Civil Rights

Hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week, according to Obama administration officials. The new system will be applied to the approximately 600 Afghans being held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration.

The de facto government of Honduras suspended constitutional guarantees indefinitely late Sunday, outlawing public gatherings and making it easier for the army to make arrests. The measure, announced on a nationwide simultaneous television and radio broadcast, came on the eve of a potentially enormous march by ousted President Manuel Zelaya's supporters. From his refuge at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, Zelaya called on people to take to the streets today to mark the three-month anniversary of his ouster.

Despite continuing criticism about the program, authorities announced Friday that 67 local and state law enforcement agencies across the country would continue enforcing immigration law under special agreements with the federal government, but that they would be subject to more oversight. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also limited the authority of the most controversial participant, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., who is under investigation by the Department of Justice for possible civil rights violations.

Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, author and longtime Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, whose hard-nosed coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the Watergate scandal in the 1970s helped establish the paper's national reputation, has died. He was 80. Nelson died today at his home in Bethesda, Md., of pancreatic cancer. "Jack finally slipped away a couple of hours ago," his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, said in an e-mail to friends.

The nation's top civil rights attorney vowed today to step up enforcement of laws against housing bias, hate crimes, racially targeted predatory lending and other discriminatory acts in what he called a new era of "transformation and restoration." Thomas Perez, U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, also said during a keynote address to an Asian Pacific American civil rights conference in Los Angeles that he would "depoliticize decision-making" and work to restore trust between career attorneys and political appointees in the Justice Department.

Re "An unlikely, unsung civil rights champion," Opinion, Aug. 28 I was heartened to read about T.R.M. Howard and his lifelong passion and action for civil rights. Specifically, to read about the large part he played in keeping the brutal slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the news (and after a jury acquitted two white men of the 1955 killing, in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise). I'm also heartened that David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito care enough to research and study such important history.

Re "Parks chief foresees sunny skies," Oct. 5 It was interesting to note that Jon Jarvis, the new head of the National Park Service, sees the agency on the brink of rebirth. Part of that is a shift in the rangers' storytelling, or "interpretation," emphasis. Jarvis said that rangers at Civil War battlefields, such as Gettysburg, now spend less time telling visitors where the Confederate and Union armies lined up for Pickett's charge and more time discussing slavery and civil rights.

For all the hand-wringing among Democrats about the tough choices the party's voters are facing in their selection of a presidential nominee, it's nothing compared to the troubles Republicans are creating for themselves this year. On that side of the aisle, three contests, including this week's primary in Michigan, have yielded three very different winners, with no sign of a uniter anywhere on the horizon.

In many churches this weekend, religious leaders will extol the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in anticipation of Monday's federal holiday in his honor. Some will quote from his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Others will invoke a letter he wrote while in an Alabama jail four months earlier.

Civil rights groups filed a petition in federal court Thursday seeking a restraining order against immigration officials who allegedly blocked workers detained in a raid at a Van Nuys manufacturing plant from consulting with their attorneys.