News & Features

Draconian cuts in the budget for lawyers who represent indigent defendants have come back to haunt the Orleans Parish criminal justice system. Upwards of 500 indigent defendants may have been locked up without the benefit of an assigned defense attorney over the past year, according to a brief filed in the state Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. The brief charges that “many indigent people facing serious criminal charges in New Orleans do not have attorneys.”

"Sometimes I'm a journalist," Matt Kohn told me the day after the 2012 presidential election. "But I consider myself a filmmaker telling stories who uses journalism." The story Kohn tells in his documentary, Call It Democracy, is a sobering one. It's a narrative that meticulously examines the problems that were -- and are -- posed by the Electoral College. The film, which aired on the Documentary Channel last November, focuses primarily on the 2000 election debacle, and chronicles the measures that have been taken to prevent those problems from happening again. 

A civil lawsuit was filed Feb. 15 against the Encinitas Union School District in San Diego County alleging that the district, by providing instruction in Ashtanga yoga, is thereby “promoting religious beliefs.” The action was filed by The National Center for Law & Policy, an Escondido, Calif.-based nonprofit “legal defense organization” focusing on “protection and promotion of religious freedom, the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, parental rights and other civil liberties.”

The state legislative session is now in full swing, and lobbyists and advocates are descending on Sacramento to talk health care coverage – who should be eligible and how they should get it. It's a debate you might have expected Obamacare to end. But though California and millions in our state will benefit when the president's plan kicks in next January, about 3 million to 4 million Californians, the majority of whom are legal residents, will remain uninsured.

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city, where the drug war has been exacerbated by a well-documented (and still unsolved) wave of violence directed against women, a growing number of young people are using music as a platform to raise their voice against the culture of violence, fear and apparent impunity enjoyed by the drug cartels and those shadowy criminals responsible for the wave of femicides.

Regarding foreign policy, a critical question is what will become of Chávez’s pet project, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). This bloc is made up of nations whose presidents were friendly with Chávez, such as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. President Correa recently said that the revolution was larger than one man and would continue even in the event of Chavez’s death. Nevertheless, it is debatable whether any of ALBA’s heads of state, including Maduro, are charismatic enough and have the same interest in the alliance to keep it afloat. 

There are  upwards of 11 million people living and working in the United States, in every state and city, who face the perpetual threat of physical exile from their lives and their homes, to be banished to a country they barely know or in which they can barely survive. The only crime most have committed was to cross an arbitrary confine seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Although their plight appears disconnected from ours, this threat involves every American who cares about their country and values their ancestral history. 

Currently, an intense media campaign is underway to promote a law that reforms articles 3 and 73 of the Mexican Constitution. In deference to educators’ concerns, the reform “recognizes, respects and promotes the rights of all teachers,” claimed a Pact for Mexico ad published in an Acapulco newspaper. But Mexico’s teachers aren’t buying the sales pitch. This month, Bello and tens of thousands of teachers in Acapulco, Zihuatanejo and other cities in the southern state of Guerrero have joined their colleagues across the Mexican Republic in repeated street protests.