We look into the varying voting rights throughout the country and how they might have an impact on the election in November.; Reporter Sharon McNary looks into the Super PAC money being spent in two races in California.; In the latest installment in our series "Props to You," we'll cover Proposition 35, which stiffens penalties for those found guilty of human trafficking.; A new report out today from the international environmental group, Oceana, says climate change is affecting the seas and making food from it more scarce in vulnerable nations.; We'll take a look back at which shows came out on top at the Emmys last night. Will changes in ownership of AEG affect the future of football in Los Angeles?;
What voting laws could mean for the November election
The presidential election is just six weeks away, and one of the big questions on the horizon is who will be eligible to vote?
Today, a federal panel in Washington D.C. is scheduled to hear closing arguments from the state of South Carolina regarding voting rights.
A new law there requires voters to show photo ID and critics argue that violates the Voting Rights Act by putting a heavy burden on minorities who may not have IDs.
But South Carolina isn't the only state with new voting laws. In the past two years alone, 19 states have introduced new voting laws.
For a closer look at what that could mean in this year's race, we're joined by NPR's Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving.
Super PACs bolster Congressional campaigns in San Bernardino and Ventura counties
This year's election is the first since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision that allows unrestricted spending by independent groups in congressional campaigns.
In the June primary, California races saw more of this independent spending than any other state.
Much of the money, from political action committees known as Super PACs, was poured into two races in Southern California.
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Props To You: Stiffening human trafficking penalties with Proposition 35
When Californians go to the polls this November, they'll once again have decide how to vote on lots of ballot measures. This time, there are 11 Propositions to sort through.
In a new series called "Props to You," we'll explain what the measure contains.
Today, we'll cover Proposition 35, which stiffens penalties for those found guilty of human trafficking.
So far its been polling strongly, but the ballot measure has also stirred criticism, and you might be surprised who's come out against it.
Q: So what exactly do we mean by human trafficking?
A: The law recognizes two categories of human trafficking. First, there's labor trafficking. That's when an undocumented person is forced to work under threat of deportation. Then there's sex trafficking, which is when women and children are forced to have sex for money.
Q: So how a big problem is human trafficking?
A: It's hard to get a firm number because the problem is so hidden, but federal estimates peg the number of people trafficked into the U.S. at tens of thousands a year. And, according to the State Attorney General's office, California is right at the top of places where people are exploited.
Q: So what would the proposition do?
A: It toughens up penalties for all human traffickers, but most of the changes would affect sex trafficking. Maximum fines for sex trafficking would go from $100,000 to $1.5 million. The money would go toward training police on how to handle human trafficking complaints, and provide services to trafficking victims. Prison sentences could be as high as 15-years-to-life.
Q: How long are prison sentences now?
A: Right now, under state law, sentences are between five to eight years. So if Prop 35 passes, offenders could do much more time. And coming out of prison, they would also have to register as sex offenders. They'd also be required to share information about their online activities with law enforcement, like what their screen names are. That's because the sex trade has largely moved to the Internet.
Q: So who's advocating for Prop 35?
A: Victims' groups like California Against Slavery are on the forefront. And they've got the support of a long list of law enforcement agencies like California Peace Officers. Also, both major state parties have endorsed it. Financially, the biggest backer is Chris Kelly.
Q: Chris Kelley, his name sounds familiar.
A: Chris Kelly lost the Democratic nomination for attorney general to Kamala Harris in 2010. Before that, he was the top privacy officer for Facebook. During his time at Facebook, he worked with the state of New York on removing sex offenders from the social network. That led him to giving $1.9 million to the campaign.
Says Kelly: "When I joined Facebook, we'd seen incredible amounts of Internet focus on attempted sexual exploitation and when that continued to come to my attention - and the scale of it - it was something I was very concerned about addressing for both my company, for the state and for the world."
In the meantime, no political action committee has been raising money to defeat the proposition.
Q: So this lopsided spending could explain why Prop 35 is polling well?
A: Definitely. The ballot question's been pulling in between 80 to 90 percent support over the last few months. This is based on surveys by the California Business Roundtable and Pepperdine University.
Q: OK, but there are organizations speaking out against Prop 35, right?
A: Yes, for starters, the American Civil Liberties Union in California is opposing the measure. The ACLU says requiring convicted sex traffickers to provide screen names keeps them from enjoying anonymous online speech.
Q: So, in the view of the ACLU, that infringes on these people's First Amendment rights. Who else is against this?
A: Sex workers, prostitutes, but for an entirely different reason. Maxine Doogan is founder of Erotic Service Providers Legal, Educational and Research Project and a working prostitute. She worries that Proposition 35 is written so broadly that people acting as prostitutes of their own accord will be treated as traffickers.
Of particular concern to Doogan is language in the proposition that she says would change the penal code, and criminalize a person who gets some financial support from a prostitute's earnings.
Conceivably, she says, the law could treat a prostitute accepting rent money from another prostitute as a trafficker.
This, she says, will only drive prostitutes further underground and make them fearful of reporting assaults.
Says Doogan: "It's just disingenuous for Prop 35 proponents to say that they are against human trafficking and and then to throw prostitutes and our communities and our families under the bus and say it's perfectly OK if we are subjected to the violence of criminalization, all under the guise of rescuing traffic victims."
Q: Nevertheless, Prop 35 looks like a good bet to pass. Will we see a lot more prosecutions?
A: Not necessarily. This year, only 18 people are sitting in California prison for human trafficking. That's because most trafficking cases are prosecuted under federal law since the crime often takes place across multiple jurisdictions. So whether Prop 35 has a big impact really depends on whether California get to prosecute the cases.
Who won and who lost at last night's Emmy Awards?
LA Times Entertainment Reporter Mary McNamara talks to A Martinez and Alex Cohen about the winners and losers from Sunday night's ceremony.
Nail biting is common, but now considered a psychiatric disorder
As the election nears, a few candidates in close races might bite their nails. If they do, they could officially be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.
That's because the updated bible of psychiatry, "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," includes a new category called "The obsessive compulsive spectrum," which includes OCD and more common behaviors like nail biting.
Amy Standen reports.
City Council weighs how AEG ownership change could impact LA football future
L.A. City Council votes today on whether to move forward with AEG’s $1.5-billion proposal to build a downtown football stadium.
One potential obstacle to green-lighting the plan could be AEG owner Phil Anschutz’s announcement last week that he is looking to sell the subsidiary Anschutz Entertainment Group, a move that, depending on the new owners, could displace Tim Leiweke as AEG’s CEO and a key figure in negotiating the football stadium.
Angelenos such as billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong and Santa Monica investment firm Colony Capital have been floated as potential buyers but, while Anschutz Entertainment is one of the most prominent parts of the international AEG business empire, it is still only a part.
A. Martínez looks into who other potential buyers could be and how that might impact the likelihood of L.A.’s football future.
How the work we do influences our relationship with money
Kevin Delaney has had money on the brain since he was a little kid.
Growing up in a large, working class family of seven, money was always tight. He remembers watching his father work multiple jobs and count out the cash he earned on the kitchen table dollar by dollar.
Since then, Delaney has handled money as a bartender, toll booth operator, but these days, he's a professor of sociology at Temple University.
He's written a new book called "Money at Work: On the Job with Priests, Poker Players and Hedge Fund Traders." It looks at how the work we do influences our thoughts on the value of money.
Federal tax credit for wind power industry set to expire
A federal tax credit that's helped prop up the wind power industry is set to expire at the end of the year.
The $1 billion tax break has been criticized by republicans, including presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
They say too much money's been spent on helping an industry that has yet to prove itself. The debate has become an issue in the presidential campaign.
A Martinez talks to Coral Davenport, reporter covering energy and the environment for National Journal
Patton Oswalt's vision of a 'Zombie Spaceship Wasteland'
The comedian Patton Oswalt is perhaps best known for his roles on the TV show "King of Queens" and the voice of Remy in the film "Ratatouille."
And now his fans can peer into his mind and see what he's thinking ... Sort of.
Last year, Alex Cohen spoke to him about his book, "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland."
Warming climate, changing ocean chemistry threaten seafood-dependent countries
More than a billion people, many of then the poorest in the world, rely on fish and shellfish to survive. Their food supply is threatened by changes in the ocean wrought by carbon emissions: a second line problem of global warming.
A new report from the international environmental group Oceana describes how climate change is affecting the seas and making food from it more scarce in vulnerable nations.
The dual climate threats to ocean-based food security are temperature and chemistry. Temperature changes where fish live: in a warming ocean, generally, fish head away from the tropics and shallow waters, looking for the right temperatures in which they can feed and breed. It can also drive fish toward unexpected predators and make them invasive species, destabilizing ecological balance in different regions.
A more acidic ocean presents a related threat. Carbon has always cycled through the atmosphere; part of that flow is an exchange of carbon molecules between the atmosphere and the top layers of the world’s oceans. As humans have contributed more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, more carbon makes its way into the ocean.
That’s changing the ocean’s pH level. Sea water’s higher acidity softens and decimates coral, a feeding zone for some marine life. It also weakens the shells of mollusks.
Oceana marine scientists looked at peer reviewed literature and publicly-available statistics to rank nations for climate related risks, ocean acidification related risks, and both combined. They looked at how dependent different nations are on ocean-related food for protein and sustenance, and how well nations can adapt to economic, political and social threat.
The study’s author admits some uncertainties remain. “We definitely don’t know exactly how organisms are going to react,” says Oceana marine scientist Matthew Huelsenbeck. “We have specific examples from the lab. But scaling it up to the entire ocean and how ecosystems will react to the removal of one species or many is a huge question mark.”
The nations most vulnerable to climate impacts on seafood are, in many cases island nations.
A 2011 documentary film, The Island President, chronicles the efforts by the government of the Maldives to call attention to sea level rise and other threats of a warming climate.
“The reason why Maldives is unique is because we’re going to lose an entire nation, an identity, a culture, all this,” said Aminath Shauna, then-climate coordinator for the Maldives. “There’s so many other countries but none of these countries are going to lose their entire national identity. We will.”
Acidification threatens places where people catch and eat mollusks for protein. Cook Islands, Turks & Caicos, Aruba.
Oceana’s Huelsenbeck said a surprising finding in his research is that Persian Gulf nations like Iraq and Pakistan, as well as north African nations, like Libya and Eritrea, bear high risk from both phenomena.
“So I was surprised to find that there’s a lot of people there in those countries who still use old wooden canoes to fish for their resources,” says Huelsenbeck. “And they provide a lot of food to coastal communities in those countries. Often times we just think of them as big oil countries. But there are many people there living a subsistence life off of fish.”
Oceana and representatives of these countries aim to call attention to the ways human activity has widened the existing pipeline of carbon into the atmosphere and thereby into the seas.
In tropical island regions, that means more advocacy for shutting down that pipe. “Maldives is a frontline state,” President Mohammed Nasheed told climate negotiators in London, in the documentary in The Island President. “If you thought defending Poland and defending Vietnam was important, defending the Maldives is very important. And when you have millions and millions of people in similar predicaments, just imagine the impact it would have on world order.”
The US isn’t overly dependent on one risky source of seafood. What’s more, it has the economic power to protect itself better than these countries. But sea level rise, changing temperatures and ocean acidification are happening in waters off Alaska, California, the Gulf of Mexico, and northeastern states along the Atlantic too.
Military and political leaders recognize that destabilizing a country’s food supply can raise its risk for political instability internally and in the region it occupies. Oceana’s Huelsenbeck says the goal of his report is to redefine the scope of field for ocean-related climate threats.