Last month, the US Department of Justice released a damning report on Ferguson, Missouri and the way in which law enforcement agencies and the local court system raise revenues through municipal fines and fees that disproportionately impact Black residents. The DOJ investigation — which detailed patterns of unconstitutional arrests and unfair court penalties — garnered national attention for its stomach-churning stories of excessive police force, overtly racist actions of city officials, and widespread mistreatment in court.

By some measures, California is not all that different. That's according to a new report released today by a group of civil rights and legal aid organizations, who argue that courts throughout the state systematically extract revenue from residents with exorbitant fines and fees for very minor traffic violations. The report, "Not Just a Ferguson Problem: How Traffic Courts Drive Inequality in California," includes a range of troubling statistics and anecdotes that illustrate how courts in the state trap people in poverty. The report argues that traffic courts in California — through harsh fines and punishments that can be impossible for low-income people to overcome — are increasingly destroying people's lives over minor infractions.

There are a number of inequities in the system and ways in which a traffic violation can rapidly lead to overwhelming debts, according to the report, which was co-authored by the East Bay Community Law Center, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Western Center on Law and Poverty, A New Way of Life Reentry Project, and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. The most striking finding of these organizations relates to the courts' widespread practice of suspending drivers' licenses — a punishment that severely disrupts people's lives and is tied to fines that are often insurmountable for people living paycheck to paycheck.

We analyze the future of Israeli politics with Arthur Goodman, the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Liaison for Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Europe's largest Jewish voice against Zionism. We cover his history with the organization, explicate the process of the recent Knesset elections, and express our knowledge and understanding of the situation happening in Palestine, as well as the international community's shift in support from Benjamin Netanyahu as he engages in further dangerous hardline rhetoric and crimes against humanity.

HANEUL: Can you tell us a little information about yourself?

ARTHUR: I've been handling lobbying for JFJFP ever since it was formed; about 13 years ago. I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and used to be 100% supportive of Israel. I had always assumed that everything Israel was right and Arabs wrong, without much thought behind it, until my mid-50s. One day, towards the end of the first Intifada, I looked at a newspaper with a picture of Palestinian teenagers throwing stones at Israeli soldiers across barren wasteland. I thought, "It takes guts to throw stones at armed soldiers". That never occurred any time before, but it shows how your psychological preconceptions can color how you look at things.

The mother entered the courtroom Tuesday weighed down by a padded green smock that attorneys said is given to inmates held in the Sacramento County jail's psychiatric unit.

That's where she's been since Saturday, when, officials said, she poured gasoline on her 7-year-old daughter and lit the girl on fire.

Porche Latrice Wright, 27, stood quiet and still as Sacramento Superior Court Judge Ben Davidian read the charges against her - attempted murder, with premeditation, and aggravated mayhem. Davidian also noted that Wright had two outstanding issues of probation including settling a case of domestic violence against a spouse or cohabitant.

According to court records, Wright completed a "batterer's treatment program" to settle a felony domestic violence charge from last year. She was scheduled to appear in court to provide proof that she had completed the program Monday, at which point she was back in jail.

She was arrested at her home, a light blue duplex in the 600 block of El Camino Avenue, Saturday afternoon when a family friend called for help after seeing burn marks on Wright's 7-year-old daughter.

The girl was taken immediately to a hospital, where she remained Tuesday. Though it was not immediately clear how badly burned the child was, a charge of aggravated mayhem indicates "extreme indifference to the physical or psychological well-being of another person, intentionally (causing) permanent disability or disfigurement of another human being," according to California law.

The girl is expected to survive.

A Texas woman has accused a cop of beating her when she was 38 weeks pregnant. Thanks to a surveillance system in her parents' home, a video has been published online that appears to prove her allegations. An investigation is under way.

The Hunt County sheriff's deputy has been identified as one of several officers who stood in the woman's home in Quinlan on the evening of March 4. Two officers can be seen keeping Deanna Robinson in the corner of her kitchen, next to the counter, restraining her, as her 18-month-old toddler watched.

Next, the deputy can clearly be seen taking at least two quick punches at Robinson, who wouldn't stop yelling. This was after she shouted, "I'm pregnant." She was handcuffed during this, she told the attorney's office on Monday, according to WFAA.

Robinson, 38, is a decorated Air Force veteran and recipient of the Airman's Medal for the time she pulled her colleagues out of a burning plane in Iraq. She now lives in Quinlan, with another infant and three step children, aged six to nine. But her marriage had been undergoing a turbulent period lately, which culminated in a shoving match with her husband several days prior to the incident.

Apparently, one of the kids told a teacher at school, who then reported the couple to Child Protection Services.
She was arrested on March 4 on charges of resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and interference with child custody, and spent some six days in jail.

The court case was over her 18-month-old son, Landry. The rest of the children are now in protective custody, while the infant son, Levi - who was born less than a week after her release from custody, is with grandparents.

It was 5:06 a.m. on a Tuesday in September 2013 when sex crimes Detective Derrick Williams caught the call. It came from the hospital. It was a distraught woman. She was saying she had been raped.

She told Williams a familiar story of French Quarter trespass: She'd hit the clubs the night before, she said. Drank a lot. Met a man. Went to his house. And awoke the next morning to find him on top of her, naked. But she told Williams she had never said yes to sex.

Williams typed up a brief report. He labeled the incident a rape. But Case No. I-31494-13 wasn't quite ordinary. The accuser was a former cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints. And the alleged rapist was Darren Sharper, a hero of the Saints' 2009 Super Bowl team, former Pro Bowl player and broadcast analyst for the league's television network.

News of the Sept. 23, 2013 incident quickly shot up the ranks. New Orleans' police superintendent and top prosecutor were briefed. In the weeks that followed, police records show that Williams gathered evidence. He got a warrant to collect a sample of Sharper's DNA. It matched a swab taken from the woman's body. Witnesses told of seeing Sharper with the intoxicated woman at a club, and later at his condo. Video footage confirmed Sharper and the woman had been together.

It wasn't enough for the district attorney's office. This was a "heater" — police shorthand for a high profile case. Prosecutors were hesitant to move too quickly on a local football hero with deep pockets and savvy lawyers, according to two individuals with knowledge of the investigation. They held off on an arrest warrant.

"If his name was John Brown, he would have been in jail," one criminal justice official with knowledge of the case said. "If a woman says, 'He's the guy that raped me,' and you have corroborating evidence to show they were together and she went to the hospital and she can identify him, that guy goes to jail."

Sharper did not — and continued an unchecked crime spree that ended only with his arrest in Los Angeles last year after sexually assaulting four women in 24 hours. In March, Sharper owned up to his savagery. He agreed to plead guilty or no contest to raping or attempting to rape nine women in four states. The pending deal allows his possible release after serving half of a 20-year sentence — a strikingly light punishment that has drawn widespread criticism.

A Fort Lauderdale cop who was caught on cell phone camera slapping a homeless man across the face is now facing charges.

On February 22, a bystander recorded the altercation between Officer Victor Ramirez, 34, and Bruce Laclair, 58.

From CBS Miami:

The video, captured by a witness at a downtown Ft. Lauderdale bus depot, shows what appears to be Ramirez striking 58-year old Bruce Laclair.

"I was sitting there on a bench and a police officer came up and started rousing me and said he was going to arrest me for trespassing," Laclair told CBS4's Ted Scouten shortly after the incident.

In the police report, Ramirez said Laclair was sleeping on a bus bench.

"I had to go to the bathroom," Laclair said, "and he wouldn't let me go to the bathroom, so the argument stemmed from simply going to the bathroom, that's all I wanted to do."

In the video, Laclair, is seen walking in front of the officer.

You then see Ramirez put his hand on Laclair. When Laclair tries to pull away, Ramirez appears to shove him on the ground. Laclair then shouts an obscenity and tells the officer he needs to use the restroom.

"You're not going to pee. You're not supposed to be here, OK? So get up," Ramirez is heard saying in the video.

Another exchange of words ensues, and that's when the officer is seen slapping Laclair.

Watch (warning: profanity and violence):

An Austrian law graduate spearheading a class action suit against Facebook for alleged privacy breaches said ahead of the first hearing Thursday he hopes the case will eventually lead to an overhaul of a "Wild West" approach to data protection.

Max Schrems and 25,000 other Facebook users are suing the social network for various rights violations, ranging from the "illegal" tracking of their data under EU law to Facebook's involvement in the PRISM surveillance programme of the US National Security Agency (NSA).

"Basically we are asking Facebook to stop mass surveillance, to (have) a proper privacy policy that people can understand, but also to stop collecting data of people that are not even Facebook users," 27-year-old Schrems told AFP in an interview.

"There is a wide number of issues in the lawsuit and we hope to kind of win all of them and to get a landmark case against US data-gathering companies."

The case has been brought against Facebook's European headquarters in Dublin, which registers all accounts outside the United States and Canada—making up some 80 percent of Facebook's 1.35 billion users.

The world is so messed up that calling it a 'freak show' doesn't quite do it justice. We need a new word to capture just how backwards, upside down, screwed up, and utterly freakish our world really is. Thankfully, we may have found one, thanks to our friends in Russia and an odious little troll known to inhabit the U.S. State Department until approximately 1 week ago. The whole world is psaki. We may also have found a word to describe the only proper response to seeing just how psaki the world is, thanks to Jen Psaki's equally cringe-worthy, 'ex-CIA' deputy, Marie. There's only one thing to do when you're confronted by such a scale of lies: to harf.

What makes the world so psaki? Why does it make us want to harf? Well, let's start with the people who inspire the words. What can we say about Jen Psaki and Marie Harf? They're both perfect poster children for the banal psychopathology upon which the USA, and by extension the rest of the world, is built. They're oh, so 'normal' with their cute smiles, propensity to humor and the ease with which they handle difficult situations. They're not just living the American dream, they are the American dream. But closely study these people, what they say and the way they say it, and you realise that those charming traits are used to mask a cold-blooded and ruthless ability to tell bare-faced lies to the world. And not just any old lies, but lies that obscure the fact that the US government is responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians on a daily basis. When you realise that, the smile and lighthearted manner isn't so 'cute' any more. Then again, they are the official State Department media liaisons, and therefore are tasked with white-washing the crimes of the massive planetary boil that is the US government and all of its institutions.

Having said that, we took the announcement that Psaki would no longer be gracing the State Dept. stage with her question-dodging and lie-spewing with a bit of disappointment. Harf was a decent replacement, but Psaki was such an easy target for us to highlight US government duplicity, and her regular 'endearing' blunders and non sequiturs and seeming inability to distinguish truth from falsehood, provided morbid entertainment to those who could see behind the veil of cuteness. As an example, here's what Psaki had to say on February 23rd about American stooge and president of Yemen, Hadi, who was recently deposed in the coup which sparked the Saudi and US bombardment of Yemen.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted on all charges Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombing by a federal jury that now must decide whether the 21-year-old former college student should be executed.

Tsarnaev folded his arms, fidgeted and looked down at the defense table as he listened to one guilty verdict after another on all 30 counts against him, including conspiracy and deadly use of a weapon of mass destruction. Seventeen of those counts are punishable by death.

The verdict - reached after a day and a half of deliberations - was practically a foregone conclusion, given his lawyer's startling admission at the trial's outset that Tsarnaev carried out the terror attack with his now-dead older brother, Tamerlan.

The two shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs that exploded near the finish line on April 15, 2013, killed three spectators and wounded more than 260 other people, turning the traditionally celebratory home stretch of the world-famous race into a scene of carnage and putting the city on edge for days.

Tsarnaev was found responsible not only for those deaths but for the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer who was gunned down days later.

A British police force has come under fire for publishing posters that critics say place the blame for rape on women rather than male attackers. Sussex Police issued the posters as part of a campaign to prevent rape. The force intends to put them up in pub toilets and bus stops.

Campaigners say the posters reinforce the message that victims rather than assailants are to blame in sexual assault cases. Sussex Police defended the posters, saying it wanted to raise awareness that vulnerable people could be targeted by rapists.

The posters feature an image of two young women taking a selfie, with the caption: "Which one of your mates is most vulnerable on a night out? The one you leave behind."

It goes on to say many rapes could be prevented if women "stick together and don't let your friend leave with a stranger or go off on their own."

Friends who play together, stay together. On a night out don't let your mates leave with a stranger or go off alone. pic.twitter.com/U3Hk3QCndu

— Sussex Police (@sussex_police) March 31, 2015

Sarah Green, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said the posters were sending the wrong message - to the wrong people.