donal brown

In recent cases of police using lethal force against unarmed black citizens, the police are rarely found guilty, but the video of a South Carolina policeman’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black man during a routine traffic stop shows that video evidence can provide clear evidence crucial to a just outcome. “We’re seeing things in a different light now that we have so much more video. Things in the past that may have been mischaracterized,

Detroit took steps to settle a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU in January by agreeing to allow downtown demonstrations. The interim rules allow up to 25 people to demonstrate, distribute literature and collect petition signatures without a permit. In February of 2014 security guards prevented citizens from handing out flyers about the bankruptcy problem and soliciting signatures on a petition. (Detroit Free Press, April 8, 2015, by Joe Guillen) The ACLU of Michigan said

Chinese hackers have recently attacked websites that help internet users bypass censors. The targets were Github and Greatfire.org, sites that allowed users access to blocked content. The government used Baidu to feed malicious code into computers to allow them to bombard Github and Greatfire.org with service requests. (National Coalition Against Censorship, April 2, 2015, by Oliver Morrison) The hackers shut down Github for five days and researchers have determined that the attacks could not exist

When the Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released its analysis of Department of Defense spending, it only reported on $21 billion out of $66 billion appropriated for reconstruction. And stories about the continued inadequacies of the country’s armed forces creates concern about the effectiveness of the spending. (Project on Government Oversight, April 1, 2015, by Neil Gordon) In War Is Boring, March 31, 2015, Matthew Gualt reports that although the Pentagon did not break any

Backed by his superintendent, a school principal in Virginia censored a student newspaper article about “dabbing,” smoking a concentrated dose of marijuana’s active ingredients from a nail. The article’s writer, SaraRose Martin, co-editor-in-chief of  The Falconer, gave the article to a local news website where it got 11,400 hits. Frank LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center said it would be better to put such news into a school newspaper where it could be viewed