Policies

A report that got little mainstream media attention indicates that although the testing of rape kits—forensic exams that collect evidence of rape or sexual assault, including the perpetrator’s DNA—can be “vital for the prosecution of cases,” a backlog of untested rape kits may factor into low rape prosecution rates.

Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed. From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.

WikiLeaks on Friday published the final negotiated text for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s Intellectual Property Rights chapter, confirming that the pro-corporate pact would harm freedom of expression by bolstering monopolies while and injure public health by blocking patient access to lifesaving medicines.

Europe and North America are currently negotiating two trade deals that could turn out to be the biggest corporate power grabs in history — TTIP and CETA. The treaties read like a corporate wish-list: secret courts that can sue our governments, the removal of environmental and health regulation and the degradation of working standards.