A national gun-control group has named Kansas as one of four states to receive its “Craziest Gun Laws” award because of a new measure the organization says allows guns in the state’s schools.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence issued its annual ranking of gun laws earlier this month. Kansas, Virginia, Utah and Florida received the group’s “Craziest Gun Laws” award.

The Wichita Eagle reports state and local officials say a bill signed by Gov. Sam Brownback last month clarifies Kansas law, but doesn’t change it.

The new measure prevents concealed-carry permit holders from taking guns into any building that posts no-gun signs on its doors.

The Brady group says that might allow guns inside schools that don’t post the signs.

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Statistics released by the FBI last week showed violent and property crimes declined nationwide in 2010, continuing a trend that initially begin in the early 1990s.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, homicide, robbery and rape are down about 40 percent from their peak in 1991. And California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced the state’s 2010 murder rate dropped to a 44-year low.

But with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling last Monday that California must release more than 30,000 inmates to reduce prison overcrowding, experts see the potential for crime rates to quickly rise again.

Rio Hondo College administration of justice professor Bob Feliciano said California’s prisons are “bursting at the seams” with criminals who would otherwise be out committing crimes.

“The majority of people in state prison are from Southern California; the majority of those are from Los Angeles County,” he said. “When they get out, they are coming back here.”

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia blasted the Supreme Court’s ruling as “absurd” and said he feared it will lead to more criminals on the streets.

His fears were echoed in a motion filed by the attorneys general in 18 other states in September. They urged the court not to “forget the hard-earned lessons of history” of other large-scale prisoner releases.

They cited a mandatory cap placed on Philadelphia’s prisons between 1986 and 1995 that required officials to release those charged with some non-violent crimes when the prison population topped 3,750.

It led to a crime wave of rapes, assaults and murders, including the death of a police officer gunned down by a recently-released prisoner, the motion said. “Many of the victims of those crimes were residents of the crime-plagued inner city neighborhoods, whose suffering all too often escapes the notice of decision makers.”

“From a law enforcement perspective, it’s a little disappointing,” Lt. Kent Miller, spokesman for the Whittier Police Department, said of the Supreme Court’s decision.

That decision doesn’t mean the state is releasing a flood of inmates onto the streets. Shorter term inmates will leave prison before the court’s deadline expires and some low-level offenders will be diverted to local jails under the plan.

Miller said he’s not expecting violence to spread across the state as inmates are released.

“It’s going to be more the property crimes,” he said. “Burglaries, shoplifting, thefts.” Read the rest of this entry »

California lawmakers have taken steps to opt out of a controversial federal immigration enforcement program, joining a growing number of states that say it harms public safety and undermines local law enforcement.

Under the Secure Communities program, fingerprints of all arrestees booked into local jails and cross-checked with the FBI’s criminal database are forwarded to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for screening. Officials said the system, launched in 2008, is intended to identify and deport illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes such as murder, rape and kidnapping.

Some state lawmakers say the reality has been far different. Citing ICE data, Democrats say that many of those ensnared in the program have never been convicted of crimes or are low-level offenders. The result, they say, has been a chilling effect on immigrant crime victims and witnesses, who stay silent for fear of deportation.

Republicans are opposed to opting out, saying it would undermine federal law.

From the program’s inception through March of this year, 55% of those flagged for deportation nationwide had committed misdemeanors and infractions or were arrested but not convicted of crimes, ICE data show. About 30% of those flagged for deportation had been convicted of serious crimes.

ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley defended the program, saying that it had netted 78,000 “deportable aliens” in California, more than 48% of whom had previous felony convictions or at least three misdemeanors. She said the agency is developing a policy to protect crime victims and witnesses.

In a heated debate on the state Assembly floor Thursday, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) called Secure Communities a “farce” as he lobbied his colleagues to support legislation that would require California’s Department of Justice to renegotiate its agreement with the federal government.

The bill would allow counties to opt out of the federal program and ensure that the participants enact protective measures for victims of domestic violence and juveniles. And it would require those counties to develop safeguards against racial profiling and share only the fingerprints of convicted felons. Read the rest of this entry »

Gov. Peter Shumlin signed a bill on Thursday that sets Vermont on a path to creating the nation’s first publicly financed health care system. The law calls for something close to a single-payer system, with doctors and hospitals billing one entity, the state government, for their services. All 620,000 of the state’s residents would be eligible for coverage under the system, which proponents say would be cheaper than the current patchwork of insurers. A board appointed by the governor will determine payment rates for doctors, benefits and other details.

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The NFL hasn’t wavered in this message to its locked-out players: Get out of the courts and come back to the bargaining table.

Reiterating that mantra, lawyers for the league issued written arguments Thursday that a recent legal response by players does not dispel “serious doubts” previously expressed by an appeals court about a federal judge’s order that the lockout end immediately.

Repeatedly during this dragged-out, employer-employee dispute over the future of this lucrative, ever-popular professional sport, the NFL has insisted the only path to a new agreement is through face-to-face talks.

In the league’s reply brief, which again urged the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Minnesota-based U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson’s April 25 decision to lift the lockout, it claimed anew Thursday that the NFL Players Association shed union status only as a tactic to gain leverage through an antitrust lawsuit filed in Nelson’s court.

“No student of the history of this industry — and no one familiar with the NFLPA leadership’s very recent statements of purpose and intent — believes that the Union is gone, let alone gone forever,” attorneys for the NFL wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

In yet another twist in Wisconsin’s bitter fight over unions, a judge Thursday struck down the Republican-sponsored bill to strip most public workers of their collective bargaining rights, moving the battle to the state Supreme Court.

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi ruled that the Legislature violated the state’s open meetings law in approving the bill championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker that sparked massive protests and the flight of 14 Democratic senators to Illinois in a futile effort to prevent its passage.

The state Supreme Court is scheduled to decide June 6 whether to hear the case.

As the Wisconsin fight intensifies — with six Republican and three Democratic senators facing recall elections, most likely July 12 — union workers and their allies in Ohio are halfway toward their goal of collecting more than 450,000 signatures to put a measure on the fall ballot that would repeal that state’s anti-union law, which sharply curtails the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

The recall proponents need to gather 231,149 valid signatures by the end of June. They say they had collected 214,399 signatures as of last week. Read the rest of this entry »

Officials from the Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. and NorthWestern Energy expressed surprise over the lawsuit filed late Friday by a dozen farmers who own land in Teton and Pondera counties challenging the state’s newly passed eminent domain law.

As of the middle of last week, MATL was in the middle of setting up mediation with a group of landowners, said Darryl James, its regulatory affairs manager.

“We were surprised by the filing of the suit by Hertha Lund as it is a vast departure from the discussions of late,” James said, referring to the Bozeman attorney representing the landowners.

James said company officials don’t know what the lawsuit will mean for the mediation process, but added that it “may force us into premature legal action on these parcels.”

He said the company will continue to make every attempt to negotiate with landowners for the remaining easements.

“We hoped to have open communication with all landowners, but this filing by Ms. Lund may change the dynamic of our discussions with those involved in the suit,” James said in a written statement. “Regardless, all of the landowners affected by our project will be treated equitably, and we look forward to moving ahead with construction of this important project.”

The farmer-landowners asked District Judge Laurie McKinnon of the Ninth Judicial District to strike down House Bill 198 as unconstitutional. This was one of the most contentious bills of the 2011 Legislature and became law without Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s signature. Read the rest of this entry »

Georgia is putting in place a new law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants, and many across the state are nervous. Businesses fear an economic boycott, the Latino community fears police officers will abuse their new powers, and farmers in South Georgia fear the law will hurt them dramatically.

Georgia is known for its peaches and Vidalia onions, the state vegetable. The specialty crop is produced in just a few counties in the rural southeast part of the state, where the soil is just right.

Aries Haygood with M&T Farms watches a crew of about 50 migrant workers as they hand pick the golden onions in groups of three or four.

“Right now they’re just coming in through the field,” he says. “They’re grabbing the onions out and just clipping the tops and roots getting them prepared to bring to the packing house.”

It’s a labor-intensive process that machines just can’t do because they’d bruise the delicate crop — a $140 million-a-year industry.

This farm has 500 acres of onions with some 80,000 plants per acre, so Haygood relies heavily on migrant workers for help.

“Our biggest fear is that because of the way the bill could be structured we won’t be able to find enough workers to do the work that we need done in a short amount of time,” he says.

‘Livelihood On The Line’

Just a few miles east, R.T. Stanley Jr. has been growing Vidalia onions since the 1970s. He’s also troubled by the immigration law, which he says is already affecting his workers.

“If they’re scared they’ll go to other states instead of Georgia because we have this new law,” he says. “And I’m worried about that.”

Stanley says experienced workers can earn as much as $200 a day. He says he’s tried to hire locals to do the job — working in the fields eight hours or more clipping, bending and lifting in the oppressive Georgia heat.

“They just don’t want to do this hard work. And they’ll tell you right quick,” he says. “I have ‘em to come out and work for two hours and they said, ‘I’m not doing this. It’s too hard.’ ” Read the rest of this entry »

Officials in the Obama administration say Indiana’s new law, which strips Medicaid funding for health care providers that provide abortions — like Planned Parenthood — breaches federal rules, the New York Times reports. The administration has 90 days to decide whether to approve the law, but officials have “made it clear they will not approve the changes,” according to the report — and they may act sooner to curb similar laws from passing in other states.

Republican lawmakers in virtually every state this year have pushed legislation to restrict abortion rights, as have Republicans at the federal level, but the new Indiana law represents the boldest state-based challenge to Planned Parenthood yet.

The law, which took effect May 10, bars state agencies from entering contracts or making grants with entities (besides hospitals) that perform abortions. It also breaks any such existing contracts. That means that Planned Parenthood facilities in the state lose $2 million in federal funding funneled through the state, including about $1.3 million from Medicaid funds allocated for family planning. Read the rest of this entry »

A US governor Thursday signed landmark legislation requiring France’s state-owned SNCF railway company to disclose its role in World War II deportations to Nazi death camps before it bids on US rail contracts.

The law is the first of its kind in the United States, and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley said he hoped it “will become a national model sooner rather than later.”

The law, said O’Malley, lets “Holocaust survivors who are still with us… know that the atrocities inflicted on their families and their people will never be forgotten and will never be repeated.”

The Maryland law requires the French rail group to be transparent about its involvement in hauling tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths in World War II, while a federal law that is working its way through Congress would allow lawsuits against the SNCF over its role in the Holocaust.

Ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz, who in 1942 escaped from an SNCF transport bound for the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz by prying apart the windows of a cattle car he was crammed into with 50 deportees, hailed the Maryland legislation as “a good beginning.”

But 66 years after the end of World War II, Bretholz said he mainly “wants a declaration of contrition from the SNCF — ‘Yes, we’ve done it, we are guilty.’”

Bretholz wrote a book about his escape and survival in World War II, telling a story of 1,000 Jews packed 50 to a rail car who were with him on that November morning in 1942 when he and 1,000 others were shipped out of Drancy, near Paris..

Many died en route to Auschwitz and 773 were gassed on arrival at the Nazi death camp in southern Poland. Only Bretholz and a friend of his escaped.

“Nothing can bring back the dead people. What I want mainly is for justice to be done. At least a contrite statement — ‘we’ve done something very wrong, we have done something that is entirely inhumane,’” Bretholz told AFP. Read the rest of this entry »