Al Jazeera: Honduras: Blood and the Water

In early March 2016, Honduras's most prominent and outspoken environmental activist, Berta Caceres, was killed in her home. While shocking, her murder did not come as a surprise to her colleagues or family.

For years, Caceres had received thousands of threats because of her work, fighting for the rights of indigenous communities and for her attempts to stop a hydro-electric dam from being built on indigenous land.  [...]

Her death is the latest in a string of assassinations that have made Honduras one of the world's most dangerous places for environmental activists.

"Knowing what my mum was fighting for, I always understood that there are dangers because there are bad people, business and powerful economic interests,"  Laura Zuniga, Caceres's daughter says. 

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Business Insider: The wage gap between blacks and whites is the largest since 1979

The report found that black men make 22 percent less money than do white males, while black women make 34.2 percent less.

Factors such as experience, location, and education were controlled for in the report, which also found that the racial wage gap is growing primarily because of discrimination, or "racial differences in skills or worker characteristics that are unobserved or unmeasured in the data." Growing income inequality is also a contributing factor.

Of all the groups evaluated by the EPI, it found that black women with less than 10 years of experience have been affected most by the racial wage gap. It also found that black male college graduates who entered the workforce in 1980 had less than a 10 percent disadvantage compared to white college graduates; today, black male graduates are at approximately an 18 percent disadvantage.

The report found that wage growth has lagged significantly behind productivity growth for everyone except those in the top 5 percent since 1979. For workers in the top 1 percent, wage growth has exceeded productivity growth. And while lagging wage growth has affected workers across all demographics, growth has been even slower for African Americans, compared to white men and women. [...]

While the report also found that the racial wage gap is smaller between women than between men, it notes that this does not necessarily imply that black women do not face as many obstacles as black men, but that the disadvantage they experience may be more associated with the gender pay gap.

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Alternet: Court Rules Black Men May Be Justified in Running From Police

In its Tuesday ruling, the high court determined that police were not justified in stopping Warren. “Lacking any information about facial features, hairstyles, skin tone, height, weight, or other physical characteristics, the victim's description 'contribute nothing to the officers' ability to distinguish the defendant from any other black male' wearing dark clothes and a 'hoodie' in Roxbury," the decision states.

In perhaps its most far-reaching determination, the court then argued that Warren and other black men in Boston may be justified in running from law enforcement, given the city's poor track record with racial profiling:

We do not eliminate flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis whenever a black male is the subject of an investigatory stop. However, in such circumstances, flight is not necessarily probative of a suspect's state of mind or consciousness of guilt. Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO [Field Interrogation and Observation] encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity. Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus.

The text references a report released two years ago by the Massachusetts ACLU, which found that, while black people make up less than a quarter of the city’s population, they were targeted by 63 percent of all Boston police encounters with civilians between 2007 and 2010.

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Independent: Theresa May committed to introducing the 'Alan Turing Law'

Sources close to the Prime Minister confirmed to The Independent that Ms May's government is “committed” to introducing the legislation, which will effectively act as an apology while the Ministry of Justice added they would “now find the right legislative vehicle to push this through”. [...]

Mr Turing, the Enigma code breaker responsible for decrypting Nazi messages, was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013 – 61 years after he was charged at Manchester police station over homosexual activity.

The pioneering mathematician, whose code-breaking skills are said to have shortened World War Two by two to four years, lost his job with the secret service following a conviction for gross indecency and was forced to undergo chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. Two years later Mr Turing took his own life – and it is estimated that around 49,000 were convicted under similar outdated laws until homosexuality was decriminalised in England in 1967. [...]

It comes after campaigners, and the family of Mr Turing – who according to Winston Churchill “made the single biggest contribution to the allied victory" in World War II – delivered the petition to Downing Street in 2015 before the general election. Public pressure led to the major political parties pledging to right the wrongs of the past and introduce what was dubbed as the 'Alan Turing law', in memory of the Bletchley Park codebreaker.

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Reuters: German government alarmed by rising xenophobia in east

"Right-wing extremism in all its forms poses a very serious threat for the social and economic development of the new states," Iris Gleicke, the federal government's commissioner for eastern German affairs, said, referring to the five states that comprised Communist East Germany from 1945 to 1990.

Germany recorded 1,408 violent acts carried out by rightist supporters last year, a rise of more than 42 percent from 2014, and 75 arson attacks on refugee shelters, up from five a year earlier, according to an annual report by the BfV domestic intelligence agency published in June.

Attacks were more frequent in east German states. There were 58.7 cases of far right-motivated violence per 1 million inhabitants in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern last year, compared to the average of 10.5 cases in west German states, the report said.

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