Skip to content
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that California’s death penalty system violates the U.S. prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” because rampant delays in appeals decisions coupled with sporadic executions create an “arbitrary” and unfair system of justice.
The ruling is a response to a challenge by Ernest Jones, who has been on Death Row in California for nearly two decades, and commutes his death sentence to life in prison without parole.
Orange County U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney—a George W. Bush appointee—wrote Wednesday that the state’s “penalty system is so plagued by inordinate and unpredictable delay that the death sentence is actually carried out against only a trivial few of those sentenced to death.” Carney continues, “For all practical purposes then, a sentence of death in California is a sentence of life imprisonment with the remote possibility of death — a sentence no rational legislature or jury could ever impose.”
The small number of people who have been executed were forced to remain on Death Row for so long their killing was “arbitrary” and “random,” argues Carney.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
No one has been executed in California since 2006, following a ruling by another federal judge that California’s lethal injection processes put people at high risk of an agonizing execution. Yet 748 people in the state remain on Death Row, at a significant cost to taxpayers.
Natasha Minsker, director of the ACLU of Northern California, told the Los Angeles Times that Wednesday’s decision marks the “first time any judge has ruled systemic delay creates an arbitrary system that serves no legitimate purpose and is therefore unconstitutional.”
The ruling can be challenged in the 9th circuit court of appeals.
_____________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
A top federal judge on Monday issued an evocative and forthright attack on the death penalty, saying that the practice of “lethal injection” is a misguided attempt by society to “mask” the “horrendous brutality” of the act.
“Using drugs meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is a misguided effort to maks the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful—like something any one of us might experience in our final moments,” Ninth Circuit Court chief justice Alex Kozinski, wrote in a dissenting opinion in the lethal injection secrecy case of Joseph Wood.
“But executions are, in fact, nothing like that,” Kozinski continued. “They are brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality.”
The comments were made, unexpectedly, in Kozinski’s dissenting opinion in the Ninth Circuit Court ruling that denied the state of Arizona grounds to challenge the postponement of Wood’s execution, which is being delayed over the secrecy of its capital punishment procedures.
Though Kozinski is for the death penalty, he argued that, “If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.”
Click Here: NRL Telstra Premiership
According to the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, the statement represents “one of the most high-profile attacks on the U.S. death penalty,” as the practice of death by lethal injection has come under increasing scrutiny following Europe’s boycott of producing death penalty drugs.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
The dissent was issued days after a California judge declared the state’s death penalty system “unconstitutional,” arguing that long delays and uncertainty over whether one will ever be executed amounts to “cruel or unusual punishment.”
“If we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood.”
—Ninth Circuit Court chief justice Alex Kozinski
In the Wood v. Ryan dissent, Kozinski said that if governments wish to continue carrying out the death penalty, they must “return to more primitive—and foolproof—methods of execution.”
After weighing the drawbacks of historic alternatives, Kozinski settled on the firing squad as being the “most promising.”
“Sure, firing squads can be messy,” he wrote, “but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood.”
“If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.”
The world risks an “insurmountable” water crisis by 2040 without an immediate and significant overhaul of energy consumption and demand, a research team reported on Wednesday.
“There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we’re doing today,” said Professor Benjamin Sovacool of Denmark’s Aarhus University, who co-authored two reports on the world’s rapidly decreasing sources of freshwater.
Click Here: camisetas de futbol baratas
Many troubling global trends could worsen these baseline projected shortages. According to the report, water resources around the world are “increasingly strained by economic development, population growth, and climate change.” The World Resources Institute estimates that in India, “water demand will outstrip supply by as much as 50 percent by 2030, a situation worsened further by the country’s likely decline of available freshwater due to climate change,” the report states. “[P]ower demand could more than double in northern China, more than triple in India, and increase by almost three-quarters in Texas.”
“If we keep doing business as usual, we are facing an insurmountable water shortage — even if water was free, because it’s not a matter of the price,” Sovacool said. “There’s no time to waste. We need to act now.”
In addition to an expanding global population, economic development, and an increasing demand for energy, the report also finds that the generation of electricity is one of the biggest sources of water consumption throughout the world, using up more water than even the agricultural industry. Unlike less water-intensive alternative sources of energy like wind and solar systems, fossil fuel-powered and nuclear plants need enormous and continued water inputs to function, both for fueling thermal generators and cooling cycles.
The reports, Capturing Synergies Between Water Conservation and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Power Sector and A Clash of Competing Necessities: Water Adequacy and Electric Reliability in China, India, France, and Texas and published after three years of research by Aarhus University, Vermont Law School and CNA Corporation, show that most power plants do not even log how much water they use to keep the systems going.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
“It’s a huge problem that the electricity sector do not even realize how much water they actually consume,” Sovacool said. “And together with the fact that we do not have unlimited water resources, it could lead to a serious crisis if nobody acts on it soon.”
Unless water use is drastically minimized, the researchers found that widespread drought will affect between 30 and 40 percent of the planet by 2020, and another two decades after that will see a severe water shortage that would affect the entire planet. The demand for both energy and drinking water would combine to aggressively speed up drought, which in turn could exacerbate large-scale health risks and other global development problems.
“The policy and technology choices made to meet demand will have immense implications for water withdrawals and consumption, and may also have significant economic, human health, and development consequences,” the report states.
The research says that utilizing alternative energy sources like wind and solar systems is vital to mitigating water consumption enough to stave off the crisis. “Unsubsidized wind power costs… are currently lower than coal or nuclear and they are continuing to drop,” the report states. When faced with its worst drought in 2011, Texas got up to 18 of its electricity from wind power and was able to avoid the kind of rolling blackouts that plague parts of China, where existing water shortages prevent power plants from operating.
An equally important step would be to shutter “thirsty” fossil fuel facilities in areas that are already experiencing water shortages, like China and India, where carbon emissions can be significantly more impactful.
“[We] have to decide where we spend our water in the future,” Sovacool said. “Do we want to spend it on keeping the power plants going or as drinking water? We don’t have enough water to do both.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
A public library in small Pennsylvania town offered a new public resource for its patrons: a seed library. That is, until the state Department of Agriculture pulled the rug out from under the plan.
Launched on April 26, the seed library at Mechanicsburg’s Joseph T. Simpson Public Library would have held all heirloom, and preferable organic, seed. Its first seed trove, with help from the Cumberland County Commission for Women, came from Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving heirloom seeds.
Library patrons could “check out” the seeds to plant, and, if all went well, at the end of the plant’s growing season, they’d save its seeds and return them to the library to replenish the stock. If the crop failed or the borrowers were just unable to save seeds, they were allowed to bring back store-bought heirloom seeds instead.
In the process of this seed library circulation, patrons would be bringing a new use to the library space, exchanging seeds with their community members and practicing the art of saving seeds — something farmers have done for years but which stands at odds with proprietary seeds.
“People have been really excited to have this opportunity to borrow seeds,” Adult Services Director Rebecca Swanger told local news ABC27 in May. “That way they don’t have to purchase a whole packet of seeds and end up not using a lot of them.”
According to reporting by the Carlisle Sentinel on July 31, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture sent a letter to the library stating that the seed library violated the state’s Seed Act of 2004.
While the Act focuses on seeds that are sold, Cumberland County Library System Executive Director Jonelle Darr told The Sentinel that there could also be a problem with seeds being mislabeled and potentially invasive, and noted that the Department indicated it would “crack down” at other seed libraries within the state.
The Sentinel continues:
But not all towns seem to agree with Cross’ take that seed libraries pose a danger, as a wave of emerging seed libraries is emerging in towns across the country including Alameda and Richmond, California, Basalt, Colorado and LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
“Seed Libraries are vital to communities,” Stephanie Syson, Basalt Food Garden Manager, told Common Dreams. “Seed Libraries offer a common place for community members to share seed that is grown locally, in celebration of cultural heritage and regional diversity. In addition seed libraries offer a chance for low income residents to access vegetable seeds and thus provide much needed nutrition to their families.”
Syson emphasized that “a Seed Library is NOT a seed company and should not be regulated in the same manner as one. There are never any ‘sales’ of seed. The seed is offered as a community asset to be freely shared and enjoyed. Community members understand that the seed does not have a guarantee of germination rates. Through multiple free workshops per year, our community is re-gaining the lost skill of seed saving. This skill is important to our culture as well as our future food security.”
It makes sense, really, that these public institutions would be involved in seed libraries. As the Duluth, Minnesota seed library states in its values: “Public libraries play a vital role in communities as a repository for a diversity of ideas and shared knowledge for the public good. Similarly, seed is a public resource and shared legacy – it must be managed in a manner that benefits the public good.”
*This post was updated to include comment from Syson.
**According to new reporting by The Sentinel posted Aug. 5, the Mechanicsburg library and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture together came to a solution that the seed library could continue to offer labeled seeds for the appropriate season, but could not offer unlabeled or older seeds, unless those unlabeled seeds were tested by a lab that follows rules set out by the Association of Official Seed Analysts Inc.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Click Here: los jaguares argentina
Former Jimmy John’s workers last week filed a class action lawsuit in federal court charging that the sandwich chain famed for “dirt cheap” prices is stealing workers’ wages as a matter of nation-wide policy.
Karolis Kubelskas and Emily Brunner, both former workers at separate Jimmy John’s shops in Illinois, charge that their employers violated numerous state and federal laws by “requiring hourly employees to work ‘off the clock’ without getting paid”—a practice that led to sub-minimum wages, denial of overtime pay, and therefore “significant monetary losses.” They say that this practice, which affects “tens of thousands” of current and former workers, amounts to intentional “systematic wage theft.”
Both Jimmy John’s Enterprise and franchisee JS Fort Group—owner of the two Illinois locations that employed the plaintiffs—are named in the suit.
Jimmy John’s, which boasts 1,900 shops across the United States, says it offers low prices and an “irreverent attitude” that college students love. But critics charge that the company’s business model is, in fact, based on skimping on labor costs and denying workers their rights.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
When 10 Jimmy John’s shops in the Twin Cities launched a bid in 2010 to win formal union recognition, they were aggressively contested—and according to workers physically intimidated and threatened—by their employer, with Jimmy John’s ultimately undermining their union recognition. Six key organizers in the drives later said they were unlawfully fired for organizing, and in 2012, a federal judge ruled in their favor.
At the time, the organizing drive was recognized as a “rare” attempt to organize fast food workers. But since then, public fast food worker organizing bids have taken off across the United States and world, including waves of fast food worker strikes.
The Jimmy John’s Workers Union, an affiliate of the Industrial Workers of the World, was created during the 2010 organizing drive and is currently involved in numerous organizing efforts across the country, Isaac Dalto, Jimmy John’s worker and IWW member, told Common Dreams. This includes Baltimore, Maryland where workers recently went public with their demands for a living wage, paid sick days, and union recognition.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Click Here: Putters
Thousands of pro-Palestinian activists have successfully blocked an Israeli ship that was scheduled to dock at the port of Oakland in California on Saturday.
The boat had been expected to dock in the early morning hours and protesters had planned to show up at 5:00 am Saturday morning to block the ship. But as word spread that the ship had delayed its arrival at Oakland in an apparent attempt to avoid the protest the protest was pushed back until 3:00pm.
The protesters plan to form a picket line to prevent work crews from unloading the ship, if, and when it docks.
The Guardian reports:
Activists interpreted the delay as a victory since the schedule change seemed to have been made in response to the planned pickets. “We have stopped the Zim Piraeus from docking on the west coast of the United States,” said Eyad, of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), into a megaphone, drawing cheers from the crowd as the march came to a halt on a bridge leading towards the docks.
“Zim Lines is the largest Israeli shipping company, and it’s a huge flow of capital for the state of Israel,” said Lara Kiswani, executive director of the center, whose organization was one of 70 to take part in planning the blockade.
Kiswani said the action was meant to generate momentum for a broader campaign calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the Israeli government as a response to violence in Gaza. “With the recent attacks on Palestine … there’s been a lot of discussion locally, particularly with AROC, on how to escalate our tactics,” she said.
A similar blockade against a Zim vessel took place in 2010, when pro-Palestinian activists formed picket lines in response to Israel’s attack on a flotilla ferrying humanitarian outreach workers to Gaza. “After the flotilla was attacked by the state of Israel, we successfully were able to block the Zim Lines ship here, with the ILWU,” Kiswani said. “So for years we were working with ILWU, with rank and file, and with the leadership, to try and raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians.” In 1984, she added, “ILWU took a position against apartheid, and the workers refused to unload that ship”.
As the march reached the port entrance, where activists had originally planned to stage a picket, they encountered a line of police officers standing in formation. Protesters erupted into chants of, “hands up, don’t shoot!” – echoing chants sounded in response to police violence directed against street protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Several others made statements linking recent acts of police brutality with the conflict in Gaza. “On Twitter, we’ve seen people in Gaza tweet to protesters in Ferguson how to cope with teargas,” said Mohamed Shehk, who helped organize the blockade with the Oakland-based nonprofit Critical Resistance. “They’re saying things like, ‘as Palestinians, we know what it’s like to be targeted and killed for being of the wrong ethnicity’.”
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Block the Boat organizers are targeting Zim Lines for it’s history of supporting Israel’s occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.
“From its founding in 1945 by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Histradut, Zim has served Israeli settler-colonialism, bringing settlers to Palestine and serving as Israel’s only maritime connection during the 1948 war, supplying ‘food, freight, and military equipment’ used of course to carry out the Nakba. The worldwide commerce conducted by Zim today funds the occupation of Palestine with revenue generated on every continent,” organizers wrote in a statement issued by Block the Boat.
#blocktheboat Tweets
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
The Kiev government in Ukraine accused the Russian army of invading its eastern border on Wednesday, even though no media outlets reporting on the claims appeared able to independently verify the accusations.
Though it can routinely be difficult to verify facts inside a war zone, there has been a pattern of errant reporting—including a consistent deference to the U.S. government’s narrative of events—in the western press when it comes to the crisis in Ukraine, especially regarding Russia’s role.
According to Reuters:
The New York Times reporting on the fighting Wednesday said that Ukraine and U.S. officials characterized the fighting as a “stealth invasion.” Citing those officials, the newspaper reported that “tanks, artillery and infantry have crossed from Russia into an unbreached part of eastern Ukraine in recent days, attacking Ukrainian forces and causing panic and wholesale retreat not only in this small border town but also a wide section of territory[…]” However, even the reporting from the ground offered no concrete evidence to verify that the advance or shelling witnessed was, in fact, coming from Russian troops who crossed the international border.
In Washington, D.C., State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said evidence indicates that “a Russian-directed counteroffensive is likely underway,” but offered journalists no concrete evidence to support the claims. Senior “American officials” reportedly showed the New York Times images of what they claimed were Russian artillery units inside Ukraine, but have yet to make such documents public.
In separate but related developments that began on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the city of Minsk, Belarus in their first face-to-face meeting since Poroshenko was elected earlier this year. Meanwhile, as the meeting in Minsk was getting underway, the head of NATO took the opportunity to voice plans by the European alliance to expand its military footprint in the Baltics and other countries in eastern Europe.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
In comments made to European news outlets and published just ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen—who has been consistently hawkish against Russia throughout the recent turmoil in Ukraine—said that a “permanent” and expanded military presence is the best way to counter Moscow and that such plans would be put forward at the upcoming NATO summit scheduled to take place in Cardiff, Wales next week.
As quoted by the Guardian newspaper, Rasmussen told the selected journalists:
In an email to Common Dreams, Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University and an expert on Russian and Cold War history, characterized Rasmussen’s comments—in the context of current events—as “reckless beyond reason.”
The expansion of NATO bases in Poland or other Baltic states along the Russian border is one of the most strident and controversial topics when it comes to the re-emerging Cold War relationship between the U.S., European nations, and Russia. As the Moscow Times reported on Wednesday, “The move [by NATO] effectively returns the state of European security back to the Cold War era, when the collective defense ministry alliance that came into being in 1949 acted as a deterrent and main rival to the Warsaw Pact nations led by the Soviet Union.” The newspaper continued:
The Russian-based newspaper also interview Cold War experts—from “across the political spectrum”—who all agreed that the Kremlin’s response to Rasmussen’s promise to move NATO bases, troops, and weapons to the east was easily foreseen and likely the goal of the comments. Predictable or not, however, those who spoke to the times said the development significantly raises the stakes for regional conflict.
“The problem is that the Kremlin dissolved the Warsaw Pact alliance of its own accord and did not represent a threat to the West in the 1990s, while NATO recklessly started to move toward Moscow,” Alexei Arbatov, a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, told the Times.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Israel announced on Sunday it was seizing 988 acres of land in the West Bank, an amount described as ‘unprecedented’ by a peace organization.
The appropriation is reportedly in retaliation for the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in June.
Click Here: camiseta rosario central
According to reporting by Haaretz, “The appropriated land belongs to five Palestinian villages in the Bethlehem area: Jaba, Surif, Wadi Fukin, Husan and Nahalin.”
Ma’an News adds:
Anti-settlement group Peace Now called the land appropriation “unprecedented in its scope since the 1980’s.” A statement by the group continues:
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
The Canadian government is exploiting last week’s attacks against soldiers in the country to push sweeping national security bills into law and give the state ever-more invasive surveillance powers, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald said in Ottawa over the weekend.
Terrorism is “the most inflammatory, but also the most meaningless word in our political lexicon,” Greenwald told an audience of over 1,000 during a speech on privacy and state surveillance on Saturday. “We’ve allowed this word terrorism to take on such profound meaning that right before our eyes governments dismantle the protections and defining attributes of western justice in order to keep us safer.”
“These attacks are instantly seized upon as a way to further dismantle civil liberties and core principles of western justice.”
—Glenn Greenwald, The InterceptLast week, following two separate incidents that resulted in the death of Canadian soldiers, Prime Minister Stephen Harper argued that Parliament should give the nation’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, more surveillance power to track terror suspects abroad and to detain suspects at home. On Monday, the Conservative government began debate over a bill that would give those agencies additional powers, even as a report published Friday by the Security Intelligence Review Committee found that the CSIS was operating without accountability.
“Our laws and police powers need to be strengthened in the area of surveillance, detention and arrest,” Harper told the House of Commons on Thursday. “They need to be much strengthened. I assure members that work which is already underway will be expedited.”
In his speech, Greenwald noted that Harper’s push came less than 48 hours after Wednesday’s attack, in which gunman Micheal Zehaf-Bibeau killed National War Memorial sentry Cpl. Nathan Cirillo.
“The speed and the aggression and the brazenness and the shamelessness with which the prime minister moved to manipulate and exploit the emotions around these events to demand more power for himself was… almost impressive,” Greenwald said.
“These attacks are instantly seized upon as a way to further dismantle civil liberties and core principles of western justice,” he continued.
Greenwald, a champion of privacy rights and civil liberties and Pulitzer Prize winner who has published many of the key stories based on a cache of documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said the surveillance tactics exposed by those revelations are not just a threat to privacy—they are a threat to democracy itself.
The abuse of power by the shadowy security agencies of the so-called “Five Eyes” governments—which include Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and the UK—is “stunning,” Greenwald said. “[T]hese five governments… have instituted a system of mass surveillance as self-evidently consequential, with such profound, far-reaching implications, as a system of mass surveillance, without a whiff of disclosure or debate among the citizenry that are supposed to hold them democratically accountable.”
“The implications for democracy are incredibly profound and our ability as citizen to understand what our government is doing,” he added.
The most compelling reason to confront Western governments’ fear-mongering and emotional manipulation, Greenwald said, is that the U.S. and its allies are embarking on “a path of endless war” in the wake of the attacks on September 11:
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Watch Greenwald’s entire speech here:
Click Here: Bape Kid 1st Camo Ape Head rompers
<
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner believes Alex Albon could have contended for a spot on the podium in the Eifel GP but for a retirement caused by a pierced radiator.
Albon was running sixth behind Daniel Ricciardo when tyre vibrations due to a lock-up on the opening lap forced the Red Bull charger to pit early on lap 8.
Albon moved swiftly through the field and into the points thereafter despite a contact with AlphaTauri’s Dany Kvyat that warranted a five-second time penalty.
But on lap 23, the Red Bull charger was unexpectedly called into the pits where the team retired the car, much to Albon’s surprise.
©RedBull
“He had a big lock-up into Turn Three on the opening lap,” said Horner. “And our concern was that he had gone pretty much through to the canvas. We were seeing vibrations increasing to the point that it was past our threshold.
“So from a safety point of view, we had to pit him at that point.
“He then started to make good progress back through the field, but was very unlucky in that he picked up some debris that has pierced the radiator on the cooling circuit, and we just saw our temperatures starting to go sky high.
“Before losing an engine it seemed we had no choice but to stop the car.
“It was a shame in the race, I think he would have been racing [Sergio] Perez and [Daniel] Ricciardo even with that flat spot and early stop. It was a shame for him not to see that come to fruition today, because he’s had a pretty sensible weekend.
“So I think it’s a shame that he didn’t get a result out of today, because I think there was more to come.”
Read also: ‘Second is where we belonged today’ – Verstappen
A frustrated Albon agreed with his team boss that he could “have done something” without his lockup on lap 1 that undermined his afternoon.
“We wouldn’t have boxed if there was no issue,” he said. “Obviously, we had the lock up in lap one. So just compromised the race really. It was a bit of a shame, obviously the car is quick.
“Without having this issue we could have done something. We were pretty slow with the flat spot, so I’m sure there was pace in the car there.”
Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers
Click Here: cheap Cowboys jersey
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter