, and therefore bottled water is still needed for many.

During Monday’s edition of NewsOne Now, guest host Avis Jones-DeWeever and her panel of guests discussed the latest development in the ongoing Flint crisis that continues to baffle the nation.

Gianno Caldwell, a contributor to TheHill.com, said bottled water in Flint “was going for about ten bucks for one bottle of water…people are suffering here.”

The NewsOne Now panelist did not feel as if the water filters Flint residents are being given are sufficient. He told Jones-DeWeever, “I think they really need to do something to reimburse these folks who have spent countless dollars – these folks that have been harmed by this poisonous water. They need to make sure that there’s some way that these people are being compensated, because there was obviously negligence by the state and local officials, including the federal government.”

Former White House official Will Jawando said Gov. Rick Snyder “still needs to resign” and added, “If anyone else would have done this in any other state, they would have had his head on a platter.”

Jawando also stated the water crisis was a result of failures of government on “all levels.”

Lauren Victoria Burke, contributing writer for NBC News, was critical of President Barack Obama not using his pulpit a lot earlier to raise awareness for the manmade disaster.

This is a group of Americans in an American city having a problem they shouldn’t be having with a basic need,” she said.

Burke took her criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the crisis a step further by highlighting their willingness to allocate funds for other crises in other nations and “every other person someplace else being a priority except the people here.”

The outspoken panelist believes these policy practices by the current administration could play right into the hands of the GOP’s presumptive nominee Donald Trump, who continues to push the message of “taking care of Americans first.”

As Adults Legally Smoke Pot In Colorado, More Non-White Kids Arrested For It

NPR

Marijuana is legal in Colorado — as long as you're 21 or older. It's still illegal for kids to possess, so juveniles are coming to dominate the marijuana arrests in Colorado. But another startling trend also has developed: Arrest rates have risen dramatically for young blacks and Latinos.

Ricky Montoya isn't surprised that's happening. He's standing outside Courtroom 4F in Denver's City and County Building, where he was just ordered to pay a $1,000 fine for his third marijuana possession offense.

"They probably look at us more different," he says of police. "I don't think they think that white people would smoke as much as we do."

A Colorado Health Department survey found there wasn't a huge racial difference in who smokes pot. But the marijuana arrest rate for white 10- to 17-year-olds fell by nearly 10 percent from 2012 to 2014, while arrest rates for Latino and black youths respectively rose more than 20 percent and more than 50 percent.

That was evident that morning at the courthouse, where about a dozen cases were heard before noon. Only one involved a white kid.

Brian Vicente, who led the marijuana legalization movement in Colorado, says that discrepancy needs to stop.

"That is, I think, a large part of the reason Colorado voters passed legalization," Vicente says. "They're tired of the sort of racist legacy of the drug war."

Vicente says it's shameful that local police have shifted their attention to minority kids. But Denver Police spokesman Sonny Jackson says it's not a matter of what police want to focus on, but what people are reporting to authorities.

"Most of these cases are complaint-driven," Jackson says. "We get a complaint from someone, we're not sure where it's going to take us, but we have to act on it. And we're not sure, if I get a call to a residence or to a location, who I'm going to encounter until I get there." [MORE]

Obama is Not a Secret Muslim or Even Pro-Muslim

Civil Rights Icon Walter Fauntroy Arrested

NewsOne 

On Tuesday, former congressman and civil rights legend Walter Fauntroy was expected to go before a judge.

Officers arrested Fauntroy on Monday at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia as he was returning to the United States after living in the Persian Gulf for approximately four years. 

In January of 2012, a warrant was issued for Fauntroy after he was charged for allegedly writing a bad check for $55,000. The check was supposed to help pay for President Barack Obama‘s first inauguration ball in 2009. Fauntroy, now 83, claims the bad check issue had been previously resolved. 

According to The Washington Post, Fauntroy returned to the United States “because he missed his family and he had finally obtained financing for his ­green-energy humanitarian projects around the world.”

During Tuesday’s edition of NewsOne Now, Roland Martin and his panel of guests discussed the fall from grace experienced by Fauntroy, who was once a congressional delegate.

Martin called Fauntroy’s downfall “sad.” The host of NewsOne Now said he spoke to individuals who said the person Fauntroy is now isn’t the person they used to know.

Citing outlandish claims Fauntroy previously made about the media in the United States, Martin made mention of multiple instances where staffers at NewsOne Now invited him to appear on the show. He added it was as if the former congressman “had completely dropped off of the grid.” [MORE]

Coalition Demands Moratorium On Metal Detectors In L.A. Schools

NewsOne

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board received an earful from dozens of parents, educators, and activists at a recent meeting. They’re demanding a moratorium on daily random weapon searches in middle and high schools, the Washington Post reports.

“On a daily basis we will be planting seeds that say you are dangerous, you are a potential threat to others and you cannot be trusted,” parent Keisha Mitchell told the board, according to the Post.

Furthermore, the searches are tantamount to racial profiling, others protested to the school board members. The Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union is leading a petition drive against the policy. It has received nearly 600 signatures so far.

Immigration Officials [white folks] Making Secret Deals With Private Prisons [white folks] to Lock Up More [non-white] Mothers & Children in detention centers [internment camps]

From [HERE] Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is striking deals with private prison companies to lock up a “guaranteed minimum” of mothers with their children in euphemistically-termed family detention centers.

The 2009 congressional mandate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep a minimum of 34,000 people minimum locked up at any given time is already well-established. But a new report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Detention Watch Network reveals that this federal quota rests, in part, on aggressive deals with companies in the business of locking up families.

“Guaranteed minimums, which appear mostly in ICE contracts with private contractors (though some exist with local governments), guarantee that ICE will pay for a minimum number of people to be detained at any given time,” states the report, whose lead authors are Dawy Rkasnuam and Conchita Garcia of Detention Watch Network. “Because the government seeks to avoid paying for detention space that isn’t being used, guaranteed minimums are essentially local ‘lockup’ quotas that influence ICE’s decision-making about immigration enforcement, whether or not people will be released, where people will be detained, and ultimately, who will profit or benefit from their detention.”

According to the investigation, which based its findings on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, such local quotas are “even more widespread than previously reported, covering at least 24 detention facility contracts,” accounting for at least 12,821 of the 34,000 beds established by the national quota. Ninety-three percent of those beds are in privately-run detention facilities.

Critically, such arrangements are confirmed in two of the three remaining “family detention center” contracts in the United States: the Karnes County Residential Center in Texas and the Berks Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania.

Since 2014, the mass detention of families in these prison-like facilities has been a foundation of the Obama administration’s immigration policies toward refugees from Central America, many of whom are fleeing violence and poverty worsened by U.S. policies. The human rights violations at these camps have been condemned by human rights organizations and the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and some have compared them to Japanese internment camps.

Karnes, in particular, has been the site of repeated hunger strikes over inhumane conditions, including nearly free labor, lack of legal representation and contaminated drinking water. In 2014, some women detained at the prison alleged that guards sexually assaulted them.

“Almost all guaranteed minimums are found in facilities that contract with private prison companies, and ICE actively collaborates with these companies to keep details of their contracts secret,” said Ghita Schwarz, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a press statement about the new findings. “The public should have a full understanding of how ICE rewards and incentivizes profiteering off the detention of immigrants.”

According to the report’s authors, numerous questions remain. “Due to ICE’s lack of transparency and the resulting unavailability of data, it is currently unclear what percentage of detention facilities are subject to guaranteed minimums, what the costs of guaranteed minimums are, and the degree to which they influence ICE’s practices in controlling the pipeline into and out of detention,” they write.

Yet, one thing is clear: profits are soaring for GEO Group and CCA, the two largest private prison companies in the United States. Both boasted to their shareholders recently that revenues are spiking, thanks in part to the windfall from locking up families.

“At first the Obama administration said they were locking up families to deter people from crossing,” Cristina Parker, organizer with the advocacy group Grassroots Leadership, told AlterNet. “Then when a judge said that was unconstitutional they changed their rationale and said it’s for national security, which is a thin argument. Seeing on paper that they have a quota that directly benefits private prisons underlines that family detention is really driving revenue and profits.”

Obama admin says up to 116 civilians 'accidentally' killed in US drone strikes

RT

The US drone strikes have accidentally killed up to 116 civilians in countries that the US is not at war with, the White House said. The number is lower than the figures cited by various human rights organizations.

No information was released on the number of unintended civilian deaths in countries the US is at war with, however.

The long-awaited announcement came on Friday afternoon acknowledges that between 64 and 116 civilians were killed by US drone operations in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other African countries, compared to 2,500 members of terrorist groups.

Deaths resulting from strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were not counted in the report.

The government said that the number of civilian deaths from drone strikes isn’t always clear, meaning that the numbers it released may be revised. The total is far lower than estimates made by non-governmental organization.

“As the statement today from the DNI notes, in releasing these figures, the U.S. Government also acknowledges that there are differences between U.S. Government assessments and reporting from non-governmental organizations on non-combatant deaths resulting from U.S. operations,” the White House said. “Although the U.S. Government has access to a wide range of information, the figures we are releasing today should be considered in light of the inherent limitations on the ability to determine the precise number of combatant and non-combatant deaths outside areas of active hostilities, including the non-permissive environments in which these strikes often occur. “

Jennifer Gibson, a lawyer from the human rights organization Reprieve, estimates that more than 4,000 people have been killed by drones including hundreds of children, and said the Obama administration’s estimation of casualties “is unlikely to be worth the paper it’s printed on.”

Drone strikes in countries that are not technically US battlefields are the purview of the CIA and the US military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command. Critics point out that the White House wouldn’t even mention the word “drone” for years, and that no entity outside of the administration reviews strikes.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that official warzones are being excluded from the count because drone assassinations in those areas are done by the Pentagon, which has its own process of disclosing civilian deaths.

CIA Director John Brennan and Dianne Feinstein, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously put the estimates for civilian at single digits per year.

Public Enemy - Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos

What's in the NYPD's 1960s/70s Political Surveillance Files?

Memory Hole 2

In the 1960s and the 1970s, the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division spied on - and infiltrated and disrupted - politically radical individuals and organizations, including the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords (Puerto Rican activists), gay-rights advocates, Lyndon LaRouche's groups, various Cubans, and the antiwar movement. It was the NYPD's version of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO surveillance/harassment of political activists, which was happening at the same time.

While researching a book on the Young Lords, Baruch history professor Johanna Fernández was stonewalled in her quest for documents and was eventually told that all records of NYPD surveillance during that era had been lost. After the media reported this in June 2016, the city coincidentally "found" 500 boxes of records - an estimated 1.1 million pages of documents - during a routine inventory of a warehouse in Queens. This incredible archive will supposedly become available to the public, but the city refuses to say how or when.

It turns out that in 1989, those records - or at least a huge portion of them - were inventoried as part of a lawsuit (the Handschu case) against the NYPD for its surveillance activities. The Village Voice posted an inventory in its article about the so-called rediscovery of the archive, writing: [MORE]

Does New York City’s ‘broken windows’ policing work? New report says no.

WashPost

For more than 30 years, activists, experts and police chiefs have been divided over the New York City Police Department’s “broken windows” method of policing. The idea — championed by Bill Bratton during his first and current tenures as New York’s police commissioner — is that cracking down on petty crimes like vandalism and public urination generates an atmosphere of lawfulness that then prevents more serious crime.

Now that debate is playing out within Bratton’s own NYPD with warring reports. The latest, released Wednesday by NYPD’s watchdog inspector general, finds no evidence that huge crack-downs on low-level “quality-of-life” incidents decrease felony crimes.

That study directly contradicts a report by Bratton’s NYPD last year that claims the exact opposite — that quality-of-life policing was responsible for fewer felony crimes in New York.

Wednesday’s report — by DOI Commissioner Mark Peters and NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure — takes direct aim at the “broken windows” policy that Bratton famously began pushing in the 1990s. Their report notes the cost of that policy “in police time, in an increase of the number of people brought into the criminal justice system and, at times, in a fraying of the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.” [MORE]

U.S. Supreme Court, split 4-4, blocks Obama immigration plan

CLG

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dealt President Barack Obama a harsh defeat, splitting 4-4 over his plan to spare millions of immigrants in the country illegally from deportation and give them work permits, leaving intact a lower-court ruling blocking the plan. The court, with four conservative justices and four liberals, appeared divided along ideological lines during oral arguments on April 18 in a case brought by 26 states led by Texas that sued to block Obama's 2014 executive action on immigration that bypassed Congress. The 4-4 ruling was possible because there are only eight justices following February's death of conservative Antonin Scalia.

Invoking Orlando, Freaky Senate Republicans [all white] Say FBI Should be Able to Read Your Emails & Browsing Info

CLG

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set up a vote late on Monday to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation's authority to use a secretive surveillance order without a warrant to include email metadata and some browsing history information. The move, made via an amendment to a criminal justice appropriations bill, is an effort by Senate Republicans to respond to last week's mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub after a series of measures to restrict guns offered by both parties failed on Monday. Privacy advocates denounced the effort, saying it seeks to exploit a mass shooting in order to expand the government's digital spying powers. [MORE]

Supreme Court upholds race-based college admissions program

CLG

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the practice of considering race in college admissions, rejecting a white woman's challenge to a University of Texas affirmative action program designed to boost the enrollment of minority students. The court, in a 4-3 ruling written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, decided in favor of the university in turning aside the conservative challenge to the policy, meaning a 2014 appeals court ruling that backed the admissions program was left intact. The Supreme Court was weighing for the second time a challenge to the admissions system used by the University of Texas at Austin brought by Abigail Fisher, who was denied entry to the school for the autumn of 2008.

Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media

[MORE]

The FBI is One of the Biggest Terrorist Organizations in the World