The Ridgway Record – The Daily Press, – The Kane Republican, Friday, July 24, 2015 -5C Q&A: A look at the death of Sandra Bland in Texas jail


DALLAS (AP) — The recent release of dashboard camera video and booking records have answered some questions in the case of a Chicago-area woman who died in a Texas jail, but oth- ers remain.


Sandra Bland, who was from Naperville, Illinois, was stopped July 10 after coming to Texas to interview for a job at Prairie View A&M University, a histori- cally black college from which she graduated in 2009. The traf- fic stop for failing to signal a lane change escalated into hostility. She was arrested on a charge of assault of a public servant, ac- cused of kicking the officer, and taken to the Waller County jail in Hempstead, about 60 miles northwest of Houston. She was found dead in her cell July 13. Authorities have said the


28-year-old black woman hanged herself with a trash bag, a find- ing her family has disputed. Here's what is known so far: What does the dashcam video of the arrest show?


The video shows a routine traffic stop that became confron- tational when the officer asks Bland to put out a cigarette. She asks why, and the trooper then orders her out of the car.


She tells him she doesn't have to step out, and he continues to yell at her. At one point, he pulls a stun gun and says, "I will light you up." After she finally steps out of the vehicle, the trooper or- ders her to the side of the road, where the confrontation contin- ues off-camera but is still audi- ble. The officer says in an arrest affidavit that she swung her el- bows at him and kicked his shin after being handcuffed. ___


Why did Bland spend three nights in jail?


Family attorney Cannon Lam- bert and Bland's sister Shante Needham said they were work- ing to get the money for bail when they learned of Bland's death.


___


What's known about her health and mental state? Family members and friends say Bland had given no indica- tion that she would kill herself. But a suicide questionnaire filled out for Bland when she was booked into the jail states she told officials there she had tried to kill herself by taking pills after losing a baby. She also told them she was epileptic and was on medication for that con-


dition, though her signature ap- pears on another document that indicates she was not taking any medication. Bland had posted a video to her Facebook page in March saying she was suffering from "a little bit of depression as well as PTSD," or post-traumat- ic stress disorder. ___


What happened the morn- ing she was found dead? No cameras were in the jail cell where Bland was found, but a camera monitoring the hall outside her cell shows no one entering or leaving it between the last time she spoke with deputies — via an intercom sys- tem — and when her body was discovered about an hour later. Following Bland's death, the jail was cited by the Texas Commis- sion on Jail Standards for not observing inmates in person at least once every hour and not providing documents proving that jailers in the past year un- derwent training on interact- ing with potentially suicidal in- mates.


___ What does her autopsy say?


The Harris County medi- cal examiner's office has ruled


Bland's death suicide by hang- ing, but the full report hasn't yet been released. Her family is having an independent autopsy conducted.


___


What's the status of the trooper who arrested her? The Texas Department of Public Safety says the trooper violated traffic-stop procedures and the department's courtesy policy. Pending the outcome of the investigation, he's been as- signed to administrative duties. ___


Who's investigating? The Texas Rangers, an inves- tigative arm of the Texas De- partment of Public Safety, and the FBI are investigating. FBI spokeswoman Shauna Dunlap said the bureau is monitoring the investigation and once it's complete will review the evi- dence to determine if any fed- eral laws were violated. The Waller County district attorney says the case is being examined as thoroughly as a murder in- vestigation and will be turned over to a grand jury. ___


What's the history of the sheriff?


The case has put a spotlight


Higher minimum-wage proposals gain ground on both coasts would be


SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The push for a higher minimum wage gained momentum on both sides of the country, with New York embracing an even- tual $15 an hour for the state's 200,000 fast-food workers and the huge Uni- versity of California sys- tem announcing the same raise for its employees. "How we support our workers and their fami- lies impacts Californians who might never set foot on one of our campuses," UC President Janet Na- politano,


who oversees


10 campuses, including UCLA and Berkeley, said of Wednesday's


action.


"It's the right thing to do." The 240,000-student University of California becomes the nation's first public university to com- mit itself to the $15-an- hour wage that has be- come the rallying cry of many labor groups in re- cent months. So far, the cities of Los Angeles,


Seattle, San


Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have approved phased-in increases that eventually will take their minimum wage to $15 an hour, or about $31,200 a year. On Tuesday, Los An- geles County, the nation's most populous county, vot- ed to craft a law to do the same over five years. In New York, the state


Wage Board Wednesday endorsed a proposal to set a $15 minimum wage for workers at fast-food res- taurants with 30 or more locations.


The increase


would be phased in over three years in New York City and over six years elsewhere. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration has the final say, and he has sig- naled his support. New


York would become the first state to single out a specific industry for such an increase. The state minimum wage is now $8.75. "You cannot live and support a family on $18,000 a year in the state of New York — period," Cuomo said at a New York City rally celebrating the proposal. "This is just the beginning. We will not stop until we reach true economic justice."


Restaurant owners warned that higher wages could force them to raise prices, cut employee hours and hire fewer workers, and they said they may challenge the move in court.


"Singling out fast-food restaurants while ignor- ing other industries that hire workers who are paid under $15 is unfair and discriminatory," said Jack Bert, who owns seven Mc- Donald's restaurants in New York City.


But Rebecca Cornick, a 60-year-old woman who makes $9 an hour at a Wendy's in Brooklyn, said, "If I made $15, I could pay my rent on time, I could put food on the table, I could hold my head up." At the University of California, the hourly wage earners include stu- dents and full-time con- tract employees who work in dining halls, dorms and bookstores or labor as gar- deners, housekeepers and custodians. Many start at the state minimum wage of $9 an hour.


Napolitano said she will boost that to $13 in Oc- tober for employees who work at least 20 hours a week and will raise it some more in stages to $15 by the fall of 2017.


About 3,200 UC employ-


GM tops 2Q profit forecasts on trucks, SUVs


DETROIT (AP) — Big profits from trucks and SUVs helped General Motors overcome a sales slowdown in China, eco- nomic problems in Ven- ezuela and payments to ignition switch crash vic- tims as the automaker's second-quarter net in- come rose sixfold to nearly $1.12 billion.


The Detroit company


made 67 cents per share from April through June compared with 11 cents a year ago. The year-earli- er quarter included $1.5 billion in expenses for a string of safety recalls. GM's $2.8 billion pretax profit in North America was a second-quarter re- cord.


The strong profits


helped GM distance it- self from the recalls. Still, the company raised its estimate for what it will


spend to compensate vic- tims of crashes caused by defective ignition switch- es from $600 million to $625 million. Chief Finan- cial Officer Chuck Stevens called it a final estimate, although GM still faces multiple lawsuits and a potentially large penalty from a Justice Depart- ment criminal investiga- tion.


GM also said Thurs- day that it expects pretax profits to be better in the second half than the first, when it made $5 billion. Shares jumped more than 7 percent as the market opened.


Excluding $1.1 billion


in special items, GM made $1.29 per share, handily beating the $1.08 average of seven analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Re-


SEE GM ON PAGE 6C


ees and a much larger but undetermined number of people employed by out- side contractors at the university will receive the higher wage, UC said. The university is California's third-largest employer, with a staff of 195,000. "I just thought it was important for a public uni- versity to plant the flag here for low-wage workers and a more livable wage," said Napolitano, who was President Barack Obama's homeland security secre- tary before she assumed leadership of the univer- sity nearly two years ago. Napolitano's plan does not need approval from the university's governing Board of Regents.


The higher minimum- wage argument has gained traction amid concerns over the shrinking middle class and rising income in- equality.


Supporters argue a


higher wage floor will help lift the working poor into the middle class. Oppo- nents warn higher wages will kill jobs and lead to higher


prices. Sixteen


states have passed laws barring local governments from setting their own minimum wage.


Democrats, including presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, have said they support a higher federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour. Vice President


Joe


Biden promoted a higher minimum wage of at least $12 an hour during a stop Wednesday at a washroom equipment manufacturer in Los Angeles, where he chatted with employees as they assembled soap dis- pensers.


Biden said the wage hikes approved by the


"life-changing" for some 700,000 workers in the Los Angeles area.


"Maybe you'll be able to have meat on the table a couple of times a week instead of once a month," Biden told workers at Bo- brick Washroom Equip- ment, whose CEO backed the city's wage ordinance. Other public university systems, including ones in Washington state, Indi- ana and Tennessee, have adopted minimum wages higher than those set un- der state or federal law. But none have commit- ted to going as high as the University of California. University officials esti- mated that the raises for workers directly employed by UC will cost $14 mil- lion a year, a fraction of the system's $12.6 billion annual payroll. UC said it also expects contractors will pass some of the cost of higher wages onto the university.


The Republican leader of the California Assembly criticized the university's plan to extend the higher wage to outside contrac- tors.


"The university should be teaching engineering, not spending student dol- lars to practice social en- gineering by limiting who campuses can do business- es with," Assemblywoman Kristen Olsen said. In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, election of- ficials approved the lan- guage of a proposed bal- lot measure that would make the nation's capital the first East Coast city to adopt a $15 minimum wage. Supporters will have to gather about 23,000 sig- natures to get the proposal on next year's ballot.


on Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith. A former justice of the peace for Waller County, De- Wayne Charleston, has joined a friend of Bland's in telling coun- ty commissioners that Smith should step down, saying a rac- ist culture persists in the county. Questions have been raised about Smith's past, including about a 2007 incident for which he was disciplined.


According to Hempstead May-


or Pro Tem Patricia Chernosky, Smith, who is white, was pun- ished for using profanity and pushing a black man during an arrest that year.


After the incident Smith was suspended for two weeks with- out pay, put on probation for six months and ordered to take an- ger management classes, Cher- nosky said.


She said that Smith was fired from the post in 2008 because the city council lacked confi- dence in his abilities but that she didn't think the rationale included racism concerns. Smith said there were "a lot of accusations back in the '07, '08 era," which he called "a political thing."


"Am I a racist? No, I am not," he said.


city's mayor and county supervisors


Comcast adds Internet customers; box office pumps up revenue


NEW YORK (AP) — Despite a slowdown in subscriber growth, the In- ternet is still propelling Comcast.


The movies and theme parks in its NBCUniversal entertainment unit also bolstered results in the quarter.


The country's largest ca- ble company added 180,000 Internet customers in the April-June


quarter, the


smallest gain in at least two years. That brings its total Internet subscribers to 22.6 million.


Comcast's Internet cus- tomers surpassed its cable customers in the second quarter for the first time ever, underscoring that the future of the industry is broadband. The company finished June down 69,000 TV customers, to 22.3 mil- lion.


Fears about a larger Comcast's dominance the


of


high-speed Internet market led to the downfall in April of its deal to ac- quire Time Warner Cable. Regulators worried Comcast could undermine online video competitors by controlling how they reached many customers. Comcast this month an- nounced an Internet video service of its own — Stream — that will include broad- cast channels and HBO for $15 a month.


Stream has limitations. It's only for Comcast Inter- net customers and, unlike Dish Network's Sling TV, shows most live content only inside a customer's home network. To watch anything out-


side your home you have to log in to an individual


BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union on Thurs- day launched an antitrust case against six major U.S. movie studios and British satellite broadcaster Sky UK, in a move that could profoundly shake up the highly lucrative pay-tele- vision market in Europe. The EU's executive Commission has sent a so-called statement of ob- jections to the companies regarding what it says are "contractual restrictions" preventing EU consumers outside Britain and Ire- land from accessing the services of Sky UK. "European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channels of their choice re- gardless of where they live or travel in the EU," EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said. "Our inves- tigation shows that they cannot do this today." The companies involved are all household names


and produce some of the most popular — and prof- itable — movies around. In addition to Sky, which has cornered a large chunk of the British pay-TV mar- ket through its acquisition of sports and movie rights, the Commission sent its objections to NBCUniver- sal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Disney and Warner Bros.


In a statement, the Commission said it found clauses requiring Sky to block access to films through its online or sat- ellite pay-TV services to consumers outside Britain and Ireland — so-called "geo-blocking."


As well as preventing consumers around Eu- rope from accessing Sky's services, the Commission says contract clauses that grant "absolute territorial exclusivity" also run coun- ter to the ideals of a free


channel's app on a mobile device, the same as a cable TV customer can do, or use Stream's DVR service. The company is launch- ing Stream as online TV options that don't require a cable subscription prolifer- ate, while cable and satel- lite TV subscribers start to slip. Channels like Life- time, Showtime, CBS and HBO have launched online video services. Sling TV gives you a "skinny bun- dle" of about 20 channels for $20 a month. Verizon is working on a mobile TV service that's expected to launch this summer. These come amid grow- ing consolidation in tradi- tional TV companies. Regu- lators are expected to soon approve AT&T's purchase of satellite TV provider Di- recTV, while Charter Com- munications wants to buy Time Warner Cable and a smaller cable operator called Bright House Net- works.


Comcast's Internet rev- enue rose 10 percent


to


$3.1 billion in the second quarter, thanks to new cus- tomers and subscribers up- grading to higher speeds. Video revenue rose 3.7 percent to $5.43 billion, even as subscribers de- clined, helped by add-ons like signing up for another set-top box. Rate


increases also


helped boost revenue. Revenue in the NBCU- niversal division rose 20 percent, to $7.23 billion, because of box office hits like "Jurassic World," ''Fu- rious 7" and "Pitch Perfect 2." Filmed entertainment revenue nearly doubled, to $2.27 billion.


EU opens antitrust case against 6 major U.S. movie studios market.


It also said it found some contracts requiring studios to prevent their services from being made available in the two coun- tries to companies other than Sky, another poten- tial restrictive practice. "We believe that this may be in breach of EU competition rules," Vestag- er said.


In a reaction, the Walt Disney Company said that "the impact of the Commission's analysis is destructive of consumer value and we will oppose the proposed action vigor- ously."


"Our approach is one that supports local cre- ative industries, local digi- tal and broadcast partners and most importantly con- sumers in every country across the EU," the Disney statement said. Other U.S. studios either declined to comment or did not im-


mediately answer requests for comment.


The charges, if upheld, run counter to one of the EU's cornerstones — that of removing barriers to trade within its borders. They also raise questions for other European broad- casters.


The Commission, which wields vast powers when it comes to antitrust and an- ticompetitive practices in the EU, confirmed it is also looking into similar cases including Canal Plus of France, Sky Italia of Italy, Germany's Sky Deutsch- land and DTS of Spain. Together, the five nations represent over 300 million consumers in the wealthi- est trade bloc on earth. The probes all started at the same time in Janu- ary 2014, but the U.K. in- vestigation was the first to reach the stage of an official, legal statement of objection.


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