A meeting yesterday between Mayor Bill DeBlasio with the leaders of five NYC police unions, though apparently fairly civil, yielded no clear progress toward a resolution of the current antagonism between City Hall and New York’s men in blue. That ...
Read MoreAn illuminating story from Reuters reporter Michelle Conlin, who reported on interviews with 15 retired and 10 active black NYC police officers. Of the 25, all but one reported having had at least one off-duty experience of racial profiling by ...
Read MoreI was planning on doing a post on the above topic when I came across this from The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky. It is so good that I’m passing it on without further comment–you should just read it. And, while ...
Read MoreThanks to the Washington Monthly’s Nancy LeTourneau, I was alerted to another torture report that came out in recent days, this one from Brazil. That country’s National Truth Commission reported on its investigation into the 21-years of dictatorship that came ...
Read MoreI have sometimes cited US-Cuban relations as an unusually pure illustration of the effects of the US presidential electoral college on policy. Cuba had been a major locus of Cold War history: the site of the US’s most embarrassing Cold ...
Read MoreA notably fatuous defense of the use of torture by the Bush administration’s CIA came unsurprisingly from ex-President Bush himself, before the Senate Intelligence Committee report came out: We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the ...
Read MoreIn reviewing my 12/3 post on the Shavit and Blumenthal books, I discovered that in the process of pasting text from Word into my website I had accidentally omitted a key paragraph. I’ve now inserted that paragraph, so if you’ve ...
Read MoreAs a non-lawyer, I generally shy away from commenting on judicial proceedings, especially since all relevant evidence is usually not readily accessible. But I find it impossible to say nothing about the Staten Island grand jury verdict. The non-indictment of ...
Read MoreMy recent trip to Israel prompted two reading self-assignments: Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, and Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Fear and Loathing in Greater Israel. Both books, in truth, had been on my to-read list ...
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