After deliberating for three days in Brooklyn’s U.S. District Court, jurors decided they would not be able to reach a verdict, according to The Associated Press. Judge Donald Walter declared a mistrial and scheduled a third trial for April 12. Turner’s first trial in December also resulted in a deadlocked jury. An Internet radio host from New Jersey, Turner was charged with threatening to assault and murder three federal judges in Chicago after he wrote on his blog in June that they “deserve to be killed” because they had upheld a local handgun ban.

As during the first trial, the proceedings this month focused on whether Turner’s blog entries constituted a criminal threat or merely heated rhetoric that’s protected under the First Amendment. However, the second trial differed from the first in key ways, according to news accounts. This time, for instance, the judges that Turner targeted on his blog testified. In addition, Turner took the stand to describe his past work as a confidential FBI informant, claiming that the agency had encouraged his online vitriol to give him credibility with the extremists the FBI was trying to apprehend. Turner, whose FBI code name was Valhalla, said the agency paid him more than $100,000 during the four years he worked intermittently as an informant. He also insisted he was not a white supremacist.

If convicted, Turner faces up to 10 years in prison.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would update the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a law that has not been able to achieve its promise of closing the wage gap because of limited enforcement tools and inadequate remedies. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make critical changes to the law, including:

• requiring employers to demonstrate that wage differentials are based on factors other than sex;
• prohibiting retaliation against workers who inquire about their employers’ wage practices or disclose their own wages;
• permitting reasonable comparisons between employees within clearly defined geographical areas to determine fair wages;
• strengthening penalties for equal pay violations and
• authorizing additional training for Equal Employment Opportunity Commission staff to better identify and handle wage disputes.

The House of Representatives has already passed the Paycheck Fairness Act; now it’s up to the Senate to help their hard-working constituents by advancing the cause of pay equity. The Paycheck Fairness Act currently has 36 cosponsors in the Senate and is poised for passage. With tomorrow’s hearing, along with Equal Pay Day coming up on April 20, the time has come to make equal pay a reality. During this climate of unprecedented economic uncertainty, nothing could be more important than ensuring women workers — as well as their male counterparts — receive equal pay for equal work. 

Contact your senators to urge swift passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. And if you’d like to watch the Senate HELP Committee’s hearing on pay equity, it starts tomorrow, March 11, 2010, at 10:00 a.m. Watch it stream live.

For more details about the ACLU’s support for the Paycheck Fairness Act, check out our letter to the Senate HELP Committee.

A casualty of the housecleaning that occurred at the Times three years ago, McCain left the paper on his own accord after managing editor Fran Coombs, with whom he was close, was terminated (Coombs had his own connections to white supremacy).

Once identified as a member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, McCain’s reporting while at the Times was always controversial. As editor of the “Culture Briefs” section of the paper, McCain used excerpts from racist publications including American Renaissance magazine and the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE.com. In fact, McCain may be the only mainstream newspaper reporter to have covered four American Renaissance conferences. Twice, he offered no description at all of the group he was covering, which is devoted to race science. Once, he said it was “critical of liberal positions on race and immigration.” Only in 2004 did he note that some viewed it as racist.

Breaching journalist ethics by reporting on causes he was personally involved in, McCain regularly quoted neo-Confederate activists favorably in his stories. In 2005, stories freelanced by McCain to the website of the conservative newspaper Human Events were scrubbed after that publication’s editor, Thomas Winter, was given information by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report about McCain’s racism.

It is unclear if McCain’s return is related in any way to the resignation last year of John Solomon, the longtime Associated Press reporter who was brought in as the Times’ executive editor in 2008 after the dismissal of Coombs and others. Solomon’s hire was widely seen as the Times’ effort to clean up a reputation that was badly soiled by its overt partisanship.

Since leaving the Times, McCain has run a rather prolific and bombastic blog about politics and culture. An E-mail seeking comment today from McCain about the nature of his rekindled relationship with the Times was not immediately answered.

For decades, nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers have been excluded from most U.S. labor protections – a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the undervaluation of "women’s work." The lack of regula­tion combined with the isolated nature of domestic work makes these women particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses, breeding the global phenomenon of human trafficking.

As the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women undertakes a 15-year review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, this public forum will call attention to the failure of the U.S. and other governments to live up to their obligations under interna­tional human rights law to protect this critical workforce.

The event will begin with a screening of Behind Closed Doors, a short documentary film about the exploitation and labor trafficking of South Asian women as domestic workers in the United States.  The filmmakers, Pracheta Sharma and Jessica Hopper, will introduce the film, which will be followed by a panel discussion with domestic workers and advocates engaged in local, national, and international movements to protect the human rights of domestic workers and re-value their labor.

What: Revaluing "Women’s Work:" Ending the Exploitation and Abuse of Domestic Workers
When: Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 6:00pm
Where: U.N. Church Center, 10th Floor, 777 U.N. Plaza (44th St. and First Ave.), New York, NY
This event is free and open to the public.

In a new report, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR)—a front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—regurgitates an argument as tired as it is flawed: that immigration hastens the destruction of the environment in the United States. Specifically, the report claims that immigration-driven population growth is increasing the nation’s “ecological footprint” and exceeding the country’s “carrying capacity.” This is a faulty line of reasoning that overlooks the degree to which destruction of the environment is a function not of population size, but of how a society utilizes its resources, produces its goods and services, and deals with its waste.

In other words, the PFIR report fails to mention that a few people can pollute a lot, or a lot of people can pollute a little. Even in countries with similar standards of living, there is no direct, one-to-one relationship between population size and environmental degradation. For instance, according to the World Resources Institute, the United States is home to 30% fewer people than the European nations of the EU-15, yet produces 40% more greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide and methane. In fact, U.S. emissions of GHGs on a per capita basis are more than double those of the EU-15. The production of GHGs in the United States is not the result of population size, but of the degree to which we as a society rely upon fossil fuels, power plants, industrial processes, and automobiles that actually produce GHGs.

The pseudo-environmentalism of the PFIR report is actually a variety of “green xenophobia” which offers no useful guide for the formulation of effective policies on immigration or the environment. The PFIR report represents the latest attempt by a web of anti-immigrant groups allied with FAIR, and its founder John Tanton, to co-op progressive rhetoric in a dubious attempt to persuade political progressives that immigrants are to blame for environmental destruction, African American unemployment, and a host of other socioeconomic problems.

However, blaming immigrants for pollution won’t fix the dysfunctional U.S. immigration system, reduce the U.S. economy’s dependence on fossil fuels, or improve the emissions systems on automobiles. The PFIR report itself casually mentions at the end that its rather limited approach “does not explicitly address any number of critical issues” such as the environmental impact of pollution, the over-exploitation of resources, “the human assault on biodiversity, or environmental justice.” The PFIR report is little more than environmental window dressing for the anti-immigrant movement.

Photo by ashley.adcox.