The failure to arrest Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, because of the law has evoked outrage among African-Americans, as they can identity with Martin’s family.

Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post:

One of the burdens of being a black male is carrying the heavy weight of other people’s suspicions. One minute you’re going about your life, the next you could be pleading for it, if you’re lucky. And far too many aren’t. That’s why the Feb. 26 killing of Trayvon Martin has black parents around the country clutching their sons a little closer.

Mark Thompson from Sirius/XM radio’s ‘Make it Plain’ told Lawrence O’Donnell:

By not arresting Zimmerman, and every day that goes by that they don’t do that, really lends credence to the belief, and really to the fact in many ways, that not only do we still have institutional racism here, but they are somehow thinking this is okay and no big deal.

Thompson went on to explain how this has a detrimental effect on the African American community.

Many African Americans are still very, very concerned about the value of their lives and if this is not addressed swiftly and directly then that concern will remain.

For NPR, the Center for Inspired Teaching’s Cosby Hunt writes about clothing advice he plans to give his two sons:

“We did not plan to give them advice about hoodies, but now I see we’ll need to have that talk, too. We will have [to] say, ‘You know how you used to wear your hooded Batman sweatshirt when you wanted to fight the bad guys as a kid? Well, now that you’re older, some people will be confused and think that you are the bad guys if they see your hoodie and your skin color. It’s silly and wrong that anyone would think that you are the bad guys, but we don’t want you to be hurt. We don’t want the real bad guys or even some guy playing superhero to hurt you.’”

Those concerns are being fanned by racist reactions such as from commentators on a Fox News story about the shooting, one of whom wrote: ‘Good Shot Zimmy’.

According to Mother Jones, Florida courts have found that under the ‘Stand Your Ground’ statute, a “defendant’s only burden is to offer facts from which his resort to force could have been reasonable” while “the State has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense.”

The law has been unpopular with law enforcement officers in Florida, since it makes it much more difficult to charge shooters with a crime and has regularly confounded juries in murder cases; many Orlando-area cops reportedly have given up investigating “self-defense” cases as a result, referring them to the overloaded state attorney’s office for action. A 2010 study by the Tampa Bay Times found that “justifiable homicides” had tripled in the state since the law went into effect.

“Stand Your Ground is a law that has really created a Wild West type environment in Florida,” Brian Tannebaum, a criminal defense lawyer in Florida told The New York Times.

“It allows people to kill people outside of their homes, if they are in reasonable fear for their lives. It’s a very low standard.”

Speaking to Lawrence O’Donnell, Arthur Hayhoe of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence said that his group had logged more than 100 cases since the law was enacted. This has included someone being able to kill a member of a rival gang in a shootout, claim they were acting in self-defense, and avoid prosecution.

Former Washington, D.C. Police Department homicide investigator Rod Wheeler told Fox News that the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law was really the ‘Make My Day’ law.

“The police department in [Sanford, Florida, where Martin was killed] oppose that law. What that law is saying in the state of Florida — and look at the case law — you can actually shoot a dog. It happens all the time. You can shoot and kill a dog and get arrested and put in jail, but if you kill a kid — and especially a black kid in Florida — you can walk away. That’s what that law means,” Wheeler said.

The NRA has referred to Florida’s statute as “good law, casting a common-sense light onto the debate over the right of self-defense.” On the passage of Florida’s law Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s then executive director, said:

“The only people that have anything to fear from this type of law is someone who plans on robbing, shooting or raping someone.”

16 states now have a similar law.

Media Matters reports that the NRA continues to push for similar laws.

· On March 16, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) criticized the Judiciary Committee chairman of Iowa’s state Senate for failing to hold hearings on “NRA-initiated HF 2215, the Stand Your Ground/Castle Doctrine Enhancement.” According to NRA-ILA, the bill would “remove a person’s ‘duty to retreat’ from an attacker, allowing law-abiding citizens to stand their ground and protect themselves or their family anywhere they are lawfully present.” The group urged supporters to contact state Senators and tell them to support the bill. NRA-ILA previously told supporters to contact Democratic members of the Iowa House after they “left the Capitol building in an attempt to block consideration of these pro-gun bills” on February 29.

· On March 14, NRA-ILA urged Alaskan supporters to contact their state Senators and tell them to support House Bill 80, which it termed “important self-defense legislation that would provide that a law-abiding person, who is justified in using deadly force in self-defense, has ‘no duty-to-retreat’ from an attack if the person is in any place that that person has a legal right to be.” NRA-ILA also promoted the bill on March 5, March 8, and February 29.

· On March 5, NRA-ILA executive director Chris W. Cox criticized Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton for vetoing House File 1467, which Cox said “would have removed the duty to retreat for crime victims currently mandated under Minnesota state law and precluded victims from facing prosecution for lawfully defending their lives.” NRA-ILA also urged supporters to contact Dayton and urge him not to veto the bill on March 1 and February 29.

Further progress for these laws may continue to go virtually unchallenged in state legislatures despite growing outrage over the Trayvon Martin case. According to Arthur Hayhoem one of the reasons that Florida passed America’s first so-called ‘Stand Your Ground’ law was because locals Democrats “caved.”

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Industrial polluters dumped 226 million pounds of toxic chemicals in to U.S. waterways in 2010, according to a new report by Environment America. The group analyzed government data on industrial facilities to reveal total discharges by state and which U.S. rivers bear the heaviest toxic chemical burden.

Food and beverage manufacturing, which includes slaughterhouses and rendering plants, heavy metals manufacturing, chemical plants, and petroleum refineries were among the largest polluters. The biggest single polluter, according self-reported data to EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, was AK Steel with nearly 30 million pounds of toxins into waterways in Indiana and Ohio.

Polluters in just the top 5 states were responsible for 40% of all toxins released into U.S. waterways in 2010.

New to the 2010 Toxics Release Inventory data is watershed discharge information, allowing Americans to know for the first time exactly how much pollution is being dumped into the rivers that provide drinking water and recreation for their communities.

The report, Wasting Our Waterways: Industrial Toxic Pollution and the Unfulfilled Promise of the Clean Water Act, did not compare actual discharges to legally permitted pollution discharges. Environment America explains: “States (who are primarily responsible for enforcing the law in most of the country) have often been unwilling to tighten pollution limits on industrial dischargers and have often let illegal polluters get away with exceeding their permitted pollution levels without penalty or with only a slap on the wrist.”

Calling America’s waterways a “polluter’s paradise,” Environment America and its network of state-based environmental organizations are calling for:

• industrial facilities to reduce pollution by switching to less hazardous production processes, for
• the Obama administration to clearly extend Clean Water Act protections to all waterways, and for
• EPA and state agencies to tighten pollution permits and reduce legal discharges of toxic chemicals.

“The Clean Water Act’s original objective was to clean up all of America’s waterways by 1985–27 years ago,” said Rob Kerth, analyst for Frontier Group and co-author of the report. “Many people born in 1985 have kids of their own now, yet still millions of pounds of toxic chemicals are being dumped into our waterways.”

Amadou Toumani Touré, the long-time president of Mali, was deposed in a military coup on Thursday. The West African nation has long been noted for its democratic government and the coup has been widely condemned, with the African Union calling an emergency meeting in Addis Ababa and suspending Malifrom membership. Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. Much of the country is desert and Mali had been considered “one of the least likely candidates for a coup attempt in all of West Africa,” says the New York Times. The coup occurred before an election that was scheduled for April 29 and that Touré said he would not be participating in.

According to the Guardian, the capital of Bamako has been “tense but calm” amid reports of soldiers seen shooting in the air while driving and of widespread looting, including of the presidential palace. One leading presidential candidate, Soumaïla Cissé, a former finance minister, said that his house had been sacked and is no longer inhabitable.The leader of the coup is Captain Amadou Sanogo, a former English teacher at the military base in Kati, who has cited Touré’s “poor handling” of the Tuareg rebellion in the north as the reason for the coup: “Scores” of Mali’s solders have been killed since January in fighting against Tuareg fighters and 200,000 civilians displaced. In addition, there have been widespread food shortages.

International Condemnation of Coup

The west African regional body ECOWAS has described the coup as “military adventurism.” All land borders and the airport in Bamako, Mali’s capital and largest city, have been closed, leaving the foreign minister of Kenya, Moses Wetangula, and a delegation of Kenyan politicians stranded.

The European Union, the African Development Bank and the World Bank have all suspended aid programs to Mali and the US State Department has denounced the coup which, it says, has put aid to Mali at risk. Currently US aid to Mali totals about $140 million with about half of that humanitarian aid.

While the US has moved quickly in the past to halt aid to African countries hit by a coup, Reuters says that the US has been reacting “cautiously,” saying that it is too early yet to ascertain the outcomes. US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that officials at the US Embassy in Bamako have been trying to get in contact with the coup leaders, who have sought to capitalize on Malians’ dissatisfaction with how Touré has handled the Tuareg rebellion. The US has trained and provided equipment for Mali’s military and Nuland says that cooperation between the countries is continuing for now. Mali is seen as an important ally in efforts to fight Al Qaeda-associated Islamist militants who have been spreading south from the Sahara.

Tuareg Rebellion: Fighters Armed With Gaddafi’s Weapons?

The Atlantic Wire cites reports from March of 2011 about large numbers of men from the Tuareg ethnic group going to fight for Mohammed el-Gaddafi as mercenaries, with promises of being paid $10,000 to join and $1,000 for every day of fighting. After the fall of Gaddafi’s regime to the National Transitional Council (NTC), Libya’s interim government, AFP reported that ”hundreds of armed Tuaregs from Mali” who had fought for Gaddafi were now returning to their own country.

Mali’s president Touré is reportedly safe and near the capital and under the protection of a group of loyalists. Touré is himself a former soldier who came to power after overthrowing the president-for-life, Moussa Traoré, in 1991, after which he handed back power to civilians. Touré was elected to the presidency in 2002 and returned to office in 2007.

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