Two Hot Articles from This Can't Be Happening!

Pennsylvania Judge's Ruling Revives 'Taxation Without Representation'...and Jim Crow
By Linn Washington, Jr.

One week before a Pennsylvania court judge upheld that state’s controversial Voter ID law by concluding the measure’s impact was “neutral and nondiscriminatory,” critics of that law released a disturbing study documenting the law’s discriminatory impact on voters in Philadelphia.

Today's ruling by PA Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson rejecting a request for an injunction blocking implementation of the Voter ID law in November’s presidential election casually dismissed evidence that the measure would adversely impact the elderly, infirm, college students and racial minorities.

Yet, a geographic analysis of voter data in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, concluded that the state’s “new strict photo ID requirement may be in effect a racially discriminatory voting procedure…African-American and Latino communities are disproportionately affected by the Voter ID law…”

That analysis, prepared for Stephanie Singer, chair of Philadelphia’s three elections supervising City Commissioners, detailed how areas around Philadelphia’s major universities, like the University of Pennsylvania and in heavily low-income/minority neighborhoods, contained the largest percentages of persons now rendered ineligible to vote under the Voter ID law.

“This law has a racial impact,” Singer said about the ID law formally known as Act 18.

According to the analysis, the “spatial distribution” of persons lacking the required ID to vote is “non-random.”

While the analysis only examined Philadelphia, the researchers stated the patterns they discovered probably existed in “rural and even suburban” areas of Pennsylvania.

“I’m very much opposed to this law but I have to enforce it since it is the law,” Singer said about the measure that now requires state-issued photo identification in order to vote – even from voters who’ve utilized the same polling place for decades.

Stella Tsai, past president of the Asian-Pacific American Bar Association of Pennsylvania, said she is concerned about the ID law’s adverse impact on Asian-Americans.

“Our citizens in Philadelphia face language problems already. This law will increase problems,” Tsai said. “The key here is for all Americans to be eligible to vote. We can’t allow laws to create barriers.”

Judge Simpson stated in his ruling that he was “convinced” that all eligible voters in Pennsylvania will “have their votes counted in the general election.”

Simpson’s ruling in this Voter ID law battle that has drawn national attention relied on testimony from state officials who promised that measures will be in place by early September to provide ID cards to all who need them by the October 9 deadline for voter registration or the November 6 election...

For the rest of this article by LINN WASHINGTON, JR. in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1280

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We Don’t Need No Bloody Treaties: Britain Blows a Fuse over Ecuador’s Asylum Grant to Wikileaks’ Assange

By Dave Lindorff

The concerted and orchestrated campaign to capture Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and ultimately to hand him over to the tender mercies of a kangaroo court in the US, where he would likely be tried for spying and other possibly capital offenses, continues as Britain threatens the Ecuadoran Embassy with a police assault.

According to the newspaper the Australian, a News Corp. property and Australian flagship of media baron Rupert Murdoch, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino says he and the Ecuadoran ambassador received a written message yesterday from the British Foreign Office warning that Britain might send police to “assault” the country’s embassy and forcibly remove Assange so as to hand him over to Sweden to face questioning on several controversial sexual assault claims made by women there.

Although the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, passed in 1961 and signed by Britain, Sweden and the US, along with nearly every country in the world, clearly grants embassies the status of being considered the official territory of the country represented by the embassy, thus putting them beyond all laws of the host country, Britain is citing a 1987 UK law that states that when a foreign nation ''ceases to use land for the purposes of its mission or exclusively for the purposes of a consular post,'' the Vienna Convention no longer applies, and the building is no longer beyond the reach of British police...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to:

www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1283

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