Category: Justice

Send the bill to Donald!

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U.S. District Court Judge Raymond Dearie, a New York City-based jurist named by a federal judge in Florida to act as a so-called special master in the review of more than 11,000 documents the FBI confiscated, proposed on Thursday that former Magistrate Judge James Orenstein help with the process…

Orenstein spent 16 years as a federal magistrate in the same Brooklyn courthouse where Dearie sits…

Dearie proposed that the former magistrate, who has a top secret clearance, be paid $500 an hour for work on the Trump documents case. The federal judge who named Dearie as special master, Florida-based Aileen Cannon, has previously ruled that Trump must assume all expenses related to the review.

HAR!

A Citadel in New Mexico to fightback against anti-abortion crusaders

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Chancey Bush/Albuquerque Journal

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham moved Wednesday to buttress access to abortions in New Mexico, signing an executive order that pledges $10 million to build a state-funded clinic providing abortion and other services in Doña Ana County.

The governor’s executive order also directs the state Department of Health to marshal state resources to expand access to reproductive health – including abortion – in rural parts of the state and study whether medication that ends pregnancies can be provided in public health clinics.

“This is a state that will stand against any attempts to remove or eviscerate women’s constitutional rights,” Lujan Grisham said during a remote briefing with reporters, legislators and members of the state’s Commission on the Status of Women.

The move comes as New Mexico has seen an influx of patients from Texas and other states seeking abortion services…

Lujan Grisham already issued a previous executive order aimed at shielding health care professionals targeted by lawsuits from losing their licenses or being disciplined for providing abortion services.

The June order also asserts the state will not comply with abortion-related arrest warrants or extradition requests from other states.

Our Governor Michelle is one tough woman. And as far as I can see, a majority of folks in the state agree with her.

“Nitchevo, nitchevo”

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Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in Germany 89 years ago today, on January 30, 1933. On this occasion, we publish a text written by the painter and left-wing activist Diego Rivera. Rivera makes recollections of his visit to Berlin prior to Hitler’s rise to power. They are very valuable in exposing the inadequacy and sort-sightedness of the leaderships of the communist parties at the time…

While the fascists were gaining influence and were posing a deadly threat to the workers’ movement, the leadership of the German and the other Communist Parties, by now under the complete control of the Stalinist bureaucracy, were acting in the most outrageous way. They were denying the creation of a united antifascist front with other forces in the workers’ movement, they were considering the social-democrats to be a bigger threat than Hitler and they were convinced that after the Nazis it was their turn to come to power…

Today, the balance of forces is of course very different than in the ‘30’s. But still, we see the same political mistakes being made by sections of the Left internationally, who either underestimate the danger by the far-right and the fascists, or betray the working class and thus feed into their propaganda.

Either way, we need to take on board the lessons from the past in order not to repeat them in the future. We should strive to create united, broad, antifascist fronts to push back the neo-fascists. And link this fight with the struggle to overthrow capitalism, the system that breeds inequality, racist divisions, crises and suffering. No passaran!

“Diego Rivera’s memoir of Hitler: a stunning insight on the rise of fascism”…This was in 1960. It would be another 2 years before my own “awakening” and Leftward move. And, fortunately, at least in the mainstream of activism in the United States, even in the face of McCarthyism and “loyal” American defenders of racism, memories of Hitler’s fascism was strong enough to overcome what we called “parlor pinkos” who didn’t consider fascism a threat, an evil returned to haunt our nation, our lives. All power to the people!

DNA test solves cheerleader’s murder after 46 years

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Carla Walker & Rodney McCoy

It has been nearly 50 years since the murder of 17-year-old Carla Jan Walker who was killed in 1974 after attending a Valentine’s Day dance. Several decades later, investigators have arrested the man they believe is responsible for the killing of the Texas cheerleader. Glen Samuel McCurley, 77, was arrested on September 22 by authorities, NBC affiliate KXAS-TV reported.

Walker and her boyfriend Western Hills High School football quarterback Rodney McCoy had attended a Valentine’s Day dance on February 16, 1974. Post the dance, they had met some friends and then stopped by a Fort Worth bowling alley.

McCoy has always stood by his story that a man had approached the couple as they were sitting inside his car and had pointed a gun at him. He was then beaten unconscious and when he woke up, his girlfriend was nowhere to be found. According to investigators, McCurley was the one to approach the couple and had kidnapped Walker, holding her hostage for a few days. Three days after she was abducted, her body was located in a ditch and her clothes had been ripped off…

Authorities believed that Walker was sexually assaulted, strangled and beaten…They were able to obtain some DNA evidence from Walker’s clothing, which were sent to a private lab leading to a full DNA profile of the suspect. This led the authorities to McCurley, a truck driver, who had already been named as a possible suspect in Walker’s murder case.

It was the latest advancements in DNA procedures that made the case. DNA and genealogy technology used works in both ways, Profiles and catches the guilty and exonerates the innocent.

Othram, the private lab, says its technology has revolutionised the field of forensic evidence and made what was once seen as impossible — building a solid profile from degraded, tiny traces of DNA — a reality…

After building a genetic profile in a matter of weeks, they can then trawl DNA databases to find matches for both unidentified victims and perpetrators.