The Department of Defense might be en route to reforming its policies regarding transgender people in the military.

In a statement Monday, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter called the department's regulations "outdated" and "confusing." He announced two directives that will hopefully lead to transgender people being able to serve in the Army openly. It seemed like the right next step following the Don't Ask Don't Tell era.

"At a time when our troops have learned from experience that the most important qualifications for service members should be whether they're able and willing to do their job, our officers and enlisted personnel are faced with certain rules that tell them the opposite," Carter said. "Moreover, we have transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—real patriotic Americans—who I know being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach that's contrary to our value of service and individual merit."

These days, transgender people are deemed "medically unfit for duty," and the ones who can serve, face being separated from the gender group they identify with.

Carter said a team will study for six months the impact of lifting prohibitions against the transgender community, and go from there.

From his statement:

At my direction, the working group will start with the presumption that transgender persons can serve openly without adverse impact on military effectiveness and readiness, unless and except where objective, practical impediments are identified. Second, I am directing that decision authority in all administrative discharges for those diagnosed with gender dysphoria or who identify themselves as transgender be elevated to Under Secretary Carson, who will make determinations on all potential separations.

As I've said before, we must ensure that everyone who's able and willing to serve has the full and equal opportunity to do so, and we must treat all our people with the dignity and respect they deserve. Going forward, the Department of Defense must and will continue to improve how we do both. Our military's future strength depends on it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun reviewing cases of immigrant children and women, who are in detention while seeking for asylum or other relief to remain the U.S. legally.

"Going forward, ICE will generally not detain mothers with children, absent a threat to public safety or national security, if they have received a positive finding for credible or reasonable fear and the individual has provided a verifiable residential address," Richard Rocha, a spokesman for ICE, said in a statement, according to the Huffington Post. 

A couple of months ago, more than a hundred Democratic Congress members told the Department of Homeland Security that they were deeply concerned about the consequences of detaining women and children. In a letter, they told DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson that the jail-like facilities were troublesome, with "conditions of confinement, issues of due process and serious developmental and medical concerns."

"DHS has not fully grasped the serious harm being inflicted upon mothers and children in custody," the letter said. 

Then in June, Johnson said the department needed to make "substantial changes" to its family and children detention practices. He proposed releasing families who post bond (that are realistic and reasonable, he said) or meet other conditions for release.

(Even the New York Times editorial board called on the government to stop detaining families.)

There will be three facilities—two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania—that will continue to detain women and children who are recently apprehended or who are denied release, the Huffington Post write up said. 

Last year, about 70,000 of mostly Central American women and children were apprehended in the U.S.-Mexico border, something President Obama called a humanitarian crisis. Many of them are fleeing gang and drug violence or extreme poverty in their native countries. 

Here's a great mini doc by VICE that follows Central Americans as they cross into Mexico and then the U.S. These are the dangers these women and youth face when they decide to come North.

Gone are the days of cheap drinks and a packed dance floor at the Wildcat House. Since it closed in 2012, the former college bar staple has sat vacant, but brothers and third generation Tucsonans John and David Aldecoa are seeking to preserve its legacy while building something new in the space at Stone Avenue between Grant Road and Speedway Boulevard.

While keeping some of the building's key features like the large bar, cedar planks and some of the large decorative medallions on the wall, the building itself is in the middle of a massive overhaul. Switching from swamp cooling to air conditioning, installing a new roof and repaving the parking lot are some of the more basic changes, but the future of the space will be completely different from any of those fuzzy memories you might still have from its old days. John Aldecoa, who the bar and restaurant is named after, admits he has a few of those from his own days at UA.

He also says his idea for Brother John's is really at least three concepts in one. First, there's the barbecue, which will be overseen by chef Nate Eckhaus. Aldecoa assures that Eckhaus will bring a love of every barbecueing region in the states. That's because Eckhaus spent nine months touring and training in the ways of different barbecue styles all over the country, including at Texas' The Salt Lick, before helping open Blue Smoke in New York City with prominent restauranteur Danny Meyer.

The serious barbecue operation will focus on the cook of the meat to provide flavor because taking "great care" and spending the necessary time are they keys to good barbecue for Aldecoa. He says they will have barbecue sauce, but he's hoping guests won't even use it. The two large smokers will be able to produce up to 6,000 pounds of smoked meats per day, which is good because the restaurant itself will be able to seat about 300 at any given time. The restaurant will also have a private dining area called the Wildcat Room where many of the former bar's memorabilia will be displayed.

As a rule, I don't write "Back in the good old days" posts. Nostalgia doesn't cloud my memory enough that I forget all the bad things that went on when I was younger. The "good old days" were the bad old days in lots of ways. When I was teaching, I even refrained from shaming my high school students by telling them how much better we were back when I was a boy. I seem to remember the rallying cry of my youth was "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!" Not to mention, "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out." Makes it kinda hard to take the moral high ground over today's kids.

But here's one thing that was definitely better back in the day. College tuition. When I went to University of California, I paid in the neighborhood of $50 a semester. California state colleges were about half that, and junior colleges—that's the name California gave to community colleges—were tuition free. College students had to find a way to take care of room, board, books and miscellaneous expenses, but tuition wasn't a serious financial consideration.

Which is why the reasonably thoughtful editorial in the Saturday Star, Regents should tighten UA, ASU admissions standards, pissed me off. The editorial said university admission standards should be tightened because graduation rates are too low, which indicates that too many unqualified students are being admitted. That's a reasonable stance. I don't entirely agree, but it's reasonable. But the kicker was an admission by the editorial board that it used to feel differently until tuition went through the roof.

What has changed our thinking about admissions is the high cost of failure. Annual tuition and fees at the UA total about $10,890, up 66 percent from five years ago.

The next paragraph should have explained that tuition isn't a force of nature that goes up and down like the ebb and flow of the tides, that the legislature, in its never ending battle against publicly funded higher education, keeps cutting funding, so tuition keeps rising. But it didn't. The next paragraph jumped right back to graduation rates.

The Star's change of heart plays right into the hands of the conservative agenda: Starve the education beast; complain schools aren't doing a good job, so they don't deserve the funding they're getting; then cut education funding even more because, why should we continue to pay through the nose to support those lousy schools? Rinse and repeat.

Chances are, unless you've just stumbled across our website for the first time ever, you're aware we're running our annual Best of Tucson survey. We're in the middle of the finals right now. 

But, there is a problem. About 600 people have started but not submitted their Best of Tucson ballots. 

Maybe those 600 people are taking their time and considering their options, maybe they got started and realized they didn't have strong enough opinions on the minimum 30 required categories, maybe the 216 category survey is a liiiittle intimidating. Whatever the case, those 600 votes matter—in fact, I looked at the numbers and in some categories, they're game changers. 

So take a look at your ballot! Even if you've already submitted it, you can tweak your answers. Make sure you've filled out at least 30 categories, press submit, and feel free to check back in and confirm your "Best Public Garden" pick still holds up after you've had a few days to mull it over.

Selene—8 years-old —Domestic Medium Hair Mix—F—#808560

Hello! My name is Selene and the staff says I am just purrrr-fect. I came to the Humane Society of Southern Arizona as a transfer and am on the hunt for my forever family. I am very sweet and loving, and I purr constantly. I love to nuzzle under your neck and fall asleep. I would really love a home that is relaxed and can give me a neck scratch every once in a while. If you’re interested in being my new family, please stop by the Main Campus and ask to meet me. But be careful because you’ll fall in love with me right away!

The great Margaret Regan, a longtime Tucson Weekly contributor, is going to chat about her book Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire in the Madison, Wisconsin-based community radio show A Public Affair tomorrow morning.

The show starts at 10 a.m. Tucson time. Call here: (608) 256-2001 to ask questions and give Margaret a shout out. You can listen to the show live, here. 

Jim Nintzel did a Q&A with Margaret in March, and the Weekly featured an excerpt of Detained and Deported that same month. Here's a taste:

Yolanda Fontes sat in her prison scrubs and watched the families gathered all around her. Husbands were reconnecting with wives, sisters with sisters, mothers with children. It was a sunny Sunday in April, and the families had flocked to the Eloy Detention Center, a dreary for-profit immigration prison in rural Arizona, to visit their detained loved ones. A female prisoner sat with her small son on her lap, her arms wrapped tightly around him, as if she were imagining never letting him go. The aunt who had brought the little boy spoke sorrowfully to her sister as the child snuggled in his mother's embrace. Nearby, an imprisoned father sat across a table from his wife, clutching her hand. They were trying to talk, but their four-year-old daughter, hungry and tired, fussed on the floor below.

An impassive guard presided over these melancholy reunions, keeping a close watch on the mothers and fathers dressed in jailbird scrubs. The visiting room was bleak and windowless, lit by glaring prison lights. It was a beautiful spring day outside, but no rays of sunlight pierced the cinder block walls.

Alone among the detainees in this stark space, Yolanda had no family visiting. She was glad to be out of her prison unit, though, and she was determined to be cheerful. Yet her tale was grim, and she looked at the other detainees' kids wistfully as she recounted it. During the two years she'd spent locked up in Eloy, she'd seen her two little girls and her little boy only sporadically. The children, all American citizens, lived in a distant suburb northwest of Phoenix. They came to visit their mom only when a relative or friend could spare the time to drive the two-hundred-mile round trip to Eloy. The last time Yolanda had seen them was two months before.

A federal judge has ordered Arizona to permanently block enforcement of the so-called revenge porn law.

The statute, passed by the state Legislature last year, made it a felony for a person to "maliciously" post a nude image or video of an ex-lover on the Internet or other mediums. But opponents and plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which included Tucson's Antigone Books, argued the law wasn't limited to revenge porn, and targeted all type of nude images. Critics said this violated the First Amendment.

"The law ended up being more about nudity than any kind of revenge porn, and the nudity issue basically put us at...any book that had a nude photo, we would need to know if that person had given consent to that nude photo," says Trudy Mills, co-owner of Antigone. "When you are selling art books or history books, we as book sellers can't know one way or the other whether that person gave permission. The law was simply too broad."

Basically, according to the ACLU, the law applied to any person displaying a nude image, no matter how newsworthy, educational, historic or artistic it was.

The judge's order approved a final settlement between Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Antigone, Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, several photographers and other book and newspaper publishers. The suit was filed in federal court back in September.

“We always believed that it would be a waste of the Arizona taxpayers' money to continue defending this unconstitutional statute," said a statement by Dan Pochoda, attorney for the ACLU of Arizona. "We’re pleased that the court’s order means this law will not be enforced, all without additional and unnecessary litigation.”

The Obama administration today is going to try to persuade the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow for the president's 2014 executive actions on immigration to move forward. A U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen, based  in Texas, temporarily blocked them in February, while a lawsuit against the actions on behalf of 26 states gets a resolution in court.

The appeals court in New Orleans will hear oral arguments on whether the judge's block should stand or die off.

Applications for the extended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—a program for undocumented youth brought to the country as children—were supposed to begin making their way to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in February, and signups for Deferred Action for Parents, which would grant parents of U.S. citizen or legal resident children a three-year work permit and permission to be in the country, were meant to head to USCIS back in May.

That day, undocumented parents around the country protested the temporary block. 

Both programs would reportedly benefit about 5 million undocumented people in the U.S. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, legal experts say the case is probably headed to the U.S. Supreme Court and then back to Hanen's desk. 

Here's a portion of the roundup by The Wall Street Journal:

The administration contends that the law grants the executive branch the prosecutorial discretion to prioritize who should be removed from the country. It also claims that the states lack legal standing to challenge its immigration program.

But the administration faces long odds in the Fifth Circuit. In May, a three-judge panel of the court denied the administration’s request to stay Judge Hanen’s injunction while the two sides continued to battle it out in court, concluding in a 2-1 ruling that “the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal.”

The two Fifth Circuit judges who sided against the administration in May, Republican appointees Jerry E. Smith and Jennifer Walker Elrod, are among the three judges who will consider the follow-up appeal. They will be joined by Carolyn Dineen King, who was appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter and is new to the case.

Legal experts said the case likely will wind up before the Supreme Court and could ultimately land back in Judge Hanen’s court.

...

Ahead of Friday’s hearing, pro-immigrant activists from across the country descended on New Orleans for what is expected to be the biggest demonstration since the president’s plan landed in court.

“In New Orleans I am representing my family and millions of other families in the same situation,” said Elizabeth Rodriguez, 26, who traveled to the city from Los Angeles. She said that she and her three siblings were born in the U.S. and attend college, but their father has been in the country for three decades without legal status.

Advocates said they want to remind 2016 presidential contenders that many U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants will be eligible to vote for the first time in the next election.

“We have been mobilizing our communities to ensure we send a strong message to Democrats, Republicans and the country that we are going to fight,” said Cristina Jimenez, managing director of United We Dream, which represents undocumented youth.

Sitting down to experience the most recent iteration of Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails' Around the Globe menu series, which gives diners the chance to experience some of the flavors of Moscow, the general consensus seemed to be one of both excitement and, honestly, a little confusion or trepidation. While the American culinary zeitgeist grows to include more and more cuisines and cultures, it seems like overall Slavic food is still largely left out. Finding a good pierogi in Arizona is hard enough.

So, although in the past the menu has gone from Buenos Aires to Hanoi to Mexico City and, most recently, Istanbul, it seems both chef Janos Wilder and chef de cuisine Devon Sanner agree that tackling a Russian menu was one of the less straightforward choices. Like any cuisine, though, quality ingredients, meticulous preparation and a little (or a lot) of R&D will get you started on the right path.

Sanner has been working on the Moscow menu for about three months. As a former Russian literature major turned chef, Sanner speaks Russian and has visited the country in the past, but even with that experience, he had to hit the books, so to speak.

What resulted was a three course menu with your choice from three appetizers, three entrees, two desserts and optional additional cocktails or wine. The menu also includes, of course, a vodka tasting flight with rye, wheat and potato vodkas to sample, showing off the more subtle variety in the white spirit. On the cocktail side, black currant, vanilla and blueberry add some richness to vodka in the Moscow Black and Blue.



Starting off, you have your choice of a simple sour cream soup with beet puree, radish, dill or salmon roe, a three-part Barrio rye bread based open faced sandwich (or zakuski) with smoked and marinated fish and crispy pork torchon medallions with cherries and expertly spiced and brined beets. The latter of the three is a play on the traditional kholodets, which is a meat in aspic dish that Sanner compared to "meat ambrosia salad."

Wilder and Sanner both agree that translating a cuisine to suit palates stateside takes a little more than a strictly traditional reading. Rather than forcing diners to eat jellied meats they probably won't like, both chefs opt to incorporate the flavors and spirit of a cuisine, without limiting themselves with a completely literal menu. After all, Sanner says the Russian cuisine is kind of having its own identity crisis as it tries to bring itself into a more modern setting, while appealing to visitors and locals alike. 

The main courses feature offer three very different experiences. The street food inspired beef shashlyk with red wine and pomegranate marinated beer shoulder, flatbread from Caravan, grilled vegetables and eggplant puree is a hearty, humble dish. On the other hand, the Chicken Croquette Pozharskij (one of the few Russian dishes to be named after a Russian chef, Sanner adds) offers a more decadent experience with marsala and porcini cream. Finally, a griddled rainbow trout gets kicked up with a bacon and braised cabbage filling with buckwheat piaf, housemade farmer's cheese and a tart cherry sauce.

To finish, velvety vanilla custard with accompanying berries and tea cookies or a warm, light apple cake with blueberry buttermilk ice cream will end the unique meal with something sweet.

Working as the opposite of Wilder's popular Sense of Place menu in the winter, which gives visitors and locals alike the opportunity to try a taste of something truly Sonoran, the Around the Globe menu is a chance for locals to go on a culinary excursion without having to pay for travel. After all, travelling is really about the food anyway, right?

As with Wilder's whole take on his Downtown restaurant, the menu is affordable at $33 or $36 for three courses, depending on which entree you have. The menu can also be served a la carte. The Moscow menu at Downtown (135 S. Sixth Ave.) will run until August 3 when a Jamaican-influenced menu by way of Kingston will take over the restaurant. 

For reservations or more information, call 623-7700.