MILITARY DISCRIMINATION.  DoSomething.org lists interesting data about military discrimination:

• Despite “don’t ask, don’t tell” between 1993 and 2011, over 14, 000 military members were discharged due to their sexual preference
• About 150,000 transgender individuals have served in the US military
• Only 3% of white officers have reported racial discrimination in the military; this is compared to 27% of both black and Hispanic officers

LAWYER’S CORNER.  A great tool to find information – particularly for cases of PTSD: together we served.com

SMEARING THE DEFENDERS? Wherever you are politically, recent knocks on Alan Dershowitz for clients he defended in the past seem unwarranted.   Many commentators pointed out that he had defended such individuals as O.J. Simpson…thereby suggesting Dershowitz was tainted by this.  Again, whatever your views of his support of President Trump, rebuking a lawyer for defending “whoever” seems highly unfair.

PRAISING LATINOS.   A. K.  Sandoval-Strausz is director of Latino studies at Penn State.  Some recent observations:

• Many neighborhoods could not have sustained themselves without the arrival of 25 million new Latino urbanites over the past half-century
• Often, these newcomers prefer walking rather than driving – thereby revitalizing the inner-city commercial landscape.
• Walking allows local shopping, renewed energy on city streets, and an increase in property values.

THE CONSTITUTION. The Washington Post raises five myths about the U.S. Constitution.   Included:

• The First Amendment is NOT first because it is the most important
• The Constitution does not require a clear-cut separation of church and state
• Before the 19^th amendment, women could indeed sometimes vote in the United States [viz., certain states allowed such votes].

OBITUARY    US District Judge Deborah Batts has died at 72; she was the first openly gay person to serve in the Federal judiciary.   

NEARLY 700 PEOPLE IN THE U.S. DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EACH WEEK.   Chicago’s landmark Cultural Center is a cluster of four glass houses.  Each has 700 glass brick openings — a stark, physical reminder of the average number of people killed by guns each week in the country.    So says the Gun Violence Memorial Project.

FINDING YOUR ROOTS? According to Axios, Ancestry.com has refused to comply with a Pennsylvania court search warrant authorizing police access to its database of about 16 million DNA profiles, the company confirmed to Axios.