ACLU Sues Walmart for Firing Employee for Medical Marijuana Use

From: ACLU National Headquarters

Today, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart for wrongfully firing employee Joseph Casias for using medical marijuana after work during off-duty hours in the privacy of his home.

Joseph is 30 years old, married, and the father of two young children. Since 2004, he’s worked at a Wal-Mart in Battle Creek, Michigan. In 2008, he was named that store’s Associate of the Year.

Joseph has sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor. The tumor, the size of a softball when first diagnosed, sits at the back of his head near his spinal column. He suffered from severe pain in his face, head and neck, even after extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Pain medications prescribed by his doctor only helped minimally, and made him nauseous.

But in 2008, Michigan voters passed the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act (MMMA), which provides protection for the medical use of the drug under state law. Joseph’s doctor recommended that he try marijuana as permitted by the new law, so Joseph obtained the appropriate registry card from the Michigan Department of Community Health and began using marijuana to alleviate the pain. According to the complaint filed today, the effects were “immediate and profound.” His pain decreased dramatically, the new medicine did not induce nausea and Joseph was able to gain back some of the weight he had lost during treatment.

The MMMA protects patients like Joseph who are registered with the State of Michigan from “arrest, prosecution, or penalty in any manner” for using marijuana as medicine. This provision protects employees from being disciplined by their employers for their use of medical marijuana so long as the employee does not use marijuana while at work, nor come to work under the influence of the drug.

In late 2009, Joseph twisted his knee at work. He was given a drug test after being sent to the doctor’s office, and predictably failed that test due to his lawful use of medical marijuana. Wal-Mart then fired him because he failed the test, despite the company’s knowledge that he was lawfully using marijuana for pain treatment under the MMMA and was not under the influence of the drug while at work.

Our lawsuit charges that Wal-Mart wrongfully terminated Joseph in violation of the protections of the MMMA.

Though the lawsuit was filed in state court, the decision in this case could affect patients’ rights in the 13 other states (and D.C.) that allow medical marijuana use.

Joseph is exactly the kind of patient Michigan voters had in mind when the passed the MMMA. Today, we’re asking the court to not allow Wal-Mart to punish Joseph for merely taking refuge from his pain, and using marijuana as allowed by state law. Corporations should never be allowed to force patients to choose between their health care and their job.

Florida Gov Urges Vactioners to Swim in Toxic Sludge

By: Anthony Papillion, Staff Writer

Florida Governer Bill Crist urged vacationers to continue to visit Florida and told CBS news that the ongoing oil spill poses no danger to health and safety.  It is safe,” Crist declared, “there isn’t a toxic nature to it that is detrimental to anybody. It is much more of a nuisance than anything else at this point.”

 As the Governor urged vacationers to visit the state beaches, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering installing decontamination stations along Alabama beaches. Still, the EPA is stopping short of banning vacationers from the beach saying they’d rather leave it to individual discretion.

So far,  400 people have sought medical care for upper or lower respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, and eye irritation after trips to Escambia County beaches.

Texas man arrested for taking picture of cop in his own home

By Raw Story

A Texas man has sued his local police department, saying he was arrested for taking a picture of a police officer when the officer entered his home without permission.

According to the lawsuit (PDF), Sgt. Justin Alderete of the Sealy, Texas, police department arrived at the home of Francisco Olvera in October, 2009, apparently responding to a noise complaint. Olvera had been playing music on his computer speakers while working outside on his patio.

The sergeant asked Olvera for identification. When Olvera went inside his home to grab his ID, Sgt. Alderete followed him inside. Believing the officer didn’t have a right to enter his home without permission, Olvera picked up his

cellphone and took a photo of the officer. At that point, the lawsuit states, Alderete accused Olvera of “illegal photography” and arrested him.

Olvera was charged with “loud music” and “public intoxication” — the officer had seen a beer can on the kitchen table, the lawsuit asserts.

In January, Olvera was acquitted of all charges.

The lawsuit names Alderete, Sealy Police Chief John Tollett, and the city of Sealy. It alleges that Olvera was the victim of “unlawful search and seizure,” “unlawful arrest” and “malicious prosecution.”

The lawsuit further alleges that Alderete made a racist remark against Olvera during booking.

“Do you know what I tell Mexicans when they get loud?” the lawsuit alleges Alderete asked. “No chinges con migo pinche culero.” (“Don’t be f**king with me,” another officer translated,)

Olvera’s lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for his legal costs in the criminal trial; for “emotional distress” and punitive damages “as allowed by law.”

Police detain 224 on second day of G20 protests

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, June 27th, 2010 — 10:40 pm

Image via Wikipedia

Nearly 600 people were arrested in violent weekend protests against a G20 summit as Canadian police used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up the mobs, authorities said Sunday.

Sporadic clashes between pockets of protestors and riot police flared throughout the day with 224 people detained on Sunday alone.

The violence flared near a security barrier erected around the conference center where leaders of the world’s top economies were gathering, and left storefronts and windows smashed and several police cars burnt out.

During a raid at the University of Toronto campus, police rounded up 70 people believed not to be students. Officers recovered “street-style weaponry” such as bricks at the scene.

“It’s not the kind stuff you’d need for a shopping weekend in Toronto,” quipped an officer.

Police also moved on a seemingly peaceful sit-in outside a film studio turned into a makeshift detention center to arrest a “known anarchist” hiding in the group, according to the Integrated Security Unit.

At daybreak, Canada’s largest city was on tenterhooks.

Police in riot gear kept vigil at intersections, while city crews swept up broken glass and wiped graffiti off buildings and streetcars.

Residents were back walking their dogs, joggers trotted through parks, but most downtown shops and restaurants remained closed.

“Slowly the city is returning to a level of normalcy,” said Sergeant Tim Burrows, spokesman for the Integrated Security Unit responsible for securing the meeting of the world’s 20 leading economies.

Overnight, the subway was shut down, and area hotels and hospitals were locked down as police clashed with militants.

Tear gas was used against a black-clad crowd of demonstrators that refused to disperse following a warning after they pelted many officers with bottles and stones, the police chief said.

Manhole covers were also welded shut for fear protestors were hiding in sewers. Police arrested four men after they popped out from one manhole behind police lines.

But Toronto police used Twitter to deny rumors that rioters had breached the security barrier erected around the conference center where G20 leaders were gathering.

“We have never seen this level of wanton criminality on our streets,” Toronto police chief Bill Blair told reporters, after four police cars were set on fire and windows in the financial district were smashed.

Some 30,000 people, according to rally organizers, marched against the G20 summit on Saturday demonstrating in favour of social causes, in what was a largely peaceful rally until violence erupted on its fringes.

The main body of the march was a well-marshaled event, led by older activists and organized labor, but splinter groups of young hardliners scuffled with riot officers and set patrol cars ablaze.

The violence “was shocking to every citizen,” Blair said, warning of more arrests to come of people already “known to police.”

Government spokesman Dimitri Soudas said: “Free speech is the principle of our democracy.”

But he denounced what he described as “a bunch of thugs that pretend to have a difference of opinion with policies and instead choose violence to express those so-called differences.”

“People do disagree on issues. Leaders that meet all the time don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye but you don’t see people burning up police cars and breaking windows,” he said.

David Martin, Greenpeace’s climate change campaign coordinator, said the group behind the violence has “no base and no credibility.”

“Yet this very small group of irresponsible people… has taken media attention away from the coverage of essential issues, like climate change, foreign aid… maternal health and so on,” he said.

“I am not a pacifist. I am for civil disobedience, but not for this kind of crazy violence.

“The Black Bloc people say they want social change, but in fact they have an adrenaline addiction to violence,” he added.

“They live for these international events but tomorrow they’ll disappear and leave us to do the hard work, which they’ve now made harder for us.”

Canada spent more than a billion dollars to secure this week’s back-to-back G8 and G20 summits in the Toronto area, hoping to avoid the serious street battles that marred recent gatherings of these global forums.

Thousands of police reinforcements backed by riot officers on horseback and spotter helicopters were drafted into the city center, much of which was sealed off behind concrete and steel barriers.

Kyrgyzstan: Picking up the Pieces

Written By: Eric Walberg
Uruknet

Image via Wikipedia

Kill the victim and go to his funeral. Is NATO poised to move into the heart of Central Asia, even as its war in Afghanistan implodes, marvels Eric Walberg

Kyrgyzstan joined the rank of failed states this month: its central government lacks legitimacy and depends heavily on external aid, with the US base looming large, while the people are largely destitute, harassed by local thugs and drug barons, and looking to Moscow for a way out.

Clashes in the south are worse than earlier reported, responsible for more than 300 killed, mostly Uzbeks, and setting off a massive wave of refugees, with 100,000 people crammed in camps on Kyrgyzstan’s border with Uzbekistan and tens of thousands more displaced. The clashes are almost certainly the result of a provocation organised by the clan of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

The issues at stake are the referendum next Sunday to legitimise the interim government, and the drug trade, which Bakiyev’s clan still controls and is loathe to give up. Heroin comes from Afghanistan via Tajikistan and is repackaged in Osh before being transported west to Uzbekistan and north to Kazakhstan and Russia, according to the UN. The killing two weeks ago of Aibek Mirsidikov, one of the drug kingpins in the area, threatened the Bakiyev clan’s control. The rest is history.

Jalalabad province commandant and first Deputy Chairman of the Kyrgyz State National Security Service Kubatbek Baibolov charged that a group of Tajik citizens, hired by the Bakiyev clan, opened fire indiscriminately on both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks sparking the riots. Former Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev told RT.com that Bakiyev’s brothers Ahmad and Janysh paid criminals and unemployed youths “in suitcases of cash to start bashing people up and set everything on fire.” Bakiyev had cleaned out the banks and the Finance Ministry when he was ousted in April. Days before the current uprising unemployed youth were suddenly flush with cash, said Akayev.

The ex-president’s son Maxim’s indictment by Italian investigators is what sparked his father’s overthrow in April. That the US was not the culprit this time (as opposed to the Tulip Revolution in 2005) is suggested by the fact that the new government continues to threaten to close down the US airbase — this time, if Britain refuses to hand over Maxim, who was arrested Sunday at Farnborough airport when he arrived by private plane, fleeing an Interpol arrest warrant on charges of corruption and misusing state funds. He is of course seeking political asylum in Britain. “England never gives up people who arrive on its territory. But since England and the US fight terrorism, and the arrangement with the airbase is one of the elements of that fight, then they must give over Maxim Bakiyev,” warned Azimbek Beknazarov, deputy leader of the interim government.

This is not just a tragedy for the normally peaceful Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, but also an alarming development for the entire ex-Soviet space. Russia is now faced with the worst post-Soviet political crisis in its “near abroad”, where it insists — rightly — that it has special claims, having millions of Russians scattered throughout those countries, with intimate economic and cultural links from centuries of both imperial and state socialist development. But where there are claims, there are also responsibilities.

This is no better illustrated than the call by both sides, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz alike, for Russian peacekeeping troops to be deployed as disinterested mediators who understand the region and can communicate with locals, unlike NATO forces in Afghanistan. The spectre of Russians policing the streets of Osh raises none of the loathing and fear that US and NATO troops patrolling, say, Marja, prompts. The peoples of virtually all the ex-Soviet quasi-states (except the Baltics) would rejoin a Soviet-type union in a flash as opinion polls continue to confirm two decades after its ignominious “collapse”. When Kyrgyzstan twitches, Russia feels it, and vice versa.

Trying to put Humpty-Dumpty together again is impossible at this point. Instead, the Russian strategy since Yeltsin has been to do everything possible to keep these quasi-states stable, whatever their political leanings. Even the Georgian bete noire Saakashvili was left in place during his war with Russia in 2008. But this hands-off approach has left a vacuum that the US has been filling, with its “democracy building”, colour revolutions and bases, oblivious to the fact that the new states it helped give birth to in the first place are more like premmies — fragile and needing careful nurturing, always in danger of dying.

Russia’s approach amounts to propping up dictators no matter how ruthless or bloodthirsty, as long as they acknowledge Moscow’s interests. The nicest of the lot, Kyrgyzstan’s ex-president Askar Akayev, was overthrown in the US-inspired 2005 coup, which the US now surely regrets, leaving one tolerable one — Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan frozen in a very nasty timewarp.

Can Russia act as “an agent of change, as a force for genuine modernisation, cautiously nudging the local authoritarian regimes to transform, democratise and broaden their socio-political base?” asks Igor Torbakov of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. If Russia keeps referring to this crisis as merely an “internal conflict,” it risks losing face, prestige and the right to claim the leading role in the post-Soviet Eurasia.

Recent weeks have witnessed several other signs of a Russian retreat in foreign policy. It failed to respond to the Brazil-Turkey proposal to defuse the Iranian crisis, voted for sanctions, and cancelled the S-300 missile deal with Iran, admitting to US pressure.

The Arabs have a saying about the rascal who kills the victim and then goes to his funeral. US involvement in Kyrgyz affairs exemplifies this well: destabilise the state and now, like former US ambassador to Russia James Collins and Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Programme deputy director Matthew Rojansky, call for NATO and the US to “immediately engage with regional partners to help restore security.” There are no lines to read between here: NATO should expand even further eastward through its Partners for Peace. Collins/Rojansky magnanimously acknowledge that this is “a responsibility NATO must share with the CSTO and the OSCE”. They blandly call for “the United States and Russia to put aside outdated stereotypes and focus on their fundamentally shared interests in Eurasian security”.

Considering the disarray of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), it is hard to fault the US for using this window of opportunity to move further into the region. This crisis has shown that the CSTO is not a serious regional organisation. The squabbling and suspicious “stan” dictators, Russia, and China have little in common other than their proximity. The CSTO’s response, according to its General Secretary Nikolai Burdyuzha, is to send “specialists who know how to plan and organise an operation to prevent mass disorder, which would unmask its instigators and localise bandit groups who provoke the situation.”

Is the OSCE an intermediate option, with its 56 member states, including both NATO and CSTO members? Hardly. Russia is the main actor here, with the other Central Asian states also having a pressing need to try to salvage a viable statelet from this tragedy. The NATO quagmire in Afghanistan needs no farcical replay. So the Collins/Rojansky call is really just a call for NATO expansion, pure and simple.

Another possibility is for Turkey to step in. Kyrgyz and Kazakh are both Turkic peoples, whose languages are mutually intelligible. Kyrgyz territory was, in the khanate past, once one with that of the Kazakhs — the entire region was known as Turkestan. During a visit to Kazakhstan this week, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and the Kazakh president supported Kyrgyz plans to proceed with the referendum next Sunday. Davutoglu said, “Immediately after the referendum, we plan together with Kazakhstan to prepare joint actions to show our assistance to Kyrgyzstan.”

If all else fails, there is China, though its presence is problematic, given its suppression of the Uighurs across the border in Xinjiang. But Beijing’s self-confidence and massive economy inevitably give it an outsize influence, especially if Russia and the West continue to flounder.

Murdering children is justified in some circumstances?

Written By: Kenneth Sorrow, Staff Writer

Apparently, the US Border Patrol believes that it’s OK to murder children if they’re involved in active smuggling – even when these same authorities have passed up at least five opportunities to arrest the boy in the last year.

Image by roberthuffstutter via Flickr

Fifteen year old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents on June 7th as he crossed the Mexican/US border with a group of other illegal immigrants whom agents were trying to arrest. According to some witnesses, several people on the Mexican side of the border began throwing rocks and agents are permitted to use lethal force when faced with rock throwers.

There is no indication that Huereca was one of the people throwing rocks and the various parties involved in the incident have all declined to comment. Mexico, which has labeled the killing a murder, is demanding that the agent who shot Huerecabe extradited to Mexico to face criminal prosecution, a move that most agree isn’t likely to happen.

The killing comes on the heals of increased tensions between the US and Mexico over Arizona‘s tough new immigration law which makes it a crime to hire or rent to an illegal alien and some outbreaks of violence between US citizens and Mexican immigrants both along the border and in Arizona.

Welcome to Expressing Freedom

Welcome to the Expressing Freedom blog.   Expressing Freedom is written by a small group of writers, journalists, and investigative reporters, who’ve come together with the single goal of providing unbiased, unimpeded coverage and commentary of the political and social events shaping our world.

Many of us have worked in traditional media and understand that the ‘truth’ is always subjective in such a setting, coming second to corporate loyalties and responsibilities. We intend to dispense with such silliness and embrace the fact that the truth is immutable and does not change according to who might be relaying it.

Because we are a very small group, our secondary goal is to expand our reach by bringing in other ‘citizen journalists’ to the group. If you are an exceptional writer (even if you’re not a pro) and are interested in covering the news on either a national or local level, we invite you to contact our editor for more information on becoming a contributor.  You can also send breaking news or other information to him for further investigation.

Thank you for visiting this website and we look forward to serving you in the future. We promise to be unshakable, unyielding, and unbiased as we search for and present the truth to you.

In Liberty,
The Expressing Freedom Team (Melody, Ken, Jamie, and Anthony)