NewsTaco

By Sandy Close and Raj Jayadev, New America Media

BAKERSFIELD, CA. — Abusive behavior by law enforcement officers in towns across Kern County and neighboring Tulare County has generated distrust and resignation, especially among Latinos who make up the majority of the region’s population.

But national media coverage of the alleged beating death by deputies of David Silva, a 33 year old Latino father of four, in downtown Bakersfield may finally break community apathy, according to some two dozen attendees at a health care fair here interviewed by New America Media.

Less than a week after Silva was beaten allegedly by eight or nine deputies and highway patrol officers, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Fox News had all reported on the incident as well as on an apparent attempt to cover it up when Bakersfield police confiscated the cell phones of several bystanders who had videotaped it.

So had the Spanish-language news outlet Univision, which ran a segment titled “Worst Police Beatings of Latinos.”

“This is a really conservative community. Most people will think something like this was bound to happen — it’s been happening in other places. But the country’s eye is now on Bakersfield and that could make the difference,” said Amy Lopez, 22, a student of dental hygiene at Cal StateBakersfield.

Bill Phelps, who works with South Kern’s low-income health plan program HMC, said news of the beatings had “accelerated a huge mistrust of law enforcement across all sectors of the community. Thanks to national media coverage, Kern County is now on the public radar.”

Hilary Meeks, a reporter for the Visalia Times, noted that the incident hadn’t occurred in a vacuum. “There’ve been five shootings over the last four years in neighboring Tulare County … A sheriff’s deputy ran over someone two years ago and nothing was done about it. We had a guy killed in Porterville. The court case ended in a hung jury. That was one or two years ago.”

At least a third of those interviewed by NAM at the fair, held at the Kern County Fair Grounds on Saturday, had not heard about the Silva incident, although it’s been front page news for the Bakersfield Californian’s daily website, and on local TV. But recession-related closures of all but one Spanish language news weekly, along with Univision’s Bakersfield bureau, has turned the city into something of a media desert, especially for non-English speakers.

“Local awareness will build with more local, state and national media coverage,” said El Popular publisher George Comacho, who plans to report on the story next week, especially in the wake of Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood’s request on May 14 for an FBI probe into Silva’s death.

Linda Vasquez, a 27 year old Cal State Bakersfield student, was as agitated by the cover up as the beating itself. “The part that makes me angry is how they took the phones, because they’ve done that before.” She told a story of how her brother was harassed, and the phone of another family member who recorded the incident was taken by law enforcement. She was not sure whether it was city police or the sheriff’s department.

Ali Morris, CEO of the local Black Chamber of Commerce, thinks that even if public pressure mounts over the Silva case it’s going to take a lot of time and education to change things for the better. “We have a broken system. In theory everything should work right. We can start attacking it here or there, but it’s the system that’s broke. It should have never gotten to this point.”

The solution, Morris says, has to come with changes in perception on both law enforcement’s side and on the public’s side.

“I think both sides are responsible,” Morris observed. “The whole police force is at the mercy of one bad officer. At the same time, the police officer wonders why he is putting his life in jeopardy when the people here don’t want him there…

“We have to go at this whole thing piece by piece,” Morris concluded. “If I didn’t have a spiritual foundation I couldn’t get through it.”

Pablo, another Cal State Bakersfield student who is studying to become a police officer and didn’t give his last name, learned about the Silva incident from his criminal justice professor. “There have been a lot of shootings and beatings by law enforcement officials. They should train the police to use non violence or non lethal force,” he commented.

Cal State student Amy Lopez said she was frustrated that there hadn’t been more public reaction like a student protest. “Something’s got to give. I shouldn’t leave it up to another group to say something. I should step up and do something.”

This article was first published in New America Media.

[Photo courtesy New America Media]

By Andrew O’Reilly, Fox News Latino

The sheriff’s department of a California county is under fire after several officers were involved in an altercation that led to the death of a local Latino man.

Allegations of brutality and cover-ups have been leveled against the Kern County Sheriff’s Department following a dispute between deputies and 33-year old David Sal Silva.

A grainy cellphone video recorded by a neighbor shows what is allegedly Kern County officers beating Silva with batons for what the department said was resisting arrest.

Click HERE 0r on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo by rustejunk]

Onil, left, and Pedro, Ariel Castro’s brothers, granted an interview to CNN’s Martin Savidge. (Screenshot)

By Rocio Gonzalez, Voxxi

CNN got the mother of all exclusives: Ariel Castro’s brothers, Onil and Pedro, are telling their story for the first time since the amazing escape of Amanda Berry, which also led to the discovery of Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight.

Onil and Pedro were arrested alongside their brother when the dramatic discovery of the three kidnapped Cleveland women came to light. Now, CNN’s Martin Savidge has gotten an exclusive interview with the two brothers, as 52-year-old Puerto Rican Ariel Castro sits behind bars, held on an $8 million bond.

They admitted that they worry people will always suspect them of aiding their brother Ariel in the kidnapping and torture of Berry, DeJesus and Knight.

“And the people that are out there, that know me, they know that Onil Castro is a good person, has nothing to do with that, would never even think of something like that,” Onil said. “I was a very liked person… I have never had any enemies. No reason to think I would ever do something like that. It’s shocked all my friends. They couldn’t believe it.”

he interview, which CNN will start airing tomorrow morning in their “Early Start” show, shows quite a difference in appearance from the Castro brothers shown in the well-publicized mug shots released by police. They were released and never charged in the case, and the police said that there were no indications Onil and Pedro were involved or had any knowledge of their brother’s disturbing actions.

Onil and Pedro say they had nothing to do with Ariel Castro’s crime

“If I knew that my brother was doing this, in a minute I would have called the cops, ’cause that ain’t right,” Pedro told Savidge. He added that this is going to haunt him. “If I knew, I would have reported it, brother or no brother.”

Since Ariel Castro became a suspect in this case, family members and friends have been distancing themselves from the suspect. When the charges against him were announced, even Cleveland’s chief prosecutor — Victor Perez, a Puerto Rican himself — felt the need to defend the Puerto Rican community from any association with Ariel Castro.

“As the chief prosecutor for the city of Cleveland, born and raised in Puerto Rico, I want everyone to know that the acts of the defendant in the criminal case are not a reflection of the rest of the Puerto Rican community here or in Puerto Rico,” Perez said.

CNN reports that Onil and Pedro, as well as other Castro family members, are hiding in an undisclosed location — they have received death threats, one of their homes has been broken into and both homes have had rocks thrown at the windows. It was only a matter of time until the pair granted an interview to try to clear their name.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Rocio Gonzalez is a multimedia editor for VOXXI. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she is an avid reader, amateur baker and a journalism graduate from American University in Washington, D.C.

[Photo screenshot courtesy CNN]

By Aliyah Frumin, MSNBC

Cleveland is reeling as more horrifying details continue to trickle out surrounding Ariel Castro, the 52-year-old former school bus driver accused of kidnapping and raping three women for nearly a decade.

This disturbing case has raised a number of unsettling questions. How could someone engage in such a heinous act? How is it possible no one knew the women were being held captive for 10 years? Could the crime have been prevented?

And in many ways, the tight-knit Latino community in Cleveland is struggling with these questions in deeply personal ways.

Click HERE or on the picture to read the full story.

[Photo courtesy The Political Freak Show]

By Huffington Post Latino Voices

While Charles Ramsey has become an Internet phenomenon for his role in saving the three women abducted and allegedly raped for years in a Cleveland home, another hero’s efforts have passed by relatively unnoticed, ABC News Channel 5 reports.

Angel Cordero, who speaks only Spanish, told the ABC affiliate that he arrived at the scene first and he was the one to kick the door down, freeing Amanda Berry, who had been trapped inside for nearly 10 years.

“I helped her,” Cordero says in the newscast that aired Tuesday. “I was first.”

Cordero often visits the house across the street to have dinner, according to a report form CNN.

Reporter Stephanie Ramirez said Cleveland police brought Cordero to her for an interview, saying he had played a role in the rescue. She pointed out…

Click HERE to read the full article.

This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.

[Photo screen shot courtesy WEWSTV]

By Margaret Moran & Luis Torres, LULAC

For the past three years, El Paso, Texas has been ranked as the safest city in the country, according to a report from the CQ Press. The data used in the report come from the Uniformed Crime Report, which is produced annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What makes the ranking of interest is the fact that El Paso sits just a few minutes north of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, arguably one of the most violent cities in the Americas. Furthermore, El Paso is not the only border city to be considered among the safest cities in the U.S. San Diego, California, Yuma, Arizona, Brownsville, Texas and others, also made the list.

Unfortunately, these statistics don’t seem to matter to politicians charged with national security policy, or to some right leaning news outlets. This was the case as the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary held a hearing on the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, the long anticipated comprehensive immigration reform bill.

As written, the bill would provide an estimated 11 million people a chance to obtain legal integration once they pay back taxes, fees and fines, pass background checks, and learn English and U.S. civics – all of which could take more than 10 years before a person is allowed to apply for a change in status. With the Boston Marathon explosion fresh on America’s mind, senators cautioned against using these attacks, which presumably involved Islamists immigrants with connections to Chechnya, as an “excuse” to delay the immigration reform process. Immediately following the terrorist act, there was a call for closer scrutiny of the immigration reform bill as a result of the recent act of the suspected terrorists.

The real threat to derailing immigration reform might be making the status adjustment contingent upon meeting border security benchmarks which have not yet been completely determined. Despite our country’s fiscal crisis, the bill appropriates billions of dollars to hire additional law enforcement officials, improve the infrastructure, and acquire new technology to help achieve these still vague security ambitions.

To this point, the important question we need to ask is how much safer can the safest cities get?

The answer, undoubtedly, depends on who you ask. Senators Grassley of Iowa and Sessions of Alabama, both from non-border states, seem to have an urgent need to express their anxiety about the seemingly insecure border region along the Southwest. They have relentlessly called for double layered fencing, biometric cards for all Americans, and billions of dollars for “border security.” But again, how much safer can the safest cities get? El Paso is already the safest city in the country, followed by San Diego. These two cities are also the largest cities on the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, these two cities received higher safety scores for having lower numbers of crime relative to their population in categories like murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson than cities like Grassley’s neighborhoods of Sioux City, Des Moines, and Davenport, and cities like Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham in Alabama represented by Senator Sessions. And, these aren’t the only cities at the lower end of the safety rankings. Dallas, Texas, (represented by Senators Cornyn and Cruz) Louisville, Kentucky, (represented by Senators McConnell and Paul), and Baton Rouge, Louisiana (represented by Senators Landrieu and Vitter) all had lower safety rankings than the leading border cities like El Paso and San Diego.

It begs the question, what exact security issues, rather than ethnic and racial issues or prejudices, are these Senators trying to address in the proposed immigration bill? The border cities are not just the safest in the nation, but they are secure and thriving. We urge Congress not to use “border security” as an excuse to derail, slow down, or doom the advancement of critical comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would help integrate countless of Americans.

Margaret Moran is National President of LULAC. Luis Torres is Education and Immigration Policy Director for LULAC

[Photo by Marco P. Sanchez]

Por Maria Lourdes Pallais, Reporte Índigo

Cerramos la semana pasada con la noticia de que dos jóvenes hijos de David Páramo, un periodista experto en finanzas, y de Martha González Nicholson, directora de El Peso, filial de corte policíaco de El Diario de Chihuahua, fueron asesinados por sicarios en Ciudad Juárez.

Estadística fría que se suma a la de miles de víctimas de la violencia en México, situación que no ha disminuido pero que sí ha dejado de ser tema del gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto y por ende, ha desaparecido de la agenda de la mayoría de los medios de comunicación.

Las autoridades no han negado que el crimen sea parte de la tendencia de la última década, cuando el Banco Mundial registró que poco más de 38% de jóvenes han sido víctimas de homicidios en México. Lo que sí hicieron de inmediato fue tratar de deslindar el crimen de la actividad periodística de los padres. El vocero de la Fiscalía de Chihuahua, Carlos González, fue el primero. Pero nunca explicó en qué basaba sus dichos. Aunque el trabajo de la madre de los jóvenes asesinados trajo a colación el tema de una posible venganza, las autoridades lo descartaron.

Tras la orden de Peña Nieto de que la Procuraduría General de la República investigara los homicidios, ésta también deslindó la labor periodística del doble crimen.

Sorprende la celeridad de los resultados de las investigaciones, considerando que México ocupa el octavo lugar en casos de impunidad en crímenes y agresiones contra periodistas.

Como afirmó, no sin un toque de ironía, el director del Comité para la Protección de Periodistas (CPJ) Mike O’Connor a esta columnista, “las autoridades fueron tan eficaces que, en esta etapa inicial de lainvestigación, ya saben quienes no fueron, pero no quienes sí fueron”.

El asesinato sucedió horas después de la celebración del Día Mundial de la Libertad de Prensa en el mundo.

Y México no tiene nada que celebrar.

El CPJ asegura que entre diciembre de 2006 y diciembre de 2012, al menos 14 periodistas fueron asesinados en represalia directa por su labor. Hace un par de semanas, la oficina en México de Artículo 19, una organización internacional cuyo mandato es la defensa y promoción de la libertad de expresión, también recibió una carta con amenazas.

A un año del asesinato de la periodista Regina Martínez, en Veracruz, que sigue impune, y un par de días antes del de los jóvenes en Chihuahua, un comunicador fue baleado mientras comía en un restaurante en el mismo estado.

No lo dirán muchos medios, pero sucede que las agresiones contra periodistas se han duplicado en los cuatro meses de gobierno de Peña Nieto, asegura la CDHDF.

Al margen de los dichos de las autoridades sobre quienes no mataron a los dos hermanos, desde el 2000 hasta hoy, 84 periodistas han sido asesinados en México, según la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Y los culpables siguen impunes…

Desde 2012, México se mantiene como uno de los países más violentos en cuanto a asesinatos a periodistas, solo por debajo de Siria, Somalia y Pakistán, de acuerdo con la Relatoría para la Libertad de Expresión de la CDHDF. Y 53% de las agresiones contra periodistas en 2011 fueron cometidas por alguna autoridad, según la misma fuente.

Mientras la mayoría de los casos de comunicadores asesinados se encuentre empantanado en la impunidad, las autoridades carecen de autoridad moral para descartar culpables en el caso de los jóvenes asesinados a fines de la semana pasada. Es así de simple y sencillo, y así de trágico.

Este artículo fué publicado originalmente en Reporte Índigo.

Periodista y autora Maria Lourdes Pallais es colaboradora de Reporte Indigo. 

[Foto por Knight Foundation]

By El Diario La Prensa/New America Media

NEW YORK — Hassan Hamdy, the detective who shot an unarmed Latino, is still on the job and entitled to his pension because the NYPD has not slapped him with any punishment.

While a Grand Jury questionably decided not to indict Hamdy in the fatal shooting last October of National Guardsman Noel Polanco, the NYPD could have taken disciplinary action.

Incredibly, it has not. And this is more shocking considering the situations that have resulted in officers at least being suspended.

In August 2010, an officer was suspended because he didn’t know how to administer CPR. In March 2013, another officer was suspended for punching his three-year-old son. Later that same month, a drunken police officer discharged his weapon in the air and was also suspended.

But Hamdy gets to report to work, collect his check and wear a badge as Polanco’s family continues to mourn the son they had to bury.

That the NYPD didn’t and won’t act internally to discipline one of its “unfinest” is outrageous and it sends a terrible message.

What standard is Commissioner Ray Kelly using to penalize members of the Department who fire their guns in the air, yet, on the other hand, not doing anything about a detective who turned a traffic incident into a shooting death?

Because of the surging controversy around the practice of stop-question-and-frisk, which has chipped away at trust among black and Latino youth, it is even more troubling that there are no repercussions in a case of reckless police violence. On top of all of this, the lack of transparency in the department’s internal procedures has prompted many leaders and organizations to call for the creation of an inspector general’s office to monitor the NYPD.

In some cases, public pressure has resulted in accountability for cops who dishonor their badge. But the outcome in the Polanco case shows that there is much work to be done.

The time to do that work is now – before another Noel Polanco becomes a victim of an unnecessary police bullet.

[Photo by Sean MacEntee]

By Mary Jo McConahay, New America Media

GUATEMALA CITY – When the judge called his name, 70-year-old Tiburcio Utuy, wearing a yellow nylon jacket and looking determined, entered through tall wooden doors to face former Guatemala strongman Gen. José Efraín Rios Montt, charged with genocide. On a global scale the process is historic, the first time a former head of state stands trial for the flagrant crime in the national courts where events took place, not an international tribunal. On the scale of the life of Tiburcio Utuy, Maya corn farmer, the day was a reckoning so long in coming he talked non-stop for an hour.

“Who says there was no genocide?” asked Utuy of the tribunal. He was referring to the often cited assessment of the Rios Montt years by Pres. Otto Perez, who served as a base commander at the time in the mountainous area known as the Ixil Triangle, home to indigenous Maya where prosecutors say the genocide took place. Still hours by road from the capital, the region was considered home of an “internal enemy” according to one military planning paper, Maya supporting leftist guerrillas.

“The shoes, the belts were piled two meters high and wide, you could see the traces of people who had been killed there,” Utuy said, describing a room alongside the Catholic church in the town of Sacapulas, appropriated by soldiers for a torture chamber and body dump, where Utuy said he was held in 1982. “They tied me up and left me sitting in blood.”

After four weeks of testimony, on April 18 a judge in a separate court granted the request of the defense to annul the trial in a judgement based on a technicality. An appeal is expected. “You are mocking the witnesses,” said a prosecution attorney in a small, crowded meeting room amid a crush of press and the under the eyes of silent Maya, some elderly.

“The victims are the accused,” said the defense.

The decision muddies the immediate prosecution of the genocide crime, but there is no taking back the information that has flooded the country.  A dozen forensic anthropologists have reported on exhumations indicating violent deaths of children, mass beheadings. A geographer testified to the unraveling of Maya Ixil culture among thousands who fled from the army into wildlands, who ate grass and watched their elderly starve, or straggled into refugee camps in Mexico. Expert witnesses testified on military plans, the history of racism in Guatemala, the statistical analysis used to arrive at numbers of dead.

It has been the testimony of witnesses like Tiburcio Utuy, however, that has reverberated through every other hour of the trial. Prosecutors must prove Rios intended to eliminate people because of their membership in a particular group, Ixil Maya, in order to bring in a guilty verdict. However, refrain of suffering and brutality created by more than a hundred voices is likely to resound in the public memory no matter what the decision on the genocide charge against the general and his co-defendant, intelligence chief Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

“They caught up to the woman and they struck her in the head with a machete and dragged her like a dog,” said Utuy of a scene he said he saw while hiding from soldiers. Experts have testified that racism toward the majority indigenous was key to slaughter in Maya villages, which occurred in the context of counterinsurgency against leftist rebels relatively small in number. Many recalled experience in terms referring to animals. “”Just as chicks run from hawks, that’s what they did to us. Why? If we are human beings?” said witness Maria Cedillo.

Ten women who testified to sexual violence were allowed to drape their heads, partially obscuring their identity. They used traditional woven stoles to hide faces, recalling biblical images of lepers.
Some two hundred thousand persons died in Guatemala’s thirty-six years of conflict that ended in 1996, mostly civilians at government hands according to a U.N.-sponsored Truth Commission. The United States government supported Rios Montt with military aid and the personal approbation of Pres. Ronald Reagan, who publicly admired Rios’ declared anti-Communism and visited Guatemala City to declare the general was getting “a bum rap.”

“I tell you judges, I’m not lying,” Utuy said. “What guilt did the baby have still in the womb of the mother?” Witnesses testified that soldiers attacked pregnant women. “I saw this,” Utuy said. Soldiers regularly burned houses, an apparent attempt to erase standing patterns of settlement. When a clay house in his village resisted destruction by fire, Utuy said, soldiers killed those inside, piling clothes, bags and blankets on the dead and set the heap alight.

At one moment in the generally somber proceedings, Utuy surprised onlookers by rising to his feet. ‘I’m not lying, look, here are my scars,” he said, lifting his shirt and lowering his belt.

Judges, two women and a man, stared down from the dias. Soldiers had tied Utuy’s feet and head together to expose his stomach, he said, during torture.

“’Ay, what pain!’ I said. What suffering I felt at that moment when my intestines fell to the floor,” he said. He replaced them with his hands, he said.

Some witnesses have been unable to relate their experience without faltering voices, others respond briefly. Tiburcio Utuy was not exuberant, but he would not let his day in court slip by with less than fulsome expression.

“What I experienced, the suffering I felt, what the military did to me, I am telling this to the whole world,” he said.

This article was first published in New America Media.

Mary Jo McConahay has reported from Central America for numerous publications. She is the author of “Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest.”

[Photo courtesy New America Media]

By Dr. Henry Flores, NewsTaco

First let me state up front, I’m glad that the police caught the Boston Marathon Bomber alive.  They needed to do this for a great number of reasons, the greatest of which was to bring the citizens of Boston and the nation a sense of relief and security.  You see how this played out as the people lined the streets of Watertown, Massachusetts and cheered as the police left their community after the ordeal was finished.

I was glad that the bomber was caught and we all, most particularly the good people of Boston, could get our lives back.  Still, this incident says a great deal about this nation and the media.  It says we will leave no stone unturned to get the perpetrators after they attack one of our own particularly in our homeland.

Although four died and many more were injured, I felt a certain discomfort (I’m still trying to find the correct word) in the way the Horror in Boston was treated in the media as opposed to the manner in which they treated an even larger tragedy  unfolding in the small town of West, Texas.

A fertilizer storage facility caught fire and a cataclysmic explosion incurred.  The resulting damage included at least 15  dead, more than 200 injured and 60 missing.  More than 200 homes were damaged or destroyed along with two middle schools and one high school.  Thank goodness the blast occurred Wednesday evening a little before eight.  If school had been in session who knows how many children would have been hurt.  Still part of the damage was the destruction of a fifty unit apartment complex and a nursing home.  The tragedy in Texas was a larger catastrophe in scope than  the one in Boston, yet the media gave it far less play.

One of the things I find interesting is how much effort and coverage was put into catching the Boston Bomber, this young man will live with that moniker the remainder of his life, yet nothing has been done to find those responsible for the fertilizer explosion. Perhaps this stark silence is because the blame for the explosion lies in many places and there are many villains.

In Boston it was clear who the villains were: two young men of foreign origin, both immigrants.  One scenario pointed to the possibility that the bombers were affiliated with some foreign and/or terrorist organization.  At one time it was reported that at least 36 governmental agencies were on the scene chasing the bomber.

In West, ten  of the fifteen dead were first responders who arrived quickly to fight the fire and then died in the subsequent explosion.  The press has yet to announce who is responsible of the West explosion because, I guess, it’s not clear who the villains are.  Well, maybe, just maybe we can help the authorities get started by asking a few questions.

The first one I would like to ask is who in their right mind would allow such dangerous land use so close to a neighborhood with schools, an apartment complex and a nursing home?  Or, conversely, who decided to build all the homes and dwellings and educational facilities next to a leaky plant storing what was reported as 56,000 ponds of ammonium nitrate and 100,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, both highly flammable and subject to easy explosion.  Ammonium nitrate was the chemical of choice for the Oklahoma City bomber who took down the Murrah Federal Building.  So, who oversaw the placing of all these dwellings and schools next to such a dangerous and toxic place?

What roles did the city council, county commissioners, and state officials play in all of this?  Or, lest I sound cynical, are we just going to declare that this is a free society and we can do whatever we wish when we wish?   Sounds so libertarian, so Texan, huh?

Ok, if you are a believer of state’s rights and sovereignty how about blaming the feds?  Where was the EPA, OSHA, FBI, Homeland Security when the Texas Tragedy unfolded? While I’m pointing fingers how about the owner of West Fertilizer Company?  Apparently, this company has been negligent in the past and has been fined for various offenses.  The plant actually operated without a permit for its building from 1962 until 2006.  They obtained their permit only because some residents reported noxious fumes emanating from the plant.  Then the Texas Commission on Evironmental Quality visited and issued the permit but no agency state, federal or otherwise has bothered to see it this plant has had any further problems.

I really think that the Boston Bomber needs to stand trial and pay for his heinous crime, but I also feel that the criminals responsible for the West explosion need to be brought before the courts and made to pay for their horrible and irresponsible behavior as well.

[Photo by Vjeran Pavic]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

By far the best compilation and rendering of the events of the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the unfolding drama of the days after, has been put together by the Washington Post.

It’s an interactive timeline that you can search by date, or by theme – “The Manhunt”: “The Suspects”; “The Investigation”; “The Scene.”

It’s got pictures, maps, satellite images, links…

Check it out HERE, or by clicking on the image above.

[Image courtesy Washington Post]

By Ian Millhiser, Think Progress

Despite initial reports to the contrary, FBI agents did not read Boston Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights immediately after he was taken into custody. Instead, they invoked what is known as the “public safety exception” to delay reading those rights to the alleged bomber. Here’s what you need to know about this narrow exception to theMiranda rule:

The Public Safety Exemption Is Real

The Supreme Court first held that there is a public safety exemption to Miranda in a 1984 case known as New York v. Quarles. In Quarles a woman told police that a man with a gun raped her, and that he’d run into a nearby grocery store. Police quickly found the suspect within the store, arrested him after a brief chase, handcuffed him, and discovered that he was wearing an empty shoulder holster. Before reading him his rights, an officer asked him where the gun was, and the suspect told the cop where to find it. After retrieving the gun, police then read the suspect his Miranda rights.

Click on the picture to read the full article.

[Photo courtesy Think Progress]

By Sebastian Rotella, Pro Publica

As an eighth-grader in a Cambridge public school, suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was quiet, friendly, spoke good English and seemed at home in his adopted country.

While hundreds of police officers pursued the 19-year-old during a nationally-televised rampage across Boston Friday, a former classmate recounted memories of the refugee who, according to counterterror officials, became a U.S. citizen on an ironic date: Sept. 11, 2012.

By Greg Sargent, Washington Post

There’s still a lot we don’t know, but it’s being widely reported that the two suspects in the Boston bombing — one of whom has been killed by police — are brothers of Chechen origin. According to law enforcement sources, the brothers entered the U.S. in 2002 or 2003, and at least one of them has been a legal permanent resident since 2007.

Some on the right are already pouncing on the news to cast doubt on the desirability of immigration reform. This morning, Ann Coulter Tweeted:

It’s too bad Suspect # 1 won’t be able to be legalized by Marco Rubio, now.

Click on the picture to read the full article.

[Photo by choyoungkwan]