Wednesday, August 20, 2014


News Clips For The Day


Protests turn mostly peaceful in Ferguson, Missouri
CBS/AP August 20, 2014, 3:03 AM

FERGUSON, Mo. -- Police and protesters in Ferguson were finally able to share the streets again at night, putting aside for at least a few hours some of the hostility that had filled that time on previous nights.

The St. Louis suburb still had plenty of lively protest Tuesday over the fatal shooting on August 9 of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer.

And tensions did rise briefly. But the overall scene was more subdued than on the past five nights, with smaller crowds, fewer confrontations and no tear gas.

Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who's heading the police response to the demonstrations, told reporters early Wednesday there were 47 arrests, mainly of people who defied orders to disperse.

One person was arrested for the third time, Johnson said, adding that the person came to Ferguson from Austin, Texas.

The slight easing of tensions came the day before Attorney General Eric Holder was to visit Ferguson to meet with FBI and other officials carrying out an independent federal investigation into Brown's death.

The mood in Ferguson was relatively calm until early Wednesday morning, when there were reports of shots fired, reports CBS St. Louis affiliate KMOV-TV.

The station says officers chased several people, and Johnson said bottles and urine were thrown at police. He said those responsible hid inside the media staging area. Johnson said no shots were fired, but a threat was made against police, who seized three handguns.

Johnson called Tuesday night a "turning point" and credited clergy and other local leaders for keeping things calm for most of the evening.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said Tuesday that he wouldn't seek the removal of the county prosecutor overseeing the investigation into the Brown shooting, which has sparked more than a week of nightly clashes between protesters and police.

St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch's deep family connections to police have been cited by some black leaders who question his ability to be impartial. McCullouch's father, mother, brother, uncle and cousin all worked for the St. Louis Police Department, and his father was killed while responding to a call involving a black suspect.

Nixon, A Democrat, said he would not ask McCulloch to leave the case, citing the "well-established process" by which prosecutors can recuse themselves from pending investigations to make way for a special prosecutor.

Departing from that process, Nixon said in a statement, "could unnecessarily inject legal uncertainty into this matter and potentially jeopardize the prosecution."

McCulloch, also a Democrat, was elected in 1991 and has earned a reputation for being tough on crime.

Earlier in the day, Ferguson city leaders urged people to stay home after dark Tuesday to "allow peace to settle in" and pledged to try to improve the police force in the St. Louis suburb.

In a public statement, the city said the mayor, the City Council and employees have been exploring ways to increase the number of African-American applicants to the law enforcement academy, develop incentive programs to encourage city residency for police officers and raise money for cameras that would be attached to patrol car dashboards and officers' vests.

"We plan to learn from this tragedy, as we further provide for the safety of our residents and businesses and progress our community through reconciliation and healing," the statement said.

Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Brown's family, said the 18-year-old's funeral and memorial service would be Monday. The time and location had not been finalized.

Earlier Tuesday, a large crowd gathered in nearby St. Louis after officers responding to a report of a store robbery shot and killed a knife-wielding man. Police Chief Sam Dotson said the suspect acted erratically and told responding officers to "kill me now."
Some members of the crowd shouted, "Hands up, don't shoot," a phrase that has been a refrain of protests since Brown's death on Aug. 9. Like Brown, the 23-year-old suspect killed Tuesday was black.

A grand jury could begin hearing evidence Wednesday to determine whether the officer, Darren Wilson, should be charged in Brown's death, said Ed Magee, spokesman for St. Louis County's prosecuting attorney.

Wilson was recognized during a Ferguson City Council meeting in February, getting special recognition for what Police Chief Thomas Jackson said then was his role in responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle, then struggling with the driver and detaining him until help arrived. Jackson said the suspect was preparing a large quantity of marijuana for sale.

In an essay posted late Tuesday on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website, Attorney General Holder said the bond of trust between law enforcement and the public is "all-important, but it is also fragile."

Arrest patterns "must not lead to disparate treatment under the law, even if such treatment is unintended. And police forces should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve," Holder wrote.

The Justice Department has mounted an unusually swift and aggressive response to Brown's death, from the independent autopsy to dozens of FBI agents combing Ferguson for witnesses to the shooting.

The Justice Department arranged for a third autopsy to be performed, by one of the military's most experienced medical examiners, Holder said.

Autopsies were also performed for local officials and the Brown family.

On Monday night, the National Guard arrived in Ferguson but kept its distance from the streets during another night of unrest.

Capt. Johnson said bottles and Molotov cocktails were thrown from the crowd and that some officers came under heavy gunfire. St. Louis County spokeswoman Candace Jarrett said 57 people were booked at the county jail alone, and perhaps more at other jails in the region.

A list of those arrested showed that only four live in Ferguson, though many live in St. Louis and other surrounding communities. Sixteen are from out of state.



“Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who's heading the police response to the demonstrations, told reporters early Wednesday there were 47 arrests, mainly of people who defied orders to disperse. One person was arrested for the third time, Johnson said, adding that the person came to Ferguson from Austin, Texas.... The mood in Ferguson was relatively calm until early Wednesday morning, when there were reports of shots fired, reports CBS St. Louis affiliate KMOV-TV..The station says officers chased several people, and Johnson said bottles and urine were thrown at police. He said those responsible hid inside the media staging area.... Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said Tuesday that he wouldn't seek the removal of the county prosecutor overseeing the investigation... Nixon, A Democrat, said he would not ask McCulloch to leave the case, citing the 'well-established process' by which prosecutors can recuse themselves from pending investigations to make way for a special prosecutor. Departing from that process, Nixon said in a statement, 'could unnecessarily inject legal uncertainty into this matter and potentially jeopardize the prosecution.'”

“Earlier in the day, Ferguson city leaders urged people to stay home after dark Tuesday to 'allow peace to settle in' and pledged to try to improve the police force in the St. Louis suburb.... In a public statement, the city said the mayor, the City Council and employees have been exploring ways to increase the number of African-American applicants to the law enforcement academy, develop incentive programs to encourage city residency for police officers and raise money for cameras that would be attached to patrol car dashboards and officers' vests. 'We plan to learn from this tragedy, as we further provide for the safety of our residents and businesses and progress our community through reconciliation and healing,' the statement said.”

This statement sounds really great if the city officials hold to their pledge of action. It is clear to me that the black people in Ferguson need to start to VOTE and establish more control over their lives. Exploding in rage every now and then is not a substitute for civic action. The voting record within the city as mentioned in yesterday's blog was shockingly low, and a handul of Ferguson voters elected all the officials, with the result that they are all white in a city that is 70% black. If the KKK presence in the city – affirmed in an article several days ago – is causing blacks to be afraid of voting, then the trusty police force need to crack down on that!





Eric Holder heads to Ferguson with a clear message
By STEPHANIE CONDON CBS NEWS August 20, 2014, 6:00 AM

When Attorney General Eric Holder released a statement on Monday regarding the developments in Ferguson, Missouri, he gave a clear signal of how seriously he is taking the matter.

The attorney general did not say that President Obama is dispatching him to Ferguson on Wednesday. Instead, Holder said that when he met with Mr. Obama on Monday, "I informed him of my plan to personally travel to Ferguson Wednesday."

While in Ferguson, Holder plans on meeting with FBI officials who are investigating the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, as well as prosecutors on the ground from the Justice Department's Civil Rights division and officials from the U.S. Attorney's Office.

"The full resources of the Department of Justice are being committed to our federal civil rights investigation into the death of Michael Brown," Holder said in his statement, noting that more than 40 FBI agents have been canvassing the neighborhood where Brown was shot.

The unusual investment of time and resources in Ferguson shows Holder's personal commitment to the case, according to legal experts.

"It is an extraordinary level of personal involvement by an attorney general," Thomas Dupree, who served as deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, told CBS News. Additionally, Dupree called the ongoing investigative efforts "an extraordinary commitment of resources."

"The fact that the attorney general is personally traveling to Missouri sends a message that this investigation is a top priority of the administration, it's a top priority for the attorney general personally," he said.

Holder's efforts so far are encouraging to those looking for reforms to the systemic problems that led to Brown's shooting on Aug. 9 and the subsequent unrest in Ferguson, such as racial inequities in the criminal justice system and mistrust between local police forces and the communities they protect. Still, they're looking for a commitment to reform from the Justice Department that will last long after the dust settles in Ferguson.

"It's tremendously important the attorney general is going to Ferguson," Vanita Gupta, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told CBS News. Holder can provide moral leadership on the ground that Gupta called "vitally important." However, she added that "this is not a situation where moral leadership alone is going to be satisfactory."

"There are very direct ways in which the Department of Justice can engage in reforms of specific policies and practices, and funding streams, to ensure another Ferguson doesn't take place."

In the immediate aftermath of the ugly confrontations between protesters and police forces decked out in combat gear, the Justice Department has sent experts from the Justice Department's Community Relations Service to Ferguson. Additionally, Ronald Davis, the director of the Justice Department's Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS), is also traveling to Ferguson Wednesday.

Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis NAACP branch, told CBS News that these Justice Department agencies are already working with local police forces and groups like his. They're playing a constructive role, he said, by giving community leaders "training and instructions on how the community can play a role to abate the overall [tense] atmosphere, and at the same time, amend the broken trust between the community and police department."

Pruitt said that in the longer term, the Justice Department can facilitate research into the sort of policing currently conducted in the St. Louis region, so that future unnecessary shootings are prevented.

"We have to do some significant research and analysis on the type of policing, the number of stops, things of that nature, not only going on in Ferguson but the entire region," he said. "In reality, Ferguson is one of 200-plus municipalities that exists within St. Louis county. They all are neighbors... While Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, the next killing could be two blocks over in Riverview Gardens."

Just hours after Pruitt spoke with CBS News, an knife-wielding African-American man was shot and killed by police in north St. Louis.

While the Justice Department works with local police forces, Pruitt said community leaders are also expecting the federal agency to be thorough in its civil rights investigation into the Brown shooting.

"If the Justice Department finds there was a... case for charges,it would go for a long way to abating the temperament of those in the community," he said. It would show, he said, that "when police do make a mistake, there is an ability for them to be prosecuted for doing so. Right now, among the folks out there, the sentiment in the community is that this doesn't exist."

The federal government has multiple options at its disposal, in terms of the role it can play in the investigation, and ultimately in terms of whether it will file criminal or civil charges in the case, Dupree said. In a case like this, the decision to file charges would be made "at a very high level," he said, and is often dependent on the status of state or local investigations.

The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation after the shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, but it never filed charges against the shooter, George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder by state prosecutors, but he was found not guilty in that case.

Dupree said the administration likely "drew a lesson" from that experience.

"The administration was heavily criticized -- in many cases from people who are typically their allies -- for not being more proactive in the Trayvon Martin case and not making that more of a civil rights case from the get-go," he said. By contrast, after the Michael Brown shooting, "from virtually the moment it happened, there was a very high level of real involvement and repeated statements by the president himself."

Gupta of the ACLU said that "there is a concern about the back-up of some of these investigations."

"People need to see activity and forward steps on these investigations in order to have faith in the value of independent federal investigations," she added.

While the Justice Department pursues its investigations, groups like the ACLU are waiting for the agency to take broader steps to reform the justice system. For one thing, the department should update its guidance on the use of race by law enforcement officials, including state and local law enforcement who work in partnership with the federal government, Gupta said. The Justice Department could also take steps such as requiring racial bias training and guidance for forces that receive federal grants, Gupta said.

The ACLU and other groups are also calling on the Justice Department to apply stricter rules -- or at least some oversight -- to local police forces that are given military equipment for free.

If Holder truly wants to make a difference, Gupta said, it will become more evident "once the cameras are no longer in Ferguson."

In an op-ed published Wednesday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Holder pledged, "Long after the events of Aug. 9 have receded from the headlines, the Justice Department will continue to stand with this community."




“While in Ferguson, Holder plans on meeting with FBI officials who are investigating the shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, as well as prosecutors on the ground from the Justice Department's Civil Rights division and officials from the U.S. Attorney's Office.... Vanita Gupta, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told CBS News. Holder can provide moral leadership on the ground that Gupta called 'vitally important.' However, she added that 'this is not a situation where moral leadership alone is going to be satisfactory.' Holder's efforts so far are encouraging to those looking for reforms to the systemic problems that led to Brown's shooting on Aug. 9 and the subsequent unrest in Ferguson, such as racial inequities in the criminal justice system and mistrust between local police forces and the communities they protect. Still, they're looking for a commitment to reform from the Justice Department that will last long after the dust settles in Ferguson.... 'We have to do some significant research and analysis on the type of policing, the number of stops, things of that nature, not only going on in Ferguson but the entire region,' he said. 'In reality, Ferguson is one of 200-plus municipalities that exists within St. Louis county. They all are neighbors... While Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, the next killing could be two blocks over in Riverview Gardens.' ….

Vanita Gupta of the ACLU seems to be watching the DOJ to see how they establish oversight on St. Louis' police department, and city police in general, as there are similar situations in the whole St. Louis area plus in other US cities. That includes race based policing, aggressive and intimidating neighborhood relationships with the police and “racial inequities in the criminal justice system,” especially in cities where the Pentagon has sent heavy duty weapons to supplement police capability. I personally do hope that the DOJ will look into similar situations in other US cities, as I think Ferguson is typical of many areas, especially in the South and the West. Sheriff Arpaio keeps making it into the news for similar reasons. We need our police forces, but we need for them to help everyone, not just white people.






Ebola In The Skies? How The Virus Made It To West Africa – NPR
by MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF
August 19, 2014

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the most explosive in history. One reason the virus spread so fast is that West Africa was blindsided. Ebola had never erupted in people anywhere close to West Africa before.

The type of Ebola causing the outbreak — called Zaire — is the deadliest strain. Until this year, it had been seen only in Central Africa, about 2,500 miles away. That's about the distance between Boston and San Francisco.

So how did it spread across this giant swath of land without anybody noticing?

To answer that, ecologist Peter Walsh says we need to look at the history of Ebola Zaire.

Back in the summer of 1976, a young Zairian doctor named Ngoy Mushola traveled to a rural village in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

He heard people were dying of a strange disease, near the shores of the Ebola River. They had fevers, stomachaches and rashes. Some had internal bleeding.

"What's so nasty about it is that it effectively melts your blood vessels," says Walsh, who's at the University of Cambridge.

Eventually scientists realized a new virus was causing the disease. They named it Ebola Zaire, after the river and the country.

Nearly 300 people died in that first outbreak. Then about a year later, poof! Ebola Zaire vanished.

In 1994, the virus reappeared and started hopscotching around the rain forest of Central Africa. "It goes away for a while and comes back," Walsh says. "This year it's here, next year it's 30 kilometers down the road."

Over the past 38 years, Ebola Zaire has proved to be the deadliest of the five Ebola strains. It has the highest mortality rate and has caused the most outbreaks. But the virus always stayed in Central Africa.

Until last December.

That's when people started dying of a mysterious disease again. This time it was across the continent, on the western tip of Africa.

At first, many people thought the culprit was another type of Ebola — Tai Forest — which hides out in nearby rain forests.

But DNA tests made it clear: Ebola Zaire was causing the outbreak.

So how did the virus end up 2,500 miles away from its normal home range?

Disease ecologist Peter Daszaksays scientists don't know for sure. But they have a top theory: The virus spread through bats.

Many signs point to bats as the main source of Ebola. Scientists have found Ebola antibodies in bat species that are widespread throughout Africa. The virus infects and replicates inside bats, but it doesn't kill the animals. So bats can easily spread Ebola.

And bats get around. Some can migrate hundreds, even thousands of miles.

"Bats don't need a passport to cross borders," says Daszak, who is the president of the conservation group EcoHealth Alliance. "Hundreds and thousands of bats migrate across countries. And we've shown that, in other countries, they have really large ranges. And they take the viruses with them."

So does this mean there are giant colonies of bats flying across a large swath of West Africa carrying Ebola?

"It sounds scary," Daszak says. "But bats have a very wide distribution. And people are becoming more and more populous across that distribution. These viruses can emerge anywhere where the wildlife reservoir lives."

There are a couple of big caveats here. This is still a theory. And although scientists have found traces of the virus in individual bats, they still haven't been able to figure out which species are actually spreading Ebola, or how long the virus has been in West Africa.

And Ebola outbreaks are still rare. "It's a bit like a giant earthquake: They happen very rarely, but they're very devastating when they happen," Daszak says.

But if Ebola Zaire could crop up in Guinea, it could appear anywhere in West Africa, where about 150 million people live. "This opens up more people at risk," Daszak says.
He's quick to point out, though, that we shouldn't blame the bats. "They are actually a really important part of the ecosystem," Daszak says. "Bats are out there pollinating trees and crops ... and eating insects that destroy crops."

We only catch viruses from bats and other wildlife when we don't respect their habitat. "Let's not blame the wildlife," he says. "Let's look at what we can do to interact with wildlife so that it's safer from a public health point of view."




“The type of Ebola causing the outbreak — called Zaire — is the deadliest strain. Until this year, it had been seen only in Central Africa, about 2,500 miles away. That's about the distance between Boston and San Francisco. So how did it spread across this giant swath of land without anybody noticing?.... Nearly 300 people died in that first outbreak. Then about a year later, poof! Ebola Zaire vanished. In 1994, the virus reappeared and started hopscotching around the rain forest of Central Africa. "It goes away for a while and comes back," Walsh says. "This year it's here, next year it's 30 kilometers down the road.".... Scientists have found Ebola antibodies in bat species that are widespread throughout Africa. The virus infects and replicates inside bats, but it doesn't kill the animals. So bats can easily spread Ebola.”

Scientists apparently don't know how human interaction with the bats occurs, or it hasn't been mentioned in the news so far, except in the New York Times article below. These aren't vampire bats, which only live in Central and South America. This article describes them as eating insects like most North American bats, while another source recently called them fruit bats. According to NPR's story here, the virus hasn't been shown to be endemic to any one species, as no thorough study has been done.

For more about this, see the New York Times article of 2013 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/science/link-to-african-ebola-found-in-bats-suggests-virus-is-more-widespread.html?_r=0. This article states that an ebola related virus has been found in bats in Bangladesh, India, China and Spain, as well as Africa. That article appears below, and suggests a means of transmission of the virus to humans. It also states that the virus is so widespread among widely dispersed bat species that it may have been originally found in a now extinct predecessor of all modern bats. If the virus is as widespread as this information states, it seems to me to be crucial that we develop vaccines as soon as possible and make up large enough quantities to handle the occasional outbreaks that are almost certain to occur.

Link to African Ebola Found in Bats Suggests Virus Is More Widespread
The New York Times – Science
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: January 28, 2013

For the first time, scientists have found evidence of the African Ebola virus in Asian fruit bats, suggesting that the virus is far more widespread around the world than had been previously known.

That does not mean that outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever are inevitable, said Kevin J. Olival, leader of the bat-hunting team at EcoHealth Alliance. But the possibility exists: bats are believed to drink out of jars attached to trees to collect tasty date palm sap, and fatal outbreaks in Bangladesh of Nipah virus, which is not related to Ebola, have been blamed on fresh sap contaminated with bat saliva, urine or feces.

Palm sap gatherers should be encouraged to put bamboo covers on their collecting jars to keep bats out, Dr. Olival said.

For the study, published this month in Emerging Infectious Diseases, his team caught 276 bats in four Bangladesh districts.

“These bats roost in caves, but there are very few caves in Bangladesh, so we put up mist nets outside old ruins that looked like something out of ‘Indiana Jones,’ ” he said. “In the evenings, they would come out to forage.” The team would untangle the bats, draw blood and take saliva, urine and fecal samples, and release them.

Five of them — all from the Rousettus  leschenaultia species — reacted to tests for antibodies to Zaire Ebola virus. The researchers did not find any virus itself, so it was not possible to do genetic sequencing and see exactly how close the match to the African strain was.

Although closely related species of fruit bats are found in Africa, India and China, their territories do not overlap and these bats don’t migrate long distances, Dr. Olival said, so it was likely the virus had been in a bat ancestor species for millenniums. A related virus, Ebola Reston, which is not known to sicken humans, has been found in Philippines fruit bats, and an “Ebola-like” virus has been found in insect-eating bats in Spain. But the match in Bangladesh was closest to Zaire Ebola.

Ebola was at first thought to be a gorilla virus, because human outbreaks began after people ate the bodies of dead gorillas. But scientists believe that bats are the natural reservoir and that primates may get infected by eating fruit that bats have drooled or defecated on.






Mississippi man shot after reporting cross burning in his yard
CBS/AP August 19, 2014, 4:35 PM

JACKSON, Miss. -- A Mississippi sheriff says a man was beaten and shot two weeks after calling authorities to report a cross burning in his yard, and investigators are trying to determine whether the attack was prompted by people being upset that the man was visited by his mixed-race grandchildren.

Deputies were called to a disturbance Friday night in a rural community outside Raleigh. Craig Wilson had been shot in the stomach and was taken to University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, said Smith County Sheriff Charlie Crumpton. He was in fair condition Tuesday, a hospital spokesman said.

Investigators heard "numerous" reports from relatives about what might have started a confrontation between Wilson and 37-year-old Jeff Daniels, Crumpton said. Among other things, the sheriff said investigators were checking whether it might have been connected to people being upset about visits from Wilson's mixed-race grandchildren. The children's mother is white, and their father is black, the sheriff said.

However, family members told CBS affiliate WJTV that it was not a racial issue about Wilson's mixed race grandchildren.

Crumpton said Daniels was arrested Friday and booked with aggravated assault. He was released Monday on $20,000 bond.

Wilson and Daniels are both white. The victim is the boyfriend of the arrested man's mother, Crumpton told The Associated Press.

Crumpton said he doesn't know whether there's a connection between the cross burning and the shooting. He said Wilson called the sheriff's department and investigators went to see the burned cross, but Wilson didn't press charges.

The shooting and beating took place outside Daniels' father's home in the Cohay (CO-hay) community of Smith County, about 45 miles southeast of Jackson, the sheriff said. Wilson lives next door, sharing the home with his neighbor's ex-wife, who is Daniels' mother, said Crumpton. The sheriff said Daniels lives across the road.

Wilson's sister, Julie Wilson, told WLBT-TV that Daniels and his son, who's a minor, showed up at Craig Wilson's home Friday night and a confrontation erupted.

"They called him some severe names and then they told him to leave and they chased him off his porch around his house and beat him with brass knuckles and then shot him with his own gun," Julie Wilson told the TV station.

Her phone number was not in service Tuesday, according to a recording that played when AP tried to call her. Another relative, Anita Wilson, did not immediately return calls to AP.

Crumpton said that while some of Wilson's relatives said they consider the shooting a hate crime, the district attorney told him Mississippi's hate-crime law could only apply if both the shooter and the victim are not of the same race. But Wilson and Daniels are both white.

The state hate-crimes law was enacted in 1994 but has seldom been used to prosecute cases.

Crumpton said a case against Daniels could be presented to the grand jury, probably in October.

It wasn't immediately clear whether Daniels has an attorney.

Daniels told WJTV that he continues to pray for Wilson and for what happened to his family. "I hate it, I hate it from the bottom of my heart," Daniels said.




“A Mississippi sheriff says a man was beaten and shot two weeks after calling authorities to report a cross burning in his yard, and investigators are trying to determine whether the attack was prompted by people being upset that the man was visited by his mixed-race grandchildren.... Craig Wilson had been shot in the stomach and was taken to University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, said Smith County Sheriff Charlie Crumpton. He was in fair condition Tuesday, a hospital spokesman said. Investigators heard "numerous" reports from relatives about what might have started a confrontation between Wilson and 37-year-old Jeff Daniels.... Crumpton said he doesn't know whether there's a connection between the cross burning and the shooting. He said Wilson called the sheriff's department and investigators went to see the burned cross, but Wilson didn't press charges.

The article doesn't clearly link the shooting and beating that occurred two weeks after a cross was burned in Wilson's yard, which probably happened because he has mixed race grandchildren who visit his home. The man who shot him is the son of his girlfriend, and the shooting occurred as he came to visit her. Daniels, the shooter, appears to be sorry for his act – “Daniels told WJTV that he continues to pray for Wilson and for what happened to his family. 'I hate it, I hate it from the bottom of my heart,' Daniels said.” Perhaps this wasn't a hate crime, though the cross burning certainly was. I have seen a number of mixed race couples here in Jacksonville, and while there are fights and shootings in the news daily, I have heard of no cross burnings here, nor any racial disputes. Thankfully, there are a good many people living here from the northeastern US, and they bring a more cosmopolitan atmosphere.





Expert debunks claim U.S. corporate taxes are too high – CBS
By JONATHAN BERR MONEYWATCH August 19, 2014, 6:33 PM

The 35 percent statutory U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the world. But according to a paper published earlier this month by University of Southern California law professor Edward Kleinbard, many companies don't pay anywhere near that much due to the plethora of loopholes in the tax code.

Kleinbard's work was highlighted by the New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin in a column Monday, triggering a flood of social media buzz. Corporate taxation has become a hot-button issue as more U.S. companies have acquired foreign firms and then moved their headquarters overseas as a way to reduce their tax burden.

According to data from the General Accountability Office cited by Kleinbard, corporations on average paid 12.6 percent as of 2010.

"It is true of course that the federal corporate tax rate -- nominally, 35 percent -- is too high relative to world norms, and that the ersatz territorial system requires firms to waste money in tax planning and structuring, but effective marginal tax rates and overall effective tax rates reach the level of the U.S. headline rate only when firms studiously ignore the feast of tax planning opportunities laid out before them on the groaning board of corporate tax expenditures," he wrote in the 32-page paper.

Other tax experts have made the same point as Kleinbard. A report by the advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice noted that 111 of the 288 companies it examined paid zero or less in federal taxes in at least one year from 2008 and 2012.

Critics of the U.S. tax code -- and there are many -- aren't convinced. American Tax Foundation Chief Economist Will McBride, argued that the GAO data that Kleinbard cites underestimates the taxes that corporations pay by 100 percent because it relies on data from a year where companies carried a high number of losses forward because business was hurt by the Great Recession.

Even when that unusual event is factored in, U.S. companies still pay too much in taxes with rates above 20 percent. Like many tax experts, McBride agrees there are too many loopholes in the codes though he doesn't fault the efforts of companies who lawfully try to minimize their tax burdens.

"You have to ask why there is so much of it going on," McBride says. "The big one is the manufacturing deduction that knocks off 3 points for manufacturers. ... Then there are all of the green energy credits which are completely over the top and do not belong in the tax code."

Unlike most countries in the world, the U.S. has adopted a territorial taxation system whereby companies have to pay U.S. taxes on their profits earned overseas. The paper takes aim at the idea that U.S. companies are placed at a competitive disadvantage because of the tax code and that high rates are to blame for the recent spate of inversions. These deals occur when U.S. companies acquire firms in lower tax countries and relocate their headquarters there to take advantage of lower rates.

President Obama has taken aim at inversions, denouncing the companies that use the strategy as unpatriotic. He supports efforts to lower the corporate tax rate and close loopholes, but figuring out which ones to close gets bogged down in political partisanship.

In his column, Sorkin urges readers to read the professor's "provocative paper" even if they disagree with him because it will "explain why corporate tax change will be so difficult to accomplish even with the backing of both Democrats and Republicans, who have routinely provided lip service to the idea of lowering rates, but taken no action."




Despite a 35% tax rate, “according to data from the General Accountability Office cited by Kleinbard, corporations on average paid 12.6 percent as of 2010,” as most US corporations partake of “ the feast of tax planning opportunities laid out before them on the groaning board of corporate tax expenditures.” ... A report by the advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice noted that 111 of the 288 companies it examined paid zero or less in federal taxes in at least one year from 2008 and 2012.... GAO data that Kleinbard cites underestimates the taxes that corporations pay by 100 percent because it relies on data from a year where companies carried a high number of losses forward because business was hurt by the Great Recession.... The paper takes aim at the idea that U.S. companies are placed at a competitive disadvantage because of the tax code and that high rates are to blame for the recent spate of inversions.”

Congressional and presidential efforts to close loopholes while lowering the tax rate have run into party disagreements that have caused a standstill. More gridlock. Personally, I think corporations should pay a fairly high tax, because otherwise the costs of running the nation will fall entirely on the citizens, especially the Middle Class. The rich never pay their fair share. Issues like global warming for our present and future living conditions – such as the very severe drought that is occurring in the West these last couple of years – will end up costing money as the government tries to cope. I think Congress should keep the high tax rate and also eliminate some of the loopholes. If they would make another loophole, however, giving a tax break to corporations which do not do an inversion, maybe we could save some of our tax money for government projects like repairing the infrastructure. I know the government is large, but so are the needs of the nation. We need a goodly tax income from sources other than the Federal income tax.






Gleaning America's Farms: Unused Crops Feed Hungry Families – NBC
BY SETH FREED WESSLER
First published August 20th 2014, 5:52 am

SEDGWICK, Maine- For years, Winnifred Gomm, known as “Ma,” drove to the local community radio station here in Hancock County to air a segment called Ma’s Kitchen. She’d offer tips on best kitchen practices and present “good recipes that people can make pretty easy with ingredients nearby.”

Now 84, Gomm has struggled to follow her own advice. She lives on about $7,000 a year in Social Security, and buying healthy food can be a challenge. “I’ve been a busy, working person most of my life, but I am actually very poor,” Gomm says in a dense Maine accent. “The kind of food I was used to buying, that is expensive.”

Yet recently things have changed for Gomm. Greens and hearty root vegetables now occupy her refrigerator, thanks to a local initiative that gathers excess crops from small farms -- a process called gleaning -- and delivers them to food pantries and food distribution programs for low-income families and individuals like her. With the help of volunteers, local health advocacy organization Healthy Acadia gleans 30,000 pounds of food each year, taking crops that would otherwise go to the pigs to people in need. It’s one of dozens of similar programs nationwide.

On a recent Thursday morning, dressed in work boots and flannel, Hannah Semler, the coordinator or Healthy Acadia’s gleaning initiative, drove out of Blue Hill, a few miles from Gomm’s town of Sedgwick, and up the long incline to the King Hill farm. King Hill owners Amanda Provencher and Paul Schultz, a couple in their 30s, wake every morning before the sun to prepare for long days working the fields of greens, corn, and berries, milking the cows, fighting the beetles from the greenhouses, and restringing the tomato plants.

With two kids and what seems like an unyielding chase to keep the tractors, wood splitters, chain saws, and tillers in working order, they’re like most of America’s small farmers. “Time for us is the most valuable resource; we don’t have any extra,” says Schultz, as he stands beside one of his greenhouses filled with a bumper crop of tomatoes in the height of the season’s bounty.

And because they’re so busy, Provencher and Schultz welcome Hannah Semler and her volunteers to their farm every week. “We just don’t have time to pick everything we grow, so we’d just till it right back into the soil or feed it to the animals, but it’s still totally good food,” Schultz says. “Hannah is identifying a resource that we have that otherwise we just would not be utilized because there are not enough hours in the day.”

Semler crouched down on a row of lettuce and kale and with a small knife cut from just above the roots, packing three bins with the leafy greens. The three boxes she fills that day are just a portion of the nearly 800 pounds of vegetables she gleans from King Hill farm each year. Semler does the same thing at 18 other farms in and around Mount Desert Island and Blue Hill, in coastal Hancock County, a place with some of the most striking inequality in the state: vast rural poverty beside luxurious summer homes and boutique back to the earthers.

From the farm, she drives the vegetables to the Tree of Life Food Pantry in Blue Hill, one of 18 pantries and other “food security sites” where the project delivers gleaned crops. Tree of Life is where Gomm picks up a box of food every Thursday for her vegetables. It provides canned goods, meat, eggs and vegetables to nearly 200 families from eight nearby towns each week; 1,000 families a year. In Sedgwick, where Gomm lives, 27 percent of residents rely on the pantry at some point in the year, nearly twice the national average of food insecure families.

“The food that Hannah brings from the gleaning project, that’s some of the best stuff the people who come here take home,” Rick Traub, the president of Tree of Life said as Semler carried in three overflowing crates of deep green salad and kale. “It’s a small amount, but for those who take home a bunch of greens, it’s literally the only thing like that they’ll eat all week.”

Nationally, 15 percent of Americans are food insecure, which means that they did not have enough healthy sustaining food at all times, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture. A recently released report from Feeding America, the largest domestic hunger relief organization, found that most of the households who request help from the organizations’ network of 46,000 food agencies report making the hard choice between spending their scarce resources on food and paying the utility bill, buying gas, getting medical care or paying rent. The dilemma leads poor families to buy cheaper, less nutritious food.

“Many people are stuck with terribly hard choices,” said Ross Fraser, the media director for Feeding America. “They know they are choosing less nutritious food, but they have to pay for basics like rent and other expenses where there’s no flexibility.”

And in the face of growing needs, many pantries are reduced to offering whatever is donated, supplying families with calories rather than healthy meals. Gleaning initiatives help to raise the quality of this free food.

The Feeding America report also found that 65 percent of households who request help for the organizations’ network of 46,000 food agencies, said that they’re facing food insecurity because they were out of work, most often because of retirement or disability.

“If you’re poor when you’re working, you’ll be poor when you retire,” said Gomm, who worked in a textile mill and held half a dozen other jobs over the years.

Many hungry families who come to Tree of Life need help even though the adults in the family are working.

“Poverty here is everywhere,” Traub says. “I go to the grocery store and the person who cashes me out, I see her the next day at the pantry. The problem of hunger in the U.S. has very little to do with a scarcity of food. There’s far more food available around here than people to eat it. The problem is really about access.”

Nationally, gleaning efforts have become a major part of the way that food pantries gather nutritious food to provide to those who otherwise would not have access to it.

The Society of St. Andrew, the largest gleaning group in the U.S., harvests or gathers 30 million pounds of food each year to distribute to a network of pantries. The effort barely scratches the surface. More than 100 billion pounds of food goes uneaten at the consumer level each year in the U.S., according to the U.S.D.A., and according to some estimates, close to around 40 percent of crops ready for harvest never make it to American tables.

To encourage more sharing of food that would go to waste, federal and state lawmakers have created tax breaks for donating to farms and grocery stores. In 1996, Congress passed a law protecting farms from liability if food donated to a nonprofit later makes a person sick. These national efforts often involve large farms and grocery stores, offloading tens of thousands of pounds of produce or other food before it spoils.

Locally, the Healthy Acadia initiative is following a similar if smaller model, but its food is consistently fresh, and the project creates a local network of farms, food pantries and families. About half of the food that Semler gleans goes not to food banks but to the Magic Food Bus, a project of the Healthy Peninsula, which partners with Semler’s group. The bus, which is really a car or van, delivers fresh food to drop spots like schools and apartment complexes for elderly residents. “Together, we’re trying to make healthy food accessible and normal as possible,” Semler says.

“So often, people have no idea where their food comes from, they just eat it and are detached from the process,” says Semler. “But we’re getting food from the local farms that these folks drive by everyday. They know the farms and now they eat from them.”




Winnifred Gomm, known as “Ma,” is well known in Hancock Co., Maine, where she gave tips on how to use produce available in the area. She is now retired and lives on $7,000.00 a year – her Social Security pension.... buying healthy food can be a challenge. “I’ve been a busy, working person most of my life, but I am actually very poor,” Gomm says in a dense Maine accent. “The kind of food I was used to buying, that is expensive.” Yet recently things have changed for Gomm. Greens and hearty root vegetables now occupy her refrigerator, thanks to a local initiative that gathers excess crops from small farms -- a process called gleaning -- and delivers them to food pantries and food distribution programs for low-income families and individuals like her. … local health advocacy organization Healthy Acadia gleans 30,000 pounds of food each year, taking crops that would otherwise go to the pigs to people in need. It’s one of dozens of similar programs nationwide.”

Hannah Semler of Healthy Acadia is picking crops that the farmers simply haven't the time and manpower to take to market, and which would be fed to the animals or plowed under if gleaners didn't come to get them. These gleaning organizations around the country work with food pantries nationwide. “Tree of Life is where Gomm picks up a box of food every Thursday for her vegetables. It provides canned goods, meat, eggs and vegetables to nearly 200 families from eight nearby towns each week; 1,000 families a year. In Sedgwick, where Gomm lives, 27 percent of residents rely on the pantry at some point in the year, nearly twice the national average of food insecure families.”. 15% of US families have to decide between food and housing costs.”

Food pantries have to offer starchy foods like pasta or canned goods that have been donated, but the gleaning programs add fresh vegetables to their shelves. Grocery stores and farms who chose to donate outdated or surplus food can get tax breaks. Semler's organization also donates the gleanings to Magic Food Bus, a van or car that transports fresh food from the farms to a known central location where those in need can come and take what they want.

The NPR article doesn't say whether city food banks get fresh food from the gleaners, too, but hopefully they do. There has been much said about “food deserts” in the city neighborhoods, where the residents don't have access to a large grocery store like those most of us shop in, but rather just the typical corner convenience store, where fresh food can't usually be bought. Besides, many people in cities are as poor as those in the more rural areas and can't afford to pay for fresh vegetables and fruit. Thank goodness for organizations like these who step in and deliver what would otherwise be wasted.