links for 2011-04-18

"A Multnomah County jury awarded a 33-year-old woman $82,000 Thursday, saying they wanted to send Portland police a message: Hand over a business card the next time a citizen asks for one.

"Several jurors who spoke to The Oregonian after the verdict in Multnomah County Circuit Court said police weren’t dealing with an urgent or dangerous situation on the evening of Feb. 13, 2009 — when Shei’Meka Newmann questioned what she thought was an unnecessarily rough arrest of a fellow MAX rider. It would have taken only a few seconds for an officer to hand Newmann a card, jurors said."

"Welcome to the highly developed, long existing world of alternative medicine as practiced in Hispanic communities in Las Vegas and across the U.S. These botanicas and other medical venues — improvised or not — are favored by people who can’t afford Western-style care or have little interest in doctors who don’t understand the highly ingrained, ancient ways many cultures have when it comes to their healing practices."

"The State Legislature this week passed a bill that puts Georgia in a league with Arizona, the first state to empower the local and state police to demand documentation of residency and to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally."

"A train carrying Tunisian immigrants from Italy was halted at the French border Sunday in an escalation of an international dispute over the fate of North African migrants fleeing political unrest for refuge in Europe.

"But France blamed what it said were hundreds of activists on the train planning a demonstration in France, and posing a problem to public order. Traffic was re-established by evening – but not before Italy lodged a formal protest."

"The study also indicates that Brazil is the world leader in the murders of homosexuals. In the United States, 14 murders of transvestites were reported in 2010, while in Brazil there were 110 murders. Furthermore, the risk of a homosexual being killed violently in Brazil is 785 percent greater than in the United States.

"According to Mott, the increase is the result of an increase of violence and impunity. 'There is an overall increase in murders. Besides that, fewer than ten percent of the murderers are sentenced and imprisoned. Currently, the visibility of gays is greater, since many are coming out and that provokes an increase of intolerance.'”

"The controversy over the African migrants, who have changed the face of some areas of south Tel Aviv, touches on core questions of Israel’s self-definition as both a Jewish and democratic state. A nation of immigrants created as a shelter for Jews after the Holocaust and an active participant in drafting the postwar U.N. convention on refugees, it is now pondering ways to stem a flow of people who say they are fleeing persecution in their own countries.