April 13, 2012
información pública
The 23 States That Have Sweeping Self-Defense Laws Just Like Florida’s
“Stand Your Ground” – “Shoot First”—“Make My Day”—state laws asserting an expansive right to self-defense have come into focus after last month’s killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
While local prosecutors have not arrested the shooter, George Zimmerman, the case is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, and a Florida State Attorney General. It’s not clear that Florida’s self-defense law will be applied in the case. (The police report on the shooting refers to it as an “unnecessary killing to prevent unlawful act.”)
Still, in not arresting Zimmerman local officials have pointed to Florida’s wide definition of self-defense. In 2005, Florida became the first state to explicitly expand a person’s right to use deadly force for self-defense. Deadly force is justified if a person is gravely threatened, in the home, or “any other place where he or she has a right to be.”
In Florida, once self-defense is invoked, the burden is on the prosecution to disprove the claim.
Most states have long allowed the use of reasonable force, sometimes including deadly force, to protect oneself inside one’s home—the so-called Castle Doctrine. Outside the home, people generally still have a “duty to retreat” from their attacker, if possible, to avoid confrontation. In other words, if you can get away and you shoot anyway, you can be prosecuted. In Florida, there is no duty to retreat. You can “stand your ground” outside your home too.
Florida is not alone. Twenty-three other states now allow people to stand their ground. Most of these laws were passed after Florida’s. (A few states never had a duty to retreat to begin with.)
Here’s a rundown of the states with laws mirroring Florida’s—where there’s no duty to retreat in public places, and, in most cases, where self-defense claims have some degree of immunity in court. (The specifics of what kind of immunity, and when the burden of proof lies on the prosecution, varies from state to state).
The laws in many cases were originally advocated as a way to address domestic abuse cases—how could a battered wife retreat if she was attacked in her own home? Such legislation has also recently been pushed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups.
Click on the state to see their law.
Illinois (Law does not includes a duty to retreat, which courts have interpreted as a right to expansive self-defense.)
Oregon (Also does not include a duty to retreat.)
Utah:
Washington (Also does not include a duty to retreat.)
Shooting suspect 'died as he fired at police officers'
Renegade soldiers seize power in Mali
Pressure grows over U.S. teen shooting
Scores die in renewed attacks
Kurdish media reports Turkish attacks
Warning over N. Korea nuclear plants
Kandahar suicide bombing kills 2
Indian footballer dies after heart attack
Myanmar invites U.S. election observers
Renegade soldiers seize power in Mali
Al Qaeda leader: Afghans must rise up
Protest over fuel hike in Indonesia
Somali pirates release British hostage
Pope has hard act to follow in Mexico
Clinton urges al-Assad to accept plan
If TV Stations Won’t Post Their Data on Political Ads, We Will
Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”
These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.
But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online. They say making the files digital would be too burdensome — it “could well take hundreds of hours for a single station,” according to comments filed with the FCC by the National Association of Broadcasters.
Others have taken their case a step further. As reported by Bloomberg Government, Jerald Fritz, senior vice president of Allbritton Communications, said in an another FCC filing that online availability “would ultimately lead to a Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” (NPR’s On the Media did an excellent segment recently on broadcasters’ opposition to the proposal.)
We tend to like the idea of public data being online. Since TV stations won’t put it online themselves, we decided to do it ourselves — and we want your help.
Working with students at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, we looked at five local stations in the Chicago market.
You can explore the results yourself: Here are detailed breakdowns of when the ads aired, during which programs, and how much each spot cost: Read the documents from the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW.
Big thanks to Medill students David Tonyan, Julie O’Donoghue, Vesko Cholakov, Safiya Merchant and Gideon Resnick, who visited the stations Monday.
We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.
Campaigns and super PACs are required to report their spending on independent expenditures to the Federal Election Commission within a day or two, but they often just report how much they paid ad-buying firms, which can disguise how much actual ads cost and where they’re airing.
What’s more, the files could be a window into what may be otherwise undisclosed spending by “dark money” nonprofit groups that are playing an increasing role in the elections .
For our experiment, we asked our Chicago volunteers to check on spending by five super PACs that individually support Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama. There were no records of spending in Chicago by four of them, but Restore Our Future, a pro-Romney super PAC, advertised on all five stations. The super PAC paid the five stations about $800,000 in the past month.
As our PAC Track interactive chart shows, Restore Our Future has spent more than twice as much as any other PAC so far — nearly $37 million.
Medill student O’Donoghue said getting the files from the ABC station took her about half an hour, most of which was spent wrestling with the copy machine.
Tonyan, another graduate student, said he spent 15 minutes at the CW affiliate, plus a 15-minute drive.
Both said the station employees who helped them were friendly and accommodating. We encountered the same when I visited five stations in New York, Missouri and Florida. Typically, a station employee will simply show you the room where the files are kept and let you dig in.
Such visits don’t seem to happen often. A log at the New York CBS affiliate showed only six registered visitors since October 2011.
The Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of Kantar Media, tracks ads that have hit the airwaves and estimates what they would cost, but the company charges high rates to obtain the information. The Wesleyan Media Project publishes some CMAG data.
Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, found that $70 million in advertising had been unreported from 2000-10 in Michigan. He got that number by personally examining public files, at one point driving 14 hours for a 15-minute visit to a station.
He told the FCC: “I can testify to you, unequivocally, that the threshold of effort necessary to report this important public interest story is too high for every news organization in Michigan, except mine.”
Which is why we’re asking for your help. You can help expose spending that might otherwise remain hidden in your television market. Sign up here.
MuckReads Podcast 1: AP’s Matt Apuzzo on NYPD Surveillance of Muslims
For the past few months, ProPublica has been curating the day’s must-read accountability stories in a feature we call MuckReads. The project has taken off with numerous suggestions pouring in each week from journalists and readers alike, so we wanted to take things to the next level with an in-depth podcast offering a behind-the-scenes look at howinvestigative reporters nabbed the story.
Often in investigative reporting, the process can be just as interesting as the final published piece. We put this theory to the test in our first ever MuckReads podcast featuring ProPublica’s managing editor Stephen Engelberg and the AP’s Matt Apuzzo. We were honored to have the duo on board to discuss the AP’s recent Goldsmith Prize-winning investigation on the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, which you can read here.
Have suggestions for future episodes or ideas on how we can improve this podcast? Email us at muckreads@propublica.org. And keep sending us your favorite watchdog stories by tweeting a link with the hashtag #MuckReads.
So, Is Dimock’s Water Really Safe to Drink?
March 21: This post has been corrected.
When the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that tests showed the water is safe to drink in Dimock, Penn., a national hot spot for concerns about fracking, it seemed to vindicate the energy industry’s insistence that drilling had not caused pollution in the area.
But what the agency didn’t say – at least, not publicly – is that the water samples contained dangerous quantities of methane gas, a finding that confirmed some of the agency’s initial concerns and the complaints raised by Dimock residents since 2009.
The test results also showed the group of wells contained dozens of other contaminants, including low levels of chemicals known to cause cancer and heavy metals that exceed the agency’s “trigger level” and could lead to illness if consumed over an extended period of time. The EPA’s assurances suggest that the substances detected do not violate specific drinking water standards, but no such standards exist for some of the contaminants and some experts said the agency should have acknowledged that they were detected at all.
“Any suggestion that water from these wells is safe for domestic use would be preliminary or inappropriate,” said Ron Bishop, a chemist at the State University of New York’s College at Oneonta, who has spoken out about environmental concerns from drilling.
Dimock residents are struggling to reconcile the EPA’s public account with the results they have been given in private.
“I’m sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet – I’m over the thresholds – and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable,” said Scott Ely, a Dimock resident whose water contains methane at three times the state limit, as well as lithium, a substance that can cause kidney and thyroid disorders. “I’m confused about the whole thing… I’m flabbergasted.”
The water in Dimock first became the focus of international attention after residents there alleged in 2009 that natural gas drilling, and fracking, had led to widespread contamination. That April, ProPublica reported that a woman’s drinking water well blew up. Pennsylvania officials eventually determined that underground methane gas leaks had been caused by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was drilling wells nearby. Pennsylvania sanctioned Cabot, and for a short time the company provided drinking water to households in the Dimock area.
This January, the EPA announced it would take over the state’s investigation, testing the water in more than 60 homes and agreeing to provide drinking water to several of families – including the Elys – in the meantime.
Then, last Thursday, the EPA released a brief statement saying that the first 11 samples to come back from the lab “did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern.” The agency noted that some metals, methane, salt and bacteria had been detected, but at low levels that did not exceed federal thresholds. It said that arsenic exceeding federal water standards was detected in two samples.
But Dimock residents say the agency’s description didn’t jibe with the material in test packets distributed to them, and they voiced concerns about why the EPA had passed judgment before seeing results from nearly 50 homes. Several shared raw data and materials they were given by the EPA with Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “GasLand,” who shared them with ProPublica.
EPA press secretary Betsaida Alcantara said the agency was trying to be forthcoming by giving the tests results to Dimock residents and is now considering whether to release more information to the public about the water samples. “We made a commitment to the residents that we would give them the information as soon as we had it,” she said. “For the sake of transparency we felt it was the right thing to do.”
However preliminary, the data is significant because it is the first EPA research into drilling-related concerned on the east coast, and the agency’s first new information since it concluded that there was likely a link between fracking and water contamination in central Wyoming last December. The EPA is currently in the midst of a national investigation into the effects of fracking on groundwater, but that research is separate.
As the agency has elsewhere, the EPA began the testing in Dimock in search of methane and found it.
Methane is not considered poisonous to drink, and therefore is not a health threat in the same way as other pollutants. But the gas can collect in confined spaces and cause deadly explosions, or smother people if they breathe too much of it. Four of the five residential water results obtained by ProPublica show methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards; one as high as seven times the threshold and nearly twice the EPA’s less stringent standard.
The methane detections were accompanied by ethane, another type of natural gas that experts say often signifies the methane came from deeply buried gas deposits similar to those being drilled for energy and not from natural sources near the surface.
Among the other substances detected at low levels in Dimock’s water are a suite of chemicals known to come from some sort of hydrocarbon substance, such as diesel fuel or roofing tar. They include anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene and benzo(a)pyrene– all substances described by a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as cancer-causing even in very small amounts. Chromium, aluminum, lead and other metals were also detected, as were chlorides, salts, bromide and strontium, minerals that can occur naturally but are often associated with natural gas drilling.
It is unclear whether these contaminants have any connection to drilling activities near Dimock. The agency says it plans further testing and research.
Many of the compounds detected have not been evaluated for exposure risk by federal scientists or do not have an exposure limit assigned to them, making it difficult to know whether they present a risk to human health.
Inconsistencies in the EPA’s sampling results also are raising concerns. EPA documents, for example, list two different thresholds for the detection of bromide, a naturally occurring substance sometimes used in drilling fluids, opening up the possibility that bromide may have been detected, but not reported, in some tests.
“The threshold that it is safe, that shouldn’t be changing,” said Susan Riha, director of the New York State Water Resources Institute and a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. “For some reason … one was twice as sensitive as the other one.”
The EPA did not respond to questions about the detection limits, or any other technical inquiries about the test data.
A spokesman for Cabot declined to comment on the water test results or their significance, saying that he had not yet seen the data.
Correction: This post said EPA tests had detected bromium in some Dimock water wells. It should have said bromide. Also, the post identified Susan Riha as the director of the New York State Water Resources Group. She is the director of the Water Resources Institute at Cornell University.
Travail, pénibilité, puissance
À lire, le débat entre François Chérèque et Toni Negri à propos de la situation, la perception et l'évolution de la notion de travail. Merci à mon ami C. Deschâts pour m'avoir envoyé le texte.
Télécharger la version pdf ---->
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