The United States and dozens of other countries have pledged to work together to tackle the illegal wildlife trade and treat it as a “serious and organized crime” following a two-day conference in London that ended Friday.

Trade in endangered wildlife, such as elephant tusks, rhino horns and tiger bones, is worth an estimated $17 billion a year and is pushing hundreds of species to the brink of extinction.

Speaking to heads of state from across the world, Britain’s Prince William, a passionate conservationist, said he recognized that law enforcement resources are already stretched in many countries.

“But I am asking you to see the connections, to acknowledge that the steps you take to tackle illegal wildlife crime could make it easier to halt the shipments of guns and drugs passing through your borders,” the prince told delegates.

Worldwide, the illegal wildlife trade is booming.

Illegal ivory trade activity has more than doubled since 2007, while over 1,300 rhino were killed in 2015. Asian tigers have seen a 95 percent decline in population, as their body parts are in demand for Chinese medicines and wine. In the last year, more than 100 wildlife rangers have died trying to tackle poachers.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told the conference the U.S. will give $90 million to programs that fight illegal wildlife traffickers.

“Their criminal acts harm communities, degrade institutions, destabilize our environment and funnel billions of dollars to those who perpetuate evil in the world. These criminals must be and they can be stopped,” Sessions said.

It is not only big mammals at risk.

For example, a critically endangered water frog from the remote Lake Titicaca in Peru has seen its numbers plummet in recent years, as thousands have been trapped and taken to make a juice that some believe has medicinal properties, despite no scientific evidence.

Delegates at the conference applauded progress made, including China’s decision at the beginning of this year to close its domestic ivory market, hailed as a major step in safeguarding the world elephant population. 

WATCH: US Pledges $90 Million to Fight Illegal Wildlife Trade

Aron White of the Britain-based Environmental Investigation Agency says other animals need similar protection.

“This market was both stimulating demand for ivory and also enabling illegal ivory to be laundered through this legal trade,” White told VOA. “But that same issue still exists for big cats. You know, there’s a trade in leopard bone products [for example], large-scale commercial trade.”

Campaigners say existing United Nations Conventions on transnational organized crime offer firepower for tackling the illegal wildlife trade, but they are not being used effectively.

In the closing declaration, conference attendees pledged to work together to tackle the illegal wildlife trade and recognize it as a serious and organized crime.

The real test is how quickly they will act on those words.
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From: MeNeedIt

Scientists say climate change is becoming more pressing with news of melting permafrost and rising sea levels. Scientists have been urging people around the globe to reduce emissions of climate warming carbon, but the Salk Institute in San Diego is taking a different approach. There, scientists are working on developing plants that would capture more carbon than plants do now and store it away for centuries, preventing it from being released back into the atmosphere. Genia Dulot has the story.
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From: MeNeedIt

Worldwide cesarean section use has nearly doubled in two decades and has reached “epidemic” proportions in some countries, doctors warned Friday, highlighting a huge gap in childbirth care between rich and poor mothers.

They said millions of women each year may be putting themselves and their babies at unnecessary risk by undergoing C-sections at rates “that have virtually nothing to do with evidence-based medicine.”

In 2015, the most recent year for which complete data is available, doctors performed 29.7 million C-sections worldwide, or 21 percent of all births. This was up from 16 million in 2000, or 12 percent of all births, according to research published in The Lancet.

It is estimated that the operation, a vital surgical procedure when complications occur during birth, is necessary 10-15 percent of the time.

Varying country rates

But the research found wildly varying country rates of C-section use, often according to economic status: In at least 15 countries, more than 40 percent births are performed using the practice, often on wealthier women in private facilities.

In Brazil, Egypt and Turkey, more than half of all births are done via C-section.

The Dominican Republic has the highest rate of any nation, with 58.1 percent of all babies delivered using the procedure.

But in close to a quarter of nations surveyed, C-section use is significantly lower than average.

Reasons to opt for surgery

Authors pointed out that while the procedure is generally overused in many middle- and high-income settings, women in low-income situations often lack necessary access to what can be a life-saving procedure.

“We would not expect such differences between countries, between women by socioeconomic status or between provinces/states within countries based on obstetric need,” Ties Boerma, professor of public health at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and a lead author on the study, told AFP.

Jane Sandall, professor of social science and women’s health at King’s College London and a study author, told AFP that there were a variety of reasons women were increasingly opting for surgery.

These include “a lack of midwives to prevent and detect problems, loss of medical skills to confidently and competently attend a vaginal delivery, as well as medico-legal issues.”

Doctors are often tempted to organize C-sections to ease the flow of patients through a maternity clinic, and medical professionals are generally less vulnerable to legal action if they choose an operation over a natural birth.

Sandall also said there were often “financial incentives for both doctor and hospital” to perform the procedure.

The study warned that in many settings young doctors were becoming “experts” in C-section while losing confidence in their abilities when it comes to natural birth.

Income a factor

It also identified an emerging gap between wealthy and poorer regions within the same country. In China, C-section rates diverged from 4 percent to 62 percent; in India the range was 7-49 percent.

While the U.S. saw more than a quarter of all births performed by C-section, some states used the procedure more than twice as often as others.

“It is clear that poor countries have low C-section use because access to services is a problem,” Sandall said. “In many of those countries, however, richer women who live in urban areas, have access to private facilities have much higher C-section use.”

Risks to mother, child

C-sections may be marketed by clinics as the “easy” way to give birth, but they are not without risks.

Maternal death and disability rates are higher after C-section than vaginal birth. The procedure scars the womb, which can lead to bleeding, ectopic pregnancies (where the embryo is stuck in the ovaries), as well as still- and premature future births.

The authors suggested better education, more midwifery-led care and improved labor planning as ways of ensuring C-sections are only performed when medically necessary, as well as ensuring women properly understand the risks involved with the procedure.

“C-section is a type of major surgery, which carries risks that require careful consideration,” Sandall said.

In a comment accompanying the study, Gerard Visser of the University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, called the rise in C-sections “alarming.”

“The medical profession on its own cannot reverse this trend,” he said. “Joint actions are urgently needed to stop unnecessary C-sections and enable women and families to be confident of receiving the most appropriate care for their circumstances.”
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From: MeNeedIt

A U.S. astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut made an emergency return to earth Thursday shortly after launching on what was supposed to be a mission to the International Space Station. Rescuers reached American Nick Hague and Russian Alexei Ovchinin after their emergency landing in Kazakhstan. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb recently sat down with Hague to talk about his future in space, a future now up in the air after his unexpected fall to Earth.
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From: MeNeedIt

Facebook announced Thursday that it had deleted over 800 mostly U.S.-based pages and accounts that were posting politically oriented spam and engaging in “inauthentic behavior.” 

The social media giant declined a request from VOA News to name the 559 pages and 251 accounts. Nation in Distress, a pro-President Donald Trump page identified by The Washington Post as being among the banned, had over 3 million followers.

Facebook said that many of the pages and accounts had posted political clickbait across multiple fake accounts to drive users to their websites, where they were often targeted with ads. 

“Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was,” Facebook said on its news blog. “Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”

Facebook said “the ‘news’ stories or opinions these accounts and pages share are often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate,” noting the proximity of the 2018 midterm elections.

In the past, Facebook has purged dozens of pages spreading fake news originating from Iran and Russia, countries that have antagonistic relations with the U.S. The company says most of the pages and accounts banned this time were from the U.S.
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From: MeNeedIt

Australia is rejecting the latest U.N. report on climate change, insisting coal remains critical to energy security and lowering household power bills.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its report released Monday that global greenhouse gas emissions must reach zero by the middle of the century to stop global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The authors warned that if warming was allowed to reach two degrees, the world would be on course toward uncontrollable temperatures.

They made special mention of coal, insisting that its use for power generation would have to fall to between zero and two percent of current usage.

The report has received a lukewarm response by Australia’s center-right government. It has said it has no intention of scaling back fossil fuel production because without coal, household power bills would soar.

Canberra also insists it is on target to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement, which attempts to unite every nation under a single accord to tackle climate change for the first time ever.

Australia earns billions of dollars exporting coal to China and other parts of Asia, while it generates more than 60 percent of domestic electricity.

Australia’s Environment Minister Melissa Price believes the IPCC report exaggerates the threat posed by fossil fuel.

“Coal does form a very important part of the Australian energy mixer and we make no apology for the fact that our focus at the moment is on getting electricity prices down,” Price said. “Every year, there is new technology with respect to coal and what its contribution is to emissions. So, you know, to say that it has got to be phased out by 2050 is drawing a very long bow.”

Australia has some of the world’s highest per capita rates of greenhouse gas pollution. A recent government report showed a failure to reduce levels of greenhouse gas pollution. The survey said that between January and March this year, Australia had its most elevated levels of carbon pollution since 2011.

Conservationists argue Australia is doing too little to protect itself from the predicted ravages of a shifting climate.

Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent. Scientists warn that droughts, floods, heat waves, brush fires and storms will become more intense as temperatures rise, with potentially disastrous consequences for human health and the environment, including the Great Barrier Reef.
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From: MeNeedIt

Google will begin offering its pay-to-carpool service throughout the U.S., an effort to reduce the commute-time congestion that its popular Waze navigation app is designed to avoid.

The expansion announced Wednesday builds upon a carpooling system that Waze began testing two years ago in northern California and Israel before gradually extending it into Brazil and parts of 12 other states.

Now it will be available to anyone in the U.S.

Drivers willing to give someone a ride for a small fee to cover some of their costs for gas and other expenses need only Waze’s app on their phone. Anyone willing to pay a few bucks to hitch a ride will need to install a different Waze app focused on carpooling.

About 1.3 million drivers and passengers have signed up for Waze’s carpooling service, the company says. About 30 million people in the U.S. currently rely on the Waze app for directions; it has 110 million users worldwide.

Waze’s carpooling effort has been viewed as a potential first step for Google to mount a challenge to the two top ride-hailing services, Uber and Lyft.

But Waze founder and CEO Noam Bardin rejected that notion in an interview with The Associated Press, insisting that the carpooling service is purely an attempt to ease traffic congestion.

“We don’t want to be a professional driving network,” Bardin said. “We see ride sharing as something that needs to become part of the daily commute. If we can’t get people out of their cars, it won’t be solving anything.”

Gartner analyst Mike Ramsey also sees Waze’s service as a bigger threat to other carpooling apps such as Scoop and Carpool Buddy than to Uber and Lyft. “Carpooling is a much different animal,” he said.

It’s a form of transportation that Bardin said Waze had difficulty figuring out. Early on, Waze tried to get more drivers to sign up by emphasizing the economic benefits of having someone help cover gas costs for a trip that they were going to make anyway.

But earlier this year, Waze realized it needed a better formula for connecting strangers willing to ride together in a car. Many women, for instance, only want to ride with other women, Bardin said, while other people enjoy commuting with others who work for the same employer or live in the same neighborhood.

“Carpooling is a more social experience,” Bardin said. “A lot of time those of us working in the digital world forget that social connections are often the most important thing in the real world.”

Waze’s app still sets a price for each carpooling trip and transfers payments without charging a commission. That’s something Waze can afford to do because Google makes so much money from selling digital ads on Waze and its many other services.

The carpooling fees are supposed to be similar to what it would cost to take a train or type of public transportation to work, Bardin said. Drivers and riders can agree to adjust the price upward or downward, but the fees can never exceed the rate the Internal Revenue Service allows for business-related mileage — currently 54.5 cents per mile.

Even though Waze’s carpooling service doesn’t appear to be driven by profit motive, Ramsey isn’t convinced that will always be the case. “I do think Google is realizing that it can’t just keep making all its money from selling ads,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Cardi B and Post Malone marked major breakthroughs in the last year, but the rap stars won’t compete for best new artist at the 2019 Grammy Awards.

Cardi B, who earned two nominations at this year’s Grammys held in February, was not eligible for nomination because of her previous nominations. The Grammys, which has adjusted the rules of best new artist over the years to keep up with the changing musical landscape, state that “any artist with a previous Grammy nomination as a performer” would not qualify. If Cardi B had not released an album around the time she earned her first pair of nominations for “Bodak Yellow,” she could have qualified. But because she had enough music to be eligible for best new artist at the 2018 show and earned prior nominations, she was not qualified to enter the category.

A person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to publicly discuss the topic, said Cardi B was submitted for best new artist at this year’s show, though she didn’t earn a nomination. The award went to Alessia Cara, while nominees included SZA, Khalid, Lil Uzi Vert and Julia Michaels.

Post Malone was also submitted for best new artist at this year’s show but didn’t garner a nomination. Because he had never earned a Grammy nomination, he met the criteria to be a best new artist contender for the upcoming awards show, but at a Grammy nominations meeting held this month his inclusion in the category was met with debate, the person said. Malone lost in a vote by music industry players — ranging from executives to producers to publicists — and will not compete for the coveted honor. Some felt because the hitmaker had success with his 2016 debut, “Stoney,” as well as the hit songs “Congratulations” and “White Iverson” — released in 2015 — he had already past new artist status.

A representative for Post Malone declined comment Wednesday. A representative for Cardi B did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The first round of voting for the 2019 Grammy nominations begins Oct. 17. Nominees will be announced Dec. 5 and best new artist will include eight contenders instead of five for the first time. The show airs live on Feb. 10.

The best new artist rules state that an artist can be submitted three times and is eligible so long as they have only released three albums or 30 tracks. Some artists, for example, earned nominations with second and third albums since those records marked their major breakthroughs as rising acts on the music scene.

Malone was also a hot topic at the Grammys meeting for his recent album, “Beerbongs & Bentleys,” which was kicked out of the rap category and pushed into the pop genre, the source said. Best rap album nominees must contain 51 percent or more of rap music, and the Grammys rap committee felt “Beerbongs” leaned more toward the pop genre with its the production, sound and melodies. The diverse album also includes singing, elements of R&B and rock and veers outside of rap with songs like the guitar-tinged “Stay.” The person said the larger Grammys committee listened to the entire 18-track album — which includes the No. 1 hits “Rockstar” and “Psycho” as well as “Better Now,” currently No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart — and voted that it would compete in pop instead of rap.

The best rap album category is expected to feature stiff competition since the genre has heavily dominated the pop charts in the last year, with albums by Drake, Eminem, XXXTentacion, Cardi B, Travis Scott, Lil Wayne, J. Cole and Migos being proposed as possible nominees.

It was not clear where Malone’s singles would land — they could appear in rap or pop, or both. Over the years more and more musicians have had songs from a single album appear in different genre categories. Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album had tracks compete in rock, pop, R&B and rap categories, while Justin Timberlake and Rihanna’s nominations have ranged over the years from dance to pop to R&B to rap.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

In Yassin Mohammed’s sketches and paintings, he and other Egyptian prisoners are crammed into tiny cells, feet in each other’s faces and their few belongings hanging from the walls.

The cramped scenes, defined by bars and closed cell doors, capture the claustrophobic reality of Egypt’s prisons, where tens of thousands have been locked away, often for months or years without charge, in the heaviest crackdown on dissent in the country’s modern history.

“One day, all this pain will go away,” one watercolor proclaims.

Mohammed, who walked free last month after serving a two-year sentence for taking part in a protest, chronicled daily life in his cellblock in dozens of sketches and paintings, offering a rare and intimate look inside Egypt’s sprawling prison network.

He has been in and out of prison since 2013, when the military overthrew a freely elected but divisive Islamist president. Since then, thousands of Islamists have been jailed, as well as a number of secular, pro-democracy activists, some of whom played a key role in the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who as defense minister led the 2013 military takeover, authorities view even mild dissent as a threat. Protests have been outlawed, hundreds of websites have been blocked, and vague laws criminalize the spreading of “false news.”

For most of the two years he was in prison, Mohammed shared a 6- by 15-meter (yard) cell with nearly 30 other inmates — Islamists, jihadis, liberal leftists and, he said, people who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rights groups say abuse of political detainees is widespread in Egypt, but Mohammed says he wasn’t physically abused, other than occasionally being pushed or slapped by guards. He says the real torment came from the unending boredom and the total lack of privacy.

His only escape was through art.

He managed to paint in a corner of his cell where the guards could not see him. Fearing that the guards would destroy the art if they found it, he smuggled the paintings out.

One piece that landed him in trouble was an unflattering caricature of el-Sissi, which guards seized in a surprise raid on his cell. Prison authorities chose not to press charges, instead sending him to solitary confinement, a light punishment for a man who says he yearned for privacy so much he spent time in the toilet just to avoid the other inmates.

A self-portrait inspired by that experience shows him sitting in the corner of a gray and black cell, slumped in resignation as a solitary ray of sunlight shines through the barred window.

Others show rare signs of normality or even beauty. A depiction of a prison bathroom — including garbage pails used by the inmates to store water because of frequent outages — has signs on the wall reading: “Please, leave the bathroom as you would like to see it!”

A bouquet of brightly colored flowers hangs above the bathroom — a wedding anniversary gift from the wife of one of the inmates.

In another painting, cardboard boxes turned into flower planters hang from the iron bars above a corridor. Mohammed says the prisoners save the cardboard boxes that their families use to deliver food and gather soil from sacks of potatoes they get from the prison’s kitchen.

“Plants and flowers there are like life in the midst of death,” said Mohammed.

Mohammed periodically had possession of a cellular phone while in prison, enabling him to communicate with a close circle of friends on social media. In the posts — which he asked his friends not to share for fear of repercussions — he described his daily routine and chores, and the claustrophobia he depicted in the paintings.

“God, I pray to you every day when the call for the dawn prayers rings out so you will free all those that are unjustly jailed or to soften their plight, and to let me meet Tom Hanks,” one post said, reflecting his near-obsessive admiration for the Oscar-winning film star.

Since his release on Sept. 20, just a day short of his 24th birthday, he has been traveling across Cairo collecting the works he smuggled out. He would like to put on an exhibition of some 50 pieces, but Egypt’s few remaining art galleries are unlikely to display his work for fear of angering authorities.

Instead, he plans to display them in his apartment in downtown Cairo.

“I don’t want to go back to prison. It does not take much these days to be sent to prison,” he said. “So, I will silently listen, watch and observe, and when I feel like I want to express a political opinion, I will talk to myself while alone in the privacy of my room.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Preventing an extra single degree of heat could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems on this fast-warming planet, an international panel of scientists reported Sunday. But they provide little hope the world will rise to the challenge.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its gloomy report at a meeting in Incheon, South Korea.

In the 728-page document, the U.N. organization detailed how Earth’s weather, health and ecosystems would be in better shape if the world’s leaders could somehow limit future human-caused warming to just 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (a half degree Celsius) from now, instead of the globally agreed-upon goal of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C). Among other things:

* Half as many people would suffer from lack of water.

* There would be fewer deaths and illnesses from heat, smog and infectious diseases.

* Seas would rise nearly 4 inches (0.1 meters) less.

* Half as many animals with back bones and plants would lose the majority of their habitats.

* There would be substantially fewer heat waves, downpours and droughts.

* The West Antarctic ice sheet might not kick into irreversible melting.

* And it just may be enough to save most of the world’s coral reefs from dying.

“For some people this is a life-or-death situation without a doubt,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, a lead author on the report

Limiting warming to 0.9 degrees from now means the world can keep “a semblance” of the ecosystems we have. Adding another 0.9 degrees on top of that – the looser global goal – essentially means a different and more challenging Earth for people and species, said another of the report’s lead authors, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia.

But meeting the more ambitious goal of slightly less warming would require immediate, draconian cuts in emissions of heat-trapping gases and dramatic changes in the energy field. While the U.N. panel says technically that’s possible, it saw little chance of the needed adjustments happening.

In 2010, international negotiators adopted a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) since pre-industrial times. It’s called the 2-degree goal. In 2015, when the nations of the world agreed to the historic Paris climate agreement, they set dual goals: 2 degrees C and a more demanding target of 1.5 degrees C from pre-industrial times. The 1.5 was at the urging of vulnerable countries that called 2 degrees a death sentence.

The world has already warmed 1 degree C since pre-industrial times, so the talk is really about the difference of another half-degree C or 0.9 degrees F from now.

“There is no definitive way to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 above pre-industrial levels,” the U.N.-requested report said. More than 90 scientists wrote the report, which is based on more than 6,000 peer reviews.

“Global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate,” the report states.

Deep in the report, scientists say less than 2 percent of 529 of their calculated possible future scenarios kept warming below the 1.5 goal without the temperature going above that and somehow coming back down in the future.

The pledges nations made in the Paris agreement in 2015 are “clearly insufficient to limit warming to 1.5 in any way,” one of the study’s lead authors, Joerj Roeglj of the Imperial College in London, said.

“I just don’t see the possibility of doing the one and a half” and even 2 degrees looks unlikely, said Appalachian State University environmental scientist Gregg Marland, who isn’t part of the U.N. panel but has tracked global emissions for decades for the U.S. Energy Department. He likened the report to an academic exercise wondering what would happen if a frog had wings.

Yet report authors said they remain optimistic.

“We have a monumental task in front of us, but it is not impossible,” Mahowald said Sunday. “This is our chance to decide what the world is going to look like. ”

To limit warming to the lower temperature goal, the world needs “rapid and far-reaching” changes in energy systems, land use, city and industrial design, transportation and building use, the report said. Annual carbon dioxide pollution levels that are still rising now would have to drop by about half by 2030 and then be near zero by 2050. Emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, also will have to drop. Switching away rapidly from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas to do this could be three to four times more expensive than the less ambitious goal, but it would clean the air of other pollutants. And that would have the side benefit of avoiding more than 100 million premature deaths through this century, the report said.

“Climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming” the report said, adding that the world’s poor are more likely to get hit hardest.

Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said extreme weather, especially heat waves, will be deadlier if the lower goal is passed.

Meeting the tougher-to-reach goal “could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heat waves, and about 65 million fewer people being exposed to exceptional heat waves,” the report said. The deadly heat waves that hit India and Pakistan in 2015 will become practically yearly events if the world reaches the hotter of the two goals, the report said.

Coral and other ecosystems are also at risk. The report said warmer water coral reefs “will largely disappear.”

The outcome will determine whether “my grandchildren would get to see beautiful coral reefs,” Princeton’s Oppenheimer said.
…

From: MeNeedIt

The largest city named for Christopher Columbus has called off its observance of the divisive holiday that honors the explorer, making a savvy move to tie the switch to a politically safe demographic: veterans.

Ohio’s capital city, population 860,000, will be open for business Monday after observing Columbus Day probably “for as long as it had been in existence,” said Robin Davis, a spokeswoman for Democratic Mayor Andrew Ginther. City offices will close instead on Veterans Day, which falls on Nov. 12 this year.

Native Americans and allied groups have long used Columbus Day to elevate issues of concern to them. That includes a peaceful protest of prayers, speeches and traditional singing in 2016 at Columbus City Hall — underneath the statue of the explorer that sits out front — to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline and to urge Ohio to support more renewable energy.

The decision to stop observing the holiday was not triggered by the national movement to abolish Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day as a way of recognizing victims of colonialism, Davis said. Columbus Day marks the Italian explorer’s arrival in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492.

“We have a number of veterans who work for the city, and there are so many here in Columbus,” Davis said. “We thought it was important to honor them with that day off.” And, she said, the city doesn’t have the budget to give its 8,500 employees both days off, she said.

Columbus made its announcement Thursday in a two-paragraph news release focused on the impact on trash pickup and parking enforcement schedules. In that way, it avoided much of the consternation that has taken place elsewhere around the holiday.

An attempt in Akron to rename the holiday grew ugly last year, dividing the all-Democratic city council along racial lines. Five black members voted to rename the holiday and eight white members voted not to, keeping the holiday in place.

A similar effort twice failed in Cincinnati before a vote Wednesday finally recognized Columbus Day as the renamed Indigenous Peoples Day. It became the second Ohio city to do so, after the liberal college town of Oberlin in 2017. Cleveland, which has a large Italian-American population, continues to host a major Columbus Day parade.

Organizers of the 39-year-old Columbus Italian Festival, traditionally held on Columbus Day weekend, were not given advance notice of the city’s decision, said board member Joseph Contino.

“It’s very in vogue politically right now to do that. It’s not PC for me to say anything against indigenous peoples,” he said. “You can kick Christians, you can kick Catholics. That’s the message that it sends to us and that’s what it feels like; we’re Europeans and we lop Indians’ heads off. Which is just not true.”

Contino said he viewed the decision on the holiday as a missed opportunity.

“If you’re mayor of a city and its name is Columbus, why wouldn’t you capitalize on that? Use it to unite everybody,” he said. “Use this day to celebrate the entire culture, celebrate Italians and indigenous both.”

Tyrone Smith, director of the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio, said the city’s decision is another step in embracing its growing diversity.

“The past is the past. It may not be pretty at times, but we cannot hold what happened back then against today’s society, regardless their bloodline,” he said. “The fact that the city of Columbus is taking action is a victory for everyone.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Bill Cosby’s lawyers have asked a Pennsylvania court to overturn the actor’s conviction and three- to 10-year prison sentence because of what they call a string of errors in his sex assault case.

The defense motion argued that trial Judge Steven O’Neill erred in declaring Cosby a sexually violent predator who must be imprisoned to protect the community. Lawyers called the sentence more punitive than necessary, given the standard two- to three-year guideline range for the crime and the fact Cosby is 81 and blind.

They also said the trial evidence never proved the encounter with accuser Andrea Constand took place in 2004, and not 2003, or that Cosby was arrested within the 12-year time limit.

Cosby was arrested on Dec. 30, 2015, and was convicted at a second trial this April. He has been in a state prison near Philadelphia since the Sept. 25 sentencing, when the judge refused to let him stay out on $1 million bail pending appeal. Given his fame, wealth and use of drugs to molest the accuser, the judge said, Cosby could remain a threat to other women.

The defense motion said O’Neill improperly considered the trial testimony of five other accusers in sentencing Cosby, instead of limiting that “prior bad act” testimony to the question of his guilt or innocence. O’Neill, in explaining the sentence in court, told Cosby he considered “voices from the past, your past,” and that he “heard their voices loud and clear,” the defense said.

The lawyers also challenged the state’s sex offender laws, which have been revised several times amid challenges they are unconstitutionally vague. The law requires judges to find that a sexually violent predator has a “mental abnormality,” a term they said has no legal or psychological meaning, yet subjects defendants to lifetime counseling and police registration.

The defense motion, dated Friday, was posted to a public court docket in the case over the weekend. Kate Delano, a spokeswoman for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, said the office will file a response.

The motion was filed by lawyer Peter Goldberger, a top appellate lawyer in the region, and Joseph P. Green Jr., who handled Cosby’s sentencing after more than a dozen other lawyers on the case had come and gone. A former appellate lawyer on the case is suing Cosby over what he called more than $50,000 in unpaid bills.

The defense also complained that an audio recording played to jurors of a 2005 conversation between Cosby and Gianna Constand, the mother of accuser Andrea Constand, was “not authentic.” They said they did not make the discovery until an expert review after the trial.

District Attorney Kevin Steele has dismissed that as a legitimate appeal issue, saying it’s been widely known that Gianna Constand started her recorder after the call began. She had called Cosby to get answers about what happened to her daughter after Andrea Constand disclosed the assault a year later. The family went to police, who suggested they try to record Cosby.

During the call, Cosby acknowledged engaging in “digital penetration” after giving her daughter pills he would not identify, and offered money for Andrea to attend graduate school, Gianna Constand testified.

“If that’s what they’ve got, it’s beyond a Hail Mary,” Steele said at the sentencing, as Cosby’s lawyers sought to keep Cosby free on bail over the tape recording. O’Neill instead had Cosby led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

 
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From: MeNeedIt