Many families throughout New Orleans have been celebrating since the city recently agreed to pay $13.3 million to settle lawsuits with 17 plaintiffs. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the chaos that ensued, these plaintiffs ended up suing the city of New Orleans for wrongful deaths and injuries, deprivation of civil rights and lost
The city of Flint, Michigan made news after finding high levels of lead in the drinking water. However, Flint is far from the only municipality dealing with water contamination. Bad water is turning up all over the place as citizens have started paying extra attention. Let’s look back at a number of incidents from last
The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and everyday jerks among us. Who knew so many folks would hear Trump’s repetitive, simplified, small-word vocabulary and exclaim, “He says what we’re thinking”? Many of us were sure, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, that the arc of the moral universe had been
A two-year investigation conducted by the Justice Department has uncovered some unsettling news. Throughout the state of Louisiana, an estimated 4,000 mentally ill people are being kept, unnecessarily, in expensive nursing homes with little to no contact with friends and family. They’re being deprived of independent living, all because the state has failed to provide
With President-Elect Trump’s inauguration only weeks away, President Obama is still hard at work signing valuable civil rights legislation, such as his latest, the “Emmett Till Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016.” Does the legislation sound familiar? It should, considering it’s merely an expansion of a civil rights bill passed by the House in
Fake news is a scourge upon the media landscape. While it’s certainly not a new phenomenon, the partisan divide in modern day America is certainly ramping it up to obnoxious levels. Satire based publications such as The Onion write fake news in a more or less obvious attempt at social commentary (“The play’s the thing
While the world was watching the standoff between the local authorities and water protectors at Standing Rock, the Navajo nation was preparing a lawsuit over the fouling of their water. The Gold King mine spill in August of 2015 turned the river a deep yellow and sent toxic pollutants like arsenic and lead coursing through
The recent tragic fire that engulfed Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse / artist space / underground residence, killing at least 36 people, is sparking a conversation about why so many people were living there in the first place. One obvious answer is that young artists that are struggling to get by can’t afford the exorbitant rents
In any society, there are people who break the rules. What the people of that society choose to do about that not only says something about that society, it also determines how well that society is going to re-assimilate the rulebreakers. If the crime is egregious and the victims hurt beyond repair, there is a
Shawnnon Hale was just 24-years-old on the December morning in 2014 when he received a phone call from Denver police at his grandmother’s house, where he lives, telling him he needed to come to the station for questioning. Hale agreed to be at the station by 10:00 AM, but because he was running late, police