• Listen to this segment with Arun Gupta

Uprising’s guest expert Arun Gupta, Independent Journalist and regular contributor to the Guardian, In These Times, The Progressive, and Truthout, and co-founder of the Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Indypendent, analyzes today’s news headlines:

The government’s criteria for placing people on terrorist watchlists have just been published online. A 166-page government document called the 2013 Watchlisting Guidelines, obtained by The Intercept, was published online with an accompanying analysis by journalists Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereux. The document, “spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no-fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings.” Until now the criteria by which people were placed on lists for things like extra screening at airports, which also made it difficult for them to get jobs, was completely secret. The lists themselves are widely shared with other governments and even so-called “private entities.” Click here to read the article in The Intercept about this story.

The Arizona death row inmate named Joseph Wood whose stay of execution was lifted by the Supreme Court, was killed by lethal injection yesterday afternoon. Wood was administered a mix of lethal drugs, but was still alive, “gasping and snorting” for almost 2 hours before he died, eclipsing even the duration of Clayton Lockett’s execution in Oklahoma earlier this year. A reporter who witnessed the execution counted 660 gasps. Wood’s lawyers had appealed his execution precisely on the grounds that the drug cocktail to be used on him was a secret and that past executions had resulted in torturous deaths for Lockett and other inmates. Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the story.

Finally, in a little-reported story related to the migration of thousands of child refugees from Central America, a group of mothers and children have begun marching down the length of California. The 400-mile march from Northern California to the US-Mexico border includes mothers who are students at UC Berkeley. The small group has dubbed their journey, Trail for Humanity to bring attention to the plight of child refugees and immigrants crossing the border. One of the marchers, Sandra Vences, told the Fresno Bee, “we want the children to know they are not alone and they deserve to be respected and loved.” Click here for a Fresno Bee article about the story.