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News from Africa

By Africa News in Brief, News & Current Affairs

LUXURY LIVING IN LAGOS BUILT WITH WORLD BANK FUNDS FOR THE POOR

Aug. 13 (GIN) – Local officials in Lagos, Nigeria, who accepted a $200 million loan from the World Bank to “increase sustainable access to basic urban services,” are instead creating an unaffordable complex of 1,000 luxury units on the grounds where poor and working people recently lived.

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‘Returned’ Citizen Helps Others Register to Vote

By News & Current Affairs

During the hot afternoon of Saturday, July 20, Courtney Stewart, founder and chairman of the volunteer organization Reentry Network for Returning Citizens, knocked on doors and walked the streets of Southwest’s Greenleaf and James Creek neighborhoods, in search of reentering citizens to register as voters. Additional volunteers registered people at the King Greenleaf Recreation Center at 201 N Street in Southwest.

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The Plight of California’s Prisoners: Hunger Strike, Sterilization and Valley Fever

By Commentaries/Opinions, War on the “War on Drugs” Posts

By Jean Trounstine

It’s been two years since Governor Jerry Brown was court ordered to fix California’s ailing prisons and the situation is still life-threatening and possibly illegal.

It’s been all over the papers and many bloggers are tackling the horrendous conditions in California. A prison system that in 2011 was ordered by the Supreme Court to figure out what to do with 30,000 people who because of the system’s overcrowding were suffering “cruel and unusual punishment.”

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Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. has been sentenced to almost three decades in jail after conspiring with private prisons to trade kids for cash.

By News & Current Affairs

by Emily Smith

In the private prison industry, longer sentences earn more money from the state.

Since 2003, Ciavarella received millions of dollars in bribes for condemning minors to maximum prison sentences. In one case, Ciavarella sentenced a 10-year-old to two years in a detention facility for accidentally bottoming out his mother’s car.

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Criminalization, Race and Food Access in a Time of Hyper-Afrophobia

By Commentaries/Opinions, War on the “War on Drugs” Posts

By Dara Cooper

Black and Brown people deserve the right to LIFE, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness.  Black and Brown people deserve the right to access quality food.  Those rights are connected.

Last week, thousands of people marched the streets all over the country for Trayvon Martin, after the teen’s murderer was acquitted, in part, because of racist imagery painted of Trayvon, making this dead young Black male guilty of his own murder.

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