Chicago reporters failed to cover a police "black site" where suspects were held without access to legal representation because they sided with the authorities, a local activist and criminologist told The Atlantic on Tuesday.

"I think that many crime reporters in Chicago have political views that are right in line with the police," Tracy Siska said. "They tend to agree about the tactics needed by the police. They tend to have by one extent or the other the same racist views of the police — a lot of urban police (not all of them by any stretch, but a lot of them) embody racism."

Siska is the head of the Chicago Justice Project, a non-profit group that works toward improving police transparency in hopes of improving community relations.

As The Guardian reported earlier in the day, local attorneys have called the police warehouse, known as Homan Square, as the equivalent to a CIA-style facility. Siska said that local police accountability activists believe it started operating during former police superintendent Phil Cline's tenure "around 2006 or 2007."

Most of the detainees at the facility, he said, were young men of color who could not afford to hire their own attorneys at the time of their arrest.

Maxim Fadeyev's latest documentary in his "Donbass Under Fire" series continues to document the destruction brought to the region by Kiev, the impact on real people - their tears, anger and loss - and their fight to defend their land, culture, and freedom. It is not pretty, but empire never is. This is the logical result of Western 'intervention': chaos and death.


See his previous documentaries (those which have been translated into English) below.

A Maplewood teacher has been indicted on charges of sexually assaulting six male students, Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn A. Murray announced today.

Nicole Dufault, 35, of Caldwell, was indicted on 40 counts of aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child, according to a press release from the prosecutor's office.

Dufault was arrested and charged in September with engaging in sex acts with five male students, but by the time the case was presented to the grand jury, a sixth victim had been identified, prosecutors said.

Dufault was released from custody in October after posting $500,000 bail. She is scheduled to appear on March 6 before Superior Court Judge Michael L. Ravin.

Dufault, a Bloomfield native, has been a language arts teacher at Columbia High School for nine years, prosecutors said. Previously, she taught at several other public schools in Passaic and Bergen counties, prosecutors said.

A single mother of two young sons, Dufault is accused of engaging in sexual activity with the six students on multiple occasions between 2013 and 2014, prosecutors said. Some of the sex acts occurred on school property and in her car, prosecutors said.

The victims were between 14 and 15 years old at the time of the incidents, prosecutors said.

The majority of British Muslims are not in favor of violent retribution for those who publish images of the Prophet Mohammed, nor do they sympathize with fighters traveling abroad to fight with Islamists, a poll reveals.

The ComRes survey, compiled for the BBC, found that two-thirds of respondents felt acts of violence against people who produce images of the Prophet Mohammed could never be justified.

However, 27 percent showed some sympathy for the motives behind the Paris attacks.

In January, extremist Muslim gunmen launched an attack at the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, several years after it published cartoons depicting the prophet.

The survey, which took information from 1,000 British Muslims during the weeks following the Paris attacks, found that 80 percent of respondents were deeply offended by images of the prophet, and 32 percent were not surprised by the attacks.

The results further suggest that half of Muslims living in Britain feel they suffer faith-based discrimination, and believe the country is becoming less tolerant.

Siddique Hasan, his legs shackled to a chair, sat in the fourth-floor visiting room of the Ohio State Penitentiary, a supermax prison. The room, surrounded by thick glass windows, had a guard booth in the center and food vending machines flanking a microwave on one wall. There was a line of small booths, entered through a door behind Hasan, where families, including children, were talking to prisoners through plexiglass partitions.

A riot that occurred Friday has made a prison in Texas, the Willacy County Correctional Center, uninhabitable and forced a mass transfer of prisoners. According to a 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, prisoners there complained of "severely crowded and squalid living conditions." Click here or here for more information about what happened there.

Hasan, 5 feet 10 inches tall, 52 years old, bearded and with wire-rim glasses, had a white kufi on his head. He wore a short-sleeve shirt over a long-sleeve shirt, light blue prison pants and white Nikes. His 209-pound frame was taut and compact, the result of an intense exercise regime. He has been on death row since he was convicted for his actions while leading, along with four others, the April 1993 uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville, Ohio. They are known as the Lucasville Five. The uprising saw prisoners take control of the prison for 11 days in protest against numerous grievances, including deaths that occurred allegedly from beatings by guards. It was one of the longest prison uprisings in U.S. history. By the time it was over, 10 people had been killed by prisoners, including a guard.

Rabbis from European countries gathered in Prague Tuesday for training in self-defense and first aid in response to a wave of attacks against Jews and a rise of anti-Semitism on the continent.

In a stunning beginning of a training session, knives were distributed to dozens of rabbis, young and old, before receiving instructions and practicing what to do to survive stabbing and how to treat injuries.Some occasionally burst out with a laugh but overall the rabbis took it seriously as it was prompted by fears after the deadly terror attack against a kosher grocery in Paris in January and the murder of a Jewish security guard outside a synagogue in Copenhagen earlier this month.

"When we see the level of anti-Semitism in Europe, when we see the level of hate in Europe, when we see the lack of leadership of European governments to fight against anti-Semitism and terror, we're not surprised, unfortunately (by the attacks)," said Rabbi Menachem Margolin.

Did you watch Channel 4's latest sensational documentary Junk Food Kids? If so, you probably shared the sense of outrage that exploded across social media when scenes featuring obese children with decaying teeth were broadcast.

But the presence of fat children on our screens masks the fact that we are currently facing an unnecessary global starvation epidemic. We live in a time of overabundant food production. Despite this, almost a billion people go hungry every day. These figures are no longer only applicable to the developing world.

According to recent statistics, one in five British children now lives below the poverty line. Speak to those working in paediatric medicine in Britain today and they'll tell you that A&E departments are not just hosting overweight children with health problems but, especially in school holiday time, kids that are seriously under-fed. Just hang on for a minute and think about that - malnourished children in this country. Isn't that, well, just a tad Dickensian? Dead right it is. And so, unfortunately, is the solution to this problem: the food bank.

The Trussell Trust, which runs most food banks, feeds more than a million people a year. The trust is a faith-based network supplemented by other voluntary anti-food poverty schemes, the majority of which are church-based.

There is nothing wrong with non-proselytising faith groups alleviating food poverty. After all, there are plenty of biblical examples supporting this ethic. But one may be forgiven for wondering where the state comes in to all this.

Before Christmas the much-anticipated parliamentary report on food poverty was published. Even "advanced Western economies" with "mature welfare states", it stated, are reliant on food banks. How has this happened?
Communal kitchens

To answer this question, we need to look at how Britain dealt with food poverty in the past. From research into egalitarian eating, it's clear this country faced a serious food problem due to trade disruption during World War I. In the centenary year of 2014, while the BBC and other broadcasters were busy sending reporters off to trudge the poppy-dotted battlefields for the umpteenth time, they ignored an aspect of the war which has great relevance for public health today: communal kitchens.

The communal kitchens of one hundred years ago grew out of wartime working class communities, where public dining ventures nourished the most needy at a time when food supplies were poor and nutritional standards low. These grassroots efforts evolved into state-supported "national kitchens" or "national restaurants". People brought a plate or bowl to a "distribution centre" and had it filled up with nutritious food for a modest fee. This rough-and-ready model soon evolved into cheap restaurants where people received hearty, fresh, nutritious meals at incredibly low prices.

{Many of you have asked that I provide my letter to young people as a PDF. Download A Letter to Young People About Fifty Shades of Grey here.}

There's nothing grey about Fifty Shades of Grey. It's all black.

Let me explain.

I help people who are broken inside. Unlike doctors who use x-rays or blood tests to determine why someone's in pain, the wounds I'm interested in are hidden. I ask questions, and listen carefully to the answers. That's how I discover why the person in front of me is "bleeding".

Years of careful listening have taught me a lot. One thing I've learned is that young people are utterly confused about love - finding it and keeping it. They make poor choices, and end up in lots of pain.

I don't want you to suffer like the people I see in my office, so I'm warning you about a new movie called Fifty Shades of Grey. Even if you don't see the film, its message is seeping into our culture, and could plant some dangerous ideas in your head. Be prepared.

An Iowa woman has decided to go public and file civil charges against former Muscatine police officer Tom Tovar for raping her.

Shari Martin told WQAD that she decided not to take advantage of Iowa's Rape Shield Law that would have allowed her to file the lawsuit anonymously because she didn't have anything to be ashamed of.

"I want people to know this happens to regular people and I'm done," she explained. "I don't want to be a victim anymore. I want to come out and say I have nothing to be ashamed of. I did nothing wrong, and I was not able to consent."

In 2013, then-Officer Tovar had pulled over Martin's boyfriend's car for OWI after the two had been out drinking on Valentines Day. According to court and police records, Tovar had taken Martin back to her hotel room while her boyfriend was being booked into jail.

Martin said that she didn't even remember being in Tovar's patrol car. And when she woke up several hours later, she realized that she had been raped.

"I realized I was naked. I don't sleep naked. I started having a flashback. I came to and said, 'Oh my God, there was a police officer laying on me,'" she recalled.

A police investigation later determined that Tovar's DNA matched sperm found on Martin's hotel bedding and inside of her jeans.

Most Americans spend their lives working for others, paying off debts to others and performing tasks that others tell them that they "must" do. These days, we don't like to think of ourselves as "servants" or "slaves", but that is what the vast majority of us are. It is just that the mechanisms of our enslavement have become much more sophisticated over time. It has been said that the borrower is the servant of the lender, and most of us start going into debt very early into our adult years. In fact, those that go to college to "get an education" are likely to enter the "real world" with a staggering amount of debt. And of course that is just the beginning of the debt accumulation. Today, when you add up all mortgage debt, all credit card debt and all student loan debt, the average American household is carrying a grand total of 203,163 dollars of debt. Overall, American households are more than 11 trillion dollars in debt at this point. And even though most Americans don't realize this, over the course of our lifetimes the amount of money that we will repay on our debts is far greater than the amount that we originally borrowed. In fact, when it comes to credit card debt you can easily end up repaying several times the amount of money that you originally borrowed. So we work our fingers to the bone to pay off these debts, and the vast majority of us are not even working for ourselves. Instead, our work makes the businesses that other people own more profitable. So if we spend the best years of our lives building businesses for others, servicing debts that we owe to others and making others wealthier, what does that make us?

In 2015, the words "servant" and "slave" have very negative connotations, and we typically don't use them very much.