"Work authorization is not meant to get you rich, it's to let you live," said an Egyptian asylum-seeker who fled to the United States after a radical group beat him and tried to kidnap his wife and daughter. After fleeing persecution in their home countries, asylum-seekers like this man in New Jersey face a new type of maltreatment in the United States: The U.S. government won't let them work during what is often a drawn-out asylum process.
Indigent defendants in Midland, Texas are not receiving proper instructions regarding their right to counsel, a problem leading to uneducated plea bargains.
Kimberly N. "leaned in" to her career for years. As a vice president of a large charitable organization, she earned high praise and enjoyed her work. When Kimberley got pregnant, she negotiated a six-week maternity leave, and looked forward to resuming work. Things did not go according to plan.
The US is already acting like it has given up antipersonnel landmines – so why doesn't Nobel peace laureate Barack Obama turn it into formally declared policy by ratifying the Mine Ban Treaty?
According to December 2011 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four women in the U.S. has been a victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in her lifetime. Nearly one in five has been raped.
Two years ago, the signs were clear. My mother, with Alzheimer's, heart failure, and kidney failure, was not going to live long. My brothers and I took time off work for medical appointments and hospice care. I worried about her comfort, about how my dad would cope and how the grandkids would feel.
Perhaps one of the greatest defects in the U.S. immigration system, including Alabama's 2011 law, is the failure to recognize the profound ties millions of unauthorized immigrants have to U.S. citizens through family, work, and community.
In spring 2011, a federal government employee in her 30s was sexually assaulted in the District by a man she met on an Internet dating site. At Washington Hospital Center, where she went for a forensic exam so medical personnel could collect evidence from her body, a female detective from the Sexual Assault Unit of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) questioned the woman for three hours, interrupting her frequently in a manner — as the woman saw it — meant to discourage her from reporting the assault and to minimize the seriousness of what had happened to her.
On the Friday before Christmas, a federal judge in Alabama ordered an end to 25 years of segregation of HIV-positive prisoners in state prisons. District Court Judge Myron Thompson ruled that segregating HIV-positive prisoners in separate housing with unequal program opportunities, inferior mental health care and fewer work options violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. This landmark decision leaves South Carolina the only state in the Union that segregates prisoners with HIV. It is high time South Carolina abandoned this unnecessary, harmful and discriminatory policy.
Viewers and critics have been shocked by Zero Dark Thirty's depiction of enhanced interrogation techniques. But, if anything, the film goes way too easy on the CIA.
Les Miserables' Inspector Javert is one of those characters who defines "blind justice." Such is the power of his symbolism that today, our laws allow just the mercy that Javert denied. However, putting mercy into practice, such as in the form of compassionate release, is a challenge.
The US is already acting like it has given up antipersonnel landmines – so why doesn't Nobel peace laureate Barack Obama turn it into formally declared policy by ratifying the Mine Ban Treaty?