Category: reason

An Italian woman,
who wasn’t named by media, is fighting to keep British social
services from placing her baby for adoption. Last summer, the
woman, who was then pregnant, came to England for a Ryanair
training course. While there, she had a panic attack and called for
help. When police arrived, she was on the phone with her mother who
told them her daughter was bipolar and hadn’t been taking her
medicine. Cops took her to a mental hospital where social services
had doctors forcibly
sedate her and remove her baby by caesarian section. The
woman has fought a legal battle since to get her child back, but
social services and British courts have refused to turn the child
over to her or to its father.

It’s been more than two years since Kelly
Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man, died after a brutal beating
at the hands of police officers in Fullerton, Calif. Today, after
community outrage, the retirement of the city’s police chief, and
the recall of three Fullerton City Council members, two of the six
officers involved in the incident face the music. Their criminal
trial has
begun.

Courtesy of
Reuters:

The trial of two former California policemen charged in the
beating and stun gun death of a mentally ill transient began on
Monday with opening statements about the deadly confrontation that
touched off protests and political upheaval in a Los Angeles
suburb.

Prosecutors say the two officers, who approached Kelly Thomas to
question him about reports of vandalized cars near a bus depot,
turned a routine police encounter into an unnecessary and savage
beating that cost the unarmed homeless man his life in what
represented a flagrant abuse of authority.

Former Fullerton officer Manuel Ramos, 39, is charged with
second degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the
confrontation between Fullerton police officers and 37-year-old
Thomas on the night of July 5, 2011.

Jay Cicinelli, a 41-year-old ex-corporal with the Fullerton
Police Department, is charged with involuntary manslaughter and use
of excessive force. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

Defense attorneys were expected to argue that Thomas had a
history of violence and resisted the officers’ attempts to detain
and question him.

ReasonTV’s Paul Detrick is at the courtroom for the trial, but
the judge has banned the media from live-tweeting the happenings.
Below, ReasonTV shows how important citizen outrage and public
recording of police officers were in
trying to bring about justice in this case:

 

Our previous coverage of the Kelly Thomas case can be found
here.

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In an effort to appease human rights concerns over antiquated
and inhumane forms of punishment, China’s central government
announced last month that it will abolish its infamous forced labor
camps. The oppressive camps are not actually going away though:
they are being
turned into forced drug rehabilitation centers. 

The announcment came after the conclusion
of the
Third Plenary meeting of the Communist Party, a
gathering of China’s top policymakers and political leaders, when
the government issued a press release detailing its plans to
curtail the country’s human rights abuses by enacting
“comprehensive reform.”  

The reforms
include (allegedly) putting an end to forced labor camps, or the
“laojiao” system, as well as the one-child policy. 

The laojiao system has been the subject of intense criticism
from human
rights groups and Chinese
citizens for decades. Established in 1957, the camps
detain petty criminal offenders, drug users, and political and
religious dissidents for up to four years without trial. Inmates
spend their days working long hours in unsafe factory conditions.
And they’re widespread: In a 2009 report to a United Nations human
rights forum, the Chinese government acknowledged
the existence of 320 facilities nationwide holding 190,000
people. 

However, according to a new report from Reuters, the
camps will remain largely in tact for drug users. From the
report:

Many of China’s re-education through labor camps, instead of
being abolished in line with a ruling Communist Party announcement
this month, are being turned into compulsory drug rehabilitation
centers where inmates can be incarcerated for two years or more
without trial.

Human rights activists and freed inmates said drug offenders
were still being forced to do factory work, as has been the
practice under the re-education through labor system.

New York-based Human Rights Watch estimates more than 60 percent
of the 160,000 people in labor camps at the start of the year were
there for drug offenses. Those people were unlikely to see any
change in their treatment, it said.

“The drug detox people are doing exactly the same work,” said
Li, who spent 19 months in a labor camp in Kunming, the capital of
southern Yunnan province.

Government websites and
state media have detailed the transition, as many camps have
started to change their names and re-train staff. But they describe
the new policy as a form of compassionate treatment for addicts,
rather than a continuation of forced labor. 

In the
Shanghai Daily, Kong Shuhua, director of
Xishuangbanna’s Justice Bureau, said, “The new rehab center
will provide compulsory drug rehabilitation treatment for addicts,
and help them find self confidence again.”

The policy is part of China’s escalating crackdown on illicit
drug consumers.

According to the
Atlantic, the influx of recreational drugs into China,
(which is a product of “more relaxed borders, increased wealth, and
greater individual freedoms,”) has resulted in frequent
record-breaking drug busts. In 2008, the government implemented an

anti-drug law that severely criminalized users. Anyone caught
using a classified drug, such as cocaine, heroin, or marijuana,
would be labelled an “addict” in the state’s official reigstry and
shipped to a labor camp.

In 2010, Human Rights Watch released a
report outlining the conditions in China’s drug
“rehabilition” centers:

Individuals detained in some drug detention centers are
routinely beaten, denied medical treatment, and forced to work up
to 18 hours a day without pay. Although sentenced to
“rehabilitation,” they are denied access to effective drug
dependency treatment and provided no opportunity to learn skills to
reintegrate into the community.

Jiang Tianyong, a human rights lawyer in Beijing,
told Reuters, “It’s wrong to say [the announced
end of forced labor camps] has no meaning, but it’s too optimistic
to think it will change a lot.”

“This is how power in this country operates,” he continued.
“They can’t use re-education through labor camps to control people,
so they just change the name and control people.”

According to the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),
some of the “neutralisation operations” relating to Syria’s
chemical weapons will be carried out aboard a U.S Navy ship.

From the BBC:

The US naval vessel on which neutralisation will take place has
not been officially named but is believed to be the MV Cape Ray. It
is undergoing modifications to support the operations.

These should be completed by 31 December, the OPCW said.

The announcement is another strong sign that the timetable given
to destroy all Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal and capabilities by
the middle of next year could be achieved, despite its many
apparent difficulties, says the BBC’s Middle East editor Sebastian
Usher.

The news comes after officials in
Norway,
Albania, and
Belgium said that they did not want their country to host the
destruction of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons arsenal.

I highlighted the fact that the OPCW was open to having chemical
weapons destroyed at sea
last month. In that post, I mentioned comments made by chemical
weapons disarmament consultant Ralf Trapp, who told the AP that
dealing with chemical weapons at sea comes with some
challenges:

Trapp told the AP that using a sea-based facility would have
numerous advantages, including the ability to position it far from
populated areas.

But he said there were many problems to be addressed beforehand,
including restrictions in the U.N. Convention on the Law of Sea
intended to protect the marine environment, and how to transport
the highly toxic cargo so it presents a minimal risk for sailors,
other maritime traffic and the oceans in general.

United Nations diplomat Sigrid Kaag outlined the logistical
details of getting the chemical weapons put on the American
ship.

From the
AP:

The international organization’s director general, Ahmet Uzumcu,
said in The Hague that the U.S. government will contribute “a
destruction technology, full operational support and financing to
neutralize” the weapons, most likely on a ship in the Mediterranean
Sea. The weapons are to be removed from Syria by Dec. 31.

The weapons and chemicals “will not be [destroyed] in Syrian
territorial waters,” Kaag said at a news conference in
Damascus.

Separately, Sigrid Kaag, appointed as the go-between for the
United Nations and the OPCW on destroying Syria’s chemical weapons
stockpile, laid out some logistical details. Importantly, the
weapons will first be packaged and transported from multiple sites
within Syria to the country’s largest port, Latakia. Then they will
be loaded onto ships owned by other OPCW members before a second
handoff to U.S. vessels.

More from Reason.com on Syria here. 

According to the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),
some of the “neutralisation operations” relating to Syria’s
chemical weapons will be carried out aboard a U.S Navy ship.

From the BBC:

The US naval vessel on which neutralisation will take place has
not been officially named but is believed to be the MV Cape Ray. It
is undergoing modifications to support the operations.

These should be completed by 31 December, the OPCW said.

The announcement is another strong sign that the timetable given
to destroy all Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal and capabilities by
the middle of next year could be achieved, despite its many
apparent difficulties, says the BBC’s Middle East editor Sebastian
Usher.

The news comes after officials in
Norway,
Albania, and
Belgium said that they did not want their country to host the
destruction of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons arsenal.

I highlighted the fact that the OPCW was open to having chemical
weapons destroyed at sea
last month. In that post, I mentioned comments made by chemical
weapons disarmament consultant Ralf Trapp, who told the AP that
dealing with chemical weapons at sea comes with some
challenges:

Trapp told the AP that using a sea-based facility would have
numerous advantages, including the ability to position it far from
populated areas.

But he said there were many problems to be addressed beforehand,
including restrictions in the U.N. Convention on the Law of Sea
intended to protect the marine environment, and how to transport
the highly toxic cargo so it presents a minimal risk for sailors,
other maritime traffic and the oceans in general.

United Nations diplomat Sigrid Kaag outlined the logistical
details of getting the chemical weapons put on the American
ship.

From the
AP:

The international organization’s director general, Ahmet Uzumcu,
said in The Hague that the U.S. government will contribute “a
destruction technology, full operational support and financing to
neutralize” the weapons, most likely on a ship in the Mediterranean
Sea. The weapons are to be removed from Syria by Dec. 31.

The weapons and chemicals “will not be [destroyed] in Syrian
territorial waters,” Kaag said at a news conference in
Damascus.

Separately, Sigrid Kaag, appointed as the go-between for the
United Nations and the OPCW on destroying Syria’s chemical weapons
stockpile, laid out some logistical details. Importantly, the
weapons will first be packaged and transported from multiple sites
within Syria to the country’s largest port, Latakia. Then they will
be loaded onto ships owned by other OPCW members before a second
handoff to U.S. vessels.

More from Reason.com on Syria here. 

What sound like fights between capitalism and socialism or
between “religious traditionalism and secular cosmopolitanism,”
turn out to be battles between “progressive liberalism” and
“conservative liberalism,” echoes of the more than 200-year-old
dispute between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. That’s the argument
of Yuval Levin, whose The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas
Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left is published this week
by Basic Books. Mr. Levin provides a valuable service by dusting
off the writings of Burke and Paine and by clearly, concisely, and
accessibly summarizing them in a way that highlights their
relevance to contemporary politics and policy. The monarchist Burke
and the religious skeptic Paine, an early supporter of the bloody
French revolution, would seem to be unlikely models for today’s
American politicians of either party, concedes Ira Stoll. But Mr.
Levin has made a convincing case that, 200 years later, we can
still learn from both men.

View this article.

• The French are increasing their military presence in the
  
  Central African Republic ahead of an expected United
  Nations-backed intervention intended to restore order in the
  country that has been experiencing increasing unrest and disorder
  since rebels removed President Bozize from power in March.
• The Supreme Court declined to hear
  Liberty University’s challenge to Obamacare without
  comment.
• 
  Fast food workers in around 100 cities will hold a strikes this
  Thursday over wages.
• Egypt’s
  new draft constitution will free the military from civilian
  oversight.
• A new study claims that a quarter of teens have been involved
  in
  sexting.
• The trial of
  two former cops in California accused of beating a homeless man
  to death began today.

Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on
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can also get the top stories mailed to
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In an
op-ed for USA Today published yesterday evening,
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius touted recent
progress the Obamacare tech team has made on repair efforts to the
health law’s troubled online insurance portal, HealthCare.gov.

“The site is running faster, it’s responding quicker and it can
handle larger amounts of traffic,” Sebelius wrote.

But please, she gently suggested, try to avoid rushing to
experience the improvements all at once. Even after saying that
“the system is now working smoothly for the vast majority of
users,” Sebelius also warned that those who prefer to shop online
“may want to visit HealthCare.gov in off-peak hours when there is
less traffic.”

So the online experience is working fine as long as no one*
actually uses it?

Some improvements do seem to have been made, but given the near
total failure of the initial rollout, that’s a pretty low bar. And
even still, it seems pretty clear that the new and improved
HealthCare.gov still has a few kinks to work out, even on the
front-end user experience that was supposed to be significantly
improved.

ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein
chronicled his own test of the reformed website this morning
and found “long delays loading pages, an endless circle of tasks
(some already completed) and ultimately an error message.” His
test-run ended with an unhelpful, grammatically incorrect apology,
“Sorry theres [sic] a problem with our system,” and a
recommendation that he log out and try again in 30 minutes. Others,

including Reason‘s Nick Gillespie, are reporting
similar
glitches in their attempts to use the site. 

Maybe these folks are just part of the minority of users still
expected to experience trouble. More likely, however, is that the
front end of the site still has some significant problems. And
remember: That’s the portion of the system that the tech repair
team prioritized, and was by now supposed to be working
smoothly for the vast majority of users.

With 30 to 40 percent of the site, including critical insurer
payment systems, yet to be completed and tested, you can bet these
problems will continue. Not only because it clearly takes longer
than expected to excise flaws from the system, but because
lingering problems with the portion that’s already been built will
take time and energy away from constructing and testing the
portions of the system that have yet to be put in place. The
administration delayed the Spanish language version of site from
its initial planned opening, and just last week announced
that the federally run small business exchange that was
supposed to open last month would be
postponed by a year. The team working on Obamacare is already
reported to be working around the clock on repairs; even if they
don’t burn out from the weeks of long hours, it’s inevitable that
building additional functionality and putting it through the paces
will fall by the wayside if the existing troubles aren’t fixed.

Even now, just a day after the relaunch, it seems likely that
the performance goals the administration was shooting for have not
actually been hit: On a press call this afternoon, a spokesperson
for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services backed
away from the 50,000 simultaneous users figure that
officials provided just yesterday.

If the administration does eventually meet its performance
goals, however, it remains to be seen whether they will be enough.
In the days following the launch of the exchanges, federal
officials falsely claimed that the sole cause of the system’s
dysfunction was too much traffic. But as we get closer to the
deadline for signing up for coverage that begins next year, traffic
loads could add to the system’s problems. The rebuilt system is
supposed to be able to handle about 50,000 concurrent users, but
when the site launched, there were as many as 250,000 people trying
to log on all at once. If a flood of users does try to sign up in
the next few weeks, that could be a problem. 

So if demand for enrollment is high, the system is liable to
crash again, resulting in more of the kind of frustrations we’ve
already seen. On the other hand, if demand is low, then that
suggests a different set of problems—minimal interest in the
insurance being sold on the exchanges, and, as a result, smaller
risk pools made up of sicker individuals who will be more expensive
to insure. Either way, in other words, it won’t really
work. 

*No, I don’t literally mean “no one.” 

An internal U.N.
document leaked to The Guardian offers a

rare glimpse of disagreement about drug policy among member
states, several of which are advocating a less violent approach.
The document, a draft of a policy statement scheduled to be
released next spring, suggests a breakdown in the international
consensus supporting the forcible suppression of politically
disfavored pharmacological tastes:

Ecuador is pushing the UN to include a statement that recognises
that the world needs to look beyond prohibition. Its submission
claims there is “a need for more effective results in addressing
the world drug problem” that will encourage “deliberations on
different approaches that could be more efficient and
effective.”

Venezuela is pushing for the draft to include a new
understanding of “the economic implications of the current
dominating health and law enforcement approach in tackling the
world drug problem”, arguing that the current policy fails to
recognise the “dynamics of the drug criminal market.”…

Norway wants the draft to pose “questions related to
decriminalisation and a critical assessment of the approach
represented by the so-called war on drugs.” Switzerland wants the
draft to recognise the consequences of the current policy on public
health issues. It wants it to include the observation that member
states “note with concern that consumption prevalence has not been
reduced significantly and that the consumption of new psychoactive
substances has increased in most regions of the world.” It also
wants the draft to “express concern that according to UNAids, the
UN programme on HIV/Aids, the global goal of reducing HIV
infections among people who inject drugs by 50% by 2015 will not be
reached, and that drug-related transmission is driving the
expansion of the epidemic in many countries.”

The EU is also pushing hard for the draft to emphasise the need
for drug-dependence treatment and care options for offenders as an
alternative to incarceration.

“Drug users should be entitled to access to treatment, essential
medicines, care and related support services,” the EU’s submission
suggests. “Programmes related to recovery and social reintegration
should also be encouraged.”

With the exception of Ecuador, this is pretty mild stuff,
especially at a time when former presidents of Latin American
countries have publicly called
for an end to the war on drugs and two U.S. states, along
with Uruguay, have taken a big step in that direction by legalizing
marijuana. But in the context of U.N. policy statements, which are
usually organized around mindless mantras like “A Drug-Free World
by 2000,” these deviations from prohibitionist orthodoxy seem
almost radical.

“The idea that there is a global consensus on drugs policy is
fake,” Damon Barrett, deputy director of Harm Reduction
International, tells The Guardian. “The differences
have been there for a long time, but you rarely get to see them. It
all gets whittled down to the lowest common denominator, when all
you see is agreement. But it’s interesting to see now what they are
arguing about.”

State and federal officials in
Arizona are fighting just the latest skirmish in a long-running war
over just how restrictive rules should be over human use of forest
and desert areas. The locals want fewer and uniform restrictions,
while their D.C. counterparts like to play “What will we cite
people for this week?” with campers, hunters, and pretty much
anybody who likes the outdoors. The most recent battle is over a
federal rule-switch, requiring hunters to move their camps every 72
hours. Decades-long practice, as the Arizona Game and Fish
Department points out, is to allow campers to stay in place for 14
days.

The terse U.S. Forest Service
press release (PDF) that set off the latest kerfuffle reads as
follows:

Flagstaff, Ariz. – The Coconino National Forest is
asking all northern Arizona -bound hunters to refrain from leaving
their trailers unattended in the forest during the upcoming hunting
season. In previous seasons, law enforcement officers have found
numerous trailers parked in the forests for the purpose of
reserving a location for the entire hunting season and also because
the individuals did not want to haul their trailers back and
forth.

Parking a trailer in the forest for this purpose violates Forest
Service regulations. If trailers are left unattended for more than
72 hours, the Forest Service considers them abandoned property and
may remove them from the forest. Violators can also be cited for
this action. Enforcing these regulations protects the property and
allows recreational users equal access to national forests.

This regulation applies to all national forests in northern Ar
izona, including the Coconino, Kaibab and Prescott forests.

Unmentioned in the press release is that this is a change in
long-standing policy. Everybody in Arizona knows that you’re
supposed to shift your camp every two weeks. This is to deter
people from simply moving into the forest permanently.

It doesn’t really work. Plenty of drifters, modern mountain
(wo)men, and adventurous types live scattered through the desert
and forest in tents, campers, trucks. and caves. Most stick it out
during the pleasant weather before moving on, but a few set up

fairly elaborate habitations and stay for years. One of my
friends (who I’ll write about in detail another time) used to work
for a year or two, and then take to the wilderness. He lived in one
of my tents for a few months after a wildfire cut him off from his
main camp.

But you’re not supposed to do that. So the two-week rule has a
rationale behind it. You can camp, so long as you stop short of
digging a root cellar or building a chimney. Parking in the forest
during the hunting season and “reserving a location” isn’t really
an issue because, you know, the forest is big enough for frigging
mountain men to hide out in on illegal homesteads.

In a
very nice letter (PDF) to the Forest Service, Larry D. Voyles,
Director of Arizona Game and Fish, points out that hunting and
fishing is actually on the decline across the country, and his
department is actually trying to get more people to go out
in the forest by reducing and simplifying rules and
restrictions.

Having worked as a game warden for more than 30 years, I am
aware that many hunters are forced to hunt in chunks of days. Keep
in mind that some hunters wait for years, if not decades to be
drawn for a particular big game tag. There are many times when a
hunter may be in camp for a few days, have to leave for work, and
then return a few days later to finish his or her hunt.

So running the risk of a citation or even having expensive gear
lifted by the feds is a bit of a downer, however unlikely it is
that one or another green-uniformed dickhead will stumble across
the camp. He pleasantly requested that the feds return to a uniform
14-day rule across all of Arizona’s forests.

No dice. The Game and Fish folks
sent out a warning last month that “the Department has met
repeatedly with staff from the affected national forests to repeal
this enforcement approach, with no success.” With the sheriffs
departments from Yavapai and Coconino counties, the state developed
a
placard for people to put on their vehicles, explicitly telling
rangers that trucks and trailers have not been abandoned,
although Game and Fish warns that the feds may well ignore
them.

As I mentioned, this is not the first confrontation between
Arizona and federal officials over land-use rules. During the
government not-so-shutdown, Coconino County deputies
cut the chains on the gate of a facility closed by the Forest
Service because the closure was causing traffic jams. Sheriffs

went head-to-head with the Forest Service over road closures.
And now the whole Arizona Sheriffs Association adopted a formal
resolution saying its members oppose and
won’t help the feds enforce their restrictions, including the new
72-hour rule.

The way things are going, I’m waiting for the first ranger with
an attitude to get trussed and thrown over somebody’s hood. You
don’t even need a tag for them.

Have I mentioned that I’ve
written a novel about wilderness-living hermits, crazed rangers and
general shenanigans?