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Ten Years In, Prison Rape Elimination Act Standards Finally Go Into Effect

Matt Stroud In These Times
This week, more than a decade after congress passed PREA in July 2003, those standards went into effect. Among them: No inmate under 18 may be placed in a housing unit where contact will occur with adult inmates in a common space, shower area or sleeping quarters.

Media Bits & Bytes - It's Elementary edition

Portside
Seattle pauses surveillance plans; Journalists on the move; Google wins book-scanning decision; Supercomputer Watson for all; Writers persecuted for digital media use; Google bigger than print industries.

Surviving Climate Change

Michael T. Klare TomDispatch
With an awareness of climate change growing and as intensifying floods, fires, droughts, and storms become an inescapable feature of daily life across the planet, more people are joining environmental groups and engaging in increasingly bold protest actions. Sooner or later, government leaders are likely to face multiple eruptions of mass public anger and may, in the end, be forced to make radical adjustments in energy policy or risk being swept aside.

Why the Boeing machinists' fight matters

Ari Paul Al Jazeera
Boeing's fight against its machinists raises a terrifying possibility about U.S. capitalism. It appears that instead of industrial growth translating into national prosperity, the United States is beginning to conform to what economists call the Iron Law of Wages, which says the natural price of labor is subsistence. The only reasonable pay for workers, the theory goes, is enough to sustain them to live and work to produce value for their bosses and nothing more.