be just

Police in CA looking into possibility of hate crime in death of severely beaten Iraqi woman By Associated Press, Published: March 24 | Updated: Sunday, March 25, 6:54 PM EL CAJON, Calif. — A woman from Iraq who was found beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” has died, and police are investigating the possibility of a hate crime. Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Shaima Alawadi was taken off life support Saturday afternoon. “The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened,” said Mohebi, who met with family members. Alawadi, a 32-year-old mother of five, had been hospitalized since her 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the family’s El Cajon home in suburban San Diego on Wednesday, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said. “A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that,” Lt. Mark Coit said. “We don’t want t...

 Incarceration Nation   : Information Clearing House March 25, 2012 "TIME.com" --  Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain - with a rate among the highest - has 153. This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans int...