HANNAH LEVINTOVA, JAEAH LEE, and BRETT BROWNEL, - Mother Jones
Stephan: We like to tell ourselves lies about how fair and just our legal system is. In fact, we don't even rank in the top 10 any more. Our judiciary is increasingly influenced by the Non-geographical Corporate States and the Uber-rich who control them. There are two levels of justice in this country. It is the very unpleasant truth, few want to acknowledge.
Click through to see the charts that accompany this report. They will tell you the truth.
In January 1962, a man sitting in a Florida prison cell scrawled a note to the United States Supreme Court. He’d been charged with breaking into a pool hall, stealing some Cokes, beer, and change, and was handed a five-year sentence after he represented himself because he couldn’t pay for a lawyer. Clarence Earl Gideon’s penciled message eventually led to the high court’s historic 1963 Gideon v. Wainwright ruling, reaffirming the right to a criminal defense and requiring states to provide a defense attorney to those who can’t afford one.
Fifty years after the ruling, many legal advocates contend that the justice system is still failing the poor. Last week, the Supreme Court disappointed reformers when it refused to rule on a case involving a Louisiana man serving a life sentence after waiting five years in jail while the state came up with money to pay his court-appointed lawyer. (The federal system for defending the poor is relatively well resourced, though it’s also struggling with budget cuts. Several of the attorneys defending Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev face up to three weeks of sequester-mandated furloughs later this year.)
Just how bad is the state of public defense in America? The charts below […]
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PATRICIA REY MALLÉN, - International Business Times
Stephan: When I read this story I remembered favelas I had seen in Brazil, or the slums in Agentina, and thought to myself is it possible that the disparity between our one per cent and the 99 per cent is so great that it is worse than the difference between rich and poor in Latin America. Apparently it is. What a commentary. This is what we have sunk to.
Latin America has for a long time held the dubious honor of being the most unequal region in the world: the gap between rich and poor was the highest on the continent, affecting a whole host of factors ranging from economic growth rates to teenage pregnancy to crime.
But not all is lost. Recent trends have shown that things are improving. Based on the Gini index — the most commonly used measure of inequality, which takes into account the percentages of total income against the number of recipients and expressed the difference between poorest and richest — Latin America had an average of 54 in the year 2000 (where 0 shows absolute equality and 100 is perfectly unequal), compared to 30 in the European Union or 46 in Asia. A decade later, the number has decreased to 50, the Economist reports.
In the last 10 years, the Gini declined in 14 Latin American countries, with Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Panama leading the decrease. Nevertheless, Brazil shows one of the worst inequality situations in the world (54.7), after Honduras (57.0) and Colombia (55.9).
Several reasons may explain this improvement. A fundamental one, as signaled by Shannon O’Neil from the Council of Foreign Relations, is […]
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Stephan: Yet another research report showing that our understanding of the complex interlocking systems of the planet is still very partial and limited. It isn't just melting ice that is causing the change in ocean levels.
Click through to see a very helpful chart of the East Coast of the U.S.
From Virginia to Florida, there is a prehistoric shoreline that, in some parts, rests more than 280 feet above modern sea level. The shoreline was carved by waves more than 3 million years ago — possible evidence of a once higher sea level, triggered by ice-sheet melting. But new findings by a team of researchers, including Robert Moucha, assistant professor of Earth Sciences in The College of Arts and Sciences, reveal that the shoreline has been uplifted by more than 210 feet, meaning less ice melted than expected.
Equally compelling is the fact that the shoreline is not flat, as it should be, but is distorted, reflecting the pushing motion of Earth’s mantle.
This is big news, says Moucha, for scientists who use the coastline to predict future sea-level rise. It’s also a cautionary tale for those who rely almost exclusively on cycles of glacial advance and retreat to study sea-level changes.
‘Three million years ago, the average global temperature was two to three degrees Celsius higher, while the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was comparable to that of today,’ says Moucha, who contributed to a paper on the subject in the May 15 issue of Science Express. ‘If we can […]
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DAVID HOLMES, - Pandodaily
Stephan: Human sexuality will not be denied; it is just a matter of how much hypocrisy is involved. To me the most disturbing thing about this story is that the number one focus of porn in religious cities is 'Teen'.
Click through to see the charts, which are very revealing.
Apple’s got a porn problem. Xbox? Huge porn problem. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest? Just three giant porn problems, basically. And with a name like Wii, you know it’s got a porn problem. And the biggest porn problem of all? Tumblr, of course. But now that’s somebody else’s problem.
Jared Keller collected these panicky links in a January 2013 Business Week story about Vine’s ‘porn problem.
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KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: This story, I think, more than almost any other trend I follow on SR makes me furious. Nearly twenty five percent of the people in the richest country on earth struggle to have enough to eat. And the Republicans try over and over again to cut even the little social support that does exist to see that the elderly and the young get at least something to eat. This is immoral at a level I cannot find the words to express.
A new Pew Research report on the economies of emerging markets reveals that nearly a quarter of all Americans are struggling to afford food, putting the United States far out of step with other wealthy nations, as Pew notes:
Reports of deprivation are closely related to national wealth. For example, in Australia, Canada and Germany - three of the richest countries surveyed in terms of 2012 GDP per capita - roughly one-in-ten or fewer have struggled in the past year to afford food. Meanwhile, in Uganda, Kenya and Senegal - among the poorest countries surveyed - half or more say food for their family has been hard to come by.
The United States is a clear outlier from this pattern. Despite being the richest country in the survey, nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 months. This reported level of deprivation is closer to that in Indonesia or Greece rather than Britain or Canada.
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