REDEYE 8/12/15

Racist kkkops kill three per day
GW, 7/10 — Police in the U.S. are killing people at a rate that would result in 1,100 fatalities by the end of this year, according to a Guardian investigation that recorded an average of three killed per day in the first half of 2015.
…Deaths caused by law enforcement…this year, found 547 people had been killed by 30 June….478 of those were shot, 31 died after being shocked by a Taser, 16…after being truck by police vehicles, and 19 died after altercations in custody.
Adjusted to reflect the U.S. population,…black people are being killed by police at more than twice the rate of white…people.
A-bomb testing threatens 53,000
GW, 7/10 — …Above a giant dome…rests America’s cold war legacy…: 84,000 cubic metres of radioactive debris left after 12 years of nuclear tests in the 1940s and ’50s….People here call it the Tomb….The effects of climate change could tear the concrete mantle wide open, releasing its contents into the ocean….
Enewetak and the…Bikini atoll were the main sites of America’s Pacific Proving Grounds for atomic explosions….
…In total, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated on Enewetak and Bikini…equal to 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day over 12 years. The detonations blanketed the islands with irradiated debris — including plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years….
In 1980…the…people of Enewetak were allowed to return to the atoll….Today the U.S. says that the jurisdiction for the dome and its toxic contents lies with the Marshal islands….
The Marshallese, a country with a population of 53,000…is incapable of dealing with the potential radioactive catastrophe left by the Americans….
Many people fear the Dome will break open….As catastrophic weather events become more frequent…typhoons could destroy…the cement panels or inundate the island….
“Why Enewetak? Why not Nevada?” asks [Enewetak senator Jack] Ading. “I know why. Because they don’t want the…nuclear waste in their backyard. The least they could have done is correct their mistake.”
Wage slavery: 84 percent of world lives below U.S. poverty line
NYT, 7/9 — …Barely 16 percent of he world’s population [were] living above the official United States poverty line — $23,021 for a family of four in 2011….
The Pew Research Center concluded that more than half the world’s population remains “low-income,” while another 15 percent are…called “poor….”
The global poor [are] defined as those who lived on $2 a day or less….
The report defined as “middle” or “upper-middle” income those who lived on $10 to $50 a day. Fewer than one-fourth of the world’s population met that criteria….
Rulers enabled Bosnian massacre
GW, 7/10 — The fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia 20 years ago, prompting the worst massacre in Europe since [Hitler’s]… Third Reich, was a key element of strategy pursued by Britain, the U.S. and France….
Eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb death squads…[in] a UN “safe area.” The act has been declared a genocide by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague….
New…evidence…show[s] that the British, U.S. and French governments accepted that Srebrenica and two other UN-protected areas were “untenable”…and were ready to cede Srebrenica to the Serbs….
Western powers were also aware of…a Bosnian Serb military directive ordering “permanent removal” of Muslims from the safe areas.
Black, Latin kids most poverty-stricken
NYT, 7/15 — Black children were almost four times as likely as white children to be living in poverty in 2013….according to…the Pew Research Center….
About 38.3 percent of black children lived in poverty in 2013, nearly four times the rate for white children….About 30.4 percent of Hispanic children…live in poverty….
The number of black children in poverty appears to have overtaken the number of poor white children, even though white children far outnumber black children in the American population….
A household in poverty in 2013 was defined as a family of four, two of whose members were children, living on an annual income of less than $23,624….
[One] reason…black children were lagging was the unemployment rate, which has been consistently higher for African-Americans….as children are more likely to be poor if their parents are unemployed.
“Arab Spring”? U.S. finances Egypt’s police state
NYT, 7/16 — For decades, Egypt’s authoritarian leaders used the Emergency Law to oppress and intimidate government critics under the guise of national security….
Egypt is already a police state. Recent drafts of the counterterrorism law…make it even more repressive….
Obama administration officials and congressional lawmakers have been all too willing to overlook the abuses because they see Egypt as an indispensable ally….In recent weeks, House and Senate members passed versions of the foreign aid bill…[allotting] the annual $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt….
Lawmakers have become complicit in Egypt’s repression.