I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
David Smith bought a small house in Leoni Township as part of starting his life over again following a divorce.
But when he arrived at the house on Friday, he was greeted with racist graffiti scrawled in green paint on the side of the white house, reports the Jackson Citizen Patriot. The words read: “No crime. No Blacks.”
Leoni Township Police tell the Citizen Patriot they are investigating the case as a “hate crime.” But ironically, in Michigan, there is no such law. There is only an ethnic intimidation act, which this certainly would fall under. Attempts to reform the law to expand its coverage other targeted groups have stalled in the state House. The legislation would change the name of the law to the Anti-Bias Crime Act, or ABC Act. It passed the House Judiciary Committee last year and the full House, and languished in the Republican controlled Senate.
Leoni Township is located (pdf) northeast of the city of Jackson.
The incident occurs just weeks after white nationalists from the group Battalion 14 Michigan Division marched through parts of Jackson. Following the incident, the Southern Poverty Law Center told Michigan Messenger in an exclusive interview the group would likely be listed as hate group in the 2010 hate map from the group.
No one has linked the group to this incident, or any other incident in Jackson county.
This is the second graffiti hate incident in as many weeks in the state.
WOOD TV 8 reported March 31 that a campground in Fenneville that caters to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community was vandalized. According to that report, some one scrawled “Fags don’t belong” as well as swastikas on the campgrounds external fence.
Allegan County Sheriff officials said they were investigating the incident, but that it could not be classified as a hate crime because of the state’s law — which currently does not include crimes targeting the LGBT community.
On March 16, Michigan Messenger reported on an incident in Auburn Hills in which residents were greeted with plastic Easter eggs containing propaganda for the Aryan Nations — a neo-Nazi group.
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