All the Feds Men: The War on Drugs in a For Profit Prison System

For good or bad, the real deep effects of a Presidential reign in America are not seen for generations.  The effects of a President’s vision for America and the laws they get passed to make that vision a reality have real life consequences.  Consequences that the average person feels for the rest of their lives, their children’s lives and grandchildren’s lives.

For instance, one of the first laws that was passed with bipartisan support in the infancy of the Clinton Administration was the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).  That was quite a feat since Republicans had fought against FMLA since 1984.

Excerpt:

The FMLA was introduced in Congress every year from 1984 to 1993 and was blocked repeatedly by entrenched, well-funded opponents. For years we built and nurtured a strong, broad-based coalition and led fierce and tireless advocacy. Congress passed the legislation in 1991 and 1992 — but it was vetoed both times by President George H.W. Bush…

The end of the story is well known — the FMLA passed with bipartisan support in January 1993 and was signed by President Clinton as the first accomplishment of his new administration. It was a historic day for women and families, and one of our proudest moments as an organization.

Prior to FMLA the illness of a family member or the addition of a child could have cost you your job.  With the passage of FMLA men were able to take an unpaid leave to contribute to the care and nurturing of their child in the first months of their lives.  Today fathers are equal partners in the raising of their children, unlike any generation before.

One of the most egregious effects of presidential visions for America was the “War on Drugs” and the effects have been devastating for multiple generations.  

Excerpt:

Nixon and the Generation Gap

In the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent, the government halted scientific research to evaluate their medical safety and efficacy.

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer. In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use.

So the placement of marijuana as a Schedule One drug, (the most dangerous drug with no medicinal purposes) was to be temporary until a commission he appointed could review the drug.  That Republican commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1972.  So what did President Nixon do?

Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.

States began to follow Nixon’s “war on drugs,” first with New York enacting the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in 1973. The laws, named for then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, required long mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to life for even first-time, nonviolent drug offenses. Gov. Rockefeller said it was time to take a criminal justice approach to drug policy. Other states followed New York’s example.

President Carter ran on a platform to decriminalize marijuana.

The 1970s and Marijuana

Then, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on a campaign platform that included marijuana decriminalization. There was even movement towards marijuana decriminalization in Congress — in October 1977, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use, but the measure never received enough support to become law.

When you talk about the effects of a presidential reign being realized generations later, you must look at the devastation caused by Reagan’s zealous, profit driven war on drugs.

The 1980s and 90s: Drug Hysteria

The presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to nearly 500,000 by 2000.

In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nation’s “number one problem” was just 2-6 percent. The figure grew through the remainder of the 1980s, driven largely by the country’s fixation on crack-cocaine, until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percent – one of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in polling history. Within less than a year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest. However, the resulting political hysteria had already led to the passage of draconian penalties at the state and federal levels. Even as the drug scare faded from the public mind, these policies produced escalating levels of arrests and incarceration.

With the Reagan crusade of war on drugs and massive incarcerations came the privatization of America’s prisons for profit.

            Excerpt:

Prison Privatization and the Use of Incarceration

Overview: Private sector involvement in prisons is not new — federal and state governments have had a long history of contracting out specific services to private firms, including medical services, food preparation, vocational training, and inmate transportation. 

The 1980s, though, ushered in a new era of prison privatization. With a burgeoning prison population resulting from the “war on drugs” and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons.

Today, the privatization of prisons refers both to the takeover of existing public facilities by private operators and to the building and operation of new and additional prisons by for-profit prison companies. (Many of the new prisons, additionally, are built to house out-of-state inmates.)

So the war on drugs gave birth to a highly profitable, Wall Street profit driven prison system.  After all, who is more vulnerable to predators than locked up people with no rights?

This gave rise to ancillary services companies raking in the big bucks on captive consumers.

One such company that was birthed out of Reagan’s War on Drugs is a company called Global Links.  According to Prison Legal News:

Nationwide PLN Survey Examines Prison Phone Contracts, Kickbacks
by John E. Dannenberg

An exhaustive analysis of prison phone contracts nationwide has revealed that with only limited exceptions, telephone service providers offer lucrative kickbacks (politely termed “commissions”) to state contracting agencies – amounting on average to 42% of gross revenues from prisoners’ phone calls – in order to obtain exclusive, monopolistic contracts for prison phone services.


These contracts are priced not only to unjustly enrich the telephone companies by charging much higher rates than those paid by the general public, but are further inflated to cover the commission payments, which suck over $143 million per year out of the pockets of prisoners’ families – who are the overwhelming recipients of prison phone calls. Averaging a 42% kickback nationwide, this indicates that the phone market in state prison systems is worth more than an estimated $362 million annually in gross revenue.

Prisoners don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during those time periods.

Holy cow, $362 million annually that prisoner’s families must pay or no contact.  I wonder why that is so high. 

The phone contracts were reviewed to determine the service provider; the kickback percentage; the annual dollar amount of the kickbacks; and the rates charged for local calls, intrastate calls (within a state based on calls from one Local Access and Transport Area to another, known as interLATA), and interstate calls (long distance between states). To simplify this survey, only collect call and daytime rates were analyzed.

Around 30 states allow discounted debit and/or prepaid collect calls, which provide lower prison phone rates (much lower in some cases). However, since other states don’t offer such options and not all prisoners or their families have access to debit or prepaid accounts, only collect calls – which are available in all prison systems except Iowa’s – were compared. Also, while telephone companies sometimes provide reduced rates for evening and nighttime calls, many prisoners don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during those time periods.

Yes, prisoners don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during hours of reduced rates.  As we know from the Sentencing Project’s article, due to the war on drugs, the privatization of prisons and the overcrowding, many of the new prisons, are built to house out-of-state inmates.

CaaChing!  Global Link makes out big time if prisoners are shipped out of state.  Their families probably can’t afford to visit them, so phone calls are all they have.   According to Global Link’s website:

HAVE YOU RECENTLY had a loved one arrested and/or incarcerated in a County, State or Federal facility that is "long distance" from you?  

                        OR 

ARE YOU CURRENTLY paying $5-$20 per inmate call because they are billed as "long distance" with "per minute" charges? 

FACT: The ONLY way to save money on inmate calls is to have a phone number that is "local" to your inmate's jail. 

WHY?  Without a LOCAL number your cost for jail calls will include very expensive long distance "per minute" fees, which will cost you as much as $25 per call. 

FACT: Our local numbers save you up to 80%.  By being LOCAL to the jail, they enable you to avoid the costly "long distance" & "per minute" fees. 

According to Robert Woodson, who was a recent guest on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” Global Links monopoly on prison telephone services includes 470 correctional systems.  Global Links pays a $40K signing contract and then prisons make $270 million/year by charging families 7 times what outside people pay for phone calls to and from prisons.    Those companies are worth $1.2 billion dollars.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department has announced a new criteria for expedited clemency applications for the victims of those unjust sentences.  According to Reason Magazine:

Today Deputy Attorney General James Cole announced new criteria for expedited consideration of clemency applications by President Obama, focusing on prisoners serving sentences longer than the ones currently imposed for similar offenses.  "Older, stringent punishments that are out of line with sentences imposed under today's laws erode people's confidence in our criminal justice system," Cole said. "I am confident that this initiative will go far to promote the most fundamental of American ideals—equal justice under law."

It seems plausible that thousands of federal prisoners could meet Cole's criteria. According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), more than 23,000 federal prisoners have served at least 10 years. Drug offenders, who account for half of federal prisoners, will be the main beneficiaries of the new policy. FAMM estimates, for example, that 8,800 federal prisoners could benefit from retroactive application of shorter crack sentences enacted by Congress in 2010.

So, when Deputy Attorney General Cole announced new clemency guidelines for releasing some of these low level prisoners who received sentences that far outweighed the seriousness of their crimes, it is being met with fierce resistance from the prison industry represented by Republican Senators.  From NewsMax:

According to this article at “NewsMax”:

Senate Republicans Rip Obama's Plan to Pardon More Drug Offenders

Wednesday, 23 Apr 2014 11:02 PM

By Todd Beamon

Top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday slammed President Barack Obama for again trying to circumvent Congress with a plan to consider clemency for more convicted nonviolent drug offenders.

Sen. Jeff Sessions called it "an alarming abuse of the pardon power."

"The president is now implementing through executive action what Congress expressly chose not to pass into law," the Alabama senator charged. "These are uncharted waters.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, said that "the president has authority to grant clemency to certain individuals who are no longer dangerous to the community."

"But I hope President Obama is not seeking to change sentencing policy unilaterally," he added. "Congress, not the president, has authority to make sentencing policy.

The panel's ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, cautioned: "The new guidelines are one thing on paper, but we'll need to see how they actually play out in practice.

"The bigger point we need to discuss is how Congress can best lower some sentences or time served and raise other sentences for crimes such as child pornography, terrorism, sexual assault, domestic violence, and various fraud offenses," he said.

Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas called for "meaningful reform of our nation's prison system," which "requires a well-thought-out proposal for using rehabilitation, jobs, and training to help prisoners re-enter society — not an election-year push with no plan to reduce their risk of becoming repeat offenders."

Yes, the GOP doesn’t want any Administration to change the sentencing guidelines that would cut into the profits of the GOP’s War on Drugs Prison Planet.

Let’s hope the Holder Justice Department does not cave to the GOP demands for any sentencing changes to be legislated through the GOP dominated congress. 

So as previously stated, for good or bad, the real deep effects of a Presidential reign in America are not seen for generations.  It’s time to drive a stake through the heart of the Nixon/Reagan prison industrial complex.

By Patricia Baeten

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US Supreme Court: Wealth and Privilege Not Diversity to Determine College Admissions

The United States Supreme Court decided in a 6-2 decision to uphold a Michigan amendment to their constitution banning the use of racial preferences in college admissions. 

With the majority of the Supreme Court consisting of justices having either served in the Reagan Administration or holding extremely partisan Republican views, it was not surprising.  Affirmative action and voting rights laws have been decimated in the United States of America by these justices with lifelong appointments to the Highest Court.

Reagan’s record on civil rights was abysmal and appalling to civil rights advocates, but admired and fostered by states’ rights advocates. 

Reagan’scivil rights legacy:

Supported Bob Jones Univ.’s miscegeny policy, inadvertently.

The president was so cut off from the counsel of black Americans that he sometimes did not even realize when he was offending them. One example occurred when Reagan sided with Bob Jones University in a lawsuit to obtain federal tax exemptions that had been denied by the IRS. The IRS denied tax exemptions to segregated private schools. Many of them were schools such as Bob Jones University, which enrolled a handful of minority students but prohibited interracial dating and marriage. It was the basis of this discrimination that the IRS denied the tax exemption.

Source: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p.521-22 , Jul 2, 1991

Opposed Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “humiliating to South”

Reagan never supported the use of federal power to provide blacks with civil rights. He opposed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Reagan said in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South.” While he made political points with white southerners on this issue, he was sensitive to any suggestion that his stands on civil rights issues were politically or racially motivated, and he typically reacted to such criticisms as attacks on his personal integrity.

Source: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p. 520 , Jul 2, 1991

Yep, that was good old Reagan.  Reagan fought to overturn the Voting Rights and Affirmative Action.  Back in March of 1988, George E. Curry wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON — President Reagan, setting the stage for a showdown with Congress on civil rights, Wednesday vetoed a bill that would restore federal protections for minority groups, women, the elderly and the physically disabled.

It had been anticipated that Reagan would veto the Civil Rights Restoration Act even though it had been passed by wide margins in the House and Senate. The President said the act would ``vastly and unjustifiably extend the power of the federal government over the decisions and affairs of private organizations.

The act affects any business or institution that accepts federal funds in its operations.

Tuesday’s decision by 6 uber-conservative state’s rights advocates returns our country to a time when higher education is reserved for the wealthy, privileged children of the powerful.  These justices have been completing the Reagan dream.

In June 2013 the Roberts Court decimated the voting rights act.  According to the Washington Post:

A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday invalidated a crucial component of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, ruling that Congress has not taken into account the nation’s racial progress when singling out certain states for federal oversight.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the other conservative members of the court in the majority.

The Reagan legacy of states’ rights lives on.  And, what was the result of the misguided ruling by 5 men to overturn years of hard fought civil rights legislation?

Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the law requiring nine states to submit voting law changes to the federal government for pre-clearance, five* are already moving ahead with voter ID laws, some of which had already been rejected as discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act.

The spate of new and potentially discriminatory laws is exactly why proponents of the Voting Rights Act argued that Section 4, the pre-clearance requirement, should remain in place.

Before 1965, when the law was first passed, state and local governments came up with ever-inventive ways to keep blacks from voting, forcing the federal government to launch countless legal battles. When Texas was prohibited from holding all-white primaries in 1927, for example, it passed a new law to allow the party leadership to decide who could vote. They chose an all-white primary.

“Early attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her fierce dissent of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place. This Court repeatedly encountered the remarkable ‘variety and persistence’ of laws disenfranchising minority citizens,” she continued.

Joseph Stalin said ‘It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes”.  Stalin would be jealous of the GOP.  It’s not only who counts the votes, it’s who is allowed to vote and who chooses the candidates on the ballot.

History of Affirmative Action

The NationalCouncil on State Legislatures April 7, 2014 article writes:

Excerpt:

Affirmative action policies initially focused on improving opportunities for African Americans in employment and education. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 outlawing school segregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 improved life prospects for African Americans. In 1965, however, only five percent of undergraduate students, one percent of law students, and two percent of medical students in the country were African American. President Lyndon Johnson, an advocate for affirmative action, signed an Executive Order in 1965 that required government contractors to use affirmative action policies in their hiring to increase the number of minority employees.

               

President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair."

The reasoning of the majority in upholding Michigan’s constitutional amendment to ban affirmative action is really interesting:

Kennedy stressed that the case was not about the constitutionality or merits of the race-conscious admissions policies of colleges and universities, but instead hinged on whether voters in the state may choose to prohibit consideration of such preferences.

Opponents of affirmative action claim that affirmative action amplifies racial prejudice and that affirmative action programs are condescending to minorities because it is implied that these groups need affirmative action in order to succeed in higher education.

So, one may deduce that the Supreme Court really leveled the playing field by doing minorities a favor.  Oh, contraire.  According to Business Insider:

Legacies Still Get a Staggeringly Unfair College Admissions Advantage

Legacy admissions — giving children of alumni preference in the admissions process — has a long history in American higher education. Kids often follow their parents to the same school, frequently applying with the hope that they'll get a favorable look. 

How much of a boost do they get?  A 2011 study of 30 elite institutions found that the children of undergraduate alumni ("primary legacies") were, on average, 45.1% more likely to get in.

An earlier study by Princeton's Thomas Espenshade found that the legacy advantage was equivalent to a 160-point swing on an SAT score. 

That's not a tiebreaker between equally qualified applicants; it's a massive advantage. That's particularly clear at the Ivies: 

Harvard's legacy admissions rate hovers around 30%. 

For Princeton's class of 2015, 33% of legacy applicants were admitted.

Yale says it admits 20 to 25% of legacy applicants.

Keep in mind, those legacy admissions rates are self-reported.  

Yes, keep in mind, those legacy admissions are self-reported. You might say, but those are the Ivies, the Michigan is a public university. 

Selective public universities, including the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia favor legacies as well. 

There's some evidence that the practice has declined. The proportion of legacy admissions is lower than it used to be. In 1958, the legacy admissions rate was 70%. 

Now, that’s interesting.  The proportion of legacy admissions is lower than it used to be.  Do y0u suppose that’s due to affirmative action?

Legacy applicants tend to be white and wealthy. Legacy admissions therefore contribute to the rich kid problem at elite schools. Underrepresented minorities make up about 12.5% of the applicant pool at selective schools. They make up only 6.7% of the legacy pool.

So 6 members of the Roberts’ court have ruled that wealth and privilege not diversity will be the determining factor in college admissions.  Maybe the U.S. will get back to the 1958 legacy admission rate of 70% for the rich and powerful.

By Patricia Baeten 

Easter Sunday: Pope Francis vs the CIA

 

Holy Week was an epic battle of the Pope and Putin fighting the CIA’s aggression in Ukraine and Syria.   In his Easter Sunday address the Pope prayed for peace.

            Pope Francis

Pope Francis, in his Easter address before a huge crowd, on Sunday denounced the "immense wastefulness" in the world while many go hungry and called for an end to conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Africa.

 "We ask you, Lord Jesus, to put an end to all war and every conflict, whether great or small, ancient or recent," he said in his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message…

The pope called on the international community to "boldly negotiate the peace long awaited and long overdue" in Syria, where more than 150,000 people have been killed in the civil war, a third of them civilians. Millions have fled the country.

"We pray in a particular way for Syria, that all those suffering the effects of the conflict can receive needed humanitarian aid and that neither side will again use deadly force, especially against the defenseless civil population," he said.

Vladimir Putin

BEIRUT — Syrian forces have overrun a strategic rebel stronghold close to the Lebanese border, the military said Sunday, in the latest battlefield victory for the government of President Bashar Assad.

The official news service reported that Syrian troops were in "full control" of Yabroud, a longtime rebel bastion and key logistics base for opposition supplies and insurgents entering Syria from Lebanese territory.

Aiding Syrian troops in the battle were militiamen from Hezbollah, the Lebanese group that has dispatched units to fight alongside Assad's forces.

The capture of Yabroud, coming as the Syrian war enters its fourth year, underscores how much the conflict has turned in the government's favor.

CIA

Syria’sopposition fighters have been supplied with U.S.-made antitank missiles, the first time a major American weapons system has appeared in rebel hands.

It is unclear how the rebels obtained the wire-guided missiles, which are capable of penetrating heavy armor and fortifications and are standard in the U.S. military arsenal. The United States has sold them in the past to Turkey, among other countries, and the Pentagon approved the sale of 15,000 of the weapons to Saudi Arabia in December. Both countries aid Syrian opposition groups.

Their appearance in Syria coincides with a U.S. commitment this year to escalate a CIA-run program to supply and train vetted “moderate” rebel groups and to improve coordination with other opposition backers.

Pope Francis

Francis asked God to "enlighten and inspire the initiatives that promote peace in Ukraine so that all those involved, with the support of the international community, will make every effort to prevent violence and, in a spirit of unity and dialogue, chart a path for the country's future."

Vladimir Putin

Accordingto this source, in September 2013, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector (Sector Pravy), allegedly in the context of a university exchange program. In reality, the guests were not students, and many were over 40. Contrary to their official schedule, they did not go to the Warsaw University of Technology, but headed instead for the police training center in Legionowo, an hour’s drive from the capital. There, they received four weeks of intensive training in crowd management, person recognition, combat tactics, command skills, behavior in crisis situations, protection against gases used by police, erecting barricades, and especially shooting, including the handling of sniper rifles.

Such training took place in September 2013, while the Maidan Square protests were allegedly triggered by a decree suspending preparations for the signing of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, which was issued by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on November 21, i.e. two months later.

The Polish weekly refers to photographs attesting to the training, which show the Ukrainians in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing.

CIA

WASHINGTON— The United States is considering deploying about 150 soldiers for military exercises to begin in Poland and Estonia in the next few weeks, a Western official said Saturday. The exercises would follow Russia’s buildup of forces near its border with Ukraine and its annexation last month of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

…. Ground exercises in Poland and Estonia would last about two weeks, but such exercises would continue off and on over time, the official said, and other locations in Eastern Europe would be considered. The official was not authorized to discuss the plan by name because it has not been made final and requested anonymity.

Pope Francis

He prayed to God to "help us to overcome the scourge of hunger, aggravated by conflicts and by the immense wastefulness for which we are often responsible."

             Vladimir Putin

            Besieged and terrified … and the food is about to run out for Damascus refugees

The desperate residents of a besieged district of Damascus are expected to run out of food on Sunday, leaving 18,000 people facing starvation and leading relief agencies to declare the crisis "unprecedented in living memory".

Food packages have not been delivered to the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp for 10 days, and Syrian authorities are not expected to allow food trucks in over the Easter weekend. Residents have resorted to eating leaves and animal feed. Some say they cannot get access even to scraps, as a desperate blockade by government forces, in place for nearly 18 months, continues to cut off supplies.

Syrian officials have allowed only sporadic access to Yarmouk, to relief groups led by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), since the first pleas for help from residents early last year.

"It is unprecedented in living memory for a UNRWA-assisted population to be subject to abject desperation in this way and the sheer humanitarian facts cry out for a response," organisation spokesman Chris Gunness told the Observer. "Without that, the humanity of all of us must be seriously questioned.

"It is an affront to all of us that in a capital city of a member state, women are dying in childbirth for lack of medical care, there are incidents of malnutrition among infants and people are resorting to eating animal feed."

CIA:

VETERANSTODAY:  The West seems bound and determined to destroy Syria, carve it up into various puppet cantons so the gas pipeline from Qatar can be brought into  Europe through Northern Syria. They also want to get the Russians and Assad out of the way to exploit the offshore Eastern Med oil and gas deposits and undermine Russia's European gas markets…

Yarmouk Palestinian camp, Damascus. — This observer does not write these words causally and he is no huge fan of most intellectually lazy quick spun internet conspiracy theories, too many of which appear given to flights from reality when facts get complicated and dispositive information is obscure.

However, after months of studying the political, social, military, and economic situation in Yarmouk camp, and based on some insightful meetings with former camp residents and PLO stalwarts who have been active in the cause of Palestine going back to the 1980’s or earlier, Yarmouk’s survival prospects appear fatally bleak….

In part, Yarmouk’s curse and current fate is due to its location. It is a triangular slice pointing straight into central downtown Damascus, a strategic last piece in the mosaic required to make a strong rebel advance on the capital.

Pope Francis

          

    

The 77-year-old pope, wearing white vestments for the service, prayed for the protection of those members of society who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and abandonment--women, children, the elderly and immigrants.

Easter is the most important day on the liturgical calendar because it commemorates the day Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead after his crucifixion, and the Church sees it as a symbol of hope, peace and reconciliation among peoples and nations.

Vladimir Putin

In the city of Slovyansk, Ari reported on Morning Edition, protesters say Ukrainian military personnel carriers approached Wednesday with soldiers who were looking "bedraggled, tired and dirty." Protesters say that after the soldiers were given food and water and had a "nice conversation" with residents, Russian flags were raised on the vehicles and they went "rolling off to Slovyansk."

CIA

"(Washington) expresses its disgust with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest in Kiev's Maidan Square with riot police, bulldozers and batons, rather than with respect for democratic rights and human dignity," he said.

"This response is neither acceptable nor does it befit a democracy."

Later Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State, handed sandwiches to both protesters and riot police in Kiev's Independence Square, along with US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R Pyatt.

Pope Francis

He also asked for an end to violence in Iraq, Venezuela, South Sudan and the Central Africa Republic.

Francis appealed for more medical attention for the victims of the deadly Ebola epidemic in Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and care for those suffering from many other diseases spread through neglect and dire poverty.

He called for a "halt to the brutal terrorist attacks" in Nigeria, an apparent reference to Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which earlier this month abducted some 130 girls from a school in the north of the country.

The Easter Sunday services were the culmination of four hectic days of Holy Week activities for the pontiff.

By Patricia Baeten