Watch the video to see how We Love Our Land came up with their idea on how to fight the Enbridge pipeline. It's quite clever, and the native American Indian music is beautiful.

#RLblockade Nizhawendaamin Inaakiminaan (We Love Our Land) is a group of Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, joined by blockaders and solidarity activists. The encampment is located in Northern Minnesota near the town of Leonard. Tom Poorbear, vice president of the Ogalala Sioux Nation declared, "We fully support the Red Lake Nation and its members who are opposing the Enbridge pipeline to stop the flow and remove the illegal pipeline from their land." The occupation of the Red Lake Ceded Land began Thursday, February 28. Similar action camps around the United States have been fighting the fossil fuel industry to stop the destruction of sacred lands. Red Lake tribal members demand the immediate shutdown of the flow through the pipes and intend to remain on the land until their demand is met. "I imagine everyone involved in the planetwide resistance to fossil fuel is watching them with thanks," said Bill McKibben founder of 350.org and leader of the recent Forward on Climate Rally. Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene First Nation stated, "We fully support and are inspired by the Red Lake members and their resistance as it is stated in the Mother Earth Accord; affirming our responsibility to protect and preserve for our descendents, the inherent sovereign rights of our indigenous nations, the rights of property owners, and all inherent human rights." Most band members were unaware of Enbridge's illegal activity until the encampment started. "When I was informed about the illegal trespassing of the company Enbridge on my homeland, I knew there was something I could do. I started calling as many Red Lakers as I could to try and make them aware," said Angie Palacio who initiated the encampment with the support of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Watch The Suicide Plan on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

An unforgettable portrait takes viewers inside one of the most polarizing social issues of our time. The debate over physician-assisted suicide has never been a simple one, and in the 48 states where the practice remains illegal, the issue has only grown more complicated in recent years.

Assisted suicide is legal in Oregon and Washington, but elsewhere around the nation, the right-to-die movement has struggled to make many inroads. Since 1992, efforts to legalize the practice have failed in California, Michigan, Maine, and most recently, in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, 41 states have passed laws making it a crime to assist in a suicide, legislation that has led many who want help dying deeper into the shadows.

As FRONTLINE reported in The Suicide Plan, this underground world of assisted suicide has added new layers of moral and legal complexity to one of the most polarizing issues in America. For example, what does it mean to actually assist in a suicide? Who, if anyone, should be allowed to pursue aid in dying, and what safeguards should be in place in states where the practice is legal?

There will be a live chat with filmmakers Miri Navasky and Karen O'Connor at Frontline's website to discuss these questions and take yours in a live chat on Thursday at 2:00 pm ET. You can leave your question now, and return to join the live discussion.

Hand out photo from the Irish Times on Wednesday shows Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused a termination of her pregnancy at a hospital in Galway.

A 31-year-old woman admitted to a hospital in Galway, Ireland, late last month with severe back pain was revealed to be miscarrying, but doctors repeatedly refused to abort the fetus.

Savita Halappanavar, who was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, eventually developed septicemia -- a life-threatening infection -- and she died in the intensive care unit a week later.

Via:

Praveen Halappanavar told the Irish Times that his wife, Savita, was suffering intense pain and had been told her baby would not survive. Upset but resigned to losing her child, she was denied an abortion despite repeated pleas with their Galway hospital as she suffered shakes and vomiting, Halappanavar told the newspaper.

“The consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita said, ‘I am neither Irish nor Catholic,’ but they said there was nothing they could do,” Halappanavar told the newspaper from India.

Abortions are illegal in Ireland except in cases where the mother's life might be at risk.

The fetal heartbeat stopped on the third day, and the dead fetus was removed, but it was too late for Savita. Her condition worsened, and by Saturday she was in organ failure and died shortly after.

The hospital extended its sympathy to the Halappanavar family, but could not discuss any of the details of the case due to investigations underway by both the Health Service Executive, and an internal hospital investigation.

By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

Answers to homeowners' questions about the Independent Foreclosure Review.The administration's website for the foreclosure prevention program. Provides an FAQ, homeowner examples, and other tools to see whether you might qualify for the program.A list of HUD-approved housing counseling agencies nationwide.Tips for homeowners from the Federal Trade Commission.These rules lay out how mortgage servicers are supposed to conduct the program.A finance and economics blog that provides news and metrics on the state of the housing market.

Late last year, the country's bank regulators launched a massive program to evaluate millions of foreclosure cases and compensate homeowners who fell victim to the banks' flawed or illegal practices. Regulators dubbed it the "Independent Foreclosure Review" to emphasize that the banks would not be making key decisions about loans they had made or serviced.

But a raft of evidence — internal Bank of America memos and emails obtained by ProPublica, interviews with two bank staff members who have worked on the review, and little-noticed documents released late last year by a federal banking regulator — throw the independence of the review into serious doubt. Together, they indicate that Bank of America — the financial giant with the largest number of homeowners eligible for the program — is performing much of the work itself.

The ultimate decision as to whether and how much a homeowner will be compensated is not made by Bank of America, the evidence shows, but is based largely on work that the bank itself performs. One current employee called that crucial judgment "only a matter of double checking" the bank's work.

Moreover, the bank gets a chance to challenge that key decision before it becomes final — an opportunity not given to homeowners.

Bank of America strongly objects to ProPublica's analysis. It insists that the independence of the review has never been compromised. It maintains that its role "has been and remains gathering documents." While it may discover "an error" in the course of that work, the bank says that an independent review conducted by an outside firm "is the sole and final basis" for determining whether homeowners have been harmed and how much compensation they merit.

A bank spokesman questioned ProPublica's fairness, writing that "there are no facts to support your claim. Yet it seems you have made a decision to move forward with a story based on speculation and a preconceived notion of this issue."

Bank of America's regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), also maintained that the review was independent. After seeing the internal bank documents obtained by ProPublica, the OCC investigated, officials said. The OCC concluded that the documents, which include a memo sent by Bank of America executives to the hundreds of bank employees working on the Independent Foreclosure Review, are "incomplete and inaccurate," said Deputy Comptroller for Large Bank Supervision Morris Morgan.

But the documents and interviews tell a sharply different story, and the stakes are high. The maximum cash compensation a homeowner can win through the foreclosure review is $125,000. Regulators set different amounts for the various errors and abuses homeowners endured, and those distinctions can result in widely differing payments — for instance $15,000 instead of $125,000 for homeowners who suffered very similar abuses.

ProPublica provided the internal Bank of America documents to Sen. Robert Menendez, who chaired a congressional hearing overseeing the foreclosure reviews. He said, "Congress was led to believe that the consultants would be analyzing homeowner foreclosures completely independently of the Wall Street banks, but these memos raise serious questions as to whether that's true. If banks are trying to skew the results in their favor, regulators should stop that immediately."

The senator also said that regulators "should ensure that homeowners have the same opportunities banks do to influence and contest the findings of the foreclosure reviews."

The Document Trail

Federal regulators designed the program to work like this: Each of the big banks would hire an "independent consultant" to conduct reviews of the bank's foreclosure cases. To ensure that these consultants really were independent, the regulators had to approve them. In September 2011, Bank of America hired Promontory Financial Group to be its independent consultant.

Two months later, the OCC released the contract between Bank of America and Promontory. The 118-page document received little notice, but it clearly spells out that Promontory will make its decision only after reviewing the bank's own analysis of each homeowner's claim.

When a homeowner sends in a complaint about the way Bank of America handled his or her foreclosure, the contract states, the bank "will process the complaint and provide the complaint, supporting resolution documentation, report of its findings, and proposed resolution to Promontory for independent review and decision concerning the complaint at issue." Promontory, the contract continues, will then review the "complaints and claims, together with [Bank of America's] recommended resolution and supporting documentation, and provide a decision on the complaint."

Job ads posted in the fall of 2011 for "Foreclosure File Reviewer" positions at Bank of America reflect this scope of work. Among the job duties listed in one ad were "Complete Claim Review and perform Harm Evaluation according to Promontory/OCC definitions"; "If there was financial injury, determine the amount"; and "Perform final determination of Harm." The ads were posted by staffing companies, but the bank confirmed to ProPublica it was the ultimate employer.

An internal bank document created to train employees on their role in the reviews also describes a "claim review" process at the bank. Employees would be running tests on the files to see if there was "harm done to the customer as a result of faulty servicing."

Continue reading »

As the United Nations marks Thursday as International Day of the Girl Child, the world body's focus this year has been on ending child marriages.

In Afghanistan, the practice is illegal under the law but still common. In one case, an Afghan woman in Kabul was forced into a marriage at the age of 11.

Al Jazeera's Jennifer Glasse speaks to a woman in Kabul who was forced into marriage at age of 11.

Ruby Brown of North Minneapolis won a renegotiated mortgage from Bank of America, just days before her home of 17 years was to be auctioned off in a sheriff's sale. Her settlement marks the fourth negotiated victory for Occupy Homes MN, the activist group formed to help troubled homeowners in the Twin Cities area fight to avoid foreclosure, and homelessness.

Via:

Brown fell into foreclosure after years of struggling with inflated payments in an adjustable rate mortgage — a predatory lending practice which is now illegal. She eventually received a trial modification and complied with its requirements for 12 months, but was dropped from the program anyway. The confusion surrounding her modification prompted her to ask the question: “The people at the top (of Bank of America), do they really know what’s going on?”

Brown began working with Occupy Homes MN and Neighborhoods Organizing for Change six months ago. Like others who have taken the pledge to stay in their homes, she felt her shame dissolve. “It generated a fight in me,” she said. “I didn’t realize there were so many people in the same situation, that it wasn’t just me.”

Ruby Brown has a message for others going through similar situations:

“Come out of the foreclosure closet. You know, there’s help. There are people around the country that are fighting. There’s power in numbers. There are a lot of people going through the same thing. There’s no shame in what is going on. It’s not your fault. It’s an epidemic, and we have to fight for the antidote.”

Via:

ALLIES of global hacker group Anonymous have put on their masks and picked up litter in a Tokyo park as a protest against tough illegal download laws.

The 80-strong collective said yesterday's busy bee was a protest against Japan's tougher laws against illegal downloads.

In light rain, they took part in an "anonymous cleaning service" for one hour in a park and on pavements in the shopping and entertainment hub of Shibuya, a change from the group's trademark website attacks.

They were dressed in black and wore masks of Guy Fawkes, the central figure in England's 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up parliament, which have become a symbol of protests by the loosely linked alliance around the world.

The group said that cyber attacks are the work of other global Anonymous networks in the global internet community, and that they prefer "constructive and productive solutions."

"We want to make our fellow citizens aware of the problem with a productive message."

At the weekly demonstration in Nabi Salih, two Palestinian women stand their ground in the face of the infamous "skunk truck." The skunk truck is a mounted water cannon that sprays a foul smelling liquid at high pressures.

The village of Nabi Salih, home to over 500 Palestinians, holds weekly demonstrations protesting the illegal confiscation of their lands by Israelis in the settlement Halamish. The Israeli Occupation Forces respond frequently with excesses of force, as the video here demonstrates.

[Via]

Thousands of people from civil rights groups walked down New York City's Fifth Avenue in total silence Sunday, marching in protest of "stop-and-frisk" tactics employed by city police.

The quiet was interrupted only by the tapping of feet on the pavement and birds chirping as protesters strode along Central Park from Harlem to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's town house on the Upper East Side townhouse.

For almost 30 city blocks, the march moved slowly and silently. Then, as they passed Bloomberg's home on East 79th Street, the crowd erupted in protest chants. The house was blocked by police barricades.

It was not known if Bloomberg was at home when the protesters passed.

Critics say the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and searching people who police consider suspicious is illegal and humiliating to thousands of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics. Last year, the NYPD stopped more than 600,000 people, up from more than 90,000 a decade ago.

Via:

Tensions increased between police officers and a group of protesters who tried to keep walking down Fifth Avenue below East 77th Street.

Police officers on scooters lined both sides of the avenue and officers on foot formed a line to keep people on the sidewalk. Several scuffles broke out between screaming protesters and officers who pushed them behind barricades on the sidewalk.
...
"The silence ended and the people's voices came out," said Matthew Swaye, 34, a former Bronx school teacher and self-described longtime Occupy protester.

"We were told to go home and we weren't ready to go yet," said Swaye, who added that his wife, Christina Gonzalez, 25, was one of the protesters arrested in the melee.

The practice of silent marches dates to 1917, when the NAACP led a protest through New York against lynchings and segregation in the U.S.

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I haven't seen many reactions to the arrogant Baum Halloween party photos that argue for full-throated support of their horrible business practices and their even more horrible attitudes. At least, until I visited Oliver Willis' blog and found this comment from Moonbat Monitor:

If the people can’t pay their mortgage, and the investor will not agree to modify the loan, or the mortgagor doesn’t qualify for anything…..what do you expect to happen? Free houses for everyone? Yay!!! Banks don’t *want* to foreclose on homes. It costs them on average about $40,000 to do so. But at some point, the people that just can not afford these houses need to GTFO, or this market will NEVER recover. If I can’t afford my car, it will get repossessed. That’s the way the real world operates. I’m not very inclined to argue with anyone here about this, because you’re all ignorant in regards to this subject and how this works, where as I am an expert.

Anyway, we make fun of these losers where I work too. It’s awesomely hilarious. Especially when I get an escalation, and I jokingly act like Commodus from Gladiator, and give the thumbs down, thus making another putz that never should’ve had the house in the first place homeless. Go rent an apartment. Losers. A lot of these people have been sitting in these houses for years without paying a damn thing, or bothering to contact their mortgage servicer.(particularly in judicial states) We can’t go to their houses and FORCE them to fill out paperwork. Then foreclosure time finally comes, and THEN they want to complain about getting kicked out. Sorry, that isn’t the way it works. And I see it every day.

Sad that so many here are completely ignorant of the ins/outs of this industry.

Oh, isn't that all so personal responsibility-ish and everything? Only, the first condition in that commenter's sentence ignores people like this homeowner, who tried to catch up on her mortgage payments but was refused, told to modify her loan, and when that didn't work, One West foreclosed on her. Foreclosed on her, even though she had the money to catch up the loan payments. I wonder what Moonbat's explanation is for that?

Just to refresh our memories, here's a good description of what foreclosure mills like Baum do.

Foreclosure mills cut costs for banks by cutting corners—when they can’t compile the documentation needed to push families out of their homes right now, they simply fabricate the documents. Still worse, these guys illegally withhold documentation from borrowers seeking to negotiate loan modifications with their banks—effectively forcing borrowers out of their homes instead of allowing them to cut a deal with the bank. When borrowers actually do straighten things out with foreclosure mills, the scumbags slap them with huge illegal fees. Kroll details a foreclosure mill that erroneously tried to evict a Florida couple who had been paying their mortgage on time. When it became clear that the couple could not be kicked out of their home, the foreclosure mill tried to charge them $18,500 in fees for mistakes committed by the foreclosure mill and the bank. The foreclosure mill even invented two new people who it said lived in the home in order to demand four sets of legal processing fees instead of two.

Maybe this is just me, but I wouldn't be out on blogs bragging about being an expert in these things.