2018-07-12
It was the first day of his paper route.
River Donaghey
Jul 12 2018, 3:35pm
Photos via Brandie Sharp / Facebook
An 11-year-old Ohio paperboy was stopped and questioned by the police last week in what seems to be yet another example of scared white people calling the cops on black people for doing absolutely nothing wrong, ABC 6 reports.
Last Friday afternoon, preteen Uriah Sharp was working the first day of his new paper route in the Columbus neighborhood of Upper Arlington with his mom, Brandie, and his 17-year-old brother. At one point, Uriah got a little mixed up about the brand-new route and accidentally delivered a few papers to the wrong houses.
That’s a pretty innocuous mistake—understandable for an 11-year-old kid working the first day of his first job—and neither he nor his mom thought much of it. Sharp just ran back to grab the papers he’d taken to the wrong addresses and redeliver them to the right ones. Unfortunately, a woman in the neighborhood apparently thought that Sharp was acting “suspicious.” So instead of doing the normal, neighborly thing of just, you know, going outside to chat with Uriah and his mom to see what was up, the lady dialed 911.
“It looked like at first they were delivering newspapers or something,” the woman told police dispatch during the call, “but I noticed they were walking up to the houses with nothing in hand and one of them came back with something. I mean, I don’t want to say something was going on, but it just seemed kind of suspicious.”
A cop showed up and questioned the family about what they were doing. It didn’t take long for the officer to realize a young kid and his mom were just delivering papers, but Brandie and Uriah were both shaken up by the whole incident.
app-facebook
Bmai Love
last Friday
First day of paper route and we are pulled over by police🚔🚔…Sad I cant even teach my son the value of working without someone whispering and looking at us out the side of their eye perhaps because we DON’T “look like a person that belongs in their neighborhood”.
Police officer pulls up and ask us questions as if we were intruding in their area. Totally disgusted and disturbed that this kind of behavior still exist.
***My apologies Upper Arlington for bringing my 12 year o…ld African American son into your neighborhood to deliver the paper and make a few dollars on the side…NO HARM INTENDED 😕
I will make sure my boss changes his route.
See More
521
1K
2.5K
“Police officer pulls up and asks us questions as if we were intruding in their area,” Brandie Sharp wrote afterward in a Facebook post. “Totally disgusted and disturbed that this kind of behavior still exist… My apologies Upper Arlington for bringing my [11-year-old] African American son into your neighborhood to deliver the paper and make a few dollars on the side…NO HARM INTENDED.”
Uriah told ABC 6 he plans to keep working the job and delivering papers, but that he feels a little “uncomfortable” after the run-in with the cops.
“Sad I cant even teach my son the value of working without someone whispering and looking at us out the side of their eye perhaps because we DON’T ‘look like a person that belongs in their neighborhood,’” Brandie wrote.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow VICE on Twitter.
2018-07-12
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjk8xw/the-hot-new-millennial-trend-is-quitting-your-job
Seriously.
Matt Taylor
Jul 12 2018, 2:16pm
Everyone with a job fantasizes about quitting it, either in a blaze of go-fuck-yourself glory, or by quietly and smugly accepting a better offer and starting to live the life you really deserve. According to the US Labor Department, that dream seems to be coming true for more and more Americans, as the Associated Press reported Tuesday:
The percentage of workers quitting their jobs reached 2.4 percent in May, the highest level since April 2001. More quits are a sign of a strong job market because workers typically leave jobs for a new one that pays more. Workers who switch jobs see larger raises than those who stay in the same position, government data shows.
On the surface, this seems like great news. Income stagnation is one of the oldest stories in American life, and a new job offers one of your best chances at overcoming it. But it’s not just the prospect of finding more money that’s driving this trend: According to a survey published in January by consulting powerhouse Deloitte, 43 percent of so-called millennials anticipated ditching their job within two years; members of Generation Z (born in 1995 or later) were even less likely to be company people, with some 61 percent expressing intent to move elsewhere. Among other things, the survey suggested young people don’t like working at places that seem to value profit-seeking above all else. This is something of a shift from the Reagan era, when Newsweek dubbed 1984 the “year of the yuppie,” marking perhaps the closest thing we’ve come in recent decades to a country where financial capitalism achieved national worship.
What happened since then? Well, a series of financial collapses, first in 1987, then in 1990-91, a third time in 2001, and, most brutally, in 2008. Also: Inequality skyrocketed, pensions vanished, foreclosures exploded, and going to college became hugely expensive. And key institutions like labor unions, mainline churches, and (perhaps most importantly) manufacturing-based jobs that promised a lifetime of gainful employment began to disappear. The so-called “Organization Man” of the 1950s, the boring (white male) corporate type resigned to a life of bland middle-class prosperity and nothing that reeked of standing out from the pack, became something of an endangered species. “Millionerds,” as Michael Lewis called them, took over in Silicon Valley, and started to dictate the values and culture of the broader economy.
For a while, that manifested itself in the heady days of the dot-com boom and what we now call “late capitalism.” But when young people saw that system go belly-up, too, attitudes kept shifting. Polling data in recent years has found young people are less focused on making the most money they can and more on finding an enjoyable job that has some kind of halfway decent impact on the world—or at least not a completely pernicious one. Survey data has also suggested young people are way less likely than Baby Boomers to stay in the same job for a long time, like decades.
These changes have begun to manifest themselves in terms of political ideology, with socialism becoming much more popular—specifically among young people—as Cold War–era stigma faded. Capitalism, on the other hand? 2016 Harvard Institute of Politics survey data found just 42 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds supported it in the abstract. And as we saw with Bernie Sanders’s surprise success as an unabashed democratic socialist in that year’s presidential race and the win by one of his former campaign organizers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York congressional primary last month, this isn’t just a shift in abstract thinking, but also seems to be affecting how young people engage with the system.
Of course, capital-S Socialists remain on the fringe of American politics, where the duopoly of big-money Democrats and Republicans won’t lose its grip anytime soon. And a willingness to quit one job for another that pays more obviously doesn’t require a left-wing political ideology. But the fact that so many people, young people especially, are anxious to seek better opportunities tells us something about society—millions of us are desperate for a change, and that is seeping into the world in ways our parents might never have imagined.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.
2018-07-12
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvnn9p/we-visited-berlins-homeless-university
This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.
Dietmar keeps a tight grip on his walker as he inches forward through the Schöneweide district of Berlin. He’s moving fast, almost too fast. “Ich will nicht zu spat kommen,” he says, before pausing as if to correct himself. “I don’t want to be late,” he repeats in English. The 72-year-old knows he should be practicing; he’s on his way to his English lesson.
The class is part of Berlin’s Homeless University project, run by the Social Pedagogical Institute of Berlin (SPI). According to SPI, the project aims to be a “low-threshold meeting and advice center.” In other words, everyone is welcome.
The “students” are mostly aged between 60 and 80 years old, and are offered 14 courses on a range of subjects—from philosophy and religious education to handicrafts and yoga—which are taught at the Strohalm community center.
In 2001, Dietmar was the victim of a hit-and-run car accident. He suffered multiple fractures and some brain damage. As the 72-year-old climbs the handful of stairs leading up to his classroom, he tells me that the accident led to a real downturn in his fortunes. But he decided last year to take up these lessons in order to somewhat change that and “keep my mind fit.”
There are eight students in today’s advanced English lesson. They are all over 60, but their teacher is 17. Kim Nitsche is a volunteer here and, despite the age difference, seems to have total control over her students. “Don’t lose this like you always do,” Nitsche warns Dietmar as she lends him a pen. He nods back bashfully.
Later on, Nitsche explains to the class the difference between “nice” and “niece.” “My nice niece!” Dietmar calls out, to the amusement of his classmates. When everyone calms down, Nitsche gets them to fill out a worksheet about irregular verbs, and the classroom goes silent. Though the room is lined with computers, her students, she explains, prefer to “stick with the analoge option of a pen and paper.”
Nitsche has been teaching at the university for the past nine months, instead of going to class herself. “I graduated from school when I was 16, and I wanted to get some work experience,” she tells me. Since discovering through this opportunity that teaching seems to bring out her confidence, Nitsche has decided to become a primary school teacher.
The Homeless University was founded by Maik Eimertenbrink in 2011. The idea was inspired by the University of Graz in Austria, which offers lectures for free to anyone who can attend. Eimertenbrink has adapted the concept to offer anyone the chance to teach a course, regardless of whether they have a qualification or not. The aim, as Nitsche reiterates, is for “people to learn, not pass exams.”
The majority of the students are not completely homeless. Eimertenbrink explains that most are living in “housing projects and shelters,” while people like Dietmar attend as a way of getting through a recent trauma.
Soon after his English lesson is over, I find Dietmar sitting on a wooden chair nearby, surrounded by a few of his classmates. He tells me in German that he has an apartment, but he lives alone. His tone is optimistic as if something exciting is coming up in the not-too-distant future. “I just want to turn 73,” he tells me. “And now I have friends,” he adds, looking around. A few look up and smile in agreement. “Friends,” he repeats in English.
With that, Dietmar suddenly gets up, says his goodbyes, and dashes off for lunch. It’s “curry turkey with rice day,” he says, at a cost of just €1.20 [$1.40].
Once a week, a local theater group puts on a workshop at the community center—decorating the stage with items created by the university’s handicraft class. Today, the cast are rehearsing The Crazy Fairy Tale Show, in which Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and other classic fairy tale characters are remixed.
In one scene, we see the wolf make his way through the forest, trying to hawk goods that nobody seems to want. “I’m old and sick!” says the grandmother in response to the wolf’s offer. “But it’s the finest whiskey, for just €4.99 [$5.85],” the wolf responds, as he caresses the old lady. But she’s having none of it. “I said no!” she insists, after the wolf tries pushing it as a “magic potion.” The animal skulks away before Svenja, the director, shouts “End scene!”
The grandmother is a 53-year-old called Markus—an alcoholic who has been sober now for two months. I meet the wolf as he steps out for a smoke break. His name is Rainer, a long-haired old rocker who has several charms dangling down around his neck, one of a stern-looking falcon. He’s 58 but could pass for 70. “I spent ten years on the street,” he says as he stubs out his hand-rolled cigarette. “When it’s minus 20 and you’re sleeping outside, you turn to the drink.”
He has a faded homemade tattoo of a sword on his forearm, which was created using a fountain pen and three needles. “An accident from East Germany,” he laughs motioning to the ink. “I only did that to myself because tattoos were banned in the GDR.”
Rainer describes his current situation as “stable,” though like many people at the university he knows that his battle will never be over. He tells me that he’s recently taken up photography and that he’s studying to become a theater teacher. “Save yourself to help others—that’s how the university works.”
Back at the university, I walk into a classroom where two men are painting. “It’s usually just us here,” says König, the art teacher. “We recently had a female student who was really talented, but unfortunately, she was addicted to pills and suddenly stopped showing up, which is often the case with those struggling with addiction,” adds his student and part-time teaching assistant, Stolpe.
Stolpe cleans off his brush in a pickle jar filled with water so he can apply the next color to a dramatic painting of a ship fighting to stay afloat at sea. “A while ago, I lost my job, my wife, and my apartment,” he reveals, though today he says he leads a “better life” and is no longer homeless.
König shows off his version of Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait, with a dominant monobrow and self-confident eyes. “I only paint with company, I can’t paint when I’m alone,” König tells me.
“At first, I wondered why I should bother learning to paint at 60,” Stolpe says. "But it helped free me from my addiction. Now I’m 75, and I love my hobby.” For Stolpe, the best way out is simple: “Find a passion that’s free.” A perfect summary of the Homeless University.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
2018-07-12
Emerson Rosenthal
Jul 12 2018, 5:48pm
In filmmaker Bassam Tariq’s new short film, Wa’ad (The Promise), little is what it seems. Its centerpiece, a conversation between a father and son, isn’t actually taking place. When the son speaks of his siblings “doing well” after their mother’s death, they aren’t really. And when he says he’ll continue to write, right before the film’s heartbreaking denouement, it’s TBD.
Deft in its execution, the four-minute short seeks to evoke the feeling of what isn’t said—“what you can write when you have a limited amount of space,” according to the filmmaker. Shot in two days last summer in Beirut, it’s a stark look at life for one detained refugee and a tragic ode to family that demands multiple viewings.
Interested to know more about the small project with a big message, VICE spoke to director Bassam Tariq.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
VICE: What’s the story behind your short?
Bassam Tariq: I’ve been obsessed with letters by prisoners. For me, there is always something special about the emotion you can’t express in a letter. A friend of mine told me about the International Committee of the Red Cross. They’ve been doing letter exchanges for 150 years. They really help people, like prisoners in Guantanamo who only get one phone call a year with their loved ones. My friend was like, “I know somebody who works there [at the ICRC]. I can get you access to letters from all these people who are migrating around the world because of climate change, famine, wars…"
From reading the letters, I was able to put together a story. I was specifically thinking about how you can tell a story about somebody who isn’t around, and how much you actually hate that they’re not around, and how much you miss them.
Tell me about your writing process. Did you write the script on a tiny sheet of paper?
The ICRC’s wasn’t willing to give me any of the pages that people wrote on. They had to read them out loud to me. So I was like, “Send me a picture of what these look like?” Then I literally cut out a piece of paper the same size and I was like, How much can you fill this in? These notes are so fucking detailed. There’s this one woman who basically told her husband who was in prison what the kids eat everyday. It’s all these details that to us mean absolutely nothing. But when you’re in prison, you want to feel like you’re still a part of a family. These letters become a form of escape and that’s what this film needed to be.
When you’re reading one of these letters, you’re not stopping, which is why the short is done in one shot. And memories are always fragmented or not quite right. That’s why the main character imagines his son with a backpack, even if his son doesn’t go to school anymore. There also needed to be a point in this letter where the father starts reading between the lines and realizes that shit isn’t going well. That tension is where something really exciting can be built. It’s universal in the sense that we all have this desire to be connected to our families. But it gets particular when you think of the situations happening around the world right now. And when you’re particular, it can allow for things to be more universal.
Is that where the title comes from?
Yeah. It came from this idea that there’s this desire a son has of, “Look, I don’t remember much about you, but I do remember that you were a man of your word.” It’s this promise that the father can’t really keep because it’s not up to him if he’s going to get out or not. But the son has to believe that his father will come out and the father will do whatever is in his ability to come out.
How did the script become a short film?
It was something that I wrote and brought to my friend Michael, who runs a small production company in Brooklyn. He was like, “Let me see if I can get something together out in Beirut and we can maybe work this out.” Then there was a production company called Reframe and they were like, “Yeah, we can do this. It sounds like a good cause.”
I contacted a DP friend in New York and literally everything was given to us for free in Beirut. They hooked it up. People just want to do good work, so I was very lucky. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Arabic, but what I was able to do was have one person from the ICRC there with me who could help translate things and make sure that everything was being communicated correctly.
How did you cast the film?
The main guy in it, the father, he’s a known for acting in soap-operas. He was friends with one of the people that was helping us make the film. He came out and did us a favor. The kid was from a local acting school…
What was the filming like?
This was filmed over the course of two days. We have all these people working and then the young actor shows up and he doesn’t have any of his lines memorized. We basically had this crew working—they’re sweating their asses off, it’s the middle of the summer—and he’s getting all his lines messed up. We stopped production and I was like, “What’s wrong?” He goes, “Look, I don’t know if I can do this.” I was like, “Fuck.” We’ve got all these people here working and we don’t have much time to get this right, and it’s one shot. So we stopped production and I told him to sit with somebody and get his lines memorized. That’s when I realized the day was gone.
We had to make sure the sun was at a certain point, because the film walks this fine line where it’s very pedestrian and documentary-like, and also still has a filmic, professional quality. We were losing light that day and it just wasn’t going to work. We got there the next day and I was ready to not do the one-shot—not because it wasn’t working, but because I wanted to honor everyone working to make the film. Thank God he had his lines down.
What are your plans for the film from here?
We haven’t submitted it to many festivals yet. What I really would love to do is keep exploring letters. I have so many more letters and I don’t want to stop this. There’s so much to explore on how people communicate and the urgency of communication, particularly with people who are dying or people who know that this will be their last letter. There’s something really powerful with what words you leave behind. For me, this is just an experiment in that. I’m so happy that we had the cooperation of such incredible people.
UPDATE 7/12/18: An earlier version of this piece featured incorrect information about the area in which Wa’ad was filmed and the production crew’s relationship with Hezbollah. The inaccurate information has been removed.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Emerson Rosenthal on Instagram .
2018-07-12
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywkgyb/what-its-like-to-be-a-black-bull-rider-in-the-south
VICE Staff
Jul 12 2018, 8:25pm
In the heyday of America’s Old West, roughly a fourth of the cowboys were black. But today, the world of professional bull riding, a sport rooted in ranching culture, is predominantly white.
On this episode of MINORITY REPORTS, VICE sent Lee Adams to Texas to meet Neil Holmes and Ezekiel Mitchell—two black bull riders at different points in their careers—to find out what it’s like as a person of color trying to make it in the predominantly white world of professional bull riding. Holmes—an accomplished pro on the eve of his retirement—explains how he got into bull riding, and talks about leaving the sport as the only black pro ranked among the top 100 bull riders. Desperately trying to fill Holmes’s shoes is Mitchell, who’s struggled with the funds to travel, and has experienced racism in the sport first-hand.
We look into why one of the most popular sports in America has so few professional black athletes at its highest levels, and explore some of the barriers to entry that have made black representation difficult in the sport.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
2018-07-12
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzyavy/a-serial-twitter-followithunfollower-explains-himself
At some point in the not too distant future the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will have to be completely rewritten to account for all the ways social media has driven us insane. And when it is, there will be subsections dedicated to the myriad archetypes we encounter online every day: the Reply Guy, the Mentions Pest, the Quote Tweet Likes Scraper, and the Fishing Trip Avi Racist to name a few. Another particularly obnoxious category of social media compulsive comes in the form of people who practice the Follow/Unfollow Gambit. It’s a move that’s been nearly perfected by Ryan Hintze a nice young man from Florida, whose name you might not recognize but whose shirtless torso you probably do.
Hintze is a 23 year old former football player at the University of Southern Florida and a model. He stands 6’6” and weighs 230 pounds, as his Twitter bio points out, and he has been in business marketing brands and running social media accounts since he was 14, he says. Above all that, he just really, really wants you to follow him back online.
Hintze was “The most interesting man at USF,” as SB Nation’s The Daily Stampede blog called him back in 2016, in a piece touting his business acumen in running accounts like the now defunct @amazingvines, which had 106,000 followers at the time. “Follow him on his personal account on Twitter,” the article said. “He’s got over 7,000 followers.” Today that number stands at 202k.
I tweeted yesterday, after Hintze had followed and unfollowed me for maybe the 50th time, that I was never going to follow him back. He’s young, jacked, and has 250k followers already. What could he possibly need my follow for? A dozen of my friends and followers quickly chimed in, saying he does the same to them. What is this dude’s deal? I called him to find out.
Tell me about yourself. What is your deal?
I want to preface this conversation by saying I apologize for probably following you a thousand times in the last year or so. I’m from Bradenton, Florida. I’ve played sports my whole life, played college football. Now I’m running my own company that I started when I was 14. I do all kinds of stuff—e-commerce, graphic design, social media management, drone photography. I started to realize I could gain a lot of followers on social media platforms back when I was making parody pages on Twitter. I have an account called I am Danny Tosh, it’s a joke account about Daniel Tosh. My biggest page had 500k followers. In 2013 I monetized—I had like two million followers over 30 accounts—by posting links to my website that had ads on them. I had gallery websites like Top 10 Ab Workouts, stuff like that. I got the clickthrough rates going pretty well because each page was a different slide of the gallery.
After I realized I was pretty good at building audiences on Twitter I decided to do the same routine but with my own brand. I would post pictures of myself with quotes on them. That’s basically free content that I already had with my modeling.
You’re vlogging now too.
I do a mix between fitness instructional videos, how to do proper form stuff, and daily vlogging. I just vlogged a few days of what I was doing. I’m up to episode seven. I have 13 in the process of being edited. I probably only get like 300 views per video. I do zero promotion. I don’t post them to my Instagram like an idiot. I’m just trying to let it grow naturally. I’ve always watched what people like Gary Vee and Casey Neistat are doing. If one of my videos catches on people will go back and watch the others. I’m not worried about the views right now I’m just worried about getting content.
So be honest with me, you said you do Twitter by hand when we DM’d. Do you really?
I have a few tools I use. It’s all done on the Chrome browser, and everything is free. I don’t pay anyone to do anything. As a verified person I have permissions a regular account would not have. I can follow an unlimited amount of people every single day and also unfollow an unlimited amount. Otherwise might think you’re a spammer or bot. The limits on Twitter for an account that’s not verified is 1000 follows per day. After that you’re risking getting banned.
I have Chrome extensions that follow people all day long. I’ve found it better to follow verified people because that’s what I’m trying to do, to connect with as many verified people as I can. I guess they’re better people to be followed by. I’m followed by like seven to 8000 verified users on Twitter. Some of the notable people are Jake Paul, Logan Paul, Amanda Bynes.
You know one verified account who doesn’t follow you though, right?
Haha. You.
Do you care that people are annoyed by your following and unfollowing?
Honestly I don’t. I’ll never bother them again if they block me. If they just complain about it and don’t block me I guess they just want to cause problems. I don’t really care what people think. I’m just trying to get eyes on me. It’s a big attention game online. The more people that see my content and the more people that I either follow or engage with the better it is.
OK, but what’s the end goal?
Honestly just to build my audience. I’m not even in the stages of monetizing, I’m just trying to build an overall brand. I’m not even sure what direction I’ll take it. It’s mainly just to create an asset for myself that I can use down the road.
You mentioned Jake and Logan Paul. Is that the type of career you’re after?
Not necessarily. I want to take it more into a tech focus whether that would be reviews on YouTube of gadgets or things like that. That’s really where my true passion is. I guess it could be a spinoff of what the Pauls do. Not just dumb stuff on YouTube, more logical.
Do you ever think it’s unethical to use social media the way you do?
Honestly, I don’t even use social media. I’m just putting content out there. I don’t use it like I should, or [like some people] to only have my friends on there and count every person I have and take it to heart whether or not someone follows me and get all sensitive about it. It could be seen as unethical to just mass follow people on Twitter. But the end goal for me is just be on as many screens as I can. That’s the way I can achieve that, utilizing my resources, and doing what I do. It’s nothing personal to anybody I follow. Since 2015 I’ve gained around 230k followers.
In our DMs you mentioned VICE has you blocked?
Yeah they blocked me because I followed them so many times. Journalists and writers get pissed off the most. I have Buzzfeed people all pissed off, GQ. If you search my name you’ll see verified accounts saying “Why do you keep following me?” I try to joke about it and play it off, like, “I’m just trying to see what you’re up to today!” to lighten the situation, but they’re actually angry that I followed them. I just don’t really have any emotional attachment to the whole thing. Some people are really too involved. It’s kind of funny.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Luke O’Neil on Twitter.
2018-07-11
“America” is a fraught concept these days. At a moment when the government is forcibly separating children from their immigrant parents, partisan justices seem poised to roll back reproductive freedom, and Trump is beefing with China and Europe while cozying up to Putin, not a lot of young people are feeling particularly proud to be American.
But if the country’s still intact once Trump is finally booted from office, it won’t be up to baby boomers to heal the nation. The mantle will fall to America’s youth. And while white haired politicians seem hell-bent on making sure the future sucks for millennials and their Gen Z successors, young people are more politically engaged and outspoken than they have been in decades.
The Czech-born, New York-based artist Marie Tomanova thinks that’s something to feel optimistic about. When she immigrated to the US in 2011, America confounded her expectations. It was bigger and more isolating than she’d anticipated. But as she established a life and an artistic career in North Carolina, and then New York City, it was America’s youth culture that consistently inspired and renewed her.
Tomanova’s primary body of work consists of nude self-portraits in wild, natural landscapes. But over the years, she’s also amassed a huge number of photographs of young people in her orbit. From now through August 10, Tomanova is showing 200 of those portraits in a new exhibition, Young American at the Czech Centre in New York City.
VICE spoke with the artist about the new series, the power of youth, and the Trump administration’s hostility towards immigrants like herself.
VICE: What intrigues you about young people and youth culture?
Marie Tomanova: It’s their energy and openness to experiment and explore. It’s the courage to feel like they can change the world. It’s the vulnerability and fragility one minute and fierce passion another minute. I think there is a special place in the universe for youth, and their energy is precious.
Just the memory of my youth… Oh my god, it was so painful in so many ways and so great in other ways. I don’t know if I would be able to handle reliving it. It can be a very intense period of one’s life. It was that time when I still didn’t know what to do with myself, where I was heading, or what I want to do. It was the time when I had to try a million things to figure it all out and got to this point. I think there is a huge “something” in this period of time that kids go through.
How’d you choose your subjects? How’d you make sure you had a diverse mix of ages, genders, ethnicities, identities, and parts of America they’re from?
Most of the photographs were taken in NYC and over a longer period of time. The New York population is diverse and rich on it’s own, you just have to look around. And that’s what I love about NYC. I have been photographing people at parties, openings, on the street or in their private places over more than three years. I think it is also the places where I chose to hang out that influenced who I photographed. The city is pulsing with young kids at the parties, the art crowd at the openings, all of these events to a certain extent inspired who I met and got to photograph.
How much collaboration did you have with your subjects? Did they give input on where and how they wanted to be portrayed?
Many of the portraits that are included in Young American were shot for a different purpose. For example, when I shot editorials and other projects, there would always be couple photographs that were super strong portraits but didn’t really fit into the fashion story… Those portraits were gradually piling up, until they became this whole new project, Young American.
Once I solely focused on taking portraits for this project, I got even more freedom in the process. The photograph is always a special thing between [the subject and me]. The thing I love best about shoots is that, most of the time, I end up chatting with people who I photograph, and it is always inspiring to hear their story.
Why’d you choose to focus on American youth, versus young people globally?
I think there is a quite simple answer to this. I focused on American youth because that is where I have been living for the past seven years and have been trying to fit in. As an immigrant, the American dream and American youth have always fascinated me, and it has been a great journey for me to have the opportunity to connect with so many amazing people and learn from them.
Living in a whole different part of the world with no family around taught me how to listen to people better, how to stand up for myself, and most of all it showed me so many new perspectives on matters in life and life in general. These series are about “Americans” who are not defined by passport or Visa but that are defined by having hopes and dreams. I relate.
What does “America” mean to you?
America is a special place for me. It completely changed my life. Maybe this would have happened as well if I went to another part of the world, but for some reason I chose the United States. I left my home country one day and thought that I would be back in half a year or so… But I fell in love and never returned. America helped me to find myself, to discover what I love, and what I want to do. It has been tough many times through the years. There were times when I hit the bottom so hard and didn’t have family around to help. I cried, feeling helpless and homesick so many times, and I considered running back home… But that’s all part of life, and I always try to find the positive side of things, even when it looks like there is none. For me, America is a place where things can happen if you work hard and have lots of grit. America is my second home.
What was it like moving to America as an adult? What was the hardest thing to get used to? Will you stay here forever, do you think?
It was a strange moment to get on a plane one day and end up in a different part of the world where nobody knows you. I spent my first year in North Carolina, and the huge highways fascinated me. The distances that one would drive each day were unbelievable for me, the size of your everyday coffee was insane! Everything was so huge and fast as I was coming from a small town. The whole Czech Republic is about half size of Florida. I really started to have a whole new understanding of distances. [laughs]
But it also was very exciting and challenging that nobody knew me. I could have been whomever I wanted to. I could have taken on a whole different persona when I arrived in Greensboro. And the same thing happened the next year when I moved to New York and nobody knew me. It was a very new and unexplored experience for me, because I am from a small town where everybody knows who you are—or at least they think they do—and they have you in certain “box,” and it’s hard to break through that. I loved the anonymity of NYC. I spent a lot of time writing the first couple of years. It helped me wrap my head around all of the changes and constant new impressions.
What do you hope the future holds for our generation? What do you fear it holds?
I hope for fewer boundaries everywhere. I hope for a global embrace of inclusiveness. I hope for positive choices and many powerful voices. I fear conservatism. I fear a lack of sensitivity and tolerance. I fear that the forward movement embraced by youth will lose energy.
Why did you want this series to be positive, inclusive, and idealistic? What drew you to beauty and positivity versus politics and dread?
My mom always used to say: “With positive attitude, half work done.” I think there is more power when things are approached in a positive way. I hate feeling helpless, and in politics nowadays it could very easily be all about that. But I consciously choose to believe in change and positivity. It is a way for me to be able to move forward and keep going.
Why did you want to do portraits of other people, which is so different from your main body of work, which is all self-portraits in nature?
In a way, it is not so different. My work of self portraits in nature is about identity and displacement and celebration and trying to connect to my youth growing up in the forests of Mikulov. When I came to the US, those memories were all that I had, and I struggled to find my identity when I was new in this country. I have realized that really it was me trying to fit into the American landscape, or to find my place in the American landscape. And Young American is really the same. The portraits are really of them, me, and us. We are all in their eyes. We are human.
Oren
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Kara Weisenstein on Twitter.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjb8q5/skeet-ulrich-from-riverdale-is-the-best-thing-in-my-life
How the former 90s heartthrob and current ‘Riverdale’ star’s social media restored my faith in the internet.
Wendy Syfret
Jul 11 2018, 8:30pm
This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.
In 1996, Skeet Ulrich was almost a big deal. He was a young handsome actor, caught in the Johnny Depp slipstream that saw several dark-eyed, high-cheek-boned babes get work in teen films. You might not know his name, but trust me, you know the dude. He was the bad guy in Scream—sorry for the 22-year-old spoiler—and the dickish and doomed love interest in The Craft—shit, spoiler for that one too.
For the past 20 years, he has worked solidly in projects you probably haven’t seen. That was until last year, when he was cast as Serpents gang leader and Jughead’s absent father, FP Jones, on Riverdale. Classic stuff.
For most, this could be seen as the career renaissance your boy Ulrich has been holding out for. Riverdale is a huge hit. And while the majority of the praise has been for a new generation of dark-eyed, high-cheek-boned babes (seriously Cole Sprouse, get in touch), it is no doubt a comfortable and satisfying check to cash midway through a career that was probably not always easy.
But to leave things here would mean missing the most interesting thing about the 90s pinup. Because you see, Skeet Ulrich is the most earnest man on the internet. How do I know this? The same way I know everything I believe to be deeply true—Instagram.
My path to Skeet Ulrich’s Instagram was winding. His press shots and screengrabs didn’t pull me in alone. He lead me there through breadcrumbs. Crumbs he sprinkled throughout the comment sections on the far more traditionally engaging accounts of Riverdale’s young adult stars.
Spend a bit of time on the grams of Cole Sprouse (great photographer), Lili Reinhart (lovable doofus),Camila Mendes (those brows though), KJ Apa (New Zealander) and you’ll see a lot of “amazing!,” “great!,” “epic!,” “the coolest!” While the young castmates post photos of each other cracking in-jokes and lovingly give shit to each other, Skeet is a constant presence. His input is broken down into two categories: Either eye-rolling dad jokes and intensely meaningful reflections on how stoked he is to be a part of all this—all completed with at least three exclamation marks.
The dad jokes are classic fare. Below a picture of KJ Apa huddled between coworkers, he wrote, “That’s one way to keep warm!!!” On another, that sees supporting cast members Casey Cott and Mark Consuelos with their arms around each other he demands, “Homies!!! Count me in next time!!!” A bit thirsty, but fine.
The bulk of his cheesy banter is reserved for his onscreen son, Cole Sprouse. The ex-Disney star’s feed is made up of his own photography work, much of which has been published in respected global publications. That doesn’t stop Ulrich though, underneath a shot of him with the wind in his hair he teases, “Love your new hair dryer.” On another, he simply exclaims, “So proud of you son!!!”
But my personal favorites are the achingly emotional remarks. Here, Lily—a.k.a. Betty Cooper, girl detective and his onscreen son’s love interest—gets the bulk of the attention. He calls her an “Amazing timeless beauty!!!” When she holds a baby he gasps, “You look so at home!!!” When she posts a Lang Leav excerpt he replies, “Hope alone will make everything you want real.” As a side note, this is objectively bad advice.
After months—literally months—of obsessively checking these feeds, screenshotting the interactions, looking at the screenshots, and going back to see if the other cast members were replying to him or if he was just screaming into a generation gap—I started to notice a few things.
Firstly, the thirst is generally only reciprocated among Riverdale cast members born before 1990. Second, related point, Gen X does not understand the internet. But third, and most importantly, cool is a total illusion. My feed, probably like yours, is a smooth, polished surface, formed by constructed and beautiful photos of constructed and beautiful things. From filters to captions, these are engineered spaces, where we only show what we want. All other thoughts, feelings, and impulses are cropped out of frame.
So when a crack of something real, something earnest, impulsive, and uncultivated cuts through, it’s jarring and precious. This dude is honestly just so clearly stoked with his life. He genuinely seems so happy—so happy to know these people, so happy to have a cool job, so happy to wake up every day and do something he likes. He is brimming over, spilling into other people’s crafted spaces.
It’s hard to think of anyone else in my life with that kind of energy, who is just endlessly, exhaustively rooting for everyone around them. My parents don’t understand Instagram but even if they did, they wouldn’t be putting in that kind of time for me. Do you understand the time commitment here? We’re literally talking about personalized comments on every other post, across several cast members.
I understand that there is a world in which people laugh at him. Maybe Cole and Lily have a cute LOL and nudge each other when a notification pops up. At the beginning of this, maybe I was like that. Seeing @skeetme1 pop up again and again, wondering, what is going on here? Babe, you have got to chill.
But it’s because honestly, I was jealous. Not of the dewy stars—although honestly, yes, of course, them too—but of Skeet. Not of his career comeback, or his still perfect bone structure, but for his openness. For never being afraid to express himself.
Everyone has cool friends they tone it down for, who they’re a little bit smaller for, a bit less themselves. For Skeet, they’re literally on the cover of Cosmo. But he doesn’t give a fuck, he isn’t monitoring his likes. You know when he scrolls two years back on someone’s feed, he isn’t watching his thumbs. He likes a picture from 2016, gets into bed, and sleeps the deep restful slumber of someone who isn’t consumed by online social anxiety. The sleep of someone who is just happy to be happy, thankful for how life worked out, and not afraid to show that.
Sometimes when I feel like shit, or stressed, or dumb I look out for him. His warm words aren’t directed at me but the glow of them is still there. I want to be brave and open-hearted on the internet like him. To just see my blessings and write “WOW!!!” beneath them. Skeet Ulrich’s Instagram makes me want to write “WOW!!!” beneath the whole damn world.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
For more overthought opinions on social media, follow Wendy on Twitter and Instagram.
2018-07-11
Apparently he’s got his own cell with a private bathroom, access to a phone and computer, and doesn’t have to wear a uniform.
Drew Schwartz
Jul 11 2018, 8:44pm
Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP
Last month, Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort got locked up at a jail in northern Virginia for allegedly trying to tamper with witnesses in the Mueller probe. Actual inmates who’ve been in the jail painted a pretty bleak picture of what he was in for, calling conditions “miserable.” But as Manafort tells it, his time at the Northern Neck Regional Jail has apparently been pretty plush.
Over one of his monitored phone calls from prison, the former Trump campaign chief allegedly said he was even being treated like a “VIP.”
Paul Manafort bragged about “VIP” jail conditions in a recorded phone call, per Mueller’s team. pic.twitter.com/aUisxxMGnX
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) July 11, 2018
The conversation was noted in a court filing that surfaced on Wednesday from prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Prosecutors said Manafort also lives alone in an extra large cell, meets with his lawyers daily, and gets a shit-ton of other perks—from a de facto private office to his very own bathroom, the Washington Post reports.
“Telephone logs indicate Manafort has spoken to his attorneys every day, and often multiple times a day,” prosecutors said. “Manafort also possess a personal laptop that he is permitted to use in his (jail) unit to review materials and prepare for trial. The jail has made extra accommodations for Manafort’s use of the laptop, including providing him an extension cord to ensure the laptop can be used in his unit and not just in the separate workroom.”
He also apparently “is not required to wear a prison uniform,” though it’s unclear if Manafort is walking around the jail in his usual $7,000 suits.
Seeing as Manafort is currently residing in a spot the Washington Post already deemed the “VIP” wing of the jail, a lock-up that’s housed Michael Vick and Chris Brown, things might not be so great if he winds up in prison.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xb93v/chicago-man-harasses-woman-puerto-rico-shirt-vgtrn
“You should not be wearing that in the United States of America. Are you a citizen?”
Drew Schwartz
Jul 10 2018, 7:04pm
Update 7/12: The officer has since resigned.
Last month, Mia Irizarry was setting up a picnic for her 24th birthday in a park outside of Chicago when, out of nowhere, a white man barged up to her and started berating her about her shirt: a tank top with the Puerto Rican flag on it. The guy, apparently unclear that Puerto Rico is an American territory, said her shirt was “un-American” and questioned her citizenship—all while a nearby cop stood by, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
It looks like you may be having problems playing this video. If so, please try restarting your browser.
Close
Posted by Mia Irizarry
1,626,498 Views
Posted by Mia Irizarry
1,626,498 Views
app-facebook
Video Unavailable
Sorry, this video could not be played.
Learn More
In a video Irizarry uploaded to Facebook, the man storms up to her, demanding to know why she’s wearing the shirt, asking if she’s “educated,” and coming just inches away from her while he goes on a tirade.
"I would like to know is she an American citizen? Why is she wearing that shit?” the man barks. "You’re not going to change us. The world is not going to change the United States of America. You should not be wearing that in the United States of America.”
Meanwhile, Iziarry calmly explains that she has a permit to use the park’s pavilion and repeatedly asks the nearby officer for help, telling him she feels “highly uncomfortable.” But the cop appears to do nothing—just mills around by his car while Irizarry asks the man to “please get away from me.”
Eventually, more cops show up and sit the man down. According to Irizarry, the guy was cuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, and the parks department refunded what she payed to reserve the pavilion. The man, who was allegedly drunk, has since been charged with assault and disorderly conduct, the Forest Preserves District of Cook County wrote in a statement. The officer who failed to step in while Irizarry was being harassed is now under investigation.
Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rossello weighed in on what happened Monday, tweeting that he was “appalled, shocked & disturbed by the officer’s behavior,” and demanding that he be fired from the force.
Irizarry is just the latest person of color to have their completely benign summer activity—like going to the pool or selling water—ruined by a white person for absolutely no reason. And just to be clear: Yes, Puerto Ricans are American citizens.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev849a/civility-is-what-gave-us-trump-in-the-first-place
To fight injustice, you need incivility.
Issac J. Bailey
Jul 10 2018, 7:05pm
A March 2016 protest in Chicago. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty
The black waiter kept quietly coming over to my table as though afraid of being noticed. He knew, as I did, that we lived in an area where civility has long been used to kill and maim and make second-class citizens of people like us. It’s a place where police shot a young black man, paralyzing him for life, lied about the incident, faced no charges or discipline, and not one local official, elected or otherwise, made a fuss about it.
Read: America’s New Lynching Memorial Is Gut-Wrenching, Gruesome, and Beautiful
The black waiter in that country-style buffet restaurant kept asking if I wanted a refill while wiping down tables near me that didn’t need cleaning because he had already cleaned them so well. He then leaned in toward me, the only other black person in the place, eyes quickly darting across the restaurant to make sure none of the white patrons could hear what he was desperate to say.
“He called me boy,” he told me, fighting back tears and subtly nodding towards a grizzled older white man in jeans and a T-shirt sitting in a corner booth. “He said, ‘Get me some sweat tea, boy.’”
The hurt in his voice was palpable. I wanted to make a scene but thought better of it, knowing the resulting anger would more likely redound back on him rather than the white man in jeans and T-shirt. It’s the kind of choice black people living in the South have had to make for decades, to swallow daily indignities or risk being blamed for unrest that make the white people around them uncomfortable.
Moments like these remind me that it was civility, not incivility, that helped make Donald Trump president. Barack Obama may have been the most civil man ever appointed to this country’s highest office. His presence—calm, careful, authoritative but not authoritarian—allowed Americans to falsely believe all our racial problems had been solved. That gave moral license to white Americans who had voted for Obama to shift to Trump—they had already proven they couldn’t be racist—after the Republican expertly weaponized their fear and cultural ignorance.
It’s worth remembering, too, that atrocities committed during the Obama era did not cause as much backlash as those being committed now. It’s true that what’s occurring under Trump is more extreme and harsher than what came before him, from his policy of stealing children from their parents to his increase of bombings and drone killings in the Middle East that have set new records for civilian deaths.
But the Obama administration was also sued because of its treatment of undocumented immigrants at the border. Activists called the president the “deporter in chief” because of a record-pace of deportations. Disturbing allegations of torture in some immigrant detention facilities that are now surfacing stretch across the Obama and Trump eras. But because Obama never referred to immigrants as an “infestation” or “animals” or “rapists” and “criminals,” many of his allies saw his policies through the lens I did, as an attempt to prove to moderate Republicans that he was serious about enforcement so he could convince enough of them to vote for a more humane immigration policy. It nearly worked with a 2013 reform package that received 68 votes in the Senate but was never brought to the floor in the House by then-Speaker John Boehner.
“Civility” means white liberals telling people of color to empathize with Trump supporters.
That is how civility works in practice in the United States. By “civility,” what is often meant is that you should take your political opponent’s concerns seriously, even when those concerns are built upon falsehoods and harmful stereotypes. “Civility” means that even the most horrible systems of oppression should be dismantled slowly and gradually rather than all at once. “Civility” means white liberals telling people of color to empathize with Trump supporters—even though the most downtrodden Trump supporter has never experienced the economic angst and societal ostracism people of color have suffered since before the founding of this country. They want us to do what that black waiter had to do: Whisper, not roar, about the daily indignities we face, indignities that have been supercharged in the Trump era.
Advocating too fervently and too unapologetically for the vulnerable upsets the social order. It disturbs those in positions of comfort and power. While good-hearted Americans will tolerate high concentrations of poverty and mass incarceration and students of color trapped in hellholes of schools—and the world’s lone superpower supporting a multi-year, Saudi-led military operation that has created one of the worst modern-day humanitarian crises in Yemen—causing the comfortable the slightest bit of discomfort will never be tolerated the same way.
And so black athletes silently kneeling during the national anthem to peacefully protest racial injustice is considered uncivil, un-American even, by a large majority of white Americans. Meanwhile, we civilly use taxpayer dollars to kill people in foreign countries we aren’t at war with. We civilly put needles in men’s arms on death row instead of chopping off their heads. We civilly memorialize rapists and murderers with statues. We revere the Civil Rights leaders but never acknowledge that Martin Luther King Jr. was once hated and Nelson Mandela was labeled a terrorist. In their time, as it is in ours, civility was defined by the powerful and used like a club by tyrants.
I didn’t ask that white man in jeans and a T-shirt, but I’m confident he likely believed he was being civil because he called that 30-something-year-old black waiter boy rather than nigger. Civility has always been defined by the oppressed, not the oppressor. In South Carolina, white residents have long perfected the bless-your-heart two-step of praying for your black soul so you can join them in Heaven in the afterlife, while upholding systems that threaten your black body in the here and now.
That isn’t limited to white Southerners. “Civility” means whatever comforts the largest number of white Americans, no matter how much injustice it codifies. That’s why even those who say they are on our side, like the white clergy members in Alabama who told King to stop making so much ruckus, so often tell us to pipe down, to put on a smile, to hide our anger and disgust. It’s why a white friend told me I was turning an ally into an enemy because I insisted there was no good reason for Oklahoma police officer Betty Shelby to have killed unarmed Terence Crutcher. It’s why white liberal pundits keep passionately telling us that we will be responsible for white America’s decision to either continue embracing or excusing Trump’s bigotry, unwittingly putting him on a glide path for re-election. Never mind that not even Obama’s world-renowned civility could stop them from supporting Trump.
Civility can be a virtue. Maybe we can use the best version of it during times like these, when kindness seems in short supply. But we need to remember that civility has never ended oppression. It didn’t end race-based chattel slavery. It didn’t destroy Jim Crow. It prevented neither the slaughter of Native Americans nor the march of Japanese Americans into internment camps.
Obama’s civility let us pretend for years that there was nothing deeply wrong with America. Trump snatched off that mask, revealing to ourselves who we’ve long been but long denied being. Going back to pretending will not help.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Issac J. Bailey on Twitter.
2018-07-10
“I cannot dance, but at least I can make an animation about the dance.”
Beckett Mufson
Jul 10 2018, 7:50pm
Image courtesy Pinot Ichwandardi
This entrancing video of Donald Glover’s “This Is America” recreated on an ancient Macintosh computer is the best thing you’ll see all day.
pinot
Verified
394.4k followers
View Profile
pinot
Verified
4,092 posts · 394.4k followers
View More on Instagram
Like
Comment
Save
175,991 likes
pinotIn progress: Capturing Donald Glover dance in This Is America video. Using Macintosh SE computer, MacPaint software & MacroMind software. Currently: 375 frames.
view all 5,686 comments
1 WEEK AGO
A post shared by Pinot W. Ichwandardi (@pinot) on Jul 4, 2018 at 4:18pm PDT
Even with cutting-edge technology, animation is an insanely time-consuming process. Features like Isle of Dogs and The Incredibles 2 require armies of animators with huge computer banks and millions of dollars to work for years. Alone, it can take as much time to animate a single short film.
Indonesian-born Pinot Ichwandardi is animating Glover’s hypnotic gyrations on computer that would barely qualify as a millennial. He’s spent two to three hours a night for months “pixel-knitting”—Ichwandardi 's term for his zen illustration method—each frame of Glover’s hypnotic gyrations using a 1970’s Summagraphics Tablet connected to a 1984 Macintosh 128k’s MacPaint program. Then this absolute legend transfers the frames by freaking floppy disk to a 1987 Macintosh SE, where he animates them with the MacroMind VideoWorks software. It seems like an elaborate form of artistic masochism, but Ichwandardi doesn’t see it that way.
Pixel art machines:
Drawing tool: Macintosh 128K + MacPaint
Animation too: Macintosh SE + MacroMind VideoWork
Both connected with LocalTalk pic.twitter.com/h19c8fWFKO
— Wahyu Ichwandardi (@pinot) June 29, 2018
“It’s like riding a classic car,” he told VICE. “[The technology’s] limitation becomes a new value, new art. All forgiven, every single flaw like ‘not enough memory’ is permissible… with this method, the process itself becomes more important than the result. The process is the story. This is the reason I posted the process on my Twitter thread. Without those processes, the result is just another piece of pixel art, generated by modern machine.”
In the months since “This Is America’s” explosive debut, Ichwandardi’s thrown together nearly 500 frames of the dance, adding up to 38 seconds. For every hour he spends animating, Ichwandardi also spends an hour studying choreographer Sherrie Silver’s “voodoo dancing” to get it just right.
His animation isn’t a shot-for-shot remake of the video, but a 2D representation of the dance, which presents challenges like estimating where Glover’s feet are placed in close up shots that cut off his lower half. “Close enough,” he tweeted last week.
Ichwandardi has been making films since his father taught him cel animation as a child, and he’s been using Macs since the mid-80s. He started collecting his vintage tools at flea markets when he and his family lived in Kuwait and completed his collection at markets in New York and on eBay. His goal isn’t just nostalgia, but to educate the internet—and his kids—about so-called obsolete technology. “Our home becomes a personal laboratory, an art and technology classroom. By giving access the old technology to our children, they develop a new idea based on their own perspective.”
The animator acknowledges that his recreation skirts the cultural impact of the video. He’s not trying to be the next Nicole Arbour, instead focusing on the parts most accessible to him and his family. “I’m a dad with three kids and the video got their attention, though the message and song is not for them. So my wife and I created a distraction for the kids to focus on a different aspect: the dance itself. I cannot dance, but at least I can make an animation about the dance."
While he may never recreate the full video due to copyright implications, Ichwandardi thinks he may release it as a GIF when he’s done. For now, his nightly pixel-knitting is simply a relaxing pastime.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Beckett Mufson on Twitter and Instagram.
2018-07-10
Renard Matthews’s family wanted to remember the 18-year-old just as he lived.
River Donaghey
Jul 10 2018, 3:51pm
Image via WGNO
The family of a New Orleans teen tragically killed in a shooting last month wanted their loved one’s funeral to honor him just the way he lived—so they had his body embalmed and posed it in a recliner with a PS4 controller in hand, WGNO reports.
Eighteen-year-old Renard Matthews was fatally shot while walking his dog on June 25. His mother, Temeka Matthews, told WGNO that her son was “a bit of a homebody” who loved the Boston Celtics, so she and the family decided on a non-traditional way of remembering him at last Sunday’s wake.
NOLA family chooses unique but loving way to say goodbye to son https://t.co/bE0KzGbcAX pic.twitter.com/ZWEtvGLIup
— WGNO (@WGNOtv) July 8, 2018
Instead of a standard casket, the family positioned Matthews at the head of the room at Charbonnet Labat Glapion Funeral Home, seated in a chair in front of a TV playing NBA2K. The Celtics fan was dressed in sunglasses and a Kyrie Irving jersey with matching socks. Next to his chair, on an end table, the family lined up some of their son’s favorite snacks—a bag of Doritos and root beer.
According to Yahoo, the Treme funeral home has hosted a variety of unusual funerals, like these so-called “extreme embalmings.” Back in 2014, the funeral home reportedly put together a wake for a 53-year-old woman whose family asked for her to be posed at a table with a cigarette and beer. The funeral home has also “stood a deceased drummer from a grassroots band at a drum set” for a wake, an employee told Yahoo.
Matthews’s wake is a surprising but loving tribute to the high school student whose life was cut short by the shooting. He is set to be laid to rest Tuesday at Interment Providence Memorial Park.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow VICE on Twitter.
2018-07-09
The group shouted at the Senate Majority Leader about the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
Drew Schwartz
Jul 9 2018, 4:18pm
Screengrabs via Andrew Massie / Facebook
Left-wing activists and regular citizens have made a point to confront Trump’s allies in their private lives recently, with protests hitting the president’s former EPA chief, his press secretary, and his head of Homeland Security (twice). And despite calls for “civility,” the activist left isn’t letting up—showing up at a Kentucky restaurant where Mitch McConnell was eating Saturday to publicly shame him for his stance on the current border crisis.
According to the Washington Post, about a half dozen protesters showed up to the Bristol Bar & Grille in Louisville, Kentucky, after a woman spotted him there and put out a call for backup on Twitter. When McConnell walked out of the restaurant with two other men, the crowd let him have it, chanting “vote you out!” and “where are the children?” while they followed him to his car.
It looks like you may be having problems playing this video. If so, please try restarting your browser.
Close
Posted by Andrew Massie
207,643 Views
Posted by Andrew Massie
207,643 Views
app-facebook
Video Unavailable
Sorry, this video could not be played.
Learn More
The crowd—which reportedly included a few members of Louisville’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter—broke into an “abolish ICE” chant while McConnell climbed into his car, and shouted “where are the babies?” at him before he drove away. One protester yelled “turtle head!” at the Senate Majority Leader a few times (a weirdly accurate comparison), along with jeers of “we know where you live, Mitch.” According to the DSA, whoever was behind that “turtle head” burn wasn’t affiliated with the organization.
Just like the activists who recently confronted DHS chief Kirstjen Nielsen, Saturday’s protesters seemed to be particularly pissed off about the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which resulted in nearly 3,000 immigrant children being separated from their parents at the border. As the Post notes, McConnell came out in support of Trump’s immigration policy, though he disagreed with family separation.
Saturday marks the second time in two weeks protesters have publicly shamed McConnell for his stance on the border crisis—and it’s just one of many recent incidents plaguing Trump allies in their lives outside of work.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.
2018-07-09
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9km5ba/planebae-proves-fun-viral-moments-are-dead-forever
This is why the internet can’t have nice things.
Eve Peyser
Jul 9 2018, 8:12pm
Screenshots via Twitter
The internet is a chaotic fiery hell pit with intermittent heavenly glimmers. I spend all day looking at it, and occasionally a seemingly lighthearted viral moment reveals itself to be so insidious and morally bankrupt that I dream about throwing my electronics into the ocean and building a new life for myself, disconnected from the horror of social media. The #PlaneBae saga was one of those moments that reminded me how depraved the social media machine can be.
A recap, for the blissfully unaware: On July 3, a blogger and actress by the name of Rosey Blair asked a woman to switch seats with her on an airplane so she could sit next to her boyfriend. “We made a joke that maybe her new seat partner would be the love of her life and well, now I present you with this thread,” Blair wrote in a tweet that now has over 900,000 likes. The Twitter thread—a series of images Blair originally posted in her Instagram story—chronicles what she interpreted as the beginning of a love story between the two people sitting in front of her with unapologetic voyeurism.
Last night on a flight home, my boyfriend and I asked a woman to switch seats with me so we could sit together. We made a joke that maybe her new seat partner would be the love of her life and well, now I present you with this thread.
— Rosey Blair (@roseybeeme) July 3, 2018
In a thread of captioned images of the back of the flirting plane-riders’ seats (with the sides of their faces blacked out), selfies of Blair and her boyfriend, and reactions from Blair’s friends, the blogger-actress excitedly documented what she was witnessing, emphasizing repeatedly how hot both of the people she was spying on were. The burgeoning couple allegedly purchased a cheese board to share, and the narrative reached its climax when Blair claimed that the pair went to the bathroom together at the same time.
The sickly sweet story appealed to the rom-com fans, single people wondering whether they’ll ever have some chance airplane encounter where they’ll meet The One. But life is not a movie, and less than a week after Blair posted her viral thread, any residual positive #PlaneBae vibes were long dead. While the man sitting in front of the couple, a former soccer player named Euan Holden, was more than happy to reveal his identity to the world, the woman, who a Today Show segment identified as “Helen,” didn’t want her identity publicly revealed. Holden told the Today Show that Helen is “a very private person,” but made sure to give viewers hope that their romance would blossom into something bigger, saying that the pair plan to meet up soon.
Unlike Helen, Blair basked in the fruits of her newfound notoriety. She immediately began tweeting at BuzzFeed asking for a job, informing her new followers that she’s an actress looking for work, asking T-Mobile for money, and making sure the world knew that the story was first and foremost about her. (“One of my favorite life mantras when struck with the thought of ‘why is this happening to me’ is to instead consider asking yourself, ‘why is this happening FOR me,’” she explained in an Instagram post where she identified herself as “some strange variety of journalist.”)
The blogger-actress, high off her viral fame, was totally unable to grasp why Helen was reticent to go public—and that’s when things took a darker turn. In a video posted on Twitter, Blair leans next to her boyfriend, encouraging the internet to dox Helen. “So we don’t have the gal’s permish yet—not yet y’all—but I’m sure you guys are sneaky. I think you might,” Blair cheerfully intones.
“Don’t encourage them,” her boyfriend interrupts with a smile.
According to Business Insider, Helen “has quietly gone dark by deleting both her Twitter account and Instagram.” The rom-com fairytale, when translated into the messy real world, quickly turned into a saga about the invasion of privacy and what happens when someone uses something happening to you IRL without your permission for their own gain.
To those who want to become famous, a thirst for likes and follows might seem like an innocent personality quirk. But anyone who has become famous against their will knows that not all publicity is good publicity. Monica Lewinsky, who was initially charmed by the thread, sent six tweets apologizing for “bringing stress, upset and a violation of privacy to whoever the woman on the plane is.” And she was not the only social media user to apologize for unintentionally egging Blair on.
“Trying to reconcile my general distaste for internet vigilantism with my overwhelming desire to elbow drop the goblin couple who posted the plane bae thread off the top rope,” one Twitter user wrote. Atlantic writer Taylor Lorenz put it like this:
The lesson here is not that Blair is a uniquely evil person or that she deserves to be bullied herself. But it is an illustration of how the allure of social media stardom turns private real-world moments, whether they belong to you or someone else, into potential content. It’s not inherently immoral to tweet an observation of something that’s happening around you—I do it all the time—but not-so-tacitly encouraging your followers to dox a woman who clearly does not want to be famous crosses a line. Smartphones have turned everyone into amateur journalists because anyone can broadcast what’s going on around them to the world, but that means everyone needs to be aware when they are infringing on people’s privacy. A world where everyone is not just a potential paparazzi but also a potential target isn’t one anyone wants to live in. (Thinkpieces on the problematic nature of the woman responsible for #PlaneBae, like this one, continue to feed the viral hate machine, and for that, I am sorry.)
In a time before Donald Trump was president, and GamerGate mentality engulfed internet life, #PlaneBae might’ve been fun. (Remember Rooftop Breakup? Simpler times!) But in the miserable, desperate social media ecosystem, #PlaneBae is just another example of how seemingly cute viral threads always turn sinister. The problem with the internet is that it’s made up of people.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter and Instagram.
2018-07-09
When I arrived at Damon Davis and Katherine Simóne Reynolds’s adjacent studios in South St. Louis, the artists were already deep in conversation. They finished each others’ sentences, like siblings for whom most thoughts don’t need to be spoken, as they talked about everything from the conservative politics embedded in the Black community, to Kanye’s problematic return to Twitter, and the gritty leather bar where Reynolds was headed after our chat.
The broken AC in the studio mirrored the hothouse effect of this small city, where the art scenes unpredictably tangle and overlap. It is a scene heating up in every sense, with art and activism intertwining following the Ferguson uprising, art spaces opening and expanding rapidly, and a new wave of artists fleeing the coasts—some in search of cheap space and room to experiment, others returning to their roots after years away.
Davis and Reynolds have each been at the forefront of this emerging scene, making names for themselves by trespassing outside expectations—of the city, of its cloistered communities, and of simplistic visions of Blackness. The pair, alongside an expansive community of artists, activists, rappers, producers, curators, and organizers are authoring an alternate identity for creative young people in St. Louis. Every time they speak, they know they are performing a role: that of rising Black artist from the 21st century home of revolt.
St. Louis, Missouri, is the birthplace of gated communities and contains some of the starkest segregation in the nation. The rupture that started in Ferguson almost four years ago wasn’t exactly news from nowhere. Dating back to at least the Dred Scott case and Missouri’s designation as a slave state, the city has been a site of recurring contention. In recent decades, St. Louis slid into a familiar post-industrial malaise felt across much of the Midwest. National news outlets focused on crime statistics and the city’s flyover status.
When Michael Brown was killed on August 9, 2014, and the cameras arrived on Canfield Drive, they came for a flash in the pan protest but stuck around as the protests became a new Civil Rights Movement. The energy of the artists and activists who helped shape it spilled out into the city’s streets, politics, gatherings, and galleries.
Witnessing (and participating in) this uprising shifted my own work as an artist and arts organizer. My partner Brea and I founded The Luminary, a far-reaching independent art space in St. Louis, ten years ago. We see the space as a means to center artists within the city’s trajectory, not just as voices of our time but as a means of envisioning new futures. We seek to be a lynchpin in this “new” St. Louis, pushing art to its limits to propose a more innovative, equitable city amidst the urgencies of our moment.
From this still-simmering uprising, a new Black arts renaissance has flourished in St. Louis, and Davis and Reynolds are taking this work to its bleeding edge, crossing boundaries and shattering previously assumed ceilings of the St. Louis art world. They are impossible to ignore in part because of their hybrid, more-is-more approach to their art—Davis calls his work “post-disciplinary” and Reynolds uses “multi-“ or half-jokingly “manic-disciplinary” to describe her eclectic output.
Davis is best known for co-directing the Ferguson documentary Whose Streets? which propelled him to a national stage and a TED Fellowship. But he also helms the long-running music label Farfetched and is a prolific visual artist, with a major solo exhibition currently up at The Luminary and work in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History.
Reynolds uses her body to explore notions of Black beauty and love in striking dance, video, and performance art. She’s collaborated with big name friends—she was the face of Martine Syms’s major commission at MoMA last summer—and is becoming a regular at art fairs and exhibitions around the nation.
Fittingly, my early summer chat with Reynolds and Davis fell between the artists’ twinned exhibitions at The Luminary—Mane ‘n Tail and Darker Gods in the Garden of the Low-Hanging Heavens. We’ve worked with the pair in almost every permutation, hosting Davis’s music label parties and Reynolds’s Citizen Book Club, and showing their work in group exhibitions alongside acclaimed artists like Hannah Black and Dread Scott. When Brea and I heard about their new projects, we revised our schedule to make way for two of the most important voices in our community. In a city fissured with inferiority, their work engages the histories of this place and proposes a brighter future.
Darker Gods is Davis’s largest solo show to date, and opening it in St. Louis, despite offers from both coasts, was an intentional statement. “So many run to seek validation from the art world at large, like if it doesn’t happen in New York or L.A. it doesn’t matter,” Davis said. “I think the folks here should see this work first, because it is about exploring and creating a new universe, a new world, new experience and ideas. We don’t get that from running to the old structures off the bat.”
“Over the last few years there has been a renaissance of creation, thought, and transformation [in St. Louis]. I think it is the perfect place to bring forth a world of new Gods that speak to a different interpretation of the world,” he added.
Davis calls the show an “afrosurrealist epic” and sees it as the start of a long-running project examining the awful weirdness of our era, where “Black Death Spectacles” are common, police violence is livestreamed to our phones, militarized tanks roll through our neighborhoods, and influential rappers don MAGA hats. “In the most basic and realistic terms, the lives of Black people, in America especially, is absolutely surreal in nature. The day to day obstacles and events we live through as commonplace are as surreal as it gets. Our very existence is something that conjures awe and inspiration,” he said. “The songs of the Blues, the myths and mysticism of the South, the street tales of hip-hop, the soul-moving spiritual religious rites of Jazz, the fashion, the film, and the stereotypes of horror built by White supremacy—these all lend themselves to something surreal.”
Darker Gods is an alternate mythology, imagining dieties whose superhuman characteristics come from negative tropes of Blackness. Take “the god of those out of options,” for example: a child whose creativity is stolen by a “pale white horse” grows into “Lord So Will It,” a hustler whose creativity is aimed at survival. Davis offers him a prayer:
Lord So Will It, bless the Trap
For the ones we lost and we’ll never get back
If Davis is rewriting the present through epic allegory, Reynolds is reframing Black love and beauty by confronting the restrictions Black bodies still experience in public and art spaces equally. A little like Tessa Thompson’s artist-activist character Detroit in Boots Riley’s new film Sorry to Bother You, Reynolds’s nuanced performance of Black femininity extends beyond her art, to the deployment of color-coded wardrobes and constructed social encounters.
Recently, I walked in late to a performance by Autumn Knight at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Reynolds turned to greet me wearing a pair of bright yellow contact lenses with smiley faces that covered her pupils and irises. They complimented her canary-colored outfit that, it turned out, was meant to match her video art screening just outside the Pulitzer. She remarked later that she bought the contacts after a customer at her day job asked her why she wasn’t smiling. She sent the smile back as a weapon, a defiant statement.
This informal performance is consistent with Reynolds’ fluid approach to her work, in “constant pursuit of authenticity and ‘real’ emotion.” Mane ‘n Tail brought together ten female-identifying artists of color in the intersectional context of a beauty supply store. It “discussed the interwoven lives of the community and the beauty supply, and wondered why there are still major cultural barriers that collide in these spaces.”
Reynolds saw the show as a social construction itself, with “a lot of language and trust barriers that I wanted to see in a room together having a ‘conversation,’ or wanted to make the audience have a conversation about.” Art-world risers like Narcissister and Diamond Stingily showed work alongside local artists like Yvonne Osei and Rachel Youn, and the silo-shattering show had the energy of a block party outside a beauty supply. It was, in the words of one visitor at the opening, a glimpse at the future St. Louis they wished they lived in.
“This need for immersion in quote/unquote ‘Blackness’ is an issue when it comes to exploring different avenues for Black thought,” Reynolds asserted, before Davis finished the thought: “You can’t be multiple things when you’re Black. You’ve got to be in a small box.”
Reynolds’s expansive three channel video for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation took these small containers of identity and collapsed them altogether. The film moves through a post-industrial landscape scored by a DJ spinning trap music to operatic overtures sung by Black vocalists (including the artist’s brother Miles Wadlington). In the final scene, Reynolds pushes her body beyond exhaustion on a yellow treadmill in an empty field. It’s an eloquent allusion to the grueling labor of constantly performing one’s identity.
Near the end of the video, Reynolds breaks stride, finishing the too-far sprint with a smile—a real one, even—as she exits the treadmill but remains in the charged landscape, catching her breath. The shot lingers on the treadmill after she’s gone, still spinning with the video’s title text painted on its belt: You’re the Only Reason I’m Staying Here.
Damon Davis in his studio, photographed by Shabez Jamal
It feels like a tenuous acknowledgement of the crushing responsibility of being young, Black, and outspoken in a place like St. Louis. It is all too exhausting: the unending requests to perform the role of rising Black artist; the pressure to deliver career-defining work seemingly every other month; the urgency to figure out how to get yourself and others free; the desperation to move beyond the city’s histories and its continuing containments.
“I am trying to build worlds, not just bodies of work,” Davis said of the force underlying his labor. “My work is about getting free. If we talk about really being free, we’re going to have to let a lot of [these expectations] go too.”
It’s hard to imagine Davis and Reynolds, like the many other artists composing the largely Black-led creative community remaking post-revolt St. Louis, not continuing to push themselves too far. But maybe a better world isn’t much further.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow James McAnally on Twitter.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xm5ab/sweet-baby-jesus-detained-by-usa-in-churchs-protest
Happy Fourth of July!
Allison Tierney
Jul 4 2018, 4:29pm
Photo via Christ Church Cathedral Facebook
Just in time for the Fourth of July, a church is protesting US family separation policy by detaining baby Jesus in a cage.
The Episcopalian Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, Indiana, put a chain-link fence around statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on its cathedral lawn on Monday night, BBC reports.
The church’s Twitter account tweeted on Wednesday, proclaiming “Good morning and Happy Fourth of July” with a photo of the caged statues.
Good morning and Happy Fourth of July from #ChristChurchIndy. #EveryFamilyIsHoly #CadaFamiliaEsSagrada pic.twitter.com/7cfhlIbNv2
— CCC Indy (@CCCathedralIndy) July 4, 2018
In a statement, the dean and rector of the church, Stephen Carlsen, offered an explanation for the caged holy family.
“Holy Scripture is clear about how we are to treat people trying to find safety for their families—we are to show mercy and welcome them. Jesus, Mary and Joseph were homeless and fled danger to seek asylum,” the statement read.
“The Holy Family today calls us to stand with all families seeking safety and a future for their children,” it continued. “We will not stand by while children are being taken from their parents, and families are being taken from our communities and congregations.”
The church said that its campaign is “designed to bring awareness to the humanitarian atrocities from our nation’s ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policies on the border and here in Indianapolis.”
Reverend Canon Lee Curtis, who told the Indy Star he came up with the idea, said that a number of the church’s congregants are first- or second-generation immigrants. The church also had a rally on June 30, #FamiliesBelongTogether, to condemn migrant children being separated from their families.
app-facebook
Christ Church Cathedral
about a week ago
Read the Statement from our Dean and Rector, Steve Carlsen. The Holy Family, held in detention, is now on the Cathedral’s lawn facing Monument Circle. #EveryFamilyIsHoly
https://mailchi.mp/…/special-announcement-every-family-is-h…
380
173
589
The church’s lawn protest has received both praise and criticism on social media. On its Facebook, commenters thanked the church for its “powerful statement,” while others expressed outrage. One even claimed the church’s display was “blasphemy.” Oh my.
Trump signed an executive order to stop the family separation policy on June 20; instead, families are to be detained together. Still, thousands of children previously separated have yet to be reunited with their parents.
“We want an end for family detention,” Curtis told NBC. “Families, all families, every family, is holy, and we hope and pray that families who are seeking out a better life for their kids are afforded that opportunity.”
This article originally appeared on VICE CA.
2018-07-06
url: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pawevz/trump-kim-jong-un-rocket-man-elton-john-cd-vgtrn
For the sake of the world, let’s hope he has a sense of humor.
River Donaghey
Jul 6 2018, 3:57pm
Original photo via Evan Vucci/AP Images
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo headed to North Korea on Friday in an effort to hammer out some actual details to push the country toward nuclear disarmament. But according to a report from South Korean news outlet Chosun Ilbo, that isn’t Pompeo’s only plan while he’s over in the Hermit Kingdom. He’s also there to deliver a gift to Kim Jong-un, courtesy of Trump—an Elton John CD, complete with the song “Rocket Man,” autographed by Trump himself.
For anyone who needs a refresher or has somehow successfully repressed all memory from the last few months, here’s a quick recap. Earlier this year, back before Trump and Kim were shaking hands and spawning memes at the Singapore summit, the two leaders were mostly just trading barbs and slinging insults at each other on Twitter.
I spoke with President Moon of South Korea last night. Asked him how Rocket Man is doing. Long gas lines forming in North Korea. Too bad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 17, 2017
Trump started calling Kim “little rocket man” to poke fun at the guy’s quest for nukes, and the North Korean dictator clapped back by calling Trump a “mentally deranged dotard.” Yes, these are the grown men who hold the fate of the world in their little hands, and yes, it seems we are all pretty much doomed.
When the pair finally met at last June’s summit, Trump reportedly brought up Elton John’s 1972 hit song that inspired Kim’s nickname, a source told Chosun Ilbo.
“The ‘Rocket Man’ CD was the subject of discussion during Trump’s lunch with Kim,” the source said. “Kim mentioned that Trump referred to him as ‘Rocket Man’ when tensions ran high last year. Trump then asked Kim if he knew the song and Kim said no.”
An error occurred.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.
Now, in some kind of bizarre attempt at diplomacy or humor or something, Trump has decided to give Pompeo a copy of the song to pass along during Friday’s trip. And Trump even signed the CD, naturally, since the guy loves to slap his name on things. Along with the autographed album, Pompeo will reportedly also deliver a letter from Trump written to the Supreme Leader. It’s unclear what the letter says, but hopefully, it’s better than the pair’s last snail mail correspondence.
According to NBC News, Pompeo would not confirm or deny that the Chosun Ilbo report was true when he landed in North Korea Friday. It remains to be seen whether Pompeo will be able to “fill in” the specifics of the disarmament deal during this trip, but if the report is real, at least we’ll be able to finally find out if Kim has a sense of humor. For the sake of the world, let’s hope he does.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow VICE on Twitter.
2018-07-06
Jasmine Edwards called the incident “a classic case of racial profiling.”
Lauren Messman
Jul 6 2018, 3:27pm
Screenshot via Jasmine Edwards’s Facebook.
Update 1:42 PM: As of Friday afternoon, Adam Bloom is no longer employed at Sonoco, where he was a business development manager, according to a Twitter statement from the company and WRAL.
Jasmine Edwards attempted to spend her Fourth of July holiday in North Carolina like many Americans: soaking up the warm weather at her community pool with her son. That is, until a member of the residential community’s home owner’s association approached her and asked for an ID as proof that she had access to use the pool.
After refusing to show her ID, Edwards said the man, Adam Bloom, decided to call the cops, an altercation that she caught on cellphone video. The footage, which she uploaded to Facebook, has since been viewed 4.5 million times and captured what Edwards called “a classic case of racial profiling.”
It looks like you may be having problems playing this video. If so, please try restarting your browser. Close
It looks like you may be having problems playing this video. If so, please try restarting your browser.
Close
Video woman records of confrontation at Winston-Salem pool goes viral: ‘I feel like this is racial profiling’
Posted by DaVonté McKenith
122,387 Views
Video woman records of confrontation at Winston-Salem pool goes viral: ‘I feel like this is racial profiling’
Posted by DaVonté McKenith
122,387 Views
app-facebook
Video Unavailable
Sorry, this video could not be played.
Learn More
“I am the only black person here with my son—and he walked all the way to me, to ask for my ID. He asked for my address. I give it to him, and then he came back and said, ‘Well, I didn’t catch your address correctly. Can you provide an ID to prove the address that you gave to me?’” Edwards tells the officers. “Where does it say that I have to show an ID to use my own pool?”
Bloom’s lawyer told the New York Post that his client had been approached by another pool member who had asked him to check Edwards’s “credentials.” As the HOA’s pool chairman, Bloom told the cops he usually checks residents’ IDs at the pool “a couple times a week.” According to NBC affiliate WXII, Edwards is a resident of the Winston-Salem residential neighborhood and did have a key card to access the community’s pool, which she verified with the cops.
“If she has a card to get in the pool, I believe that should be enough,” the cop says to Bloom.
“They kinda make their way around sometimes,” Bloom responds. “But that’s good enough for me today.”
Bloom walked away from the altercation without offering Edwards an apology, but resigned from his position as the community’s pool chairman the next day, the Winston-Salem Journa l reports. The homeowner’s association also released a statement following the incident.
“In confronting and calling the police on one of our neighbors, the pool chair escalated a situation in a way that does not reflect the inclusive values Glenridge seeks to uphold as a community,” it wrote.
In the video, the cops advise Edwards that she can file a civil dispute against Bloom regarding the altercation, which follows a string of recent incidents in which a white person has called the cops on a person of color for essentially no reason—an aggressive reaction that can often just escalate the situation.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Lauren Messman on Twitter.
2018-07-06
She’s rubber, they’re glue.
Eve Peyser
Jul 6 2018, 5:19pm
Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images
After card-carrying Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez triumphed over ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York City Democratic congressional primary, the right didn’t seem to know what to make of her victory. For years, the ghouls of Fox News had been warning their viewers about how Barack Obama’s alleged secret socialist ideals would threaten our great nation, even as actual Democrats advanced fairly middle-of-the-road policies. So when an actual socialist prepared to come to Congress (Ocasio-Cortez is expected to easily win the general election in November), it didn’t rattle conservative commentators as much as you might think.
“I have heard some Republicans deride Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I think that’s a mistake,” disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly wrote on Twitter. “She won by outworking long time Democratic Congressman Joseph Crowley and seems to care more about people than power. A good thing for any politician.” For good measure, he added, “Socialism never works. Ask Venezuela.” (Conservatives love bringing up Venezuela as an example of socialism rather than, say, Northern Europe.)
Glenn Beck, another former Fox News host and founder of the right-wing website the Blaze, agreed. “@Ocasio2018 seems genuine and honestly trying to do what she believes is right,” he tweeted. “I completely disagree with her solutions, but she is listening to her community. I would rather debate an open socialist than those who hide what they believe.”
As Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez called Ocasio-Cortez “the future of our party,” Trump-loving political cartoonist Ben Garrison did his best to make her seem as grotesque as possible. Placing the 28-year-old’s head on the body of a donkey with Karl Marx himself pulling on its tail, the cartoon outlines her apparently horrifying platform: “Guaranteed High Wages Jobs!! Open Borders! Free Healthcare! Free College! Free Housing!” Oh, the horror!
This underscores the problem with attacks on Ocasio-Cortez. If you do what Garrison and Fox News host Sean Hannity did and just point to her leftist platform in fear, you’re basically giving her free advertising. For all the conservative griping about the failures of the Affordable Care Act, “Medicare for all” and “support[ing] seniors” seem like common-sense ideas.
Sean Hannity’s display of Ocasio-Cortez’s platform
Even conservative firebrand and former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh—who once tweeted, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you”—had kind words for Ocasio-Cortez.
“I’m a tea party guy, but I applaud @Ocasio2018. She beat an arrogant career politician. She ran with energy & ideas,” Walsh wrote on Twitter. “She & I probably disagree on every single policy issue. But I respect the hell out of her. Those attacking her personally are making a mistake. Debate her ideas.”
That attitude might have something to do with how self-evidently ridiculous some of those personal attacks have been. The New York Post managed to find a former coworker who badmouthed her, but even that article noted that “most of the staff” at the bar where she worked said they liked her. Then there was the conservative who accused Ocasio-Cortez of growing up in a house on Twitter, only to be greeted by widespread derision. A recent Daily Caller article accusing her of hypocrisy on taxes was a bit more sophisticated, but just gave her the opportunity to describe herself as being pro–small business:
All this is being celebrated by lefties who spent years fuming at Obama’s impotent attempts at compromise with a Republican Party that wouldn’t give him anything. The Affordable Care Act—which, famously, bore striking similarities to the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s 90’s-era healthcare legislation as well as “Romneycare” in Massachusetts—somewhat improved the nation’s healthcare system for some without addressing the structural issues that make medical treatment for many Americans so expensive. The ACA is a complicated piece of legislation to describe, let alone defend, and the right has subsequently dishonestly blamed rising premiums on the ACA.
Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, which is a long ways from being put into practice, will prove harder to attack, because the message is simple: The government should provide a basic level of material security for people. And Ocasio-Cortez’s rising stardom in conservative media is good for that platform. Attacks will only amplify it beyond the bounds of the already progressive district she hopes to represent.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter and Instagram.
2018-07-09
The federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments over efforts to reverse the dismissal of a wrongful death suit involving the 2016 shooting death of Antwun “Ronnie” Shumpert.
In a filing this week, the court announced that oral arguments are tentatively scheduled to begin the week of Sept. 3, though due to the Labor Day holiday, court won’t begin until Sept. 4 of that week.
Most cases appealed to a federal district court are decided based only on written filings.
A heavy reliance on the written briefs is in part due to the heavy case load faced by federal appeals courts as well as a sense that in many cases oral arguments don’t make a difference to the outcome.
Shumpert was fatally shot by a Tupelo Police Department officer in June 2016, and surviving family members shortly thereafter filed suit in federal court, claiming excessive force and civil rights violations.
In late 2017, U.S. Northern District of Mississippi Chief Judge Sharion Aycock granted summary judgment in the case.
The decision to award summary judgment resolved the case without a trial. Aycock wrote that no meaningful facts were in dispute and that the law was clear that the officer and the city could not be found liable for damages in the death of Shumpert.
The federal appeal will not involve questions about the merits of the claim that TPD Officer Tyler Cook acted wrongfully when he shot Shumpert. The only issue at hand in the appeal is whether Aycock rightfully granted summary judgment.
Federal appeals courts do not hold new trials on a case but only rule whether or not the law was correctly followed and applied by lower court decisions.
2018-07-08
HOUSTON – A principal with the Houston School District has been arrested and charged with DUI following a traffic stop in Tupelo.
Houston Upper Elementary School Principal Trevor Hampton, 33, was pulled over by the Tupelo Police Department around midnight Saturday, July 7.
Capt. Chuck McDougald, spokesman for the Tupelo Police Department, said Monday that Hampton was taken to the Lee County Jail and charged with DUI – first offense and careless driving at 12:43 a.m. Sunday. Both are misdemeanors. According to Lee County Jail records, Hampton was released on a $2,200 bond at 1:30 a.m. Sunday.
McDougald said officers pulled Hampton over in the area of Milford Street for careless driving. He said Hampton was taken into custody without incident.
Hampton was an assistant principal at Houston High School and was promoted to Principal at Houston Upper Elementary School two years ago.
Hampton
by:
2018-07-11
url: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/11/this-call-may-be-monopolized-and-recorded
South Woods State Prison was two-and-a-half hours from home. With work Monday through Friday and no car, C.B. — the girlfriend of inmate J.S. (their names are withheld out of fear of retribution) — could only make the trip once a month. Letters were delayed or sometimes not delivered at all. This left telephone calls as the last way for J.S. and C.B. to meaningfully communicate. But an automated voice warning, “you have 30 seconds left,” followed by a dial tone reminded them that their relationship was different.
For each minute they spent in conversation, their account would be docked another 21 cents, the maximum allowed under FCC rate caps. Calls would cut off at 30 minutes as if to notify them how much they had already spent. And every time J.S. called back, they would both be reminded of who was collecting the check with a simple pleasantry, “Thank you for using Securus.”
A year into J.S.’s sentence, C.B. had paid Securus hundreds of dollars. Still, she considered herself lucky. Though the rate she paid was the maximum allowable for interstate calls under FCC rate caps, family and friends with instate phone numbers were paying $3.40 for the first minute and $0.40 for each minute after that.
Securus has similar contracts with over 2,200 facilities, serving a significant portion of the nation’s 2.2 million incarcerated individuals and their support networks. And its reach just got broader.
In May, Securus announced that it would acquire Inmate Calling Solutions (ICS), a smaller competitor, for $350 million — extending its reach to over 260 new facilities. The deal may seem like just the latest in a series of acquisitions that have cost the company nearly $600 million in the past six years. But this purchase marks a turning point for the company that raises grave concerns for the industry and those it serves.
Before the deal, Global Tel Link (GTL), Securus’ main competitor, led the $1.2 billion correctional telecom industry in revenue. The ICS purchase will make Securus the largest provider by nearly every measure — revenue, contracts, and facilities served.
If the FCC approves the ICS deal, then 47 state prison systems will contract with just three companies for telephone services: Securus, GTL or CenturyLink. As much as 90 percent of the market will be split between Securus and GTL. The remaining piece will be controlled by smaller competitors, with many of whom Securus has signed licensing deals for use of its large and growing portfolio of patents. In fact, according to the company’s CEO, these Securus licensees represent over 95 percent of the revenue generated in the outbound inmate calling sector.
We Are Witnesses
Yet, these statistics understate the degree of control that Securus will have over the industry after the deal. CenturyLink, although nominally independent, has a long-standing partnership with ICS in its correctional services, giving Securus a stake in the company’s market share after the deal. That leaves Securus and GTL as the only two independent competitors, raising critical antitrust concerns.
Securus now has an immense competitive advantage over its competitors. In states where ICS and Securus used to compete, the deal will remove a key rival from the bidding process. In new markets with smaller regional providers, these competitors will be less and less likely to compete with Securus’ ever-expanding suite of services. And in still other areas, Securus will be the only national provider competing for a contract. With fewer businesses making offers, officials cannot turn to other bids for better terms.
Once Securus has won a bid, it can wield its extensive bargaining power to secure favorable terms for the company. While officials may bemoan these contracts, they may not have any other options. But in the end, it is incarcerated individuals and their support networks that will bear the costs of higher rates and fees or less communication.
This deal is not inevitable. The FCC is currently examining the deal, and the public has until July 16 to submit comments opposing the merger. In order to approve the deal, the FCC must find that it “serves the public interest” and preserves competition.
Left holding the bill, people like J.S. and C.B. already know, all too well, that it does not.
Bianca Tylek is director and Connor McCleskey is an associate with the Corrections Accountability Project, a non-profit criminal justice advocacy organization dedicated to eliminating the influence of commercial interests on the criminal legal system. It is a project of the Urban Justice Center.
by:
2018-07-09
url: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/10/license-to-clip
Cosmetology students at the Central California Women’s Facility practice applying makeup during a lesson in 2017.
Rosemarie Abruzzese feared losing her cosmetology license and her job in 2017 after the Pennsylvania Board of Cosmetology said her past felony drug conviction made her a threat to public safety.
Her story is familiar, a license being threatened or denied outright because of a past crime.
Abruzzese was fortunate, though. She had access to a lawyer and appealed the decision to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. In April, the court ordered the board to grant her a probationary license, which means she can keep her job. If no other problems occur, the full license will be reinstated.
Eliminating licensing regulations that block people with criminal histories from getting work has gained support on the federal and state level. In 2015, the Obama administration released a list of best practices for states on occupational licensing. And President Donald Trump’s labor department is providing funding to states that want to study their licensing laws.
“If a person commits a crime, and they pay their debt to society, when does that debt end?” asked Jeff Robinson, director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Does it end when you come out of prison? Because apparently it’s just beginning when you come out of prison. And that makes no sense.”
In 2016, state and federal prisons released about 626,000 people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Studies show that having a job after incarceration makes a person less likely to return to prison. In 2017, about 24 percent of employed people had either a license or certification, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development has advised states to review their licensing laws. Strict licensing requirements have cost the economy 2.85 million jobs, according to The Hamilton Project, a research group within the liberal Brookings Institution.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, is working on a bill to remove such barriers, said Kristin Lynch, a spokeswoman. The bill would require licensing agencies to standardize how the applications are handled and calls on the FBI to improve the accuracy of background checks.
“The bill would make it easier for people with criminal records who have served their time to obtain occupational licenses, which are needed in a wide range of jobs, like cutting hair and driving a taxi,” Lynch said.
Advocacy groups are also pressing for reforms. The National Employment Law Project, a workers’ advocacy group that helped draft Booker’s licensing bill, has joined with the liberal Center for American Progress to fund local criminal justice advocacy organizations in Rhode Island, North Carolina and Ohio. The libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice is also advocating change.
Since 2016, 14 states — Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Tennessee — have passed laws revising offender licensing restrictions or requiring boards to track how many people are rejected based on a past criminal conviction. A licensing reform bill is pending in the California Legislature.
Life Inside
The National Employment Law Project has put an emphasis on changing licensing laws for the big industries that can lead to good jobs for people leaving prison, said Maurice Emsellem, its fair chance program director.
“Transportation, healthcare, education — industries like that, where there’s a lot of background check restrictions. And if folks can get those jobs, they can really move up the income ladder,” Emsellem said.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has said criminal history checks have a disproportionate effect on people of color. The checks perpetuate discrimination, without persuasive evidence that a criminal background predicts risky behavior on the job, Emsellem said.
In a unique report released Tuesday, the Prison Policy Initiative says the unemployment rate for people with criminal records is more than 27 percent, five times higher than the overall U.S. unemployment rate, or higher than the Great Depression. It was done with numbers from The National Former Prisoner Survey, which was completed in 2008. The Initiative’s report shows that black women with criminal records rank at the top of that unemployment list (43.6 percent), with white men with criminal records at the bottom (18.4 percent). The Initiative is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group focused on the harm of mass criminalization.
Background checks became a licensing hurdle for Pennsylvania barbers in 2015 after the licensing board added a question about criminal history to the application. Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections saw the number of inmates getting licensed through its training program take a severe dip. The overall number of barber and barber manager licenses awarded in the state annually dropped by almost 25 percent, according to the corrections department. Even after prison officials got the board to review mitigating factors, there were still fewer student inmates getting licensed.
In June, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf proposed repealing a law that allows certain boards to ban anyone who has a felony drug record from being able to work in the field for 10 years after completion of a sentence. He has also proposed abolishing 13 licensing boards, including those governing natural hair braiders and barbers.
Licensing can result in higher wages and more credibility for an industry, and reviewing criminal history is “vital” to the board’s ability to protect public health and safety, according to a statement from the Pennsylvania Department of State. The department oversees 29 of the state’s licensing boards. A spokesperson said the department favors removing unnecessary barriers to licensure. Board members do not answer questions from the press, the spokesperson said.
In 2015, Rosemarie Abruzzese was arrested on charges of trading pills with an undercover police officer, according to court records. Before being sentenced, she completed two court ordered treatment programs and applied for her cosmetology license.
She was sentenced to five years probation in September 2015. Nine months later, Abruzzese was working two cosmetology jobs and was the sole provider for her two kids. Then she got a letter that her license was in jeopardy. Despite the board’s state attorney recommending Abruzzese continue working, the board chose to suspend her license indefinitely.
When Abruzzese appealed, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote that the board had abused its discretion and made findings not based on fact.
“I love what I do,” Abruzzese said. “I love where I work. It helps me on a daily basis.”
With a job, Abruzzese said she can stay focused; stay accountable; and stay a productive member of society.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/05/learning-violin-helped-me-survive-prison
Jason Naradzay, far left, plays violin as part of the Riverside Quartet at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. JP Chirdon
First, let me situate you: doors clanging, people yelling, guards barking. The noise in prison is non-stop, and nighttime is often louder than daytime, because at night many inmates cry out, haunted by their trauma.
I often felt like joining them. For the first three years, the cacophony in here drove me absolutely bonkers. I walked around like a zombie — neither dead nor alive. I had a long beard and no one to talk to. My hygiene was so bad that a newfound friend counseled me on the importance of keeping my face washed and teeth clean.
Over time, I started to adjust, and my life began to improve. I became a gardener. I saw firsthand how life started as a seed, grew into a plant, and then died off in the fall. I realized that is exactly what happened to me: Part of me had died in those first few years, but I did not see what was next.
I ended up at Sing Sing, a place that offers many educational opportunities for inmates, and I took advantage of them. I enrolled in a theology degree program. I explored my faith. But after a while, I felt stuck in limbo—stuck because I knew a lot about what not to do. I had given up most of my bad habits and examined my heart and mind with help from counselors, both inmates and professionals, but still had no real purpose. Nothing to do.
At the prison there was a program called Musicambia that brings teachers in every week for music theory and performance classes. I went to one of their concerts, and was struck dumb. I saw guys I knew talking and living it up. They seemed whole, put together, genuinely having fun with one another. We, the audience, felt a part of it, too. I thought: I have to get into this program.
But first I needed to learn an instrument. I had played the snare drum for a year as kid in middle school, but the drum was too big for me to haul around. At Sing Sing, you are allowed to practice an instrument in your cell, though, so I asked a friend on the outside to buy me a violin. For $100, she bought a beginner instrument and a book titled “Violin for Dummies.”
I started off absolutely terribly. The best I could do was run certain correctional officers off the gallery with a song that sounded like the whining of a dying cat. One C.O. got hip to my little gimmick and wrote me up for disturbing the count at roll call.
Case in Point
Musicambia came in to Sing Sing every Saturday, and I would spend the six days in between by practicing the lessons they had for us. I began to write little ditties, but mostly I just broke down chords into violin, viola and cello parts. I helped pull together a string ensemble: myself, a lead violinist, a violist, and a cellist. We called ourselves the Riverside Quartet, since Sing Sing is next to the Hudson River.
Then, in October 2015, my father passed away at the ripe age of 95. I was allowed to go to his funeral, but vomited all over the prison van — I had not driven anywhere in a few years, and I was deeply frustrated, nervous, and sad. Because I had to stay in handcuffs and shackles, I could barely move to find my seat at the church, and my family had to shepherd me around. I was tasked with eulogizing him, but stumbled and did a poor job. I was at a loss for words, feeling sad and remorseful for having missed his last days. I was very upset and had no way of expressing it. Back at the prison, I was depressed, staying up late at night, thinking about him. I got an idea: to commemorate him in song.
A teacher from Musicambia named Elliot Cole instructed me on basic melody writing, how to create chords for the strings to play. To inspire the lyrics, I re-read “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” by Wallace Stevens. I called it, “Ode To My Father John.”
When I first heard it in rehearsal—I composed but did not perform it myself—I cried. The song was played in front of the entire prison population, and Musicambia brought in the famous opera singer Joyce DiDonato to perform it. When she sang the final line —“Goodbye, Dad” — all my angst was carried away into the atmosphere. I realized that I was mourning my father’s death in a healthy way. Others told me they were moved by the song. I felt I had discovered a new talent to explore.
Music is something that comes deep from my soul, a way of communicating that is better for me than talking. In music, the strong emotions of my inner world come out. I feel lighter, not tight and anxious and depressed like I did before. I feel closer to the true me.
Jason Naradzay was paroled in June 2016 after serving 12 years for second-degree attempted murder and first-degree attempted burglary. He is currently a chemical dependency counselor in Syracuse, New York.
2018-07-11
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/12/separated-children-alex-azar-generosity/
Earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar celebrated the Trump administration for its treatment of immigrant children it has separated from their parents. “We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities,” said Azar on CNN. “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids.”
Alex Azar: Treatment of Immigrant Children Separated From Parents “One of the Great Acts of American Generosity”
from The Intercept
What’s going on here?
Some of your technology may be out of date, which means this video won’t play properly. Please upgrade your browser or install Flash.
Play
This magnanimous claim raises an obvious question: What are the other great acts of American generosity?
Of course, we know that the U.S. treatment of Native Americans has been extraordinarily generous. They were literally asking for it since before there was an America: The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for most of the 17th century was an Indian saying, “Come over and help us.”
So as President Andrew Jackson explained to Congress in 1829 when making the case for the Indian Removal Act, “Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself. … Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous.” The passage of the act the next year generously allowed the Cherokee to experience the Trail of Tears.
Sixty years later, in “The Winning of the West,” future President Teddy Roosevelt remained impressed by this example of American generosity. “In [our] treaties,” he wrote, “we have been more than just to the Indians; we have been abundantly generous. … No other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.”
Slavery, too, was an act of generosity. As Thomas Roderick Dew, who went on to become president of William & Mary College, put it in the famed 1832 treatise, “The Pro-Slavery Argument,” slaveowners were among the “most generous” Americans. Moreover, a slaveholder’s son, precisely because he witnessed his father enslaving others, “acquires a greater generosity and elevation of soul, and embraces for the sphere of his generous actions a much wider field.”
The Vietnam War was another high point in U.S. generosity. David Lawrence, then editor of U.S. News & World Report, proclaimed in 1966 that “what the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.”
More recently, we generously helped three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay kill themselves. “The manipulative detainees,” wrote Michelle Malkin soon afterward, “reportedly used the generous civil liberties protections we gave them to plot their suicide pact.”
So we clearly have a long history about which to volubly praise ourselves. But we should be modest enough to realize that we have never matched the moral heights of the most generous man in history: Adolf Hitler.
Just before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the British ambassador to Germany wrote home to explain how frustrated Hitler was that he was not receiving credit for his generosity:
Herr Hitler replied that he would be willing to negotiate, if there was a Polish Government which was prepared to be reasonable. … He expatiated on misdoings of the Poles, referred to his generous offer of March last, said that it could not be repeated.
We shouldn’t feel too bad about the Poles’ ingratitude, however. Hitler had an advantage, because he was leading the Germans, who are naturally generous to a fault. Joseph Goebbels explained this in a generous 1941 article, titled “The Jews Are Guilty!“:
If we Germans have a fateful flaw in our national character, it is forgetfulness. This failing speaks well of our human decency and generosity, but not always for our political wisdom or intelligence. We think everyone else is as good natured as we are.
At this point, all we can do is pray that someday we will find it in our hearts to be as generous as 1940s-era Germans. Overall, we’re still a long way from that achievement, but certainly there seem to be some pioneers among us right now who are getting close.
Top photo: U.S. Border Patrol agents arrive to detain a group of Central American asylum-seekers near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas.
2018-07-10
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/11/separated-children-encarnacion-bail-romero/
Christian, from Honduras, recounts being separated from his child at the border during a news conference at the Annunciation House, in El Paso, Texas, on June 25, 2018.
Photo: Matt York/AP
Tuesday was the deadline that a federal court set for the Trump administration to reunify the migrant families whose children under the age of 5 who were forcefully separated from their parents. The children were ripped away from their parents and then shipped out all over the country with strangers for no reason other than cruel and unusual punishment.
Of course, that deadline wasn’t met — the Trump administration told the court it had only reunified 38 of 102 of these kids with their families. And of course, the Trump administration is not really bothered by this failure. The entire ordeal was designed to strike fear into immigrants of color who may dare attempt to enter this country.
The numbers released by the Justice Department on Monday show that, of the 102 children, many of them simply cannot be unified with their parents before the deadline.
Why?
Because many of these little kids have been farmed off to nearly 20 different states and their parents have already been deported. The Trump administration admitted yesterday that it has already deported nine parents of the 102 youngest children. If these numbers hold up for all age groups, with about 3,000 children now in custody, we could reasonably conclude that 250 of them now being housed with complete strangers have parents who’ve already been deported.
How in the hell are those deported parents supposed to reconnect with their children?
The Trump administration said that other children under the age of 5 who’ve been separated from their parents are unlikely to be unified with them. Four of those parents are in local jails, where reunification is not possible. Eight are in federal criminal custody, where reunification is not possible.
And then the unthinkable: The Trump administration admitted yesterday that it doesn’t even have any information on the parents of one of the young children who has been separated. How old is that child? How did this happen? Is this child related to a family whose records were already destroyed by the government?
I know that we are frequently overwhelmed with bad news in the Trump era, but this isn’t simply bad news — it is a human rights catastrophe. And it was completely avoidable.
Of the 102 youngest children we have the most basic data for, we now know that it will be outrageously difficult to reunify at least 22 of them.
What will eventually happen to these children? It’s tough to say with the family separation crisis still ongoing, but there’s a case from five years ago that we should all be aware of.
Know this name: Encarnación Bail Romero.
Attorney Curtis Woods, left, clutches his client, Encarnación Bail Romero, in July 2012, minutes after a Greene County judge in Springfield, Mo., terminated her parental rights to the son she last held five years ago.
Photo: Tammy Ljungblad/The Kansas City Star via AP
There’s no evidence that the Trump administration is farming separated children out for adoption. And yet, in recent history, there has been an example of an immigrant mother getting caught up in immigration enforcement — and having her child put up for adoption as a result. That is exactly what happened to Bail Romero.
Some of the same foster care groups that are housing these migrant children are also large adoption agencies. While foster care providers have made clear that separated migrant children will not be put up for adoption, stories like that of Bail Romero underline the seriousness of migrant families’ fears and should serve as a warning to all of us.
In 2007, Bail Romero, a Guatemalan immigrant, was arrested in Missouri during an immigration raid. Her young son, Carlos, was just 11 months old and put in the care of family and friends — until a judge decided to take the child into government custody and put him up for adoption.
What happened next is completely unimaginable. As a father of five myself, I have to fight back the tears as I think about what this government did to Bail Romero.
The family whose home the government placed Carlos in changed his name to Jamison Moser, then fought for Bail Romero to never see him again. And won.
The courts declared that when Bail Romero was jailed for an immigration violation, she abandoned Carlos and forfeited her parental rights. She even lost her rights to see Carlos. For years on end, Bail Romero fought to regain custody of Carlos but was denied at almost every turn. When she finally appealed to the Supreme Court, they refused to even hear her case.
Carlos, now called Jamison Moser, lives with his adoptive white parents in rural Missouri.
Bail Romero was working as a migrant farmer in Missouri. She was providing for her family. But even if she wasn’t, poverty and unemployment are not legitimate excuses to basically kidnap someone’s child, rename them, and terminate the rights of the birth parents.
While the threat of adoption for separated children isn’t immediate, it would be naive for us to assume that many of the thousands of migrant children forcefully separated from their parents are not at risk of being put on the same path as Encarnación Bail Romero and Carlos.
Top photo: Christian, from Honduras, recounts his separation from his child at the border during a news conference at the Annunciation House, in El Paso, Texas, on June 25, 2018.
2018-07-11
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/11/a-judicial-coup-the-carceral-state-and-the-war-against-us-all/
Donald Trump is poised to make another lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. It is a grave injustice and is tantamount to a coup within the judicial branch of the U.S. government. This week on Intercepted: Jeremy Scahill makes the case for an inside-outside strategy for resisting Trump. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, 33, is running for governor of Michigan on a campaign of creating a single-payer health care system, raising the minimum wage to $15, legalizing marijuana, and a sweeping overhaul of the state’s criminal justice system. He discusses his campaign, his views on the Democratic Party, the Flint water catastrophe, and why he believes he can accomplish his agenda despite the powerful right-wing forces in Michigan politics, including the DeVos and Prince families. As the internment of immigrant families continues, we revisit Scahill’s 2017 conversation with educator and organizer Mariame Kaba. She retraces the evolution of the U.S. prison system, from convict leasing to three-strikes law, and the devastating generational impact these policies have disproportionately had on black and brown communities. Filmmaker Michelle Latimer discusses her new documentary “Nuuca,” a nuanced exploration of the brutal transformation that oil extraction brought to one North Dakotan community. The film follows three young indigenous women who struggle with an influx of men and rising rates of sexual abuse, rape, and kidnappings.
Transcript coming soon.
2018-07-10
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/10/amid-brexit-turmoil-trump-praises-boris-johnson-called-insane/
Ahead of his visit to Britain this week, President Donald Trump took a moment to undermine Prime Minister Theresa May by praising her rival Boris Johnson, who stepped down as foreign secretary on Monday over May’s plan to pursue close ties to the European Union even after Brexit.
An error occurred.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.
“Boris Johnson is a friend of mine; he’s been very, very nice to me,” Trump said, apparently having forgotten or just never heard that Johnson had denounced him as “clearly out of his mind” in late 2015 when the then-candidate for the American presidency had demanded “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
“You can’t ban people going to the United States in that way, or indeed to any country,” Johnson, who was then London’s mayor, told a television crew two days after Trump first called for a ban on Muslims on December 7, 2015.
An error occurred.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.
Referring to Trump’s subsequent claim that his ban was justified because immigrants had made parts of London off-limits to non-Muslims, including police officers, Johnson also said that Trump was “betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States.”
“I would invite him to come and see the whole of London and take him ’round the city,” Johnson added, “except that I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump.”
Despite that criticism, Trump was apparently so convinced of the falsehood that parts of London are “no-go zones” for non-Muslims that he even repeated the claim to May when she visited the White House in 2017 to invite him to Britain. One witness to that conversation, May’s strategy director at the time, Chris Wilkins, later told Bloomberg News that the prime minister was forced to “correct him.”
On the eve of his visit, however, with mass protests planned in London, Trump has provoked so much outrage among Britons that he has succeeded in making the British capital effectively off-limits for himself. British and American officials have planned an itinerary that will keep Trump out of London for all but a few hours during his stay.
Britons promoting the protests objected to an alert issued by the U.S. Embassy in London, arguing that the demonstrations were not anti-American, but anti-Trump.
Um yeah, calm down @USAinUK?
I hope Americans in Britain will join the protests against Donald Trump on Friday in their thousands. You are our friends and we will be proud to march with you. pic.twitter.com/6jVlurLmdW
Americans, on Friday there are demonstrations here in solidarity with you in your struggle against your appalling President. Please don’t “keep a low profile”. But we apologise that your flag might be appropriated by drooling neo-fascists who support him.
— Jeremy Hardy (@JeremyJHardy) July 10, 2018
Having recently voiced support for far-right, anti-immigrant politicians in Germany who want to topple Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump appears to also hold a grudge against May. The reason could be that May has rebuked him for bigotry on more than one occasion since.
In June 2017, when Trump was harshly critical of London’s current mayor, Sadiq Khan, in the wake of a terrorist attack on the city, May hesitated but eventually said, “I think Donald Trump was wrong in the things that he has said about Sadiq Khan.”
Last November, when Trump promoted three anti-Muslim video clips from a fringe group of British racists, May again spoke up, despite the risk of jeopardizing a trade deal with the U.S. to compensate for Brexit. “British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right, which is the antithesis of the values this country represents, decency, tolerance and respect,” May said in a statement. “It is wrong for the president to have done this.”
Trump responded at the time by scolding May on Twitter, writing: “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”
When he was asked this week by the Washington Post why he was so critical of May and Merkel, Trump suggested that it was because both leaders support the kind of multicultural living that is common in the United States. “Immigration is destroying Europe as we know it and it is very sad to be witness to what is happening,” the son of an immigrant from Scotland told the newspaper.
Top photo: At a NATO meeting in 2017, Boris Johnson, then Britain’s foreign secretary, joked with Donald Trump behind the back of Prime Minister Theresa May.
2018-07-10
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/10/abolish-ice-movement-democrats/
More than 100 state and local elected officials from 20 states on Tuesday joined the call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, adding momentum to a push that, until recently, was dismissed as a fringe left rallying cry. In a joint statement, state legislators, mayors, city council members, and county officials made their demand clear: “The experiment that is ICE has failed, and must be ended as soon as possible.”
State senators and representatives from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Illinois signed the open letter, which is being reported for the first time by The Intercept. They were joined by officials from dozens of cities in 14 other states and the District of Columbia.
“While this escalation of policy is particularly devastating and inhumane, it is part of a larger crisis that has been building in our communities for years because of the rampant and brutal enforcement tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the lawless federal agency that, since its creation in 2002, has terrorized immigrants and separated families in the communities we live in and represent,” the statement reads.
Immigrant communities and rights groups have drawn attention to abuses by the agency for years, but the call to “abolish ICE” has found renewed urgency in the year and a half since Donald Trump took office, and particularly in the two months since the Trump administration began to implement its “zero tolerance” border policy. What was started by some grassroots immigration activists turned into a viral hashtag and eventually became part of the platforms of several progressive Democratic candidates. It even made its way to Congress, where Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., have promised to introduce a bill to eliminate the agency.
Helen Gym, a Philadelphia City Council member who signed the statement, said that state and local elected officials joined the movement because they are the ones closest to the ground, which means they see the toll that ICE’s “inhumane tactics” take on immigrant families and communities.
“I think the clarity around ‘abolish ICE’ is important because it’s not an agency that can be fixed or reformed,” Gym told The Intercept. The function of the agency should not simply change names or absorb into a different department, she added, “it needs to be dismantled.”
City Council member Helen Gym, right, accompanied by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipients, and activists, speaks during a news conference in Philadelphia on Sept. 11, 2017.
Photo: Matt Rourke/AP
Another signer of the joint statement, Hartford City Council member Wildaliz Bermúdez, said that “instead of spending $6 billion on an agency that terrorizes immigrant communities and raids our schools, local businesses, and places of worship, we should be investing our taxpayer dollars in infrastructure, education, and creating good jobs.”
A number of senators who are presumed to be 2020 presidential hopefuls — Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — have also joined the push to abolish ICE, but there appears to be no consensus on what the alternative should be. Left-wing activists have proposed a moratorium on deportations, while more moderate Democrats say the agency is simply in need of reform. Still, the odds that Congress will undertake any substantial overhaul of the agency in the foreseeable future are dismal, as lawmakers have so far failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill, including a fix for DACA, which both sides of the aisle have claimed to support. Nonetheless, the calls to dissolve ICE are quickly shifting the Overton window and bringing a section of the left anchored in maximalist demands into the political mainstream.
Pocan and Jayapal have said they will introduce the abolish ICE bill, which Pocan first announced in late June, in the coming weeks. In a Tuesday statement by the Working Families Party about the letter issued by the state and local officials, Pocan is quoted as saying that Democratic members of Congress want to end Trump’s “use of ICE as a personal deportation force and implement an immigration system that upholds the dignity of all individuals.”
“By abolishing ICE and transferring its necessary functions to other agencies,” Pocan added, “we can ensure that the President can no longer terrorize countless immigrant families, while making our nation safer from actual threats.”
Top photo: Demonstrators march in the Little Village neighborhood calling for the elimination of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and an end to family detentions on June 29, 2018, in Chicago.
2018-07-09
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/10/separated-families-reunited-zero-tolerance/
The couple walked into Emily Fanjoy’s office carrying a shopping bag full of receipts and scribbled paperwork. Fanjoy, a social service provider in the coastal Oregon city of Tillamook, knew the pair. She has worked with the couple off and on for a while, informally linking them up with local immigration and health services. The man has lived in the United States for more than 40 years; the woman has been here for about 26. They arrived after fleeing Guatemala amid one of the most brutal civil wars in Latin American history. They are legal U.S. residents, but experience has taught them to be cautious with authorities nonetheless.
The two originally gravitated to Fanjoy because, owing to a stint in the Peace Corps a decade ago that landed her in the couple’s corner of Guatemala for two years, Fanjoy is part of a small population of people able to speak the Mayan dialect of their native region. The walk-ins were normal, Fanjoy told The Intercept recently. It’s easier that way. “They never call me on the telephone if they can avoid it,” she said. “It’s too hard. They need to be able to be in person.”
But while their appearance may have been standard, the reason for the couple’s visit this past June 12 was not.
In a mix of Q’anjob’al, Spanish, and extremely limited English, the couple explained that the woman’s adult nephew and his 9-year-old son had disappeared crossing the border a month ago. Nobody had heard a thing from them. Then, one day, the nephew called. He was in U.S. immigration custody in the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico. He was alone. More than a month after being apprehended, his aunt and uncle told Fanjoy, the man still had no idea what the U.S. government had done with his child.
The couple was frustrated with their nephew’s risky decision to cross the border, but for now, that was beside the point. A 9-year-old child in their family was lost in the system. They told Fanjoy that they wanted to step forward as sponsors for him. That, it turns out, is easier said than done.
More than a month after being apprehended, the man still had no idea what the U.S. government had done with his child.
Due to a series of intentional decisions by the Trump administration, some version of this story is playing out in an untold number of households across the U.S. and Latin America. From October through mid-June, the administration separated a minimum of 3,700 children from their parents, with a substantial increase in May, following the border-wide implementation of its “zero tolerance” strategy. The true number of separations over the last year could be somewhat higher, given the existence of a “zero tolerance” pilot program the administration launched in Texas last summer.
The administration’s decision to charge every single adult accused of crossing the border illegally with a crime – including asylum-seekers – has made thousands of kids “unaccompanied” in the view of the state. Despite the predictable outcome of this policy, creating a sudden influx of solo children, the government made no effort to bolster the system for reconnecting newly separated kids with their parents once their criminal cases were complete. (Typically, for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry, border crossers are given time served.)
Border Patrol arrest data indicate several hundred parents were deported without their children in April alone, before “zero tolerance” kicked into high gear; others are being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers around the country. Meanwhile, around 3,000 children are said to be in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a component of the Department of Health and Human Services. For years, ORR has worked with private and nonprofit outfits to house kids who actually cross the border unaccompanied — not kids made unaccompanied by the government. These populations differ in key ways.
In years past, young people who have entered ORR custody have typically been older — teens and preteens mostly. Often, they would come with some sort of identification and a plan. That has not been the case for the children separated by the Trump administration. These children are much younger, some are preverbal, some have disabilities, and some are infants. They crossed the border dependent on the grown-ups in their lives, parents who had a plan for them. Now they are alone.
“Zero tolerance” has, predictably, triggered a series of legal challenges. At the heart of those fights is a longstanding Trump administration effort to expand the practice of holding families together in detention, and for longer. The administration argues that it has no other choice: It’s either family detention or family separation. Lawyers challenging the government’s efforts say that’s not at all the case. In a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal judge in California late last month ordered a nationwide injunction calling on the agencies responsible for family separations to immediately begin reuniting parents and kids.
Under U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw’s order, the administration had until July 10 — today — to reunite children under 5 years of age, and July 26 to reunite the others. On Monday, with the first of those deadlines fast approaching, it became clear that the government was in no position to fully comply with the judge’s order. Lawyers for the administration disclosed in court that it had only located 54 parents for 102 children under 5 years old currently in its custody. According to the New York Times, those children will be reunited with their parents today, in what the paper described as “a secretive operation that involves transporting children hundreds of miles to undisclosed locations around the country.” The fate of the rest remains unclear.
In the midst of this high-stakes legal maneuvering, families like the one that walked into Fanjoy’s office are adrift in an uncertain world. The aunt has submitted a declaration in a separate lawsuit, filed by attorneys general in 17 states and the District of Columbia, which challenges a sweeping range of practices associated with “zero tolerance.” The Intercept is withholding the names of the aunt and uncle in this particular case, out of concerns they expressed for their safety, and identifying their relatives by their initials – the father, AMJ, and 9-year-old, AMMP.
Navigating the system — or lack thereof — created in response to the government’s self-imposed family separation crisis would be difficult for anyone, Fanjoy said: “It’s profoundly challenging for a person who can speak multiple languages and has a college degree.” It does not take much to imagine how difficult the process would be for a rural Central American family, particularly one that predominantly speaks a rare indigenous language. The family’s experience, and Fanjoy’s experience trying to help secure their freedom, provides a snapshot of the chaos playing out in the immigration system right now. It has left Fanjoy with deep concerns about what the future holds.
“I don’t have any faith that this is going to be resolved in a way that is respectful of humans,” Fanjoy said.
Fanjoy’s work with the Guatemalan couple sprung from an impulse to help, and she has done it on her own time — she normally specializes in cases of intimate partner violence. Fanjoy, who hardly considers herself an immigration expert, determined the first step was to figure out where AMMP was being kept. She reached out to a cousin who is an immigration lawyer. It took a couple days to confirm but, using a 1-800 number the government has provided to the families it has separated, they established that AMMP was being held at a facility run by a private contractor, Southwest Key Programs, in Mesa, Arizona.
Fanjoy connected with an ORR caseworker by phone, who explained that for AMMP’s release from Southwest Key to a sponsor to be considered, the family would first need a notarized power of attorney form signed by one of the child’s parents. They were also told that the family would hear from Southwest Key within three days in order to facilitate the transfer of the requisite resettlement paperwork.
None of this would guarantee AMMP’s release to his aunt and uncle, of course. Sponsoring a child is an involved process. That has become increasingly true in recent months, with the government treating parents separated from their children through “zero tolerance” exactly as it would any other potential sponsor. Under a new agreement, HHS now collects biographic data and immigration history records from every adult living in a potential sponsor home and shares that information with ICE for review before a child may be released. Advocates worry that this policy will result in potential sponsors being scared off or unable to come forward for children, because the adults may themselves be undocumented or living with others who are; the Women’s Refugee Commission and the National Immigrant Justice Center have said that the new agreement indicates that “DHS and HHS see children as bait or suspects first, not children.”
With Fanjoy working the phones on the U.S. side of the border, the aunt and uncle contacted AMMP’s mother in Guatemala. The mother traveled to meet with a lawyer to sign the power of attorney paperwork. Because she cannot read, the mother signed the form with a thumbprint and faxed it to Fanjoy, so that she could then pass it on to Southwest Key. Days went by, however, and the call from Southwest Key never came. “We know that the child’s father, who’s incarcerated in New Mexico, has called ORR and said that he wanted to give power of attorney to the couple that I’m working with, and I have a notarized attorney letter from the mother in Guatemala,” Fanjoy told The Intercept in late June. “But I have nowhere to send that fax from the mother.”
Following up with ORR yielded little. The case managers took notes, she said, and could “tell me how many times I’ve called.” But she would speak to a different case manager each time, and those case managers did not provide direct contact information. Not only that, Fanjoy added, she said she was told early on that she could only call once every three days. Communications with Southwest Key were similarly frustrating. Neither HHS (the department overseeing ORR) nor Southwest Key would provide comment for this story.
Complaints regarding the call-in system ostensibly in place to reconnect families separated by the administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown have become commonplace. Last month, in a statement to the press, the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal collective that has interviewed hundreds of parents separated from their children, claimed that “when trying to locate these children, legal counsel found that government representatives often deliberately hung up on them after they disclosed that they were calling to inquire about the location of a parent separated from a child at the border.”
Emily Fanjoy in Tillamook, Oregon.
Photo: Courtesy of Emily Fanjoy
On the same day that the federal judge in the ACLU’s case issued the national injunction ordering reunifications to begin — June 26 — the aunt and uncle Fanjoy is working with sat down with an investigator from the Oregon attorney general’s office. The investigator’s boss, Ellen Rosenblum, is one of 17 state attorneys general currently suing the Trump administration over family separation practices. The couple told the investigator that ICE had recently told AMJ that if he signed paperwork authorizing his own deportation, he could be reunited with AMMP down the line. AMJ did not accept the offer.
“He didn’t want to leave without his son,” Fanjoy said.
With legal pressure mounting and the deadlines imposed by the injunction in the ACLU suit approaching, numerous stories have surfaced from along the border alleging that ICE officials are suggesting that parents sign paperwork consenting to their voluntary removal in order to be reunited with their kids — The Intercept reported on one such alleged incident last week, while NBC News obtained the paperwork in question. The Department of Homeland Security has strongly denied that the offers are in any way new or inappropriate.
While the attorney general’s investigator was in the room, Fanjoy made a call to ORR — her fifth in the weeks since the couple came in. She was placed on hold for 45 minutes. “Is this this long every time?” the investigator asked Fanjoy.
The following day, according to Fanjoy, she and the family received their first call from Southwest Key. The employee she spoke to asked who she was, why she was calling, and what she had to do with the child in Southwest Key’s custody. “They acted as though they had no information,” she said. Fanjoy explained that she was a social service provider working with the family. ORR, Fanjoy said, had told her that AMJ had called to say that he wanted to give power of attorney to the aunt and uncle. “The woman on the other line said she had no record of that,” she said.
“I have a note from the mother in Guatemala, prepared by a lawyer and notarized,” Fanjoy recalled telling her. The woman told her she had seen no such note.
“Exactly,” Fanjoy said. “Because we don’t have anywhere to send it. Where should I send this information to? We’ve been waiting for someone to call us.”
Fanjoy said the woman gave her a fax number. “Should I send it attention to anyone?” she asked. No, the woman told her, it should be fine. Fanjoy and the family promptly faxed the note.
In conversations with the Southwest Key case manager that followed, Fanjoy and the family continued to press for the resettlement paperwork that would allow the process for AMMP’s sponsorship to begin. But in their last conversation, on July 2, the case manager indicated that it might not happen, citing an ever-shifting set of policies, Fanjoy said. “She said the official policy is: We’re reuniting children with parents if the parents are still in the United States.” Additionally, Fanjoy was told that if she wanted to continue working with the family, she would need to submit paperwork with DHS, establishing herself as an accredited representative.
If the government indeed planned to reunite AMJ and AMMP, there was no indication of when, where, or under what circumstances it might happen. In fact, when Fanjoy spoke with AMJ for the first time the following day, he told her that he was under the impression that AMMP’s sponsorship was proceeding, and that his son would be sent to the aunt and uncle. Fanjoy had hoped that speaking to AMJ might alleviate some of the confusion between the family and the bureaucracies they are attempting to navigate. That was not the case.
“It didn’t clarify anything,” Fanjoy said. In their conversation, AMJ said that he had not heard his son’s voice since the government separated them two months ago. The pair finally had their first conversation late last week.
This week will mark one month since the couple walked into Fanjoy’s office. Whether they are any closer to seeing their family members put back together or, at the very least, getting 9-year-old AMMP out of government custody, is as unclear as ever. Back in Guatemala, the boy’s mother worries. She had been able to communicate somewhat regularly with the boy, but late last month, according to Fanjoy, she was told that he had become sick. “She didn’t understand whether he was taken to the doctor or if he was hospitalized,” Fanjoy said. All she knew was that the calls had stopped coming.
“We have now created an entire group of young people that will carry this for the rest of their lives.”
In mid-June, Newsweek reported that more than 600 United Methodist clergy and church members wanted to see Attorney General Jeff Sessions charged with child abuse for his implementation of “zero tolerance” (Sessions, who issued the order that made “zero tolerance” a border-wide policy, is also a Sunday school teacher at Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama). Fanjoy read the article and, she said, felt it rang true. “I feel like that’s accurate,” she said. “But it’s not just him. It’s him and everyone that participated in this system.”
For Fanjoy, whose entire career is focused on the root causes and manifestations of trauma, often bound up in experiences of child abuse, the implications of what the Trump administration has created are particularly dire. “What I do in my day-to-day work is I talk to health care providers about adverse childhood experiences and the intersections that has with intimate partner and sexual violence,” she explained. “One of the biggest adverse experiences is separation from your parents or caregivers, and it’s by death, divorce, separation, or removal. And most of the time, when we talk about removal, we’re talking about the foster care system.” Through “zero tolerance,” the government systematically created adverse experiences for thousands of children, Fanjoy argued, and because there’s no functional system in place to bring those experiences to an end, they multiply by the day.
“We have now created an entire group of young people that will carry this for the rest of their lives,” she said. “It’s an absolute disaster that was intentionally created, and people’s lives are at stake.”
“It’s disgusting,” she added. “The whole thing is disgusting.”
2018-07-09
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/09/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-fight/
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is warning Democrats in the chamber that if they don’t put up a brutal fight over the next Supreme Court justice, there will be hell to pay from the Democratic base, according to senior Senate aides briefed on Schumer’s message.
Democratic leadership’s response in the two weeks since Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement has been in stark contrast to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s firm, across-the-board rejection of any Obama nominee sent up in 2016. McConnell, flexing the power of a majority leader, announced within an hour of the news of the February 2016 death of Antonin Scalia that under no circumstances would the Senate consider a nominee before the November election. But shortly after Kennedy announced his retirement on June 27, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said that “the Senate should do nothing to artificially delay” the nomination, a public pronouncement of good faith that was celebrated by Republicans and condemned swiftly by Democratic activists.
Blumenthal quickly cleaned up his statement, saying that a deliberate process to confirm any nominee would necessarily take the Senate until beyond the November elections. Since then, an organized effort to pressure Senate Democrats has conveyed the stakes for refusing to do so.
What that fierce opposition will look like, and how broad it will be, remains to be seen, as Schumer lacks the full authority over the Senate that McConnell wielded in 2016. But as a major political party just two seats shy of a majority, Democrats are not as powerless as they sometimes let on.
Schumer has told colleagues that reviving complaints about the Garland process will be ineffective, referring to Republicans’ refusal to consider Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. Instead the party needs to attack the nominee specifically, Schumer’s team has advised Senate offices, according to Democratic aides who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
The advice has solid grounding, both in polling and in recent history: Democratic opposition to Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, centered heavily on McConnell’s theft of the seat and the unfairness of it all. Judge Gorsuch, after a lopsided 54-45 vote in the Senate in the face of that strategy, is now Justice Gorsuch.
It’s unusual for Schumer or Democratic leaders to eschew an argument about the political process, which tends to be their comfort zone. In 2016, for example, Democrats made their argument against McConnell about process, launching a “We Need Nine” campaign, an ultimately futile effort to rally the American people around the notion that the Supreme Court would function best with a particular number of justices on it. According to sources involved in the current judicial fight, the shift is backed up by recent internal polling that showed that voters are motivated to oppose Trump’s pick not over process, but over substance — particularly around abortion rights, which also serves as a proxy for constitutional rights more generally.
With the announcement Monday night that Trump has selected Brett Kavanaugh as his next justice, the question of how unified Schumer can keep his caucus will determine whether the votes of Republican senators who have shown some semblance of independence, such as Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, or Dean Heller, will come into play.
Collins and Murkowski support legal abortion — a constitutional right long upheld by the Supreme Court, but that Trump has pledged to overturn by appointing justices who want to criminalize abortion. The Federalist Society screened Supreme Court applicants for Trump with overturning Roe v. Wade in mind, so there is little mystery where Kavanaugh stands. As a lower court judge, he tried to stall an immigrant minor held in detention from getting an abortion, though ultimately conceded that eventually it would have to be offered, because “the Government will be required by existing Supreme Court precedent to allow the abortion.” That precedent would no longer be binding if a new court, with Kavanugh casting the deciding vote, overturned it.
President Donald Trump greets Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee, in the East Room of the White House on July 9, 2018.
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
With 51 seats in the Senate, Republicans have a very slim majority. The ailing John McCain of Arizona is unlikely to be able to vote, meaning a single defection could defeat a nominee by a 50-49 vote. Collins has said that she will not vote to confirm any nominee who will overturn Roe v. Wade.
Out of the gate, some Democrats say they’re girding for battle. “I will vote against Judge Kavanaugh and work hard to tell the country what kind of damage he will do if confirmed. There is a fight coming, and I’m ready for it,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., noting the judge’s record against abortion rights and gun control. Murphy added that “Trump outsourced the biggest decision of his administration to the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, two political groups that gave him a list of acceptable nominees to the anti-choice, pro-corporate right.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., also pledged her quick opposition, noting that Kavanaugh is also opposed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Brett Kavanaugh’s record as a judge and lawyer is clear: hostile to health care for millions, opposed to the CFPB & corporate accountability, thinks Presidents like Trump are above the law – and conservatives are confident that he would overturn Roe v. Wade. I’ll be voting no.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 10, 2018
Democratic senators and activists gathered outside the Supreme Court on Monday night to pledge a willingness to fight the nominee. “Are you ready for a fight? Are you ready to defend Roe versus Wade?” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked the crowd of hundreds. Blumenthal, Warren, and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon joined Sanders at the court.
For Democrats to put up a united opposition, Schumer would have to corral Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, all of whom face re-election in November in states won by Trump and are accustomed to having free reign. Heitkamp, Donnelly, and Manchin all voted to confirm Gorsuch.
Whipping those Senate votes into line will require Schumer to push his colleagues in ways he never has before. “Chuck has spent his career trying to make everyone of his colleagues happy and telling them what they want to hear,” said one Democratic senator, speaking anonymously so as not to anger the party’s Senate leader. “There’s no sense of leadership. It just feel as if everyone is in a big tent, just staying where they are, doing whatever they feel is in their best interests.”
Recent confirmation fights have not been impressive displays of united opposition. Six Democrats joined 48 Republicans to confirm Gina Haspel as CIA director, despite her role in advocating for and overseeing torture at the CIA, as well as her refusal to declassify or otherwise share documents related to her record. Seven Democratic senators similarly voted to confirm Mike Pompeo, Trump’s hawkish pick for secretary of state after he fired Rex Tillerson from the job.
Pressure will be on Collins and Murkowski only as long as Democrats stay united either in opposition to or at least not in support of Trump’s pick, producing something of a staring contest between the two sides. Given the one-vote margin, the minute that a red-state Democrat signals support for Kavanaugh, a decision by Collins or Murkowski becomes less important. Both Republicans and Democrats, though, can make the intuitive-sounding argument that it is wise to study a nominee, read what they’ve written, meet with them personally, and see how they do in confirmation hearings before announcing a decision.
After all, that’s precisely what Democrats vainly requested Senate Republicans do with Garland: Just give him a chance.
Activists have suggested to Democratic leaders that the party walk out of the committee hearing in protest or refuse to show up. Neither tactic could on its own block Kavanaugh, but it would put a spotlight on how radical the nominee is and how dire the situation. Given the extremism of the nominee, argue the activists, the process can’t be normalized.
The party’s leadership may have decided to fight Kavanugh’s nomination, but what that will look like in practice is uncertain. A spokesperson for Schumer declined to preview what such a battle might look like. Privately, Schumer’s aides have cautioned other Democrats that there is no secret weapon a party in the minority can pull out. Schumer’s aides have warned that if senators attempt to deny a quorum on the Senate floor, rules would allow Republicans to pass legislation by unanimous consent until a Democrat arrived to object.
Senate Democratic leaders are clear on at least one point. As one senior Democratic aide put it, “If we don’t put up a fight, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
Top photo: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks with reporters following the weekly policy luncheons at the U.S. Capitol on June 26, 2018 in Washington, D.C.
2018-07-04
url: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/04/july-4th-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/
Today, the Fourth of July, is a good time to think about the First Amendment — and the possibility that journalism, at least as it’s traditionally produced by liberals and progressives, is often a barrier to the creation of a better country. There’s a better way to do it, and we can thank Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for pointing it out.
The left-of-center worldview is: People are mostly good and can be trusted to govern themselves, and what they do that’s bad is largely due to poorly designed institutions and malevolent individuals who take advantage of them. This has the benefit of being true and encouraging – yes, we can.
Now imagine you came to visit Earth from your home planet of Gliese 832c to finish your master’s thesis on “Journalism Produced by the Lefties.” Your space-brain would instantaneously ingest a year’s worth of the best American investigative reporting, which is to say, 1,000 lovingly detailed, beautifully designed dissections of human depravity. And you’d conclude that the conservative worldview — i.e., people are mostly awful — was the right one.
The hearts of self-consciously progressive writers everywhere will cry out against this. (I know mine does.) The whole reason we’re doing this is for the chance to righteously expose awful people doing terrible things, while also getting reimbursed for our copy of Microsoft Office.
But any honest look at the U.S. today suggests that there are limits to this as a life mission. Reporters have ripped the lid off Donald Trump so many times that it’s incredible America has any lids left. Never before has there been as much information available about corruption and idiocy and corrupt idiots at the highest levels of U.S. society. But nothing much seems to change.
So it may be time to consider whether this type of journalism is, at least when pursued by progressives to the exclusion of other approaches, an elaborate form of self-sabotage.
Consider what’s necessary for progressives to succeed. It’s great for the conservative worldview if all Americans ever hear is that people in general are dreadful and politicians in particular are tricksy vampires. But for the progressive worldview to have a fighting chance, we need to broadcast the exact opposite: that public life is full of individuals who are trustworthy and honorable, and even many of the vampires would be redeemable in a world with better incentives. Politics isn’t necessarily an open sewer. The idea of a common good seems like an illusory sham until the moment enough of us believe in it simultaneously.
I suspect this is why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has captured so many people’s imaginations. It’s not simply her personal story, energy, or preternatural Twitter skills. It’s that she and hundreds of other Americans with no special money or connections got together and decided that the progressive worldview remains alive, that maybe we were right after all. William Greider, national affairs correspondent at The Nation, wrote about the significance of this kind of assertion in his book, “Who Will Tell the People”: “My encounters as a reporter with ordinary citizens have led to optimism about the potential for democratic renewal. … Unexpected music can resonate from politics when people are pursuing questions larger than self. I have seen that ennobling effect in people many, many times — expressed by those who found themselves engaged in genuine acts of democratic expression, who claimed their right to help the larger destiny of their community, their nation. Power can accumulate in mysterious ways, if citizens believe they possess this right.”
So possibly, there’s a lesson here for journalism. Readers were thrilled to learn from progressive outlets, including The Intercept, about Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign. Yes, the president of the United States is a dumber, oranger version of Richard Nixon, and most members of Congress are Uriah Heep with extra unctuousness. But there are thousands of elected offices across America, with dozens if not hundreds of candidates that deserve the same recognition Ocasio-Cortez is now receiving. There is Theranos, but there is also AeroFarms, a company that grows greens in a vertical farm in a former steel warehouse in Newark, New Jersey. There are rapacious corporations whose DNA requires them to destroy the biosphere, but there also attempts across the country to invent new forms of organized commerce with different incentives. There are hideous ideas gaining ground, but also little-known wonderful ones. If we can avoid destroying ourselves, there are rational reasons to believe our future is bright.
This doesn’t mean we need mindless optimism or to abandon exposés. But progressives are not serious if we don’t understand that, while despair works for conservatives, we need some hope about human potential.
You don’t have to take it from me, though — take it from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence promulgated 242 years ago today. Decades later, at the end of his life, he wrote a letter to Henry Lee IV delineating the two types of political worldviews:
Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. in every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. the last appellation of artistocrats and democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.
Why was Jefferson saying all this? To explain why he was willing to subscribe to Lee’s new newspaper, which would support the “democrats” worldview.
(However, like any sensible person, Jefferson did emphasize – “I have sometimes subscribed for the 1st year [of newspapers] on the condition of being discontinued at the end of it, without further warning” – that he didn’t want his subscription to auto-renew.)
Top photo: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, photographed in the Bronx, N.Y., on April 21, 2018.
2018-07-10
url: https://theappeal.org/conservatives-are-obsessed-with-prosecutorial-overreach/
Unfortunately for millions of Americans, only one case matters: Trump’s.
One evening in June, Sean Hannity began his nightly Fox News show indignant about the “Mueller witch hunt.” It is a favorite topic of Hannity’s: A recent study found that, between May 2017 and May of this year, almost 60 percent of his opening segments focused on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump and his associates. This particular evening, he was irked by Mueller’s reported request for electronic information from certain witnesses. “[Prosecutors] are demanding that witnesses turn in their phones so that team Mueller gets to review all of their electronic communications.” Hannity said, his graying hair perfectly coiffed and his voice thick with outrage. “Even texts that are on encrypted apps.” He riffed some advice to the witnesses. “Delete all your emails and then acid-wash your emails and hard drives on the phones, then take your phones and bash them with a hammer to little itsy bitsy pieces,” he said. (Later, perhaps realizing that asking people to obstruct justice on national television is not a great idea, Hannity clarified that he was joking.)
Hannity isn’t alone. A May survey found that 76 percent of Republicans think the investigation is a “witch hunt,”while about 75 percent of Democrats consider it legitimate. Conservative personalities and politicians have been publicly wringing their hands, convinced that Mueller is guilty of exceeding the boundaries of appropriate prosecutorial power. The Federalist notes “a pattern of abuse of prosecutorial discretion,” citing Mueller’s decisions during his 12-year tenure as FBI director. The right-wing organization Freedom Watch has filed a federal suit against Department of Justice officials demanding Mueller be removed on account of his “gross prosecutorial misconduct.” And conservative site RealClearPolitics, in a commentary called “Special Prosecutorial Abuse,” characterizes Mueller’s investigation as a “crusade”: “The liberals worried about a police state? In some respects, it feels as though it’s already here.”
Whether Mueller is overstepping his authority is a matter of opinion. But this conservative indignance rings hollow. For over three decades, conservatives—and many liberals—have encouraged the expansion of prosecutorial power. They’ve sat idly by as the prison population exploded. They watched our criminal justice budget skyrocket. They’ve heard stories of primarily Black, brown, and poor people facing draconian punishments that far exceeded the alleged crime. And yet, many of them have looked the other way as prosecutorial discretion grew unchecked.
Tom Fitton, the president of conservative think tank Judicial Watch, claimed on “Fox and Friends” that “[Mueller’s] operation is the most secretive I can remember,” and that “it’s difficult to get basic information about what he’s been up to.” He failed to mention that opaque investigations are the norm. Prosecutors rarely provide information to defendants unless they absolutely have to. In fact, in 10 states, prosecutors can wait until right before trial to give evidence to the defense, including witness names and statements. Often, defendants have to negotiate a plea deal without even knowing if the state has any evidence against them.
Many Republican congressional candidates have claimed that Mueller’s investigation, which started last May, has lasted too long. Yet those same candidates say nothing about the epidemic of excessive pretrial delays in America, even in relatively minor cases. Waiting two or three years for a case to go to trial is not uncommon. And defendants who aren’t rich and connected often spend that time in custody simply because they can’t afford bail. In New Orleans, a man was found to have spent eight years in jail awaiting trial on a drug charge.
Some of Trump’s confidantes are especially hypocritical. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, also complained about the length of the Mueller probe, stating, “It’s about time to say, ‘Enough. We’ve tortured this president enough.” And after rumors circulated that Mueller had wiretapped Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, Giuliani said, “It’s not appropriate. I mean, he’s a lawyer. … [T]hey’ve already eviscerated the attorney-client privilege. This would make a mockery of it.”
In fact, as a former prosecutor, Giuliani often flouted the law, not only infringing on the rights of defendants but boasting about it. One of those rights was, of course, attorney-client privilege. Giuliani was infamous for “extensive wiretaps and the subpoenaing of defense attorneys,” the New York Times Magazine wrote in 1985. He was also unapologetic. ”If I don’t tip in favor of law enforcement, who will?” he asked, according to the Times. ”The civil libertarians won’t.”
Lest we believe this is just one party’s problem, Democrats have been so blinded by the Mueller investigation that some are pursuing punitive new laws in the hopes they might be used against Trump and administration officials. One of our most critical constitutional protections is the prohibition of double jeopardy, meaning the right to not be prosecuted twice for the same crime. There are exceptions to this rule: Depending on the state, prosecutors in state court and federal court may be able to both charge a person for the same action. But, generally, this ban on double jeopardy is an important shield against state power for defendants. Yet in New York, a bill that would make it easier to prosecute people twice for the same crime is garnering support because it could be used to prosecute defendants who have received pardons from the president.
As prosecutorial power has increased, so has the prison population, creating a mass incarceration crisis that has seen millions of people spend months, years, even decades of their lives languishing in jails or prisons. But prosecutorial overreach is usually unacknowledged by those decrying it today. Hannity has called the Mueller investigation a “monumental abuse of power” and has claimed that “Mueller is causing irreparable damage to the rule of law in this country.” But prosecutors have been causing irreparable damage for decades, with little attention from Hannity and his fellow conservatives. That damage is only compounded by the countless people in the Republican Party who seem to think that only Donald Trump deserves a more restrained justice system.
2018-07-10
url: https://theappeal.org/the-shadowy-world-of-jailhouse-informants-an-explainer/
In our Explainer series, we help unpack some of the most complicated issues in the criminal justice system. We break down the problems behind the headlines — like bail, civil asset forfeiture, or the Brady doctrine — so that everyone can understand them. Wherever possible, we try to utilize the stories of those affected by the criminal justice system to show how these laws and principles should work, and how they often fail. We will update our Explainers quarterly to keep them current.
In 2006, Ann Colomb and her three sons were convicted of running one of the largest crack cocaine distribution rings in Louisiana. Federal prosecutors said that, over the course of a decade, the family bought $15 million worth of drugs with a street value of more than $70 million. Over 30 witnesses were prepared to testify that they had sold crack to the Colombs. After the jury convicted them, Colomb and her sons sat in prison facing sentences that ranged from 10 years to life.
But none of it was true. The 30 witnesses were jailhouse informants who fabricated evidence against the Colombs in the hope of reducing their own sentences. A for-profit snitching ring was operating inside the prison system, where wannabe informants could pay thousands of dollars for information about defendants. The scam came to light accidentally when a Texas inmate paid $2,200 for the Colomb file but never received it. He sent an angry letter to the prosecutor on his own case complaining, ironically, that he had been robbed. The case against the Colombs unraveled, and the presiding judge called for an investigation. “The problem wasn’t just this case,” U.S. District Judge Tucker Melancon said. “We potentially have a huge problem with this network in the federal prison system.”
The Criminal Informant Deal
The Colomb case is just one example of how the use of criminal informants, and jailhouse informants in particular, distorts large swaths of our criminal justice process. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. criminal system permits the government to trade leniency for information, giving law enforcement wide discretion. Police can refrain from arresting a person who offers information about somebody else. Prosecutors can drop charges or recommend lower sentences in exchange for a defendant’s cooperation. This authority has created an enormous market for information and cooperation in the criminal process. Defendants, inmates, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges all understand that leniency is available for those who offer useful information to the government. Cooperation is a way of “working off” sentences. This awareness affects the behavior of every player at every stage of the process.
Criminal informants are incentivized by a wide range of benefits to produce information for the government. The most common benefit is leniency for the informant’s own crimes, but informants also work for all sorts of things including money, drugs, improved conditions of confinement, or legal immigration status for themselves or family members. Government officials, conversely, have strong reasons to ignore informant wrongdoing and unreliability in order to win cases: Officials have been known to lie, break rules, cut corners, and even commit additional crimes to create, reward, and protect their informants. The entire market is challenging to track and regulate because so many of its operations are secretive and informal. In all these ways, the informant deal threatens the integrity of the criminal process.
At the same time, using informants offers real benefits to law enforcement. Sometimes informants permit the government to investigate and convict offenders who would otherwise escape prosecution. The FBI’s use of mafia informants—some of them murderers—helped dismantle organized crime. Kenneth Lay, the corrupt CEO of Enron, was convicted based on the testimony of numerous cooperating defendants. More broadly, the informant deal has become an integral part of American plea bargaining, a way of negotiating and resolving thousands of cases as well as generating evidence.
In sum, trading leniency for information is a risky public policy with deep implications for the entire criminal process. This piece explains an especially fraught version of that policy: the use and reward of jailhouse informants.
Jailhouse Snitches: An Especially Problematic Kind of Informant
Jailhouse snitches, sometimes referred to as “in-custody informants,” are a particularly risky and unreliable category of criminal informant. Like all informants, they provide evidence to the government in the hope of receiving a benefit. But they have additional characteristics that make them especially poor witnesses. They are incarcerated, so they are surrounded by a ready-made supply of vulnerable targets who are already suspected of criminal conduct. At the same time, because jailhouse informants are under the control of jail officials, there are many benefits and incentives for which they can exchange information, including food, cigarettes, visiting privileges, phone access, and cell assignments.
Simply being in jail incentivizes informants to come up with information and educates them about how to do so. Prisoners learn from law enforcement and from other prisoners a wide range of practices and expectations about how to be a jailhouse snitch. While incarcerated, for example, detainees may acquire new skills in gathering and fabricating information, learning how to find news reports, how to steal other prisoners’ legal papers, recruit family members on the outside to do research, or to collude with other prisoners.
The jail experience also teaches detainees that the government will often confer benefits in exchange for information even when no express promises have been made and no express instructions have been given. In Los Angeles, for example, an extensive jailhouse snitch scandal led to a 1990 grand jury investigation into informant abuses in the county jail. Law enforcement officials would place suspects in a “snitch tank” where seasoned jailhouse informants would extract information and fabricate confessions, which the informants would then trade to the government for leniency. The grand jury found that informant prisoners understood that being moved to a cell next to a defendant was an implicit instruction from the government to elicit information from that defendant, even if no government official expressly said so. The investigation also found that detainees would offer information to the government in anticipation of receiving benefits down the road, putting cooperation “in the bank.”
Prisoners also learn that their testimony is more valuable to the government if they can state they have not received or been promised a benefit. Seasoned snitches often invent pretextual reasons for their cooperation, for example, by claiming that they are disgusted by the defendant’s crime, or that they want justice for the victim. These lessons reinforce to informants the value of being entrepreneurial and going after targets without express government direction.
As a result of this jailhouse informant culture, law enforcement officials will often not need to instruct informants to collect or fabricate evidence because the culture will already have done so. This arrangement effectively permits an end-run around the Constitution. A defendant who has been charged with a crime has the constitutional right to counsel. In Massiah v. United States, the Supreme Court explained that the government cannot use informants to deliberately elicit information from such defendants without their lawyer present. Informants who collect information on their own, by contrast, are not considered government agents and therefore do not fall under the prohibition. Entrepreneurial informants can truthfully state that no government actor instructed them to collect information about a defendant, even though they received implicit encouragement to do so. Likewise, many jailhouse informants can truthfully state to the jury that they have not received or been promised any benefit, even though realistically they expect to and will be compensated for their testimony. Ironically, jurors will often be the only people in the courtroom who do not understand this arrangement.
Sometimes law enforcement officials simply ignore the law. Orange County, California, is reeling from an enormous and debilitating jailhouse snitch scandal in which sheriffs and district attorneys used informants for decades to extract information from inmates. The government failed to disclose its practices to defendants and to the courts even though it was constitutionally required to do so; some sheriff’s deputies perjured themselves when put on the stand. When the unconstitutional practices were finally uncovered, numerous homicide and gang cases throughout the county crumbled; a judge kicked the prosecutor’s office off a prominent capital case involving a mass shooting; the federal government initiated an investigation; and the ACLU filed a lawsuit. In Detroit during the 1990s, police ran a snitch ring on the ninth floor of the jail, offering leniency and other benefits to prisoners if they would testify against others. Hundreds of people were convicted as a result. These scandals reveal how jailhouse informants have become a deeply troubling feature of American criminal justice culture.
Can They Do That? The Constitutional Law of Jailhouse Informants
The government’s use of compensated criminal informants is highly discretionary and only lightly regulated. In Hoffa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could use Edward Partin as a witness against union leader Jimmy Hoffa. Partin was in a Louisiana jail facing numerous charges, including embezzlement, manslaughter, and perjury, when he cut a deal with the federal government. He was released, charges were dropped, and he and his wife were paid. In exchange, Partin insinuated himself into Hoffa’s inner circle and then testified against him. The Supreme Court held that none of Hoffa’s rights were violated by this maneuver, largely because, as the Court saw it, Hoffa had relinquished any expectation of privacy when he voluntarily chose to engage with Partin. In other words, people assume the risk that their friends, family members, and colleagues might be snitches.
Jailhouse informants also provide a loophole in Miranda doctrine, which requires that suspects be informed of their rights before they can be held and interrogated by police. In 1986, the government placed an undercover police agent in a jail cell with Lloyd Perkins. The agent, posing as a violent criminal, asked Perkins if he had ever “done” anybody, and Perkins confessed to murder. The Supreme Court held that Perkins had no right to be Mirandized, even though he was being interrogated by a state agent, because he didn’t know he was speaking to an agent. This rule means that jailhouse informants can interrogate suspects on behalf of the government in ways that police are forbidden from doing without Miranda warnings.
Even if informants can extract information in entrepreneurial ways, they are not supposed to threaten their cellmates. In Arizona v. Fulminante, a jailhouse informant scared his cellmate into confessing. The Supreme Court held that confessions extracted through violent threats are involuntary and violate the Constitution’s due process clause. But it still happens. In the Orange County scandal, the government used violent gang members as informants who threatened other prisoners to get them to confess.
Wrongful Convictions
Perhaps the best-known problem with jailhouse informants is their unreliability. Bruce Lisker, for example, was wrongfully convicted of murdering his mother, based on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch. He was exonerated in 2009 after serving 24 years in prison. Thomas Goldstein served over 20 years for a murder he did not commit, based on the fabricated testimony of an experienced jailhouse informant named Edward Fink. As a result of the Los Angeles jailhouse snitch scandal, hundreds of convictions were overturned.
Large-scale studies confirm that wrongful convictions are a common result of informant use. The Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School issued a report finding that over 45 percent of all wrongful capital convictions are due to lying by criminal informants, making “snitching the leading cause of wrongful convictions in U.S. capital cases.” According to The Innocence Project, 15 percent of DNA-based exonerations alone involve a lying informant. Professor Samuel Gross, founder of the National Registry of Exonerations, has estimated that nearly 50 percent of wrongful murder convictions involved perjury by someone such as a “jailhouse snitch or another witness who stood to gain from the false testimony.” These demonstrated risks of wrongful conviction have generated informant reforms in numerous states.
Prosecutorial Mistakes and Misconduct
Prosecutors often rely heavily on informants. This is especially true in drug enforcement, where it is often quipped that every drug case involves a snitch. Informants, however, are used to prosecute cases ranging from terrorism to securities fraud to murder, and prosecutors can become invested in their informants’ stories. One prosecutor described it as “falling in love with your rat”:
“You are not supposed to, of course. … But you spend time with this guy, you get to know him and his family. You like him. … [T]he reality is that the cooperator’s information often becomes your mind set. … It’s a phenomenon and the danger is that because you feel all warm and fuzzy about your cooperator, you come to believe that you do not have to spend much time or energy investigating the case and you don’t. Once you become chummy with your cooperator, there is a real danger that you lose your objectivity.”
As a result, prosecutors may not see the weaknesses in their informants’ narratives. Legal scholars call this “tunnel vision”—when prosecutors are focused on winning cases, they interpret evidence in the light most favorable to victory. Once prosecutors decide to use an unreliable informant in a case, it becomes difficult to change course.
Sometimes prosecutors affirmatively engage in misconduct in connection with their use of informants, most commonly by failing to disclose evidence. In the landmark Brady v. Maryland case, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense, meaning all evidence that might indicate the defendant’s innocence. This includes any information that an informant might be lying, so-called impeachment evidence, especially any evidence that the informant was promised a benefit. All too often, however, prosecutors do not disclose this information. In John Giuca’s murder case, the prosecution never disclosed that their jailhouse snitch had a deal. Giuca served 15 years before he was exonerated. Albert Burrell served 13 years for a murder he did not commit after the prosecution withheld evidence about the jailhouse informant. Michael Anderson was granted a new trial after being sentenced to death in the killing of five men; the state did not disclose its deal with a jailhouse informant which the New Orleans judge called “a heck of a deal. It couldn’t have been any better.”
In Los Angeles, the grand jury discovered that the district attorney’s office intentionally refrained from keeping track of its own jailhouse informants to avoid having to disclose information to defense attorneys. As a result of such tactics, several states have introduced reforms that strengthen prosecutorial obligations to track and disclose information about their informants.
Bolstering Bad Forensics
Jailhouse informants can also exacerbate problems with weak forensic evidence. Specifically, informants often come forward entrepreneurially when the government has a murder or other high-profile case. When the evidence in those cases is already strong, the government may not need or use informants. But when the case is weak, at precisely the moment when prosecutors should be most concerned about wrongful conviction, the government may turn to jailhouse informants to bolster its case. As a result, there have been numerous instances where jailhouse informant testimony has corroborated unreliable forensic evidence, making weak cases look stronger than they actually were.
Cameron Todd Willingham, for example, was convicted and executed for the arson deaths of his children. His conviction rested on expert arson testimony corroborated by the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who came forward after being promised leniency by the prosecutor. Years later, the arson science was shown to be faulty, and the jailhouse snitch recanted his testimony, making it highly likely that Willingham was wrongfully executed. Jailhouse informant testimony has similarly been used to obtain convictions in cases involving dubious dog-sniff evidence and unreliable eyewitness identifications. The dangers of such wrongful conviction are built into the market for informant testimony because informants have the incentives and opportunities to provide evidence precisely when the government needs it the most and when the risks to the innocent are at their height.
Reforms
There is growing awareness that using informants, jailhouse informants in particular, leads to wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice. As a result, states are engaged in reform. Texas, California, Illinois, and Florida are among states have passed significant new laws; other states, including New York, Nebraska, Washington, and Pennsylvania, have introduced legislation. In 2018, the American Legislative Exchange Council proposed model jailhouse informant reform legislation.
Three types of reform in particular have garnered support, and they represent best practices for regulating informant use. Pretrial reliability hearings permit judges to screen out the most unreliable snitches. Tracking and disclosure systems help the government keep better tabs on its informants, better judge their credibility, and disclose all necessary information to the defense. Juror education is especially important because jurors are often not well-equipped to evaluate informant credibility. When jurors are misled, it leads to wrongful convictions.
A. Pretrial Reliability Hearings
Courts can hold pretrial hearings to evaluate whether jailhouse informant witnesses are reliable. Such hearings help avoid wrongful conviction in a number of ways. Judges who understand plea bargaining and jailhouse culture are well-positioned to evaluate whether informants, their criminal history, and the benefits they hope to obtain make them unreliable. The judge does not decide if an informant’s specific testimony is true or false—that is still the jury’s job. Instead, the hearing permits the judge to screen out particularly unreliable witnesses where the incentives to fabricate are enormous, where there is weak corroboration, and where jurors might not understand the risks. Illinois requires reliability hearings for all jailhouse informants. The state of Washington has considered legislation that would require them as well.
B. Jailhouse Informant Tracking and Disclosure Systems
In the wake of the Los Angeles jailhouse informant scandal, the LA County district attorney’s office instituted a jailhouse informant registry and supervisory system to mitigate the risks of wrongful conviction and unconstitutional practices. This system offered the first model tracking system for all prosecutorial offices; as part of its response to its own scandal, the Orange County district attorney has promised to institute a comparable system. In 2016, Tarrant County, Texas, instituted an updated model policy.
Tracking systems involve collecting basic information about informants who offer evidence or who are used in investigations, including their criminal history, record of reliability, lying and recantations, and any benefits given or promised. In Los Angeles, before a prosecutor can use such a witness at trial, he or she must submit this information to an internal jailhouse informant supervisory committee, as well as “strong corroboration” for the informant’s proffered evidence. This mechanism creates a database of relevant information for prosecutors who can then evaluate the reliability of their witnesses and avoid wrongful convictions before they happen.
Tracking systems also promote disclosure. The Constitution requires the government to disclose impeachment material regarding informants, namely, any information that would cast doubt on the person’s credibility. Many states specify exactly what that material must include, such as the informant’s previous statements, his or her criminal history, benefits received or promised, any testimony in prior cases, and recantations. Tracking systems help ensure that such information is fully collected and properly disclosed.
C. Educating Juries: Instructions and Experts
Jurors need to be educated about the reliability risks of informant witnesses. It is a common misperception that cross-examination by defense attorneys is sufficient to discredit a lying informant. In fact, jurors are often unable to discern when an informant is telling the truth. For example, the dozens of informant-generated wrongful convictions documented in the Northwestern University report were overwhelmingly the result of trials. That means in each case, jurors heard the testimony and cross-examination and believed a lying criminal informant anyway.
Jurors can get it wrong for numerous reasons. Because informants’ liberty is at stake, they are highly motivated to create plausible testimonies, and their criminal background often makes them appear knowledgeable and persuasive. In addition, jurors often wrongly assume that because the government is offering the informant as a witness, it has additional information about the reliability of the informant and knows that the informant is telling the truth. This, of course, is not true. The government often doesn’t know whether its informant witness is lying. The phenomenon is sometime referred to as prosecutorial “vouching” and it makes informants seem more credible to jurors than they actually are.
Psychological research has also found that jurors do not fully understand the influence of compensation on an informant’s testimony. One study found that incentives made witnesses more likely to lie, but that even when jurors knew about the incentives they were just as likely to believe the informant witnesses. Jurors also often underestimate the unreliability of informants. They do not necessarily understand the lengths to which informants can and do go to fabricate evidence because they have no experience with the phenomenon. They may not fully appreciate the impact that the hope of leniency can have on an informant’s willingness to fabricate. And they typically do not know that informants are rarely prosecuted for perjury, so there is little downside to lying.
There are two main ways to educate jurors: jury instructions and expert testimony.
Numerous states as well as many federal jurisdictions require the court to instruct jurors regarding the special unreliability of compensated criminal witnesses. The standard instruction cautions jurors as follows:
The testimony of an informant who provides evidence against a defendant must be examined and weighed by you with greater caution and care than the testimony of an ordinary witness. Whether the informer’s testimony has been affected by interest or prejudice against the defendant is for you to determine. In making that determination, you should consider: (1) whether the witness has received or hopes to receive anything (including pay, immunity from prosecution, leniency in prosecution, personal advantage, or vindication) in exchange for testimony; (2) the extent to which the informant’s testimony is corroborated by other evidence; (3) the extent to which the details of the testimony could be obtained from a source other than the defendant; (4) any other case in which the informant testified or offered statements against an individual but was not called, and whether the statements were admitted in the case, and whether the informant received any deal, promise, inducement, or benefit in exchange for that testimony or statement; (5) whether the informant has ever changed his or her testimony; (6) the criminal history of the informant; and (7) any other evidence relevant to the informant’s credibility.
Expert testimony can also help jurors make more informed credibility determinations. The realities of jailhouse culture and informants’ expectations of benefits are not understood by the average juror: there is no reason that a non-expert would understand the sophisticated tools available to informants, or the ways that benefits are actually expected, deferred, and conferred. Accordingly, courts can bring in experts to testify at trial to assist the jury. Such experts do not testify regarding whether any particular informant is lying. Rather, the expert educates the jury about common informant benefits and practices, jailhouse culture, and the implicit understandings that informants, jail officials, and prosecutors all share so that the jury can make a fully informed evaluation.
A Connecticut court explained why such experts are important. First, the court noted “the growing recognition by the legal community that jailhouse informant testimony is inherently unreliable and is a major contributor to wrongful convictions throughout this country.” The court went on to say that “jurors [are] not fully aware of the dangers in relying on informant testimony and that expert testimony could assist jurors in properly evaluating an informant’s credibility.”
Conclusion
Such reforms are just a beginning. Criminal informants are used in thousands of cases every year, sometimes as witnesses, often behind the scenes and off the record, shaping investigations and determining plea bargains. These informant deals—in which the government trades leniency in exchange for information—create an enormous, shadowy market that profoundly shapes the quality of American criminal justice. It is time that this market was brought into the light.
Alexandra Natapoff is professor of law at the University of California, Irvine. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, which won the 2010 ABA Silver Gavel Award Honorable Mention for books. She has helped draft legislation at both the state and federal levels and is quoted frequently by major media outlets. Her website Snitching.org provides educational information on all aspects of criminal informant use and policy.
2018-07-09
url: https://theappeal.org/california-county-law-enforcement-puts-kids-on-probation-for-bad-grades/
A new lawsuit says Riverside County’s probation officers threaten to prosecute kids for ‘pre-delinquent’ behavior.
Andrew M.’s first interaction with the criminal justice system began with an orange.
On Feb. 9, 2017, when he was 13, Andrew was playfully kicking the fruit around with some friends on school grounds during lunch, when he accidentally sent the orange in the direction of a Moreno Valley officer standing nearby. The orange went through the officer’s legs, and Andrew was handcuffed and shepherded into the principal’s office, where the assistant principal searched his backpack and found marijuana. Andrew received a civil infraction for possession that day. A month later, he was instructed to show up at the police station to discuss probation. Sitting in a windowless room with his father, grandmother, uncle, and two officers, including one who was armed, Andrew was handed a contract and told that he could participate in the Youth Accountability Team (YAT) probation program for six months instead of going to juvenile court.
Andrew, now 15, is one of four named plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed in the Central District of California on July 1 against Riverside County, as well as the chief and deputy chief of the county’s probation department, over the Youth Accountability Team. According to the lawsuit, approximately 400 kids and teenagers in 17 school districts in Riverside County are funneled into the program for “pre-delinquent” or “delinquent” conduct each year—labels assigned by school administrators law enforcement officials, community members, and some parents for school discipline problems, mental health issues, poor academics, and family conflicts. One sixth grader was allegedly referred in part because school staff complained that he had used the “race card” against them.
According to the lawsuit, YAT probation skirts due process, leads to unreasonable searches and seizures under California law, violates the right to freedom of expressive association, and adversely impacts Black and Latinx students like Andrew.
Scared, confused, and without a lawyer to consult, Andrew signed the contract. He had to attend school, earn good grades, abide by an 8 p.m. curfew, participate in 25 hours of community service, meet with a probation officer regularly, follow all YAT instructions, go to counseling, go to weekly programs facilitated by the Moreno Valley Police Department, and visit a correctional facility. Any violation could result in a referral to the Riverside County district attorney’s office for possible prosecution. Upon signing, Andrew was repeatedly forced to leave class to talk to YAT officers, who also conducted house visits. On one occasion, he was pulled out of class to fill out a YAT survey, even though it meant he would miss a Spanish quiz. Even after sticking to these strict conditions, Andrew was still summoned to Superior Court less than two weeks after signing. He ultimately pleaded guilty to the marijuana possession charge and received a sentence of 10 community service hours, an agreement to complete a drug test, and a fine.
The YAT program was created in 2001 to identify “at-risk” youth and intervene before they got into more serious trouble. But teachers, school administrators, and law enforcement officials use the program as a form of school discipline, the lawsuit asserts. Students are often charged with violating Section 601(b) of the California Wellness and Institutions Code, a vague statute that penalizes minors who “persistent[ly] or habitual[ly] refuse to obey the reasonable and proper orders or directions of school authorities” by allowing local officials to place them on probation. Like Andrew, many students say they were told that if they violated these “informal” conditions of probation, they would be referred to the DA. They subsequently have to jump through hoops—like submitting to home searches and drug tests—to avoid violating their contracts.
From 2005 to 2016, 12,971 youths were under a YAT contract, 25 percent of whom were accused of a noncriminal offense, according to the complaint. Black students were 2.5 times and Latinx students were 1.5 times more likely than white students to be accused of a Section 601(b) violation from 2003 to 2016.
A PowerPoint slide from a Riverside County Probation Department presentation on the Youth Accountability Team at the 2012 Juvenile Delinquency Symposium.
“It’s kind of like this expedited version of the school-to-prison pipeline by having this extrajudicial system operating exclusively through the school,” said Hannah Comstock of the ACLU, which was among the plaintiff’s counsel. But, the lawsuit states, young people generally opt into the program without legal counsel present and without a full grasp of their rights—information they would learn if these contracts were established through the courts.
When reached for comment by The Appeal, the Riverside County Probation Department said they could not discuss the allegations until they had been served with the lawsuit.
YAT can have disastrous consequences by setting youth up for future involvement with the criminal justice system, the complaint argues. Probation officers allegedly use the program to create profiles of participants by accessing school records, reading counseling reports, and compiling extensive family histories—information they can use against participants who encounter the juvenile justice system in the future.
In a YAT presentation recounted in the book Psyche-Soul-ology: An Inspirational Approach to Appreciating and Understanding Troubled Kids, Debbie Waddell, a former senior probation officer, was quoted as saying that YAT is used to “get them into the system by fingerprinting and photographing them. We can search their homes any time we want and work to obtain evidence against them so that when we can get ’em, we can really get ’em!” Former Deputy District Attorney Anthony Villalobos, who participated in the same presentation, also explained, “We can do all kinds of surveillance, including wire taps on phones, without having to get permission from a judge.”
If people end up in court for a first time, low-level criminal offense down the line and they have already completed YAT, they are no longer eligible for diversion. If they started but did not complete YAT, the failure can be considered during the criminal sentencing process.
The YAT kids “feel like they have broken a law and that this is a punishment,” said Corey Jackson, the CEO of Sigma Beta Xi, a mentorship organization and plaintiff in the lawsuit. The organization works with many of the youth who encounter the probation program, so Jackson has seen its impact firsthand. One mentee under a YAT contract attended a young man’s leadership conference in nearby Los Angeles and received a penalty because the outing wasn’t pre-approved by a probation officer, Jackson recounted. “It’s being sold to these school districts as a mentoring program. There is nothing in the program that has anything to do with mentoring, based upon best practices and national standards,” he said.
In addition to reading contracts from years past, the ACLU attorneys have met with parents picking up their children from probation meetings and consistently heard that impacted families feel voiceless. But it is hard to fight a system when the charges aren’t clear and there isn’t a lawyer to assist them. “If you don’t know how you’ve been wronged, how can you raise that issue?” Comstock said.
The plaintiffs are asking for the court to prohibit the enforcement of Section 601(b), the signing of contracts through coercion and without explaining charges against the children or their legal rights, searches of students’ homes and personal property, use of records compiled against a student under probation in the future, and operating in a way that specifically targets Black and Latinx youth.
“Kicking an orange doesn’t mean you’re going to jail or going to rob somebody. Playing ‘the race card’ doesn’t mean you’re going to break some type of laws,” Jackson said. “We can no longer accept that in Riverside County.”
2018-07-08
A heroin camp in Pennsylvania is visited by police
In overdose-wracked Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a small-time dealer is denied bail, while the number of drug induced homicide cases has skyrocketed.
Angel Fortich was at worst a small-time drug dealer, but he faced consequences befitting a major trafficker or even a murderer: denial of bail and pretrial detention for six months. In 2017, Fortich, a 21-year-old resident of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, was charged by prosecutors with selling roughly three stamp bags of heroin and possessing an eighth of a pound of marijuana in Franklin County, a small county of approximately 150,000 residents along the Mason-Dixon Line in central Pennsylvania.
The judge’s sole rationale for the bail denial was that Fortich faced “multiple drug charges,” according to court records. But bail is not supposed to be used as punishment. “We do not want to administer punishment before the defendant has been adjudicated guilty,” wrote Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg in a brief supporting a lawsuit over the county’s cash bail system.
Cherise Fanno Burdeen of the Pretrial Justice Institute in Rockville, Maryland, says judges often do just that, reasoning, “‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to cases down the road, but I can get punishment now by setting a bond amount that someone can’t meet.’”
Fortich was arrested by Pennsylvania State Trooper Antwjuan Cox. A review by The Appeal of Cox’s affidavits documenting three alleged heroin sales by Fortich between January and March 2017 reveals that the trooper wrote nearly identical affidavits in each case. Fortich was contacted by an unnamed individual, either by phone or on Facebook, requesting the purchase of a “sum of heroin,” and then Fortich allegedly delivered drugs to the individual in view of the police. Cox did not quantify the “sum” of heroin sold by Fortich. However, in a sentencing report for the one case in which Fortich negotiated a guilty plea, it appears that the amount of heroin he dealt was 0.01 gram, the equivalent of one stamp bag.
In April 2017, Cox filed criminal charges against Fortich and requested a warrant for all three drug sales, and Chambersburg Police arrested him. Roughly an hour later, Officer Cole Baker—who noted in an affidavit of probable cause that Fortich smelled of marijuana—said his patrol vehicle still smelled of the drug. When he searched the vehicle, Baker said he found 18 baggies of marijuana in his patrol vehicle where Fortich had been seated. Baker concluded that that the drugs belonged to Fortich and charged him with felony possession with intent to deliver. Based on these charges, Magisterial District Judge Kelly Rock denied bail.
Pennsylvania law allows bail denial only in the most serious cases, like murder, or when “no condition or combination of conditions other than imprisonment will reasonably assure the safety of any person and the community when the proof is evident or presumption great.” But Burdeen says that far too often “we use the criminal justice process as punishment.”
Indeed, as Pennsylvania confronts an overdose crisis which has seen the annual number of deaths surge from 10 in 2013 to 40 in 2016 in Franklin County, magisterial district judges appear to be using bail as a means to punish defendants charged with drug dealing. The Appeal reviewed all criminal cases filed in Franklin County between 2012 and 2017 and found that the median bail for people charged with possession with intent to deliver has quadrupled from $25,000 to $100,000. Reliance on cash bail has also increased in Franklin County. In 2012, cash bail was imposed in roughly half of all drug delivery cases; in 2016 and 2017, cash bail was imposed in 70 percent of such cases, The Appeal found. In Franklin County, median cash bail for possession with intent to deliver cases is now higher than bail for violent crimes such as felony aggravated assault, according to The Appeal’s review.
Drug-induced homicide cases—where people are charged with homicides if they share or sell drugs to someone who later overdoses and dies—have also risen sharply in Franklin County, from two in 2016 to 17 in 2017, according to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
After Fortich spent nearly six months incarcerated pretrial, charges in two of his heroin delivery cases were dropped. Fortich pleaded guilty to possession with intent to deliver in the third heroin case; in the marijuana case and he was sentenced to five years’ “intermediate punishment” which involves an initial jail sentence followed by community supervision. He was also ordered to serve two additional years of probation and pay roughly $5,000 in fines and fees. Franklin County is “probably trying hard to figure out how to manage some of these social issues” says Burdeen, but “the problem is the tools we’re using, like jail, backfire. Whatever risk label you want to give Angel, nothing about his life situation gets better by being incarcerated.”
2018-07-08
url: https://theappeal.org/this-red-state-governor-is-giving-hope-to-people-sentenced-to-die-in-prison/
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards
But after a spree of commutations, the governor recently put down his clemency pen amid tough-on-crime fear mongering.
In 2016, after serving nearly 27 years in prison, 61-year-old Kerry Myers experienced something he didn’t know would ever happen: Christmas at home with his family.
At the time of his sentencing for second-degree murder in 1990, Louisiana was enforcing decades-old “life means life” laws that meant that unless Myers could prove his innocence, he would die in prison. Louisiana is one of two states that mandates life without parole for second-degree murder, and almost 5,000 people are currently serving sentences with no chance of parole or probation.
But Myers wasn’t ready to accept his life sentence. He kept fighting to prove his innocence and applied for clemency from the governor. For a long time, the chances of either proving successful were low. Then Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, took office in 2016.
After campaigning in the deep red state on a promise to reduce its prison population, Edwards set his sights on changing Louisiana’s reputation as the incarceration capital of the nation. One of his first actions was to give relief to people like Myers serving long sentences for violent crimes. In his first six months in office, Edwards commuted 22 sentences out of 56 sent to him with positive recommendation from the state’s Board of Pardons. Sixteen of the offenders whose applications he granted were serving life without parole.
Just a few days days before Christmas, the warden told Myers that Edwards had signed his application and had granted him immediate release. Four days later, he was home near Baton Rouge, celebrating Christmas with his mother, brother, daughter, grandchildren, and extended family.
“It was amazing,” he said. “It was a fantastic reunion.”
Edwards’s commutation spree stood in stark contrast to how his predecessors used their power. Neither Governor Mike Foster, a Republican, nor Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, signed any commutations in their first year. (Foster waited almost three years to start signing pardons and commutations, but focused on nonviolent offenders.) Blanco commuted 129 sentences in four years, and Foster commuted 52 in eight years, but the majority came during their last few years in office.
Governor Bobby Jindal, who served most recently, approved one clemency application in his first year but only three during his eight years in office. While the Pardon Board sent many applications with positive recommendations to his desk, Jindal, a Republican, ignored the vast majority. That included Myers’s, which the Pardon Board recommended in 2013.
How often Democratic governors grant commutations appears to have more to do with the governor than the political makeup of their state. In solidly Democratic New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo granted only seven commutations in December 2016 and just two since then. But in California, Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, commuted 49 sentences in the final two years of most recent his term.
Criminal justice reform advocates credit Edwards for bringing long-needed change to Louisiana’s justice system—not just through his clemency push but also by spearheading a legislation package that lowered mandatory minimum sentences, expanded alternatives to prison, and made it easier for nonviolent offenders to get out of prison early. Thousands of people have since been released, and last year Louisiana lost its title as the state with the highest incarceration rate in the nation. Edwards’s renewed use of the clemency power made many of the lifers at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, hopeful for the first time in decades.
“I can tell you most certainly there was renewed hope,” said Andrew Hundley, the executive director of the Louisiana Parole Project. “For so long, there wasn’t hope. … There’s about 6,000 people at Angola and about 5,000 of them have life sentences or sentences akin to life sentences, so the majority of people who go to Angola won’t leave Angola.”
Hundley was himself sentenced to life without parole as a juvenile, but was also released from Angola in 2016 thanks to Edwards’s bill that prohibited that sentence for young people. He said that Edwards’s use of his clemency power had positive effects across Angola. Many offenders who previously assumed they would die inside prison suddenly started trying to improve their behavior, as a favorable recommendation from the pardon board requires an applicant to be free from disciplinary reports for 24 months. Inmates also began applying for educational opportunities and prison organizations to boost their applications. “Edwards may not realize this but he’s the warden’s best friend,” Hundley said.
But then the commutations stopped.
In the last year and a half, since the end of 2016, Edwards has not signed a single commutation. The pardon board has issued at least 70 positive recommendations to people seeking commutations since December 2016, when Edwards signed his last commutation, according to an analysis by The Appeal. Representatives with his office did not respond to questions about why the commutations stopped.
Advocates like Norris Henderson, who leads the civil rights nonprofit Voice of the Experienced, say they understand why Edwards has put down his clemency pen. The governor is up for re-election next year, and they say it would be dangerous for him to do anything that could jeopardize his chances of serving another term.
“I think he’s just being cautious,” Henderson said, pointing out that as the lone elected Democrat in Louisiana, Edwards has a long list of opponents who would capitalize on any misstep. “Some of these folks are trying to use any excuse possible to throw a brick at you.”
“He’s doing his due diligence,” Myers agreed. “The political fallout could wreck someone who has an opportunity to do good. … You have to be there to do good.”
While his efforts have garnered praise outside the state, Henderson said it’s common knowledge in Louisiana that supporting criminal justice reform can be a politically dangerous position. Edwards is already facing pushback from the state’s district attorneys, who have said they need more time to consider each application. (E. Pete Adams, the executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, said the DAs respect the governor’s commutation authority, as long as victims and their representatives are given notice and the opportunity to be heard.)
Two Republicans, U.S. Senator John Kennedy and state Attorney General Jeff Landry—both considered potential opponents for Edwards in next year’s election—have already gone after the governor for being too lenient on crime, with Kennedy calling Edwards’s package of reforms an “unqualified disaster.”
If just one of individuals whose sentence Edwards commuted or who have been released were to violate their parole or get sent back to prison, Edwards’s ability to use his clemency power could be over.
“People are looking for a Willie Horton,” Henderson said, referring to the man who was convicted of a rape and other crimes committed while on a Massachusetts weekend furlough program and may have cost the state’s governor at the time, Michael Dukakis, the 1988 presidential election.
The pause in commutations is also easier for advocates and offenders in Louisiana prisons to understand because of the widespread belief that it’s just that—a pause and not an end. “I don’t think he’s going to shut down the process,” Henderson said. “I trust that once things start shaking themselves off around the budget and the governor’s office gets a handle of where we are fiscally, then I think we’ll go back to things as normal.”
Many believe they will have to wait to see if Edwards wins a second term in 2019. In the scheme of things, Henderson said another few years is nothing compared to the decades many have been waiting. “Folks will understand,” he said.
They also understand that if he wins re-election—which polls last winter showed would be difficult but possible—Edwards would not have to worry about the potential pushback that granting mass clemencies would bring. “The prison population wants to see him become a second-term governor because of pardons and the assumption that he would do more criminal justice reform in his second term,” Hundley, of the Louisiana Parole Project, said. “There’s an understanding—don’t expect any more pardons before the election.”
But advocates are also thinking about how to keep the commutations coming if Edwards were to lose. Voice of the Experienced is advocating a bill that would relieve a governor of some responsibility by making it possible for a recommendation that sits on the governor’s desk for 90 days to be considered signed. That change would also relieve some of the stress on the prisoners, Henderson said. “It’s very disheartening for a person who gets a recommendation and then is sitting there five years, six years, seven years,” he added.
Myers, who said he feels lucky to have had his application considered in Edwards’s first group in 2016, said he will do his part to make him a second-term governor who can continue signing clemency applications.
“I talked to him and I said, ‘You know I do get to vote in the next election now,’” Myers said, remembering when he got to meet and thank Edwards last year. “I said, ‘You can probably count on my vote.’”
2018-07-05
url: https://theappeal.org/immigrants-and-activists-flood-san-diego-to-protest-operation-streamline/
Defense attorneys say they’ll have only minutes to meet with their clients before the immigrants are convicted en masse.
Starting Monday, immigrants arrested at the California border will be driven to a converted garage in the basement of the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Office Building in downtown San Diego, according to a plan devised by prosecutors and shared with defense attorneys. The immigrants will meet quickly with their attorneys before being taken across the plaza to the federal courthouse. Up to a dozen of them will appear together in the courtroom, most likely in chains, wearing headsets from which they will hear a translation of the proceedings. They will be charged individually with illegal entry, most likely plead guilty, and be sentenced, all within just a few minutes.
This fast-track prosecution process is being unrolled as part of the expansion to the Southern District of California of “Operation Streamline,” a George W. Bush-era program created to speed up prosecutions that is expanding as courts buckle under the growing caseload of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.
According to the prosecutors’ plan, the immigrants’ brief meeting with their lawyers will take place in “a room where other lawyers will be meeting with their clients at the same time and where there will be marshals and agents sitting in the back of the room who could potentially hear our conversation,” explained Jami Ferrara, head of the Criminal Justice Act Panel, which assigns lawyers to provide defense for poor people charged with federal crimes, and who was part of a commission assembled by the district’s chief judge to deal with the increase in prosecutions. “It is not a good system,” she said.
Operation Streamline has already been implemented in federal courthouses in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, where reporters have witnessed groups of immigrants pleading guilty and getting sentenced in less than a minute per defendant. Ferrara believes that by not allowing immigrants the chance to mount an adequate defense, and with prosectuors generally offering them time served if they plead guilty, the court is compelling thousands of immigrants to plead guilty to federal crimes. That could be a mistake, defense attorneys argue, since some would be better off fighting their charges. Eight out of the nine misdemeanor illegal entry cases represented by Federal Defenders of San Diego that have gone to trial since May have ended in dismissal or a “not guilty” verdict, according to the organization. And there are consequences for pleading guilty: Immigrants who do so could face felony charges if they are re-arrested for the same offense, which carries a potential sentence of years in federal prison.
Federal defenders and magistrate judges have long resisted efforts to expand Operation Streamline to the Southern District of California. But with the surge in prosecutions, the courts system, as well as the federal jail system, have been unable to keep up. Operation Streamline allows U.S. Marshals to avoid jailing defendants, instead taking them directly to federal court from the Border Patrol or ICE stations where they are held in the hours after an arrest. Assuming they plead guilty, they are then handed over to ICE custody, where they face civil immigration proceedings, including determinations regarding asylum claims and possible removal.
Right now, pleading guilty to illegal re-entry does not affect a defendant’s future immigration status. However, according to new draft regulations proposed by the Department of Justice and obtained by Vox, anyone convicted of entering the U.S. illegally would become ineligible for asylum—meaning that mass prosecutions for border crossing without authorization could potentially make countless asylum-seekers unable to ever gain legal status.
Protesters outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Office Building on July 2, 2018
Federal public defenders in San Diego have been fighting against the expansion of Operation Streamline since prosecutors began pushing for it in May. In a series of letters written to the chief judge of the district, both Ferrara and Ruben Cahn, the head of the Federal Defenders of San Diego, have brought up serious due process concerns regarding the fast-track prosecutions.
On June 22, Cahn wrote an email to Chief Judge Barry Moskowitz, pointing out how Operation Streamline is part of America’s long legacy of “separate and unequal” tribunals.
“It is worth reflecting on just what the proposed court would look like,” Cahn wrote. “Though charged only with misdemeanors, all defendants in this courtroom will be in custody. … These defendants will not be treated as individuals. Their cases will be heard en masse. For most, there will be no ‘initial appearance’ and no consideration of bond. These defendants will face a choice between pleading guilty in hopes of immediate release or waiting two, three, or four weeks for a trial to challenge the government’s case against them. The faces of defendants will all be brown. All will be aliens, a class of people historically subject to discrimination.”
Cahn compares this to how the court regularly adjudicates federal misdemeanors in the Southern District: “Defendants [in those cases] will walk into the courtroom through the same door as the public, as free men and women. They will not be chained. They will be treated as individuals, their cases heard separately. No coercive influence will urge them to resolve their cases and plead guilty to obtain their freedom. The faces of defendants in this special courtroom will be of every color. They will not be marked as aliens.”
Moskowitz did not respond to a request for comment from The Appeal. In the order that he filed in May to form the committee that led to the expansion of Operation Streamline, he wrote that the increase in prosecutions “has and will cause strains, issues and problems for the court and its personnel.”
In response to The Appeal’s request for more details about the rollout of Operation Streamline, the Department of Justice wrote: “Beginning on July 9, the district court will be placing an additional magistrate judge on rotation to handle misdemeanor immigration cases. We look forward to our continued work with this committee to effectively implement this program in a manner that protects the constitutional rights of these defendants.”
Ferrara contests the notion that the plan for Operation Streamline was the result of input from all members of the committee. “We are not creating this court. We are responding to their demands. The court is responding to their demands,” Ferrara told The Appeal. “This is not collaborative. It’s reactive.”
A banner hung by activists across from the federal courthouse and jail
This week, hundreds of people marched through downtown San Diego to the federal courthouse in opposition to Operation Streamline and the practice of separating families at the border, as part of a series of civil disobedience actions organized by the Latinx-led organization Mijente.
“We already live in a highly militarized area, we don’t need more border patrol or more prosecutions” said San Diego resident Itzel Guillen, 24, a DACA recipient who works with the community organization Alliance San Diego. Guillen spoke at a rally in San Diego’s Chicano Park shortly before the march to the federal courthouse began. “Our border communities are among the safest in the nation. It doesn’t make sense to invest in that instead of infrastructure and education.”
As part of the civil disobedience actions, protesters disrupted arraignments of immigrants in federal court before they were removed by U.S. Marshals. As the estimated 600-person march reached the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego, activists rappelling down the side of a nearby hotel unfurled a banner that read “Free Our Families Now! #stopstreamline.” Clergy members formed a human barricade in front of the federal office building, where protesters demanded the end of Operation Streamline as well as the abolition of ICE.
Elizabeth Estrada, a member of Mijente, came to San Diego from the Bronx for the march. “I’m an immigrant from Mexico and I didn’t want to just stay home. I wanted to come out in direct opposition to deportation and streamline policies to deport people without any type of representation or a trial,” Estrada told The Appeal. “We do not need to expand Operation Streamline. We need to end it.”
by:
2018-07-07
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHbI1pICKIo
Hancock County NAACP President Gregory Barabino hopes his Sundays Back in the Park program will bring people back to Martin Luther King Jr. Park on Washington Avenue in Bay St. Louis. A recent shooting has kept people away from the once-popular spot.
2018-07-10
When body-camera footage of an aggressive or abusive police officer goes viral, the response from law enforcement groups is often to caution that we shouldn’t judge the entire system based on actions of a few bad apples. That’s fair enough. But what does it say about the system when the cops gets away with their bad behavior? What if, despite video footage clearly showing that the cops are in the wrong, sheriffs and police chiefs cover for them, anyway? What if local prosecutors do, too? What if even mayors and city attorneys get into the act?
Adam Finley had such an interaction with a bad cop. He was roughed up, sworn at and handcuffed. When he tried to file a complaint, he was hit with criminal charges. The local police chief turned Finley’s wife against him, which (according to both Finley and her) eventually ended their marriage. The fact that video of the incident should have vindicated him didn’t seem to matter.
Finley’s trouble — first reported by the Jonesboro Sun and Stan Morris at NEA Report — began in December 2016 in Walnut Ridge, Ark. It’s a small town of about 5,000 in the northeast part of the state — its charmingly humble claim to fame is that the Beatles once changed planes there. Officer Matthew Mercado of the Walnut Ridge Police Department pulled Finley over, near the railroad yard where Finley works. But Finley hadn’t committed any traffic infraction. Instead, Mercado apparently suspected that Finley didn’t really work for the railroad and therefore was trespassing, or perhaps engaged in some sort of criminal mischief.
The encounter quickly escalated. But as you can see in the video below, the escalation was entirely due to Mercado’s behavior, not Finley’s.
An error occurred.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.
Mercado didn’t turn on the audio for his camera until about 30 seconds into the stop. During that time, the video shows Finley handing Mercado both his license and his employee ID from the railroad company. Mercado then asks Finley to get out of his truck. It’s here that Mercado then turns on his mic. He asks Finley, “What’s with the attitude?” Finley, who appears to have done nothing to indicate an “attitude,” replies, “Nothing.”
Mercado persists. “No, you have an attitude. What’s your problem?” Finley responds, “I don’t have no problem, I’m good.” Mercado again pushes. “I can pull you over if I want.” Finley says, “That’s fine.”
Later Mercado again expresses doubt about Finley’s employment — again, despite having Finley’s employee ID in his own hands. “It doesn’t look like you were working,” he says. As he says this, Finley takes a small step away from the truck. Mercado snaps, “If you get up on me again, we’re going to have problems.” Finley, clearly taken aback at the escalation, flashes a nervous smile. Mercado again ratchets up the tension. “I’m glad you think all of this is a joke, sir.” Finley shakes his head and again tells Mercado that he works for the railroad. Mercado again indicates that he doesn’t believe him.
Mercado then orders Finley to put his hands behind his back, and says he’s going to arrest him for “obstructing my operation.” Finley, clearly nervous, protests and tries to prove to Mercado that he works for the railroad by showing him some equipment in the back of his truck. At this point the stop turns violent. Mercado grabs Finley and throws him against the truck. Finley puts his hands behind his back. Mercado cuffs him and says, “You’re about ignorant.” He then again shoves Finley into the truck, this time with enough force to dislodge his own body camera, which falls to the ground.
Over the course of the next several minutes, Mercado repeatedly uses profanity, lectures to Finley as if he were a child and claims that Finley is “hostile and aggressive.” Throughout all of this, Finley is remarkably calm, insisting over and over that he works for the railroad, and that he doesn’t understand why he was pulled over.
Mercado ultimately released Finley without arresting him, likely after finally realizing that Finley really did work for the railroad and had done nothing wrong. But before he does, he issued multiple threats and allegations. At one point he tells Finley, “The next time I tell you something, you’re going to ride lightning.” He’s referring here to a stun gun. Later he warns, “Don’t later on try to complain that I roughed you up or anything like that, because you know I should take your ass to jail.” He also falsely accuses Finley of “assaulting a peace officer.” For good measure, just before walking away, Mercado asks, “Did we learn anything today, Adam?” Finley responds, “Yeah. I learned a lot.” This is undoubtedly true.
But the lessons would keep coming. Finley and his wife later went to the Walnut Ridge Police Department to file a complaint. Instead of taking the complaint, Police Chief Chris Kirksey and Sgt. Matt Cook interrogated and scolded Finley. Cook then wrote Finley two citations for “refusal to submit” and “obstructing governmental operations.” Note that Mercado didn’t feel compelled to cite Finley. It was only after Finley attempted to file a complaint about Mercado’s behavior that Mercado’s supervisors hit him with two misdemeanors. (Note: The Walnut Ridge Police Department declined to comment, citing Finley’s lawsuit. A WRPD officer also relayed my request for comment to Kirksey, who also declined.)
At one point during the interaction, Finley left the room, leaving Kirksey alone with Finley’s wife, Heather. At one point after Adam Finley left, Kirksey said, “From what I saw, he’s lucky he isn’t going to jail.” Heather responded, “Who? Adam? For what?”
“Obstruction of justice.”
“What did he do?”
“He interfered with a law enforcement officer’s investigation … ”
“How did he do that?”
“… Well, when you watch the video, you’ll find out.”
Again, the video shows nothing of the kind. But authority figures can be incredibly persuasive. And there are few positions that project more authority than a chief of police. Perhaps that’s how Kirksey managed to turn Finley’s own wife against him. She said to Kirksey, “Well, there’s probably more to it than what he … I don’t know what he did, he gets a little … ”
“Does he get irate?”
“Mm-hm.”
At that point Finley returned, and the two stopped talking. The full exchange begins at about the 8:00 mark in the video below.
An error occurred.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.
Both Adam and Heather Finley would later tell Morris that this exchange eventually ruined their marriage. They’re now divorced. “I’m sure they had their problems, like any marriage. But I think that was definitely the main thing that did it,” says Adam Finley’s attorney, Mark Rees.
Finley’s case then went to the office of Third Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Henry Boyce, who assigned it to deputy prosecutor Ryan Cooper. Again, despite the video, Cooper moved forward with the charges against Finley. He took the case all the way to trial. In April 2017, an Arkansas judge acquitted Finley on both counts. Finley filed a civil rights lawsuit in April 2018. The city answered in May with a brief arguing that Finley hadn’t made an actionable claim, had missed the statute of limitations and had failed to sufficiently serve the officials he is suing.
When the lawsuit went public, local media outlets filed open-records requests for video of the traffic stop and any records related to it. Morris, a former newspaper reporter who runs what is essentially a one-man operation (NEA stands for Northeast Arkansas), had been particularly dogged in pursuing the story, filing multiple open-records requests, poring through the results on his Web-based program, then asking Walnut Ridge officials to answer for what he had found.
At one point, Morris said, Kirksey called him in to his office and pleaded with him not to publish anything about the incident. “He had Mercado in there with him,” Morris said in a telephone interview. “Mercado said he made a mistake by using the f-word and apologized. But they also told me that the video would show that Finley was wrong” — just as Kirksey had done with Finley’s wife.
When Morris finally saw the video, he felt deceived. “It definitely helped me understand what that meeting was really about,” he said. “I think they knew that this would be a big problem for them, and they tried to mislead me.”
An error occurred.
Unable to execute JavaScript.
After he sent his open-records request, city attorney Nancy Hall texted Morris to fill him in on some additional information about Finley — that he had been the subject of a protective order from his first wife. “I hadn’t asked for anything about that,” Morris said. “I thought it was completely irrelevant. They were trying to make him look violent.” He later learned that Hall was the personal attorney for Finley’s first wife during the divorce. “That seemed like a conflict of interest. I asked Finley about the order. I still didn’t think it was relevant. But he made a persuasive case that it was all a misunderstanding.”
Morris later obtained a copy of Mercado’s police report on the original traffic stop and noted a number of contradictions between the two. Among them:
• Mercado claimed that Finley wouldn’t hand over his driver’s license when he asked for it, and instead “he just waved it front of me.” The video shows Finley promptly handing over his license.
• Mercado claimed Finley at one point said “this is the stupidest s— ever.” That isn’t depicted anywhere in the audio. It’s possible that Finley said this at the outset of the traffic stop, before Mercado turns on his mic, but that seems inconsistent with Finley’s language and demeanor during the entire portion of the video for which there’s audio.
• Mercado claimed that Finley “made an aggressive step” toward him. The video doesn’t show anything of the kind.
• Mercado claimed that once he restrained Finley, he continued to look for evidence that Finley was an employee of the railroad company. But he had that evidence — Finley’s ID card — from the very first moments of the encounter.
• Mercado claimed that Finley drove his shoulder into him, which dislodged his body camera. The video seems to show that Mercado was the aggressor, and that his camera came loose when he threw Finley into the side of the truck.
Despite all of this, city officials continued to defend the stop and the criminal charges, both publicly and privately. Their main claim was that Finley had been aggressive and combative before Mercado activated his microphone, and that it was this behavior that escalated the situation. There are several reasons to be skeptical of that claim. First, only about 30 seconds transpire before Mercado activates his mic. Second, the silent footage of that 30 seconds doesn’t suggest that Finley was angry or uncooperative. Third, it seems odd that Finley would be aggressive and rude for the first half minute of the stop, then immediately become cooperative the moment Mercado turned on his mic. It also isn’t clear that he would have known when the mic was on or off. Finally, there should have been dashboard-camera footage of the entire incident, including that first 30 seconds. There wasn’t. Walnut Ridge Mayor Charles Snapp initially claimed there was no dashboard camera in Mercado’s car. When photos indicated that it was outfitted with a camera, the city said they could not access footage because of dash-camera software changes.
Snapp did issue a verbal warning to Mercado, but only for using the “F-bomb” — as he put it — during the stop. The rest of Mercado’s actions apparently didn’t merit discipline. In April, Boyce, the head prosecutor, put out a press release defending the decision to charge Finley. Boyce pointed out that under Arkansas law, it’s illegal to resist an arrest, even if there was no legal justification for the arrest itself. That may be true, but it’s also true that a prosecutor has the discretion to decline to bring charges if doing so wouldn’t be in the interest of justice. Resisting an illegal arrest would seem to be the sort of scenario for which it would be appropriate to use that sort of discretion. An even more appropriate scenario would be one in which the arrestee wasn’t even resisting, as the video strongly suggests.
Nevertheless, Boyce declared in his press statement that “I have … reviewed the video of the incident that led to the citations being issued and feel that the evidence justified the recommendation Mr. Cooper made to the Chief of Police.” Hall, the city attorney, also said the city’s legal team would “make quick work” of the case and said, “It’s sad that this happened because we have such good, hard-working personnel within our department.”
Morris kept digging and discovered that roughly two years before the incident with Finley, Mercado had been arrested for battery, though he was acquitted. Moreover, before he was hired by the Walnut Grove Police Department, he had left two different police agencies in Colorado in a span of less than three months. He had been on the job in Walnut Grove for 11 days before he pulled Finley over.
Mercado resigned a couple of months after the incident with Finley, and he has since moved back to Colorado. Despite the timing, it isn’t clear if his resignation was forced or voluntary. His message seems to indicate he was looking for more pay, and he asked that he be reconsidered for law enforcement if Walnut Ridge followed up on a proposal to merge with a nearby town. Kirksey responded with an email praising Mercado’s service to the department.
When video of the stop was finally made public, reaction was quite a bit different than that of city officials. Commenters to Morris’s reports expressed outrage on behalf of Finley. The managing editor of the Jonesboro Sun sharply criticized city leaders in an opinion piece, and the police department said it was temporarily shutting down its Facebook page.
Perhaps seeing the public pressure building, the city placed Kirksey and Cook on administrative leave, albeit 16 months after their alleged infractions. Kirksey resigned last month, although here again, there was no public indication that his resignation was related to his handling of the Finley complaint. Cook is back on the job. Boyce and Cooper also remain on the job.
There’s an argument to be made here that the two officers who treated Finley most poorly have since resigned and therefore have been held accountable. But for accountability to work, for it to serve as a deterrent to bad behavior, there should be clear, articulated connection between the behavior and the punishment. Here, the reason for both resignations remains ambiguous.
It’s tempting to blow all this off as a single, insignificant incident in a small town. It isn’t Los Angeles’s Rampart, after all. Or Chicago’s systemized torture. But it also isn’t unique. There’s a steady stream of stories like this one. I was alerted to this particular story by a former police officer who now advocates criminal-justice reform. (He asked me not to use his name, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment.) I asked him: In his experience, how common is this sort of thing? His response:
This is very common in policing. Looking back on my career, I realize just how often I acted similarly and didn’t even realize it. It was subconscious. I was trained and subtly incentivized to do so. You intentionally create conflict and manufacture noncompliance in order to build your stop into an arrest situation. Because that’s what generations of law enforcers who have been steeped in a fear-based, comply or else, us-vs.-them mind-set do. They arrest people. Arrests are a primary measure of productivity and gives the appearance your department has solved a problem.
Most aggressive cops have honed this to an art. They are savvy, know exactly how to weaponize numerous petty laws, ordinances, use-of-force policy and procedure against citizens. This cop was off his game and clumsily went through the motions like a desperate door-to-door perfume salesman. Except when cops manufacture a “sale” like this, the “customer” ends up arrested, criminalized, emotionally and financially devastated, not to mention possibly physically beaten or worse. And the justice system will deem it legal, even when it isn’t.
As far as the police leadership and prosecutors, they knew exactly what they were doing. If someone makes a complaint, you find something, anything to charge them with.
Finley wasn’t shot, or choked to death, or found hanging in a jail cell. He didn’t suffer any permanent or lasting physical injury. Mercado didn’t even use racist or bigoted language. But Finley did everything he was supposed to. From the footage we can see and hear, he was polite, provided ID when it was asked of him and stepped out of the truck when ordered. Despite cooperating, he was treated poorly, detained and roughed up. When he then tried to file a complaint, he was harassed, and the chief of police attempted to turn his own wife against him — by citing video she hadn’t seen and that ultimately vindicated her husband. Yet even after viewing that video, city officials proceeded to prosecute. And even after the video was released, city officials maligned Finley in the press and insisted that the residents of Walnut Ridge believe the assertions of authority figures over the video evidence that contradicted them.
The “lesson” Finley learned here is pretty clear. Power usually wins. You can be as cooperative as possible, but if a police officer wants to dish out some abuse, he can. And he’ll probably get away with it. Try to hold him accountable if you’d like, but just know that doing so may come with a heavy price.
Once other public officials cover up for “bad apple” cops, the story is no longer about the bad apples. It’s about systemic failure. It’s about public servants willing to tolerate abuse because they’re more loyal to one another than to the public they serve. It’s difficult to say how someone in a position of authority — someone with the public trust — could view footage of the encounter between Mercado and Finley and proclaim they believe that the criminal charges against Finley were merited. Perhaps they were just lying. Or perhaps they were so blinded by deference to law enforcement, a fear of accountability or a knee-jerk defense of authority that they actually believe what they’re saying. I’m not sure which of those scenarios ought to worry us more.
by:
2018-07-11
url: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/jobs/jr-0001034/advocacy-director
The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to criticism, whose laws and policies are open to debate and correction, and whose political institutions are open to the participation of all people. We seek to strengthen justice and the rule of law; broaden respect for human rights, including the rights of minorities; encourage pluralism and a robust diversity of opinion; deepen democratic practice and participation; expand economic equity; support effective governance; and invest in individuals, public and private organizations, and social movements that advance these goals.
We are a global network of foundations committed to local knowledge and national expertise. Our network includes national foundations, regional foundations, and other geographic programs operating in more than one hundred countries. In addition to making grants to organizations and individuals, the Open Society Foundations engage in policy advocacy, legal advocacy and litigation, program-related investing, and public communications, as well as providing direct assistance to governments.
The Open Society Foundations are the global philanthropies of George Soros, who, as chairman, plays an active role in the work of the foundations.
OSF’s DC Advocacy Program and its lobbying affiliate, the Open Society Policy Center, are located in Washington D.C. They conduct and support advocacy on a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues. This position reports to the Deputy Director, who directs domestic policy advocacy.
Job Description:
• Develops and evaluates complex policy advocacy strategies and leads sophisticated advocacy campaigns
• Creates original policy recommendations and advances them using established contacts with key decision-makers within the U.S. government and influential organizations
• Authors, co-authors, and edits policy reports, memos, issue briefs and other documents on complex issues related to subject of expertise
• Regularly represents OSF as lead expert at meetings in Washington, D.C., and globally
• Maintains a broad network of relationships with high-level officials in the U.S. government and other key players within the policy community
• Leads and manages major advocacy coalitions and works closely with leaders of other organizations and OSF grantees
• Crafts persuasive advocacy messages and authors high-quality written materials for a range of audiences
• Develops advocacy and grantmaking budgets and manages consultants in area of expertise
• Solicits, vets and recommends consultancies and grants and drafts write-ups and eligibility assessments
• Reads and analyzes complex statutes and drafts legislative language for bills and amendments
• Contributes original content for op-eds, blogs, and websites, represents OSF in the media, provides direction to communications staff on media strategies, and may develop relationships with key reporters
• Interprets the U.S. political environment and serves as a policy expert and resource for other OSF programs and makes significant contributions to multi-program efforts in area of expertise
• Co-supervises a Policy Associate and may supervise a Research Assistant or Law Clerk
Requirements:
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience/education.
• At least 10 years of experience working for non-profits or government in a senior role
• Demonstrated experience and effectiveness with most of the job duties
• Policy expertise in at least two of these areas: civil rights; criminal justice; voting and elections; health care; economic justice (budget/tax/consumer finance/wages); civil liberties; media; government ethics; and Puerto Rico debt and recovery.
Application instructions: Please include a cover letter and resume (both required), and upload as one document when submitting an application.
We are strengthened by the diversity of our colleagues across the Open Society Foundations. We welcome applications from people of all cultures, backgrounds, and experiences, and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations so that colleagues with disabilities are able to fulfill the essential functions of the job.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/opinion/racism-progress-income-equality.html
Chester Higgins/Skoto Gallery, New York
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to write a comforting column. The thesis was going to be that even though Donald Trump is doing his best to inflame racial division, we are still making gradual progress against racism and racial disparities.
I was going to cite evidence showing a steady decline in racist attitudes. I was going to point to a steady rise in intermarriage rates. In 1967, 3 percent of American newlyweds married outside their race or ethnicity. As of 2015, 17 percent do, including 24 percent of African-American men.
I was going to point out that in 2017, 87 percent of blacks 25 and older had completed high school.
I was even going to note some positive economic statistics, too. The black unemployment rate was at a record low (and is now still close). After you control for parental income, black women now out-earn their white counterparts. In 1960, only 38 percent of black men — measuring by family income — were members of the middle class or above. Today, 57 percent are. In 1960, over 40 percent of black men lived in poverty. Now only 18 percent do.
Unfortunately, this is not that comforting column. The deeper I dug into the evidence, the more I came to doubt the idea that we are still making progress on race. For every positive statistic indicating racial reconciliation, there was one indicating stagnation or even decay.
Let’s take that statistic about the decline in poverty among black men. It comes from an excellent report by Bradford Wilcox and others at the American Enterprise Institute. As their report clearly shows, the vast bulk of that decline happened between 1960 and 1975. If you look at poverty data since 1980, there’s been little progress, either in black men moving out of poverty or into the middle class.
The recent famous study co-produced by Raj Chetty points to an elemental truth: There is still a strong, steady societal wind pushing against African-American men. Those born into poverty are much less likely to be able to climb out than their counterparts in other races. Those born into affluence are much more likely to fall down the income scale over the course of their lives.
When it comes to segregation, the story is even worse. One of the things we’ve learned over the past decades is that place really matters — the nature of your neighborhood and surroundings.
American neighborhoods are desegregating slightly, but the situation is worse for children. Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be residentially segregated than minority adults.
Schools are resegregating, too. The percentage of black students who are attending schools that are 90 to 100 percent minority went down in the South in the 1970s and 1980s, but now is shooting up. In the Northeast, the percentage of black students in these schools has been climbing for decades.
Even the workplace is showing signs of regression. Big companies are still reasonably integrated, but newer, smaller businesses are more segregated, often largely white, black or Hispanic.
As a nation we seem to have lost all enthusiasm for racial integration. A culture of individualism has led people to focus more on individual outcomes and less on the components of each community. We have settled into a reality that is separate and unequal, and we seem not too alarmed about that.
I’d say the correct response to all this is an attitude I encounter a lot among people who are working in these communities, which you might call left on structural racism and right on cultural accountability.
That is to say, the left-wingers have it correct when they point to the systems of oppression that pervade society: the legacy of residential segregation; the racist attitudes in the workplace that demonstrably make it much harder for African-American men to get jobs; the prejudices — in the schools, in the streets and in the judicial system — that make it much more likely that African-American males will be punished, incarcerated and marginalized.
But conservatives are right to point to the importance of bourgeois norms. Three institutions do an impressive job of reducing racial disparity: the military, marriage and church. As the A.E.I. study shows, black men who served in the military are more likely to be in the middle class than those who did not. Black men who attended religious services are 76 percent more likely to attain at least middle-class status than those who did not. As Chetty’s research shows, the general presence of fathers — not just one’s own — in the community is a powerful determinant of whether young men will be able to rise and thrive.
We’ve fallen into a bogus logjam in which progressives emphasize systems of oppression and conservatives emphasize cultural norms. Both critiques are correct. If we’re going to do something about this appalling retrogression on race, we probably need to be radical on both ends.
by:
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/opinion/china-surveillance.html
A video showing facial recognition software in use at the headquarters of the artificial intelligence company Megvii in Beijing.
To the Editor:
Re “With Cameras and A.I., China Closes Its Grip” (front page, July 9):
In the not so distant future, the rest of the world will inevitably succumb to the ever so tempting virtues of these budding surveillance technologies in the name of the public good.
What is deemed today as China’s dystopian dreams will be tomorrow’s unfortunate global reality.
JEREMIAH D. BRAUNLIN
RIDGEWOOD, N.J.
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/opinion/new-york-crime-public-housing.html
Karla Alonso, an engagement coordinator for the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, second left, and her team of residents handing out fliers for a fitness class at the St. Nicholas Houses complex in Harlem.
New York City is the safest big city in the nation. Can it get even safer?
The city is betting it can, with a novel strategy that goes far beyond traditional crime-fighting.
The strategy, embodied in the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, is being employed in 15 of the most dangerous public housing complexes in the city. The idea is to lower crime by making these neighborhoods better — places where residents live in well-maintained buildings, have necessary services, are engaged in civic life and can collaborate to solve problems.
Working elevators, summer jobs for teenagers, community centers open till midnight, residents who know what to do when the trash piles up — no one would doubt that these are good things. But it seems a stretch to call them crime prevention measures. Will people really commit fewer robberies and shootings if the trash gets picked up?
The city is working with researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to test exactly this. So far, crime has dropped more in the 15 complexes involved in the plan than in other public housing (with one exception: Shootings are way down in both, but more so in sites not in the program).
Why? It might be this: Crime is in part a function of trust. “Trust is the heartbeat of civic life,” said Elizabeth Glazer, head of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. “It’s not just about policing. It’s not just that you have to have trust to report crime. You have to have some relationship to government. These neighborhoods feel completely estranged.”
Perhaps more important, a necessity for improvement is what social scientists call “collective efficacy” — achieved when neighbors feel that they can trust and rely on one another and work together to get things done. Collective efficacy is so important that the lack of it — common in disadvantaged neighborhoods — is most of the reason poor communities have more crime. When they build collective efficacy, even without other changes, crime drops.
So it’s not the trash pickup that lowers crime. It’s having an engaged community that can get it done.
In June 2014, in East New York, Brooklyn, a man entered an elevator in the Boulevard Houses, a public housing complex where outdoor lighting was poor, and stabbed a 6-year-old boy to death and seriously wounded a 7-year-old girl. (She survived to testify against the murderer, who was sentenced to 50 years to life.)
Within a few days, the city had installed temporary safety lights at the complex. The crime also awakened government officials to the consequences of the staggering neglect of New York’s 2,413 public housing buildings. The federal government has cut $3 billion from its support of New York’s public housing since 2001. The city too has undermined public housing, with a lack of accountability and alleged fraud. For example, prosecutors have accused the housing authority of failing to comply with lead-paint regulations, and then lying about it.
The result has been failing boilers, broken elevators, mold, leaky roofs and mountains of trash. Housing officials recently released a report that put the cost of covering necessary capital improvements at $31.8 billion. From all sources, the city said, it has commitments for just one-third of that. Last month New York City signed a consent decree authorizing federal oversight and committing the city to spend an additional $1 billion over the next four years.
Tyrone Ball, president of the residents’ association at the St. Nicholas Houses.
The malignant neglect has had another consequence: apathy. Tyrone Ball, a freelance security operator who is president of the residents’ association of the St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem, said that when his neighborhood was thriving, people were involved. But with disinvestment, he said, “people became apathetic — the same old ladies doing the same thing.”
A month after the stabbing, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice introduced the action plan. City officials met with residents to see what mattered to them, and then looked at research on crime to identify programs that had been successful.
Obviously, there’s no simple relationship here — even as public housing deteriorated, crime continued to plummet, for many other reasons. But city officials believe that their plan might be effective against crime that hasn’t responded to other strategies.
Part of the action plan is improving buildings. Part is providing new social services. Those are normal tasks of government. But the plan is also trying to encourage more resident participation and stronger social bonds. Can a city government do this? We don’t know.
Working with the Center for Court Innovation, the plan is hiring an “engagement coordinator” for each complex. At St. Nicholas, the complex that’s furthest along, the coordinator is Karla Alonso. She started by walking around the buildings, talking to residents in their homes, on the sidewalk and at the playground. “If you had a magic wand, what would you change in your development?” she asks people.
“Sometimes it is hard to recruit people,” she said. “Some people have lost the faith — nothing can ever be done. But at the same time, it becomes easier after seeing certain things being put into action.”
Ms. Alonso has recruited a committee of 15 residents of various ages, including some residents who hadn’t been active before. The committee does safety audits — talking to people and looking at the buildings to see what’s unsafe. It also has a small fund to use for projects it chooses. She has trained members in community organizing and helps them communicate with neighborhood groups and city agencies. “I want them to no longer be afraid to pick up the phone and call an agency and say, “Please assist us in solving this problem,’” she said.
One example is broken elevators. She helps the committee members connect to the right person in the fire department, trains them to ask for what they need and to follow up to make sure it happens. Pretty basic — but it wasn’t happening. “There could be 25 to 30 people in the lobby waiting for the elevator that’s not coming,” Ms. Alonso said. “Each one assumes the person next to them has called.” And no one knew the phone number, or whom to contact.
To get all this done, the action plan relies on CompStat — an accountability method invented by the police department that has become a standard part of police departments in medium-size and big cities all over the country.
Before CompStat, precinct commanders submitted their crime data every few months. With CompStat, data is collected and analyzed every week. Precinct captains regularly stand at the podium of a huge room in Police Headquarters to be grilled about problems like why cellphone robbery is rising. The captain is required to have a plan for knocking those numbers down — one from which he or she can present results at the next CompStat session.
CompStat is a way to know what’s going on, deploy resources intelligently, and hold people accountable for results. It’s good for more than crime, and some cities have been using it to track, for example, pothole repair or homelessness. Baltimore was early to the idea, inventing a program called CitiStat to hold city officials to account on all kinds of issues. (As with many other good ideas, though, this one has fallen victim to politics in Baltimore.)
On a Wednesday morning in late June, about 200 people gathered around the U-shaped table in the CompStat room at 1 Police Plaza in New York. They were there to hear from police and housing officials and residents from St. Nicholas Houses and two other Harlem complexes, the Polo Grounds Towers and Wagner Houses.
Officials from 10 city agencies relevant to public housing, including the fire department and homeless services, were in the room.
Deputy Chief Ruel Stephenson questioned the police officials about their crime reports. Capt. Michael Shugrue detailed each shooting, rape, robbery and incident of domestic violence. “We are, by and large, the safest we’ve ever been,” he said of St. Nicholas. That was true elsewhere as well — the Polo Grounds hadn’t had a shooting for 17 months.
Then, housing authority property managers, residents and police officers moved onto other data. How many people attended the free fitness classes? How many lights were installed? How many work orders to fix doors were issued How many youths enrolled in the summer jobs program?
Amy Sanaman, the senior strategy adviser at the Criminal Justice office, called out St. Nicholas on summer jobs. “You had 238 people apply, but 80 not yet enrolled,” she said. “There’s still a week left before summer starts. Please work with your networks to help young people get that paperwork in.”
Mr. Ball, the residents’ association president, said that at St. Nicholas, the plan’s record was mixed. “It does bring in a bunch of people, but you still have to go through bureaucracy and red tape,” he said. One reason for broken doors, he said, was that firefighters had broken them open on calls and no one had fixed them. “Two meetings ago, the issue of doors was addressed,” he said. “People at the top said, ‘We’ll stop doing that, we’ll talk to our people.’ But there’s been no change.”
Safety has improved, he said. “Lighting has worked out well,” he said. “The summer youth jobs program — that’s very important.”
And he said that more people have been getting involved, because they’re seeing changes — perhaps the most difficult of the plan’s goals. “We’re getting people to start to care about the community a little bit more,” he said. “Some of those efforts were there,” he added, but the Mayor’s Action Plan “started to stoke the fire with some folks.”
“You can throw money at any problem, but nothing’s going to be resolved because people don’t care,” he went on. “So keep trying to stoke it. Make sure people know that you can actually make a change where you live.”
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
To receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
by:
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/alan-dershowitz-shunning-mccarthyism.html
Alan Dershowitz is a longtime regular at the Chilmark General Store on Martha’s Vineyard.
To the Editor:
I have never compared myself to the actual victims of McCarthyism who lost their jobs, went to prison or committed suicide (letters, July 6). I compared the way some people were shunning me for defending the civil liberties of all Americans, including our president, to the way lawyers for accused Communists were shunned by many.
These civil liberties lawyers were accused of complicity with Communism in much the same way I’m being accused of complicity with President Trump’s policies, despite the fact that I have publicly criticized these policies.
It is important to understand my point before criticizing it.
ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
CHILMARK, MASS.
The writer is professor emeritus of law at Harvard.
by:
2018-07-07
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/opinion/editorials/why-nato-matters.html
Harry Campbell
As Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary general, somewhat cheekily observed, the trans-Atlantic alliance was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” Seven decades later, those goals have largely been met (yes, the Germans have risen, but in the right ways), and many people — including, evidently, the president of the United States — wonder whether the alliance still has a purpose.
It does. It remains the most successful military alliance in history, the anchor of an American-led and American-financed peace that fostered Western prosperity and prevented new world wars. No one has proposed anything credible to improve upon it. But as the allies gather in Brussels this week for their annual meeting, many are wondering whether the American president is intent on wrecking it.
Born after World War II, NATO linked America and Europe not just in a mutual defense pledge but in advancing democratic governance, the rule of law, civil and human rights, and an increasingly open international economy.
The alliance was the core of an American-led liberal world order that extended to Asia and relied on a web of international institutions, including the United Nations and the World Bank.
American military protection gave the allies space to develop their economies and pluralistic societies. Despite compromises and occasional failures, the experiment was broadly successful.
During its existence, NATO has often been strained as the security and political environment evolved. After the Cold War, it found a new purpose, defending Muslims in the Balkans, and after 9/11, helping the United States fight terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa and elsewhere.
Former Communist countries swelled the alliance from 12 members to 29, with others knocking on the door even now, concerned about an aggrieved and aggressive Russia.
Across seven decades NATO has invoked its Article 5 mutual defense commitment only once: to rally to the defense of the United States after the attacks of 9/11. Even today, the armed forces of 39 countries are serving, and sometimes dying, with American troops in Afghanistan.
More than 70 (NATO and non-NATO) countries are part of the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State; two dozen countries have joined a global counterterrorism initiative.
In short, NATO remains central to major American national security initiatives in a world shaken by the rise of an increasingly assertive China, the expansion of competing power centers from India to Saudi Arabia, the surge of migration from the Middle East and Africa and the dislocations caused by globalization.
Yet NATO is being weakened from within — by members’ failure to spend enough on defense; by the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, especially in Turkey, Hungary and Poland; and perhaps most of all, by President Trump, who seems to prefer President Vladimir Putin of Russia to America’s European allies.
NATO has always depended on leadership from the United States, the world’s biggest economy and most lethal military power. Mr. Trump not only doesn’t want to lead the West, he has denigrated the alliance, bullied its leaders and accused NATO and the European Union of exploiting American largess.
At a rally in Montana last week, he complained that while the United States is protecting Europe, “they kill us on trade.”
“We’re the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing,” the president said. “I’ll see NATO and I’ll tell NATO, ‘You’ve got to start paying your bills.’”
While his predecessors often pressed the allies to raise their military budgets, Mr. Trump has a singular view of NATO as a transactional relationship in which members pay for protection.
Many allies can do more to reach the target level of spending 2 percent of their annual G.D.P. on defense by 2024. Faced with the Russian threat and Mr. Trump’s pressure, they are making real progress toward this goal, for which the president can take some credit.
But NATO is not a golf club, and money, the only thing Mr. Trump prizes, is just one, narrow measure of the costs and benefits of belonging. This president has shown no understanding of the power of partnership, and the reciprocal nature of its bonds, in an alliance that stands for something far bigger than paying your dues on time.
Mr. Trump is burning up all the credit the United States has accrued with our allies across decades by attacking the basis of this alliance, if not the very idea of any alliance — thus, deliberately or not, doing the bidding of Mr. Putin in his quest to divide the West.
“NATO can withstand four years under Trump,” one former NATO ambassador said in an interview. “I don’t think we’ll withstand eight.”
Given the legacy of Republican support for national security and democratic allies, one might expect that Republican congressional leaders would speak up. But, cowering before Mr. Trump, they have been virtually silent as he has undermined America’s alliances.
The NATO meeting is expected to approve significant new steps to contain Russia, which most of the allies, and most of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers, recognize as a threat, even if the president does not. These measures include establishing two new military commands, expanding cyberwarfare and counterterrorism efforts and approving a new plan to speed the reinforcement of troops and equipment to Poland and the Baltic States to deter Russian aggression.
Sooner rather than later, NATO is also going to have to decide what to do with Turkey and the other countries that are eroding the fabric of the alliance by repudiating democratic principles.
At this week’s gathering, the result that matters most is a firm and convincing commitment to a strong NATO, ready to contribute to stability today, and to adapt to future challenges. With no coherent vision of his own to make Americans, and democracy generally, more secure in a world without NATO, Mr. Trump would do well to make that commitment, and honor the friends we have.
by:
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/trump-putin-china-north-korea.html
President Trump boarding Air Force One on Tuesday.
When future generations look back to the first weeks in June 2018, the summit meeting in Singapore between President Trump and North Korea’s president, Kim Jong-un, may well be remembered not so much for its impact on the threat of nuclear war in Korea, but for the dissolution of the West as a unified negotiating team driven by Western values. Along with that came America’s emergence as a go-it-alone superpower, with those values set aside in deference to Russia and China.
Mr. Trump has now secured a second summit meeting, this time with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Scheduled for July 16, after a NATO conference, it is bound to irritate Mr. Trump’s Western allies and even some of his own advisers. Its site, Helsinki, Finland, is about 240 miles from Mr. Putin’s native St. Petersburg. The agenda is unclear, but the course of the Singapore meeting may offer some idea of its path.
Neither China nor Russia was party to the Singapore talks, but both were there in spirit. Mr. Trump seems to have followed a blueprint for a resolution to the Korean conflict that China and Russia proposed a year before.
“The idea is to ensure a double freeze,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in an interview with NBC in Moscow on July 21, 2017. “North Korea suspends all their launches and tests, and in response, the U.S. and South Korea reduce the scale of their war maneuvers in the region.”
Indeed, the broad design of his agreement with Mr. Kim does match China’s and Russia’s double freeze. Mr. Kim had been preparing to accept it as early as April, when he suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests. In Singapore, Mr. Trump completed the bargain by offering — apparently to South Korea’s surprise — to suspend the annual American-South Korean war games, calling them “expensive” and “provocative.”
But all the meeting really accomplished was to open the prospect of new and probably lengthy negotiations for a final peace on the peninsula. Achieving that will depend on how the interests of five countries — North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia and the United States — can all be served.
The history underlying this quest is worth pondering.
North Korea and South Korea were created when World War II ended with Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and American troops the south. After North Korea invaded the South in 1950, only to be driven back to China’s border by American-led forces, the fighting didn’t stop until after Chinese troops poured in and restored Communist control in the North.
A person of Mr. Putin’s age and experience cannot help seeing in Korea a likeness to a divided Germany. Having served in East Germany as a K.G.B. officer, Mr. Putin was deeply dismayed at the Soviet Union’s decision nearly three decades ago to give up control of what had been the Communists’ East Bloc. Today, his most powerful narrative of grievance is of the West expanding its institutions — especially NATO — to Russia’s western border. He would surely be loath to see the West achieve a matching situation at its eastern door.
In opening the prospects, however distant, for a reunification of the Korean Peninsula, the Singapore meeting did — at least in appearance — sideline Russia and even China. But was the United States still acting as “the West” in doing so? Or had it also sidelined its own allies, which include South Korea and Japan?
Keep in mind yet another summit meeting — in Canada with the Group of 7 powers, all Western-allied — that immediately preceded the Singapore meeting. Mr. Trump essentially dismantled the collective “West” by throwing that gathering into disarray over tariffs and the Iran nuclear deal. He then flew to Singapore and elevated Mr. Kim to a respectable world statesman.
For decades, the united West saw the Kim dynasty’s totalitarian principality as a murderous anti-Western dictatorship. But if you take away the unity, the values of the West disappear with it. So does any “anti-West.” And persecution on political and religious grounds, abductions of other countries’ citizens, extreme brutality by the North Korean regime and similar issues were conspicuously absent from Mr. Trump’s remarks at a news conference after the talks in Singapore. He said he had raised those subjects with Mr. Kim, but then made it clear that denuclearization had taken precedence over human rights.
For his part, Mr. Putin, speaking to Chinese reporters in Qingdao, called Mr. Trump’s decision to meet Mr. Kim “very brave and mature.” Mr. Putin’s detractors in Russia reacted differently. “The meeting was depressing to watch,” Leonid Volkov, who is active in opposition politics, wrote on Telegram, Russia’s social networking app. “It’s hard to forget that this amenable fatty is the commandant of the world’s largest prison camp,” he said, referring to Mr. Kim.
China was not entirely absent from the lead-up to the Singapore talks. To be sure, Mr. Kim was the first to signal, in March, a willingness to discuss with America the fate of Pyongyang’s nuclear program — an invitation Mr. Trump greeted enthusiastically. But later that month, Mr. Kim traveled to consult President Xi Jinping, and they met again before the summit.
It also is significant that the Singapore agreement’s terms were left vague, and that any detailed discussion that may now follow would have to include China, which accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s trade volume and most of its energy supplies.
In addition, Beijing and Moscow are wary of the possibility of a future American effort to topple the North Korean regime. Pyongyang’s complete denuclearization in exchange for a guarantee of regime security is derided by some in Moscow as a “Libyan model,” the Russian foreign policy commentator Vladimir Frolov wrote recently. Mr. Kim is of course aware of this view, and Mr. Trump assured him of security.
It is likely that without Mr. Xi’s nod, Mr. Kim would not have met with Mr. Trump. And China may have kept its distance and let the American president steal the spotlight, hoping that a peaceful North Korea colonized by Chinese, Russian and American businesses might emerge and make an American military presence on the peninsula irrelevant.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Trump was doing China’s or Russia’s bidding. He had reasons of his own to want a deal — or the appearance of a deal.
But he was not acting as a leader of a collective West. He was acting alone. And that was enough to make an agreement between him and Pyongyang palatable to China and Russia.
Welcome to the post-Cold War, post-values world. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy vision ignores concerns about other countries’ political structures as long as a deal can be reached. He clearly prefers bilateral deals to multilateral accords. He enjoys politics that are personal rather than institutional.
So his political goals thus align better with those of China or Russia than with Europe’s — or with the postwar policies with which America built long-term strategic partnerships.
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/trump-supreme-court-midterms.html
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, spoke to activists at the Supreme Court last month.
This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.
“The potential center-left majority in this country — and it’s very real — has to actually organize and elect people to office,” the political scientist Theda Skocpol told me while I was reporting my column this week.
I think that’s the most important message for any progressives feeling despondent about President Trump’s second Supreme Court nomination, which is set to be announced tonight: Elections matter. Miserably low turnout in the 2014 midterms helped Republicans take the Senate, which in turn allowed them to steal a Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama. And mediocre turnout in 2016 helped Donald Trump to win the presidency, which has allowed him to nominate two justices.
My column focuses on how Democrats should respond now, and my main advice is to focus on this year’s elections. As always, I welcome feedback by email (leonhardt@nytimes.com), Twitter or Facebook.
Related: “To me, Democrats don’t have a lot of good options,” Vox’s Ezra Klein said on a recent podcast, referring to the coming confirmation battle. “But they have a lesson here: Midterms matter, even when you don’t think they do. Midterms matter.” That podcast episode features a good discussion between Klein and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick about how politicized the court has become.
And the best overview of the 2017-18 Supreme Court term that I’ve heard (or read) is a Fresh Air episode, with Terry Gross interviewing Adam Liptak of The Times.
Department of disagreement. Brian Fallon, the Democratic strategist, wrote me a thoughtful note yesterday disagreeing with my column after it appeared online. He thinks I’m too negative about the Democrats’ prospects of blocking Trump’s nominee. “The odds may not favor those of us seeking to defeat Trump’s pick but I think you underestimate the chances we could pull off an upset,” he wrote.
The nominee may provide the fifth vote to take health insurance from millions of people and to overturn Roe v. Wade, both of which would be unpopular. Progressive activists can highlight those stances and build pressure on senators to oppose the nomination, Fallon says. If Democrats remain unified, and Senator John McCain is too ill to return to Washington for a vote, only a single Republican senator would need to flip to defeat the nomination.
“If we don’t contest” the nomination, Fallon continued, “at this inflection-point moment, we will never build muscle memory to organize around the courts.”
I still think the chances of victory are slim. But I agree with Fallon that Democrats should not simply fold on the confirmation. And so long as the party fights in a way that helps it in the midterms — rather than focusing only on its base and thereby alienating swing voters — there is little downside to waging that fight.
by:
2018-07-06
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/opinion/constitution-amendments.html
CreditRick T. Wilking/Getty Images
To the Editor:
Because of controversies over judicial (and other) appointments, I would propose two amendments to the Constitution:
Each seat on the Supreme Court would be limited to a term of 18 years, with terms staggered to expire every two years. That would allow every president to appoint at least two justices.
Every presidential nominee would be considered to be confirmed if the Senate does not affirm or reject the nomination within 120 days. The recess appointments clause should also be changed so that appointments are effective only for the recess and 120 days after the Senate returns to session.
DANIEL B. EVANS, GLENSIDE, PA.
To the Editor:
The Equal Protection Clause has been interpreted to guarantee equal rights for a wide range of groups. Yet without explicit protections in the constitutional text, these interpretations could easily shift — especially as the Supreme Court’s composition evolves. The Constitution should specifically guarantee equal rights regardless of gender, race/ethnicity, religion, country of origin, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Guarantees of equal rights that were uncommon over 200 years ago when our Constitution was adopted are now widespread internationally. A majority of constitutions explicitly protect equal rights or prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender (85 percent do so), race or ethnicity (76 percent), and religion (78 percent). A growing number cover disability, social position, migration status, sexual orientation and gender identity.
As the president selects his nominee to the Supreme Court, people should not have to wonder whether their fundamental rights will be recognized.
ALETA SPRAGUE, LOS ANGELES
The writer is a senior legal analyst for the WORLD Policy Analysis Center, U.C.L.A. Fielding School of Public Health.
To the Editor:
The Constitution has too many flaws to patch it up with a few amendments here and there. It is thoroughly unfit for a nation of 330 million, in 50 unequal states with 21st-century problems, values and ideals. Therefore, we should introduce one Final Amendment to terminate the Constitution and draw up a new and better Constitution, with an expiration date of 50 years.
The new Constitution should be an academic endeavor by a body of 300 or so of the best minds in political science, law, history, sociology, economics and philosophy, and must exclude politicians. It should draw upon the history of democracy, not just in the United States but around the world. We must recognize that the existing 50 states are completely nonsensical on multiple levels and contribute to today’s polarization.
The Final Amendment and its Constitution should propose, possibly, 22 states of about 15 million people each, redrawing boundaries around natural borders and cultural considerations.
MARK TRACY, VALENCIA, SPAIN
The writer is an American citizen.
To the Editor:
Our Republic is in trouble. It was intended to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people; instead we have devolved into an oligarchy. Congress is beholden to the donor class, corporations, unions, special interests and foreign powers. Super PACs and dark money groups have the capability to spend unlimited amounts of money to buy influence.
We need an amendment that would offer real campaign finance reform and overturn Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United. The best path forward would be through a so-called Article V Convention, called by two-thirds of the state legislatures, to propose this amendment, since we know Congress has already sold out.
JOSEPH SACKMAN
HICKSVILLE, N.Y.
To the Editor:
America needs a constitutional amendment to do away with the two-party system once and for all. This can be accomplished with an amendment that redefines congressional districts and institutes a proportional voting method for the House of Representatives. Allowing smaller parties to win a proportion of seats in the legislature — as few as they may be — will introduce new ideas into our political culture, increase energy for third-party candidates running at the presidential level, and force the Democrats and Republicans to adopt positions beyond their traditional comfort zones.
MATT HINSON, PRINCETON, N.J.
To the Editor:
The Constitution should be amended to require at least a three-fifths majority on all Senate votes. If 60 votes were required, an unpopular president, elected without a majority, could not appoint people with only the support of his party.
The makeup of the Senate already grants disproportionate power to the least populous states. My proposal would force the president to nominate judicial candidates who have broad support and represent the mainstream of judicial thinking, rather than extremists on either side of the political divide. It would also lead to legislation that could pass only with broad support, which would compel members of both parties to work together for the good of the country.
WILLIAM F. BAUER
MADISON, WIS.
To the Editor:
As an L.G.B.T.Q. person, I’d like to see — permanently and finally — a constitutional amendment prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (real or perceived), in employment, housing, public accommodations, credit and the military.
Many well-intentioned straight folks seem genuinely startled when they learn that no federal law exists to protect against widespread anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bias and/or hatred — particularly with regard to workplace discrimination.
DAVID DORAN, LOS ANGELES
The writer is a consultant for companies on L.G.B.T.Q. and workplace issues.
To the Editor:
The Supreme Court’s failure to rule on whether partisan gerrymandering may be unconstitutional, coupled with the announced retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, should convince us that we cannot rely on courts to protect the right to vote. Accordingly, we should amend the Constitution to do so.
The amendment I propose would have four clauses: 1) a declaration that the right to vote shall not be denied or impaired because of voters’ race, religion, creed, national origin or political affiliation; 2) a requirement that state and federal legislative districts be compact, contiguous and as nearly equal in population as is practical; 3) a requirement that state and federal districts be drawn by commissions in which no party constitutes a majority; and 4) a provision that the federal courts shall enforce the rights stated in the amendment.
Fair elections are essential to democracy. The Constitution should protect them.
JONATHAN J. MARGOLIS
BROOKLINE, MASS.
The writer is a civil rights lawyer.
To the Editor:
Serving as a senator or member of Congress was never intended to be a lifetime job. All members of Congress should be limited to 12 years — two terms for senators, and six terms for representatives. They would then be ineligible for 12 years. But this will never happen as the members of Congress will never vote themselves out of a job.
JOSHUA KAVETT
FARMINGDALE, N.J.
To the Editor:
I propose what I call the “Merrick Garland Amendment.”
Section 1. Any bill, treaty or nomination that has the support of at least one-fifth of the Senate shall be presented to the full Senate for due consideration.
Section 2. Any bill that has the support of at least one-fifth of the House of Representatives shall be presented to the full House of Representatives for due consideration.
PAUL GORFINKEL
WOODMERE, N.Y.
by:
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/opinion/federal-prisons.html
The Trump administration’s push for smaller government has left the Lee penitentiary in Virginia and other prisons across the country short on correctional officers, requiring other workers to step in.
To the Editor:
Re “Secretaries Guard Inmates as Cuts Hamstring Prisons” (front page, June 18):
Jails and prisons are where society puts the problems it doesn’t want to see and are the last places politicians want to spend money. But I’ve learned it’s the one place where the money can be well spent, and public oversight is critical.
That is why I was incredulous reading about the understaffed federal prison system, especially given the government’s intense scrutiny of my jail — the Cook County Jail in Chicago — over that very issue.
Upon becoming sheriff in 2007, I set out to make major changes at the jail, but that same year the Justice Department began an investigation into the jail. What resulted was an agreed court order that outlined areas to improve and federal monitors given unfettered jail access.
While I had already begun reforms, the consent decree ensured funding for additional staffing, among other improvements.
Seven years of hard work, transparency and collaboration ended the consent decree.
At a time when jails and prisons have been asked to become mental health centers and opioid clinics, now is not the time to cut staff and deny outside access. The government needs to give the same scrutiny it gave my jail to its own prisons.
TOM DART, CHICAGO
The writer is Cook County sheriff.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/collins-murkowski-change-parties.html
Just hours after Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, media legal analysts and commentators began forecasting what this will mean for women’s reproductive freedom. On CNN: “Roe v. Wade is doomed.” Huffington Post: “It’s time to prepare for life without nationwide legal abortion.” Reuters: “a death knell for Roe v. Wade.” Or, as one commenter remarked, invoking Dylan, “looks like it’s all over now, baby blue.”
I share the despair, but have we forgotten something? Republicans have a one-vote majority in the Senate. Their number includes two female moderates, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom support abortion rights, and one of whom — Ms. Collins — has already declared this week that she would not support a candidate hostile to Roe v. Wade.
A no vote from these two senators might not be enough to offset affirmative votes from endangered red-state Democrats. And the attack on Roe may be pursued through a host of more subtle and incremental assaults, not an out-and-out declared repeal. To save Roe, Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski might need to wield a bigger stick. Fortunately, there’s one at hand, and wielding it at this pivotal moment might do good beyond the single issue. They could bolt their party and shift the balance of power in the Senate.
Since 1890, 21 senators have switched party affiliation during their time in office, some for matters of conscience, some to advance careers. In 2001, when the Senate was split 50-50, Jim Jeffords renounced his Republican membership to become an independent aligned with the Democrats, flipping control of the chamber. Arlen Specter, the last senator to switch party affiliations, became a Democrat again in 2009 for the same reason he became a Republican in 1965: he couldn’t get elected otherwise. Mr. Specter’s was an act of self-preservation. Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski have an opportunity for a principled act of national preservation.
By leaving the G.O.P. — either to join the other party or, more plausibly, to become independents and caucus with the Democrats — Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski wouldn’t simply be registering their opposition to a single Supreme Court justice. They’d be taking a powerful stand against their party’s escalating betrayals of the country. The Trump-era Republicans have made screamingly clear what should have been obvious for a long time: The G.O.P. is no longer a comfortable home for anyone who cares about the rights of women — or of minorities, immigrants, L.G.B.T. people, and the poor — or about the Constitution. Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski could drop the pretense that dissenting within the party has made one bit of “moderating” difference.
Defection would come at a cost. Both senators would lose precious seniority and powerful committee appointments. But accommodations can be made, and neither necessarily needs the Republican Party to win re-election. Ms. Murkowski, famously, ran and was elected in 2010 despite her party, which chose as its nominee a hard-line anti-abortion Tea Party zealot. “I am very cognizant of how I was returned to the Senate,” she said. “It was not my party that returned me. It was voters across the spectrum that returned me.”
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters
Ms. Murkowski holds conservative views that, arguably, explain her hanging in with the G.O.P. — just for one, she’s all for drilling in pristine wildlife refuges to fuel her state’s economy. She would likely be uncomfortable with some of the Democratic agenda. But she’s also proved an independent voice of conscience, which earned her the Tea Party challenge; she ranks near the bottom on many right-wing scorecards. (Conservative Review gave her an F.)
Ms. Collins would have an easier road. She consistently ranks as one of the most popular senators and is beloved in Maine, as this former constituent can attest. Her blue-ish state voted for Hillary Clinton, and she avowedly did not vote for Trump. She’s gone against her party, voting for same-sex marriage and denouncing Muslim travel bans. But her recent concessions to the right — between her deciding vote on the tax bill, her crucial vote to send Education Secretary Betsy DeVos out of committee and her laudatory introduction of Jeff Sessions at his confirmation hearing for attorney general — are shredding her reputation for earnest moderation. She may be positioning herself to the right to deflect more harsh challenges from the reactionary Maine governor, Paul LePage. But these moves are alienating her sizable liberal constituency.
It’s a mistake to doubt the sincerity of Ms. Collins’s and Ms. Murkowski’s dedication to questions of women’s health. Ms. Collins was one of only three Republican senators to vote against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Last year, she and Ms. Murkowski broke ranks to cast the deciding votes against defunding Planned Parenthood. And this year, the two senators again voted with the majority of Senate Democrats to oppose a ban of abortion after 20 weeks. Both have been solid defenders of family planning and birth control. Both have earned high ratings with pro-choice groups — Ms. Collins has been rated higher than 90 percent by groups like NARAL in multiple years. To cave on this particular issue would be a tragic abrogation of personal, as well as political, conviction. Which is why the Supreme Court battle may at last compel both women to abandon the party they should have abandoned already.
A Senate no longer in the Republican grip could rescue women’s reproductive rights on multiple fronts: maternity coverage, access to contraception, teen-pregnancy prevention, breast-cancer treatment. It could protect us from planned eviscerations of Social Security and Medicare, and stop the gutting of Obamacare, the greenlighting of partisan gerrymandering, and the enshrining of an ethically shameless kleptocracy. It would thwart the authoritarian dream of seamless one-party rule across all three branches of government. Even a threat of leaving would send a salutary shock through the party.
Maine Senator (and Congresswoman) Margaret Chase Smith, Ms. Collins’ political foremother and idol, often broke ranks with her party — to defend, for instance, F.D.R.’s New Deal legislation from conservative attacks. On June 1, 1950, she became one of the first members of Congress to denounce the anti-Communist witch hunt of fellow Republican Senator Joe McCarthy. She began her Declaration of Conscience speech: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.” She did not want “to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
After six moderate Republican senators signed the declaration, Mr. McCarthy labeled them, in Trumpian fashion, “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” He had Ms. Smith removed from her post on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (replacing her with Richard Nixon) and lavished support on her challenger in the next election (she won anyway).
Ms. Smith could at least appeal to Republican legislators willing to put reason, compassion, and country ahead of party. Trumpist Republicans have no room for such niceties — they care only about winning. Which is why only losing the Senate can get their attention, and slow the party’s extremism.
We are at another watershed moment that could “result in national suicide and the end to everything we Americans hold dear.” As the damage and outrages pile up, it’s important to remember that Ms. Collins and Ms. Murkowski are enabling them with their affiliation, even when they dissent. They could halt the whole charade, and alter the course of history, with a press release.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/trump-australian-refugees.html
A display at a vigil in Melbourne, Australia, for refugees who died at the Manus Island detention center.
The Trump administration retreated last month when faced with outrage over its separation of refugee and migrant families at the Mexican border. President Trump said he hated taking children away from their parents, and soon abandoned his claim that only Congress could stop it.
Such a reversal is hard to imagine here in Australia, where the ruthless deterrence of asylum seekers has provided a template for other countries in an era of hardened attitudes. Australia does not separate the children of “unauthorized arrivals” from their parents, but it does detain entire families in horrible conditions, sometimes for years.
Because these families are held in prisonlike centers on islands hundreds of miles away, Australians rarely get to see the kinds of images that provoked widespread anger in America. But even if we did, it is unlikely that public opinion or government policy would change. We Australians understand, and many of us accept, that discouraging migrants from landing on our shores means cruelty.
Deterrence is a seductive policy. It promises a sense of security and sovereignty in return for atrocious costs on a relatively small number of people, people often stigmatized as lawbreakers who need to be stopped for their own safety.
The only way to deter people desperate enough to risk death on their journey to a new country is to threaten them with conditions worse than the ones they fled. The United States has so far been unwilling to do this explicitly, and Americans seem unprepared to face the human consequences of such an approach.
But if political leaders in the United States keep talking about a humanitarian crisis as nothing more than a violation of America’s laws, Americans could become inured to the suffering of migrants and more receptive to brutality. Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with foreigners “taking advantage” of Americans could still usher in an Australian-style future.
Australia has imposed mandatory detention on immigrants without valid visas since 1992. The government of Prime Minister John Howard toughened this policy in 2001 with the “Pacific Solution.” Under this system, asylum seekers arriving by boat cannot apply for protection visas in Australia. Instead they are taken to detention centers in the island country of Nauru or, until recently, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea while their claims are examined. Since 2013, it has been government policy that they cannot be resettled in Australia.
And while they wait to be processed, they languish in conditions that are often horrifying. A United Nations report from 2017 cites isolation, overcrowding and limited access to basic services on Manus and Nauru, along with “allegations of sexual abuse by the service providers” and continuing reports of self-harm and suicide.
This year, the Department of Home Affairs contested a federal court order that a 10-year-old who repeatedly attempted suicide on Nauru must be brought to Australia for treatment. In 2015, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture found that Australia’s processing centers violated the rights of asylum seekers to be free from torture. The prime minister at the time, Tony Abbott, responded that Australians were “sick of being lectured to by the United Nations.”
About 80 percent of the asylum seekers detained on Nauru and Manus are ultimately found to be refugees. But with no prospect of ever being allowed into Australia, hundreds decide to return to their countries of origin. Australia has sought other locations for resettlement, including Cambodia and the United States. Canberra has so far refused offers by New Zealand to resettle refugees, arguing that this option would be too appealing to asylum seekers.
Almost no boats have arrived in Australia since 2014, though the Australian government has turned back an unknown number at sea. There are still some 225 people in detention on Nauru, and an estimated 515 in “transition centers” on Manus Island.
Some of Australia’s politicians openly defend the brutality of deterrence policies. For many years, they have preferred to talk about “people smugglers” rather than asylum seekers themselves. Forever banishing boat-borne asylum seekers from Australia, they say, destroys the business of those who carry refugees on dilapidated vessels for profit. The politicians warn that people smugglers are watching and waiting for a moment of weakness by Australia to resume operations. Last month, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned that “the hard-won success of the last few years could be undone overnight by a single act of compassion.”
Many people’s attitudes about asylum seekers changed in 2008. That year, the Labor Party government of Kevin Rudd closed the Pacific detention centers and began processing asylum seekers in Australia. This coincided with deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and there was a surge in boat arrivals, resulting in many deaths at sea. Some progressives were finally convinced of the moral need for harsh policies.
A former Labor immigration minister, Tony Burke, describes how he kept the name of a 10-week-old boy who died at sea on his desk as a reminder of why he came to support policies to discourage people from getting on boats. Labor reinstated offshore processing in 2012, but lost an election the following year to the Liberals and Mr. Abbott, who pledged to “stop the boats.” The Australian Greens, a smaller progressive party, is the only one in Parliament that consistently opposes offshore processing.
The severe stances of the major parties are popular. A recent study found that about two-thirds of Australians support offshore processing, and growing numbers support measures to turn back intercepted boats at sea. While a quarter of the population say policies are too tough, higher numbers usually say policies are too soft. Some Australians see refugees from predominantly Muslim war-torn countries as national security threats, and believe they must be dealt with as harshly as possible. Many others resent those who arrive by boat as “queue-jumpers” who have unfairly circumvented Australia’s laws, unlike the “legitimate” refugees who wait for years in United Nations refugee camps.
Government statements and public opinion reinforce each other. Politicians justify draconian measures with appeals to Australians’ sense of fairness and safety, and in turn they face an electorate that they fear would punish them if they did otherwise.
If American public opinion turns toward accepting cruel deterrent measures, it will be political rhetoric that leads the way. Warnings by the Trump administration that criminals use children to exploit legal loopholes would sound familiar to Australians, whose government once claimed that asylum seekers threw children into the sea to force the navy to take them to Australia.
While some Americans compared Mr. Trump’s separation policy to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” when Australians seek fictional dystopias to account for our asylum policies we often reach for Ursula Le Guin. Her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” describes a peaceful and idyllic city-state whose happiness depends on the cruel imprisonment of a child in a basement. Everyone knows the child is there.
The citizens of Omelas may be disturbed by the predicament of the child, but they are convinced of its necessity. In the words of the journalist Jeff Sparrow: “Le Guin intended her story as a cautionary tale. How did we end up with two political parties using it as an instruction manual?”
David T. Smith is a senior lecturer at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney.
by:
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/scott-pruitt-epa-resigns-corruption.html
Tom Brenner/The New York Times
Just when America had all but given up hope, Scott Pruitt’s appalling reign as Environmental Protection Agency administrator is finally over. Thursday afternoon, Mr. Pruitt delivered President Trump his resignation letter, replete with references to “God’s providence” and how “blessed” he was to have had the opportunity to serve not the nation, but this president. He sadly noted that “the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.” And so Mr. Pruitt heads for the door, leaving behind a dark, oily stain on the office that he has spent the past year and a half vigorously defiling.
Mr. Pruitt’s departure did not come as a total shock. Word around Washington in recent weeks was that the stench of corruption wafting from E.P.A. headquarters was getting to be too much even for Mr. Trump. Someone in the White House no doubt noticed that, with the midterms approaching, Mr. Pruitt was not playing well with any voter who retains some common sense. In an administration characterized by extreme swampiness and ethical flexibility, the E.P.A. chief had nonetheless distinguished himself with pathological grifting to the point that even some Republican lawmakers and reliably conservative commentators had begun publicly slapping him.
Still, for months, Mr. Pruitt held on to his job as the embarrassing revelations piled up like so many used mattresses: his profligate spending on posh travel, over-the-top security, and ridiculous, self-aggrandizing office supplies; his directing agency staffers to run his personal errands, including finding him a place to live in Washington and combing hotels for his favorite skin cream; his attempts to score his wife a high-paying job, possibly involving chicken nuggets and waffle fries. Every week seemed to bring fresh examples of Mr. Pruitt’s shameless and yet surprisingly petty misuse of his office.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to tolerate Mr. Pruitt’s chicanery was not surprising. The two men share an environmental philosophy that may be roughly summarized as “industry over science,” and, for all his flaws, Mr. Pruitt was tireless in the crusade to dismantle environmental protections. His greatest hits include playing a key role in getting Mr. Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement; pushing the repeal of numerous Obama-era regulations, including those to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and automobiles; and instituting a policy that barred scientists who receive federal grants from serving on the E.P.A.’s advisory committees, while simultaneously welcoming corporate representatives onto these panels. Just last month, The Times reported that the E.P.A. had decided for the most part not to consider exposure to chemicals through the air, water or ground when it is evaluating whether they should be regulated or banned under a bipartisan law passed in 2016.
Impressively, Mr. Pruitt was both a sneak and a thug. Self-aware enough to realize that some of what he was up to — especially his snuggling up to certain industry interests — might be viewed negatively by some, he took pains to keep his activities under wraps. Aides have accused him of keeping secret schedules and calendars, employing multiple email accounts and conducting important agency business on phones other than his own to ensure that the calls wouldn’t show up on official logs.
At the same time, staff members who tried to curtail some of Mr. Pruitt’s more egregious behavior were demoted, reassigned or fired.
Upon accepting Mr. Pruitt’s resignation, Mr. Trump felt moved to tweet supportively: “Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.” Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Mr. Trump said Mr. Pruitt was a “terrific guy.” The president said the decision to leave was Mr. Pruitt’s, but then noted, “We’ve been talking about it for a little while.”
The daily drumbeat of toxic publicity finally turned the president against his E.P.A. chief. “It’s one thing after another with this guy,” Mr. Trump told a friend recently.
Not that Mr. Trump is likely to lose much sleep over Mr. Pruitt’s departure. Mr. Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler, is expected to stay the antiregulatory course, albeit presumably without drawing as many headlines, by avoiding his predecessor’s penchant for scandal. Mr. Wheeler is a former coal industry lobbyist and a former aide to Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has denied the existence of climate change and has long opposed legislation to address that global problem.
One task facing Mr. Wheeler — who publicly opposed Mr. Trump during the Republican presidential primaries — is to rebuild morale at the E.P.A. Much of the agency’s career staff has felt under siege, not just because of Mr. Pruitt’s policies and bullying behavior, but also because of his contempt for science and professional expertise. When President Trump’s tweet appeared announcing the Pruitt resignation, there were reports of cheering in the hallways.
In the end, Mr. Pruitt was driven from office for having abused his position so outrageously. But if Mr. Trump continues down the same policy paths, as seems likely, Mr. Pruitt’s more lasting legacy, along with the president’s, will be an overheated planet and shortened life spans.
2018-07-05
A new volume offers insight into the personal and political life of one of the 20th century’s most influential freedom fighters.
During the 27 years of his imprisonment — from Nov. 7, 1962 to Feb. 11, 1990 — Nelson Mandela wrote hundreds of letters — to prison officials, family and friends. The most complete collection of these letters to date, “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” will be published next week. The publication coincides with what would have been Mandela’s 100th birthday, on July 18, 2018.
The volume contains more than 250 letters — well more than half of them previously unpublished. The excerpts below, provided exclusively to The New York Times, offer a first look at these unpublished letters.
An essay by the novelist on why the letters, with their detailed account of family separation, resonate so powerfully today.
Mr. Mandela was 44 years old and the father of five young children when he was first sent to prison. The writing and receiving of letters during his incarceration allowed him to maintain his political purpose of overturning South Africa’s apartheid government, to nurture his relationships with his family and friends, and to express in words his deeply held convictions and beliefs.
Many of the letters speak directly to the pain and challenges of being held apart from his family. Letter writing and mail was severely restricted by prison authorities, and many of Mr. Mandela’s letters were censored or never delivered.
Photos of Nelson and Winnie Mandela on their wedding day in June 1958.
In an official letter of complaint to officials 12 years into his imprisonment, Mr. Mandela wrote, “I sometimes wish science could invent miracles and make my daughter get her missing birthday cards and have the pleasure of knowing that her Pa loves her, thinks of her and makes efforts to reach her whenever necessary. It is significant that repeated attempts on her part to reach me and the photos she has sent have disappeared without trace whatsoever.”
These letters provide detailed accounts of the personal, ethical and political life of Mr. Mandela during the nearly 10,000 days of confinement and punishment he endured in South Africa’s prisons.
April 2, 1969
‘Hope Is a Powerful Weapon’
Writing to his wife Winnie nearly seven years into his imprisonment, Mr. Mandela shares his thoughts on the power of positive thinking.
“The Power of Positive Thinking” and “The Results of Positive Thinking” both written by the American psychologist Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, may be rewarding to read. The municipal library should stock them. I attach no importance to the metaphysical aspects of his arguments, but I consider his views on physical and psychological issues valuable. He makes the basic point that it is not so much the disability one suffers from that matters but one’s attitude to it. The man who says: I will conquer this illness and live a happy life, is already halfway through to victory.
… Remember that hope is a powerful weapon even when all else is lost. You and I, however, have gained much over the years and are making advances in important respects. You are in my thoughts every moment of my life. Nothing will happen to you darling. You will certainly recover and rise.
Nov. 3, 1969
‘The World for Which I Am Fighting’
In 1969, Mr. Mandela was not permitted to attend the funeral of his son Thembi, who had died in a car accident. In this letter to Adelaide Sam Mase, the sister-in-law of his first wife, Evelyn Mandela, he reflects on the loss of his son, and on his reading of Christian scriptures, during which he refers to St. Paul as a “perfect pest” who would not quit in his persistence and mission.
Thembi’s death was a painful experience to all of us. This was particularly so for me, especially when one takes into account the fact that I had not seen him for 5 years, and that my application for permission to attend the funeral was not granted. I will never forget Thembi.
… I read the fresh and meaningful passages from the scriptures to which Mqwati kindly referred me. …[T]he importance of the passages quoted by him lies in the fact that they tell us of a way of life which would have brought us peace and harmony many centuries ago, if mankind had fully accepted and faithfully practiced the teachings they contain. They visualize a new world where there will be no wars, where famine, disease and racial intolerance will be no more, precisely the world for which I am fighting …
The lives and actions of prominent religious men show that those who fight for a new order need not divorce theory from practice. Moses shared common hardships with his countrymen in Egypt and eventually led them physically from slavery to the Promised Land. In his efforts to establish the Christian Church, St. Paul came into conflict with established authority and vested interests. The advocate who prosecuted him is reported to have said: “The plain truth is that we find this man a perfect pest; he stirs up trouble amongst the Jews the world over, and is ringleader of the Nazarene Sect.” Thereafter this “Nazarene Sect” was to spread to almost every corner of the globe and be embraced by many nations as their state religion. The man who was described as a perfect pest later became a saint loved and respected by millions of Christians throughout the world.
Feb. 4, 1969
‘I Do Not Know, My Darlings, When I Will Return’
Mr. Mandela wrote many letters to his children, and often attempted to soften the confusion and feeling of abandonment his young daughters must have felt, before they could understand why their father was not at home. This letter was written to his daughters Zenani and Zindzi.
Zindzi says her heart is sore because I am not at home and wants to know when I will come back. I do not know, my darlings, when I will return.
You will remember that in the letter I wrote in 1966, I told you that the white judge said I should stay in jail for the rest of my life.
It may be long before I come back; it may be soon. Nobody knows when it will be, not even the judge who said I should be kept here. But I am certain that one day I will be back at home to live in happiness with you until the end of my days.
Do not worry about me now. I am happy, well and full of strength and hope. The only thing I long for is you, but whenever I feel lonely I look at your photo, which is always in front of me. It has a white frame with a black margin. It is a lovely photo. For the last two years I have been asking Mummy to send me a group photo with Zindzi, Zeni, Maki, Kgatho, Nomfundo and Kazeka. But up to now I have not received it. The photo will make me even more happy than I am at the present moment.
‘Our Cause Is Just. It Is a Fight for Human Dignity’
Mr. Mandela wrote to his wife Winnie after a visit from Thoko, the widow of his son Thembi, whose father had recently died. He reflects on the persistence of hope in the face of repeated tragedy, and restates his commitment to the cause of the anti-apartheid struggle.
When I think of the disasters that had invaded us over the past 21 months, I very often wonder what gives us the strength and courage to carry on. If calamities had the weight of physical objects we should long have been crushed down, or else, we should by now have been hunchbacked, unsteady on our feet, and with faces full of gloom and utter despair. Yet my entire body throbs with life and is full of expectations. Each day brings a fresh stock of experiences and new dreams. I am still able to walk perfectly straight and firmly. What is even more important to me is the knowledge that nothing can ever ruffle you and that your step remains as fleet and graceful as it has always been — a girl who can laugh heartily and infect others with her enthusiasm. Always remember that this is how I think of you.
… We fight against one of the last strongholds of reaction on the African Continent. In cases of this kind our duty is a simple one — at the appropriate time to state clearly, firmly and accurately the aspirations that we cherish and the greater South Africa for which we fight. Our cause is just. It is a fight for human dignity and for an honorable life. Nothing should be done or said which may be construed directly or indirectly as compromising principle, not even the threat of a more serious charge and severe penalty. In dealing with people, be they friends or foe, you are always polite and pleasant. This is equally important in public debates. We can be frank and outspoken without being reckless or abusive, polite without cringing, we can attack racialism and its evils without ourselves fostering feelings of hostility between different racial groups.
Aug. 31, 1970
In this letter to his son Makgatho, Mr. Mandela regrets that he cannot be with him to celebrate his 20th birthday. He reminisces about Makgatho’s childhood and reveals his thoughts on fighting poverty.
I have been reminiscing a great deal … Those were the days when you lived a happy life free of problems and fenced from all hardships and insecurity by parental love. You did not work, grub was galore, clothing was plentiful and you slept good. But some of your playmates those days roamed around completely naked and dirty because their parents were too poor to dress them and to keep them clean.
Often you brought them home and gave them food. Sometimes you went away with double the amount of swimming fees to help a needy friend. Perhaps then you acted purely out of a child’s affection for a friend, and not because you had become consciously aware of the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterized our social life. I hope you’re still as keen today to help those who are hard-hit by want as you were then.
It’s a good thing to help a friend whenever you can; but individual acts of hospitality are not the answer. Those who want to wipe out poverty from the face of the earth must use other weapons, weapons other than kindness. …
This is not a problem that can be handled by individual acts of hospitality. The man who attempted to use his own possessions to help all the needy would be permanently ruined and in due course himself live on alms. Experience shows that this problem can be effectively tackled only by a disciplined body of persons, who are inspired by the same ideas and united in a common cause.
March 1, 1971
‘You Felt I Had Deserted You and Mummy’
This letter was written by Mr. Mandela to his daughter Zenani not long after her 12th birthday. He recalls a painful episode from her early childhood, and attempts to explain his separation from her, and why he was not able to live at home.
… Your birth was a great relief to us. Only three months before this, Mummy had spent 15 days in jail under circumstances that were dangerous for a person in her condition. We did not know what harm might have been done to you and to her health, and were happy indeed to be blessed with a healthy and lovely daughter. Do you understand that you were nearly born in prison? Not many people have had your experience of having been in jail before they were born. You were only 25 months old when I left home and, though I met you frequently thereafter until January 1962 when I left the country for a short period, we never lived together again.
You will probably not remember an incident that moved me very much at the time and about which I never like to think. Towards the end of 1961 you were brought to the house of a friend and I was already waiting when you came. I was wearing no jacket or hat. I took you into my arms and for about ten minutes we hugged, and kissed and talked. Then suddenly you seemed to have remembered something. You pushed me aside and started searching the room. In a corner you found the rest of my clothing. After collecting it, you gave it to me and asked me to go home. You held my hand for quite some time, pulling desperately and begging me to return. It was a difficult moment for both of us. You felt I had deserted you and Mummy, and your request was a reasonable one. It was similar to the note that you added to Mummy’s letter of the 3rd December 1965 where you said: “Will you come home next year. My mother will fetch you with her car.”
Your age in 1961 made it difficult for me to explain my conduct to you, and the worried expression that I saw in your face haunted me for many months thereafter. Luckily, however, you soon cooled down and we parted peacefully. But for days I was lost in thought, wondering how I could show you that I had not failed you and the family. When I returned to South Africa in July 1962 I saw you and Zindzi twice and this was the last time we met. In 1964 you were brought to the Supreme Court in Pretoria and I was quite disappointed when you were not allowed to see me. I have been longing to see you ever since. You will be able to pay me a visit me in 1975 when you will have turned 16. But I am growing impatient and the coming five years seem longer than eternity.
‘A Saint Is a Sinner Who Keeps On Trying’
Prisoners spent long periods in solitary confinement. This passage from a letter to Winnie expresses Mr. Mandela’s ability to find positive aspects in isolation, and in prison as a place to cultivate a spiritual life.
… [Y]ou may find that the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings. In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course, important in measuring one’s success in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others — qualities which are within easy reach of every soul — are the foundation of one’s spiritual life.
Development in matters of this nature is inconceivable without serious introspection, without knowing yourself, your weaknesses and mistakes. At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you. Regular meditation, say about 15 minutes a day before you turn in, can be very fruitful in this regard. You may find it difficult at first to pinpoint the negative features in your life, but the 10th attempt may yield rich rewards. Never forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying. … No ax is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise and win in the end.
Aug. 19, 1976
The Power of Writing
Mr. Mandela writes to Winnie after learning that she had been arrested. He reflects on the power he acquires from writing, and a future that will produce “saints” motivated by love.
It’s always given me plenty of satisfaction and joy to write to you. I sincerely don’t know whether you’ll ever get this particular one nor those of July 18, Aug 1 and 18 and, if you do, when that’ll be. Nonetheless, the act of writing to you at this moment removes all the tensions and impurities in my feelings and thoughts. It’s the only time I ever feel that some day in the future it’ll be possible for humanity to produce saints who will really be upright and venerable, inspired in everything they do by genuine love for humanity and who’ll serve all humans selflessly.
May 27, 1979
Words That Cut Through Iron and Stone
Mr. Mandela wrote to his friend Peter Wellman, a journalist, who recently sent him a telegram asking him to be godfather to his daughter. Here, he emphasizes the solace that communications from the outside world had given him.
[T]hroughout the many years of incarceration numerous messages of good wishes and hope sent by people from different walks of life, have cut through massive iron doors and grim stone walls, bringing into the cell the splendor and warmth of springtime. No two messages are ever the same and each one has struck a special note. Yours was typical. Frankly, there are moments, like now, when I feel as if the whole world, or at least the greater part of it, has been squeezed into my tiny cell. I have comparatively more time to think and dream; obsessed with a sense of involvement and with far more friends than ever before.
Tayari Jones on the prison letters of Nelson Mandela: An essay by the novelist on why the letters, with their detailed account of family separation, resonate so powerfully today.
These excerpts are adapted from “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” to be published next week by Liveright Publishing Corp., in cooperation with the Estate of Nelson Mandela and the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa.
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/sunday/nelson-mandela-tayari-jones-prison-letters.html
Some time ago, the writer Nikki Giovanni offered me guidance on writing about the life of a public person. Most of her advice I understood and dutifully jotted into a small notebook. However, one of her dictums confused me: “Whenever you receive a letter from a prisoner, make sure you write him back.” I frowned, confused but also a little guilty. I’d received a few letters with penitentiary return addresses and hadn’t responded. “Write them back,” she repeated. “You don’t know how much mail means to people in prison. You can’t imagine what they have to do just to get the stamp.”
Since then, I’ve heeded her advice. But sometimes it isn’t possible to write back. One gentleman I met at a book club on Rikers Island said he wouldn’t reveal his last name or ID because he couldn’t bear the disappointment of not receiving a response. Those of us who live freely in the age of electronic communication often take the mail for granted. But for people in prison letters remain the best way to engage with a society that has forcibly excluded them.
From Nov. 7, 1962, to Feb. 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner in South Africa, jailed for his role as a leader in the African National Congress and its struggle against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Four years after his release he was elected his country’s president. Today, nearly five years after his death at age 95, his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most distinguished and influential freedom fighters is well enshrined. But the man himself is not completely known.
Like prisoners all over the world, Mr. Mandela wrote letters, hundreds of them, each one a condensed autobiography. They have been collected in a forthcoming volume, “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” published by Liveright. It includes more than 250 letters, well over half of them previously unpublished. In some ways these letters rock the pedestal he was placed on after his release in 1990, for they show his complicated humanity. I’m not using “humanity” as a euphemism for “flawed.” The prison letters reveal no cracks in the foundation of his faith and commitment to justice. Rather, these messages to family, friends, comrades, elected officials and prison administrators reveal a Mandela as vulnerable as any other human.
Prison is a depraved environment. Incarcerated people live without comfortable beds, healthy food, adequate health care or the freedom of movement most of us who have never been incarcerated take for granted. They’re subjected to great violence, as though their sentence invalidates their own legal protections. While these severe deprivations are harrowing, Mr. Mandela’s prison letters underscore isolation’s other violence: Every incarcerated human is stripped of family.
At the Robben Island prison Mandela was held in, people were made to sit in rows in the prison courtyard and smash stones into gravel.
As a captive, Mr. Mandela was kin to Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders who worked to overthrow racism and colonialism. But alone in his cell, he joined an international underclass including dissenters in North Korea, women in Arizona shackled as they give birth and infant children caged on our southern border.
Our humanity derives from our most intimate relationships. Mr. Mandela’s prison letters, particularly those to his family, reveal that even the most righteous cause cannot inoculate anyone from the agony of separation. Mr. Mandela was allowed occasional visitors; his wife Winnie’s visits were strictly limited. His daughters could see him only after they reached the age of 16. Visits, while precious, are ephemeral, but the letters he received and treasured gave him tangible connection with his loved ones with each rereading. Throughout Mr. Mandela’s incarceration, prison authorities severely restricted and censored his letters. Considering the solace and strength he took from these folded sheets of paper, it’s a marvel his captors allowed him any mail at all.
Still, there are limits to paper and pen. When Mr. Mandela’s son, Thembi, was killed in a car accident, Mr. Mandela was forbidden to attend the funeral. Prison stole from him the critical years in the lives of young daughters. In a letter written to his daughter Zenani shortly after her 12th birthday, he reminds her of a brief visit he had with her nearly a decade before, during the time when he had gone underground and was living away from home: “In a corner you found … my clothing. After collecting it, you gave it to me and asked me to go home. You held my hand for quite some time, pulling desperately and begging me to return.”
Reading his anguished account, we understand another function of letters: to make memories tangible. He sought to remind his 12-year-old not only of his own love but also of the love that her heartbroken, 2-year-old self once felt for her vanished father. Winnie Mandela was briefly incarcerated while pregnant with Zenani, and Mr. Mandela reminded his daughter that she was the rare person who’d served jail time even before she was born.
Mr. Mandela’s letters tell a story beyond their own words. The printed volume includes several images of the pages. His handwriting is careful but crowded, as though trying to include more words than any page could hold. Perhaps he is saving rationed paper and ink, but he also seems to be tying a rope bridge of words to carry him from prison to the home where his wife and children await.
While these letters overflow their pages, there’s also a haunting sense of all that’s not expressed. Mr. Mandela wrote knowing his letters would be censored. He often asks about earlier missives, possibly intercepted or destroyed. On Aug. 1, 1970, he writes to Winnie: “Can it be that you did not receive my letter of July 1? How can I explain your strange silence at a time when contact between us has become so vital?”
He must also have known that these letters would one day be read by people all over the world. This loss of privacy is also a loss of the intimacy at the heart of our most sustaining relationships. He laments, “There are affairs in life where third parties, no matter who they are, should not be let in at all.” But he knew, too, how to sneak in a thousand unspoken words. To Winnie he writes, “I suspect that you intended the picture to convey a special message that no words could ever express. Rest assured that I have caught it.”
The Mandela we have come to revere since his triumphant release in 1990 is an elder statesman, weathered yet elegant, intelligent yet accessible and above all, brave and resilient. His gray hair and smiling face, his fist raised gently in a nod to troubles past, has supplanted the image of a much younger man who appeared before the court in 1962 dressed in a cape made from the skin of jackals. Then, his raised fist promised continued defiance and civil insurgency. His vow to dismantle apartheid earned him not only the ire of the illegitimate white South African government but also the contempt of the Reagan administration, which branded him a terrorist.
Somehow we’ve chosen to laud Mr. Mandela’s capacity for forgiveness without dwelling on what he actually forgave. These letters remind us of the cost of freedom. Upon his release, Mr. Mandela was feted with state dinners and parades, and there’s joy in seeing a hero so rewarded. However, the fall of apartheid and even the triumph of a 1993 Nobel Peace Prize (which he graciously shared with South Africa’s President F. W. de Klerk) could never return to him what he lost: decades of intimacy with a young family, growing away from him in his absence.
Separating a person from his kin is the ultimate expression of state power. I can’t help seeing, in the image of Mr. Mandela’s daughter begging for her father’s return, the children weeping at our southern border. I understand the impulse to marvel at Mr. Mandela’s civility and eloquence, even under duress. How, it’s easy to wonder, could a man form such generous, brilliant philosophies in the face of cruelty and injustice? Mr. Mandela was unique. How often in a generation does a giant walk among us, with brilliance and courage, guided by an immaculate moral compass?
But we do his memory a disservice if we merely celebrate his difference from people who suffer with less transcendent purpose. To honor Mr. Mandela, we must remember him as a man — one of millions of incarcerated men and women separated from their families and denied basic rights.
In a letter to his son, Mr. Mandela writes, “those who want to wipe out poverty from the face of the earth must use other weapons, weapons other than kindness.” He means, of course, fighting with relentless urgency against the very structure of social injustice. While he’s right, anyone who reads this collection will also rediscover the power of small kindnesses penned onto paper and tucked into an envelope, which, Mr. Mandela wrote, had the power to “cut through massive iron doors and grim stone walls, bringing into the cell the splendor and warmth of springtime.”
Someone, somewhere in an enclosing prison — across town, in a border detention facility, in a country you’ve never known — is waiting for a letter.
Read the Excerpts: Previously unpublished letters from the forthcoming book “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela.”
Nelson Mandela at 100: A special offer for New York Times subscribers. On Monday, July 9, join us for a live event in New York City celebrating the centenary of Mr. Mandela’s birth, featuring readings from “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela.” Read more and get tickets here.
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/surfing-autism.html
This week I am sharing some essays on surfing — the sport that came to us from the Polynesian islands and evolved into its own subculture, influencing our fashion, slang and music.
I have not been on a board myself yet. But my son, who has autism, got a chance to surf a couple of times last year. And it was epic.
Like many children on the spectrum my son is fascinated by water. He is ecstatic whenever he is near a sprinkler, a swimming pool or the ocean. So when I learned about a program called Surfer’s Way, which gives children with special needs a chance to get on a board, I signed him up.
“We find the motion of the ocean has a really calming, enlightening effect on kids on the spectrum,” said Elliot Zuckerman, who founded the nonprofit program. (He runs a surfing school, too.) He was inspired through work with Surfers Healing, a program based in California.
For two days last year, once in July and once in August, my son and I left behind the concrete of Manhattan and headed to Long Beach. There, we were greeted by a crew of volunteers armed with kindness and infused with a laid-back vibe. When it was my son’s turn, two surfers took him by the hand and guided him into the ocean.
I’ve written before about how isolating it can be helping my son navigate the world, but there are also moments of piercing joy. This was one of them. My son was coursing through the ocean on a surfboard, thrilled. I was watching from the beach, surrounded by extremely cool people who had sacrificed their time and energy to give him, and other kids like him, this experience. It blew my mind.
He and I will get a chance to take part in Surfer’s Way again next week, and we can’t wait.
Check out some favorites on riding the waves:
Ben Whittle, left, surfing with Sidney Nakamura in a 1957 photo taken by Clarence Maki, a pioneer of surfing photography in Hawaii. Maki taught John Clark, the author of “Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions From the Past,” how to surf in the 1950s.
“There are few moments of genuine political drama in surfing, but here was a clash for the ages: On one side were the squares and ‘Tricky Dick,’ prosecuting an imperialist war in Southeast Asia; on the other side were the longhaired waveriders who, at least in their minds, were psychic explorers pursuing a different kind of manifest destiny.”
The closest thing to big waves on the East Coast is storm swell, so some dared to ignore the warnings and take to the water during a hurricane.
Kent Nishimura for The New York Times
“The rush of surfing is not just about the skill but is about getting back into the primal state; the ocean is the catalyst,” Margaret Norton wrote. “I wanted to get back to those beginnings; that is why I decided to welcome my 40th summer by getting back on a board.”
We’ve been curating some of the best reads from the Opinion section each weekend. Here are collections of favorites on love and relationships, the power of music, the joy of swimming and how we view money.
by:
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/democrats-fight-trump-supreme-court.html
Claire Merchlinsky
With Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.
This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather” and go to the mattresses on this issue. Because this battle is about more than a single seat on the nation’s highest court. With public attention focused on all that is at stake with this alignment, this is the moment for Democrats to drive home to voters the crucial role that the judiciary plays in shaping this nation, and why the courts should be a key voting concern in Every. Single. Election.
This call to arms may sound overly dramatic. It’s not. As hyperpartisanship, gridlock and a general abdication of responsibility have rendered Congress increasingly dysfunctional, the judiciary is taking an ever-greater hand in policy areas ranging from immigration to guns to ballot access to worker rights. As John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, mused in 2016: “The legislative process, the political process in Washington, is at a standstill and will be regardless of who wins. The only thing that really matters over the next four years or eight years is who is going to appoint the next Supreme Court nominees.”
Of course, it’s not only Supreme Court picks that count. Lower-court appointments matter enormously as well, a reality of which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is exquisitely aware, as demonstrated by his efforts to ram through circuit court nominations at a dizzying clip. Thanks to Mr. McConnell’s labors, Mr. Trump installed a record number of federal appeals judges in his first year. This bench packing will be one of the Republican lawmakers’ prime talking points on the campaign trail this fall.
The trillion-dollar question is whether Democrats can also use this battle to turn out their voters. This is not a given. If progressives wind up feeling as though their team didn’t fight fiercely enough against Mr. Trump’s nominee, they could be less inspired to show up at the polls. But even if Senate Democrats pull out all the stops, the political reality is that Republicans have been far more effective than Democrats at galvanizing their base around the judiciary.
Certainly this was the case in 2016: Whatever impact the former F.B.I. director James Comey or Russian hackers had on the race, Mr. Trump owes a big chunk of his win to Mr. McConnell for shamelessly refusing to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s empty seat until after the election. Even conservatives turned off by Mr. Trump’s sexual creepiness could be rallied around the prospect of claiming that seat. In his endorsement of Mr. Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas listed the Supreme Court as his top reason, warning supporters, “We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices.” Even the maverick, country-before-party Senator John McCain of Arizona vowed that, if Hillary Clinton won the presidency, a Republican-controlled Senate would block any nominee that she put forward. Despite Democratic outrage over the blockading of President Barack Obama’s court pick, more Trump supporters than Clinton supporters cited the appointment of justices as “very important” to their vote.
This is not to suggest that Democrats don’t care about the judiciary. The issue just hasn’t resonated as widely and viscerally with their base as it has with Republicans, where the threat of judicial activism has become a reliable, enduring motivator. At least since early in the Obama era, Democratic voters have held a generally more positive view of the Supreme Court than their Republican counterparts. Survey data also show that Democrats, at least until recently, have tended to see the court more as what it is supposed to be, a neutral, independent arbiter. Republicans, by contrast, have been more likely to see it as a hostile force to be overcome. And, of course, the dream of one day overturning Roe v. Wade helps keep social conservatives fixated on remaking the judiciary.
The rise of Mr. Trump has created an imperative to change all this. Even before Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement last week, nervous progressives had started working to close the urgency gap. This spring, the Committee for a Fair Judiciary, which advocates progressive judicial values, beefed up its lobbying shop. Around the same time, a gaggle of Democratic operatives formed a nonprofit group, Demand Justice, aimed at energizing voters around the courts. Demand Justice hopes to change the current political dynamic, in which Democrats and progressive interest groups typically mobilize to battle a specific court nominee, after which their energy and attention quickly dissipate. Through a combination of education and activism, the group wants to make judicial appointments a core electoral concern for progressive voters and a standard talking point for Democratic politicians. Among other efforts, they plan to set up a database that enables the public to track which Democratic senators vote for which jurists at all levels, making it easier to hold lawmakers accountable at election time. Yes, that seems like a pretty obvious and basic tool — and the fact that it doesn’t already exist speaks volumes about Democrats’ failure to draw attention to the radicalization of the judiciary.
The fire now raging against Mr. Trump and his nominees can’t be sustained indefinitely. Before it burns out, Democrats need to tap some of the energy to help make the courts an enduring cause for their voters. Because of the destructive game played most cynically, and with the greatest indifference to judicial integrity, by Mr. McConnell, the notion of jurists as unbiased umpires in robes has become, for now, dangerously naïve. We wish it weren’t.
Long after Mr. Trump is nothing but a toxic memory, the federal judiciary — from the Supreme Court on down — will bear the smear of his fingerprints. The coming confirmation battle will be fierce, but no matter what happens, the fight cannot end there. On Nov. 6, voters will have their first chance to arrest Mr. Trump’s warping of the judiciary. Reversing the damage already done will require a much longer-term commitment.
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/trump-summit-nato-russia.html
President Trump after meeting with NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, at the White House in May.
President Trump’s next two summits, first with NATO allies in Brussels, then with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, will either restore American global leadership or kill it off, depending on how he plays our hand.
Unity at NATO, followed by a firm encounter with Mr. Putin, would demonstrate American resolve to stand with allies and stand up to strategic competitors. Or Mr. Trump could squander all the power and leverage of the United States by abusing and dividing our allies, then lavishing praise and freebies on an autocrat he admires who is set on undermining our democracy and global position. It all depends which President Trump shows up in Brussels and Helsinki — the one his national security adviser says wants a strong NATO, or the man who regularly calls NATO “obsolete.”
Mr. Trump meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia last year at the Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.
Traditionally, an American president gains when he meets a Kremlin boss with the wind of allied unity at his back. If he uses the NATO meeting to coordinate his message to Moscow, he multiplies the impact by speaking for dozens of free countries, not just America. And a Trump-Putin summit is overdue. The mountain of problems we have with Russia requires leader-to-leader talks because Mr. Putin has neutered decision-making at all other levels of his government.
The Trump team, led on alliance issues by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, is poised to have a successful NATO summit if the president can take “yes” for an answer. The combined defense budget of NATO nations has grown by $14.4 billion since Mr. Trump took office (increases began under Barack Obama). All but one of 28 allies are increasing spending, and 26 are sending more troops to NATO missions. Sixteen are on track to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024, NATO’s target.
Rather than thrash allies, the president should celebrate this success, take credit for it, and accelerate bilateral work to help close remaining spending gaps. Other NATO achievements worth celebrating include two new military commands that will increase the readiness of alliance forces and speed deployments. These moves, directed against any further territorial ambitions Moscow may have, should strengthen Mr. Trump’s hand at Helsinki.
The leverage NATO gives Mr. Trump at the Putin summit will be wasted, however, if the message from Brussels mirrors the president’s presentation at the Group of 7 meeting last month: Allies are feckless free-riders, America doesn’t need them and it’s the planet’s autocrats who deserve our respect.
Mr. Putin, the biggest winner from any disunity in NATO, is counting on the second outcome. The only additional thing he needs to make his Helsinki meeting a success is money. Here, Mr. Trump is holding a hand nearly as strong as Ronald Reagan’s in 1982 — if he plays it right. Mr. Putin survives on a governance model that requires $60-per-barrel oil, total political control of his citizenry and a kleptocratic stranglehold on the economy. The reform Russia needs is impossible without more power-sharing than he will allow.
A population that he once intoxicated with military deployments in Crimea and Syria now cares most about improvements in Russia’s hospitals, according to recent polls. And after four years of those costly deployments, along with sanctions and low-to-zero growth, Mr. Putin’s government is broke. He has run through half of the sovereign wealth Russia saved in the oil boom of his first two terms as president, starting in 2000; the cost of living has increased for most Russians by 15 percent or more; and last week, the Russian Duma had to raise value-added taxes and the pension age to increase revenue.
Mr. Putin, therefore, needs more from the United States and the West than we need from him. He needs sanctions relief. He needs direct foreign investment and trade. He needs the New Start nuclear accord extended when it expires in 2021 so he doesn’t have to pay for a new generation of weapons. He wants the United States out of Syria so that Russian forces can take over the eastern oil fields we now protect, and use income from those fields to pay for the war, among other motives. He knows that if Russia’s financial situation doesn’t improve, he could be presiding over a 21st-century “Upper Volta with rockets,” as Dean Acheson once called the Soviet Union.
This gives Mr. Trump considerable leverage in Helsinki if he plays our hand strongly, as Reagan would have. Rather than ceding Crimea, forgiving Mr. Putin’s interference in our elections and offering sanctions relief free, Mr. Trump — with NATO at his back — can make American diplomacy great again if he demonstrates to Mr. Putin that normal relations with us require civilized global behavior by Russia. The alternative — a NATO in tatters and a re-energized Mr. Putin — would leave America weaker and Mr. Trump the loser in the great power competition he himself has declared.
Victoria Nuland, a 32-year veteran of the United States Foreign Service, is the chief executive of the Center for a New America Security.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/us/laquisha-jones-rodolfo-rodriguez.html
Rodolfo Rodriguez seen in the unincorporated Willowbrook area of Los Angeles.CreditMisbel Borjas, via Associated Press
A woman was arrested late Tuesday in the beating of a 92-year-old man in Los Angeles County in which the attacker reportedly told the man to “go back to Mexico.”
The beating left him bloodied, bruised and bewildered about why he was attacked.
The woman, Laquisha Jones, 30, of Los Angeles, was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and was held on $200,000 bail.
A witness, Misbel Borjas, told CNN and other news organizations that the attacker used a brick in the beating of the man, who was identified by the authorities as Rodolfo Rodriguez. Several men soon joined in the attack.
The beating occurred around 7:30 p.m. on July 4 in an area of unincorporated Los Angeles County, a statement from the sheriff’s department said. It’s known as Willowbrook and is about 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Mr. Rodriguez, who was visiting the area, was hospitalized for several hours, and is now recovering with family, the statement said.
On July 5, Ms. Borjas posted a video on Facebook in which Mr. Rodriguez can be seen sitting on the ground next to a red-stained sidewalk, the right side of his face spilling blood. He later gave interviews on television as he lay in bed, his face still covered in cuts and bruises.
“I can’t walk anymore,” Mr. Rodriguez, who was visiting family in the area, told CNN in Spanish. “I’m in so much pain.”
The police did not immediately determine a motive, and said Tuesday that they were still searching for the other men. But according to CNN, Ms. Borjas said she heard the attacker saying: “Go back to your country. Go back to Mexico.” She gave similar accounts to The Los Angeles Times and other news organizations, but did not respond to follow-up interview requests.
Mr. Rodriguez said to CNN that the woman told a group of men nearby — the men who came over and began kicking him on the ground — that he had tried to take away her daughter.
“But that’s not true,” he said, according to CNN, adding that he had not bumped into a child. “In the years I have been alive, I have never offended anyone.”
Ms. Borjas told CNN she tried to help Mr. Rodriguez, but the woman threatened her, too. Ms. Borjas snapped a photo of the woman, who was with a young girl.
Erik Mendoza, Mr. Rodriguez’s grandson, told CNN that his grandfather sustained a broken jaw, broken cheekbones, two broken ribs and bruises on his face, back and abdomen. He said Mr. Rodriguez visits from Michoacán, Mexico, twice a year and walks through the neighborhood every day after lunch.
In a bedside interview with Noticias 62, a Spanish-language station in Los Angeles, Mr. Rodriguez said he was happy to be alive.
“God has given me his blessing,” he said.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/opinion/trump-nato-failure.html
President Trump speaking to the press Thursday in Brussels after the NATO summit.
So Donald Trump went to a NATO summit, insulted our allies, then made the absurd demand not just that they increase defense spending — which they should — but that they raise it to 4 percent of G.D.P., much higher than the bloated military spending in his own budget. He then claimed, falsely, to have won major concessions, and graciously declared that it is “presently unnecessary” to consider quitting the alliance.
Was there anything our allies could have done that would have mollified him? The answer, surely, is no. For Trump, disrupting NATO doesn’t seem to be a means to an end; it’s an end in itself.
Does all of this sound familiar? It’s basically the same as the story of the escalating trade war. While Trump rants about other countries’ unfair trade practices — a complaint that has some validity for China, although virtually none for Canada or the European Union — he hasn’t made any coherent demands. That is, he has given no indication what any of the countries hit by his tariffs could do to satisfy him, leaving them with no option except retaliation.
So he isn’t acting like someone threatening a trade war to win concessions; he’s acting like someone who just wants a trade war. Sure enough, he’s reportedly threatening to pull out of the World Trade Organization, the same way he’s suggesting that the U.S. might pull out of NATO.
It’s all of a piece. Whatever claims Trump makes about other countries’ misbehavior, whatever demands he makes on a particular day, they’re all in evident bad faith. Mr. Art of the Deal doesn’t want any deals. He just wants to tear things down.
The institutions Trump is trying to destroy were all created under U.S. leadership in the aftermath of World War II. Those were years of epic statesmanship — the years of the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, in which America showed its true greatness. For having won the war, we chose not to behave like a conqueror, but instead to build the foundations of lasting peace.
Thus the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, signed in 1947 — at a time of overwhelming U.S. economic dominance — didn’t seek a privileged position for American products, but instead created rules of the game to promote prosperity around the world. Similarly, NATO, created in 1949 — at a time of overwhelming U.S. military dominance — didn’t seek to lock in our hegemony. Instead, it created a system of mutual responsibility that encouraged our allies, including our defeated former enemies, to see themselves as equals in preserving our mutual security.
One way to say this is that America tried to create an international system reflecting our own ideals, one that subjected powerful countries — ourselves included — to rule of law, while protecting weaker nations from bullies. Small countries can and do win W.T.O. cases against big countries; small members of NATO receive the same unconditional security guarantees as major powers.
And what Trump is trying to do is undermine that system, making bullying great again.
What’s his motivation? Part of the answer is that anything that weakens the Western alliance helps Vladimir Putin; if Trump isn’t literally a Russian agent, he certainly behaves like one on every possible occasion.
Beyond that, Trump obviously dislikes anything that smacks of rule of law applying equally to the weak and the strong. At home, he pardons criminal bigots while ripping children away from their parents. In international relations, he consistently praises brutal strongmen while heaping scorn on democratic leaders.
So of course he hates the international institutions created by an infinitely wiser generation of U.S. statesmen, who understood that it was in America’s own interest to use its power with respect and restraint, to bind itself by rules in order to win the world’s trust.
He may complain that other countries are cheating and taking advantage of America, that they’re imposing unfair tariffs or failing to pay their share of defense costs. But as I said, those claims are made in bad faith — they’re excuses, not real grievances. He doesn’t want to fix these institutions. He wants to destroy them.
Will anything put a check on Trump’s destructive instincts? You might have thought that Congress would place some limits, that there were at least some responsible, patriotic Republican lawmakers left. But there aren’t.
Alternatively, you might have thought that big business, which is deeply invested, literally, in the existing world order would protest effectively. So far, however, it has been utterly ineffectual. And while talk of trade war sometimes causes the stock market to wobble, as far as I can tell, investors still aren’t taking this seriously: They imagine that Trump will bluster and tweet for a while, then accept some cosmetic policy changes and call it a win.
But that kind of benign outcome looks increasingly unlikely, because Trump won’t take yes for an answer. He doesn’t want negotiations with our allies and trading partners to succeed; he wants them to fail. And by the time everyone realizes this, the damage may be irreversible.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/business/media/senators-smart-tv-investigation.html
Senator Edward J. Markey sent a letter, also signed by Senator Richard Blumenthal, to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday expressing concern that Samba TV wasn’t transparent with viewers about data it collected.
Two Democratic senators have asked federal regulators to investigate the business practices of smart-television manufacturers amid worries that companies are tracking consumers’ viewing behavior without their knowledge.
In a letter on Thursday to Joseph Simons, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Senators Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said they were concerned about “consumer privacy issues raised by the proliferation of smart-TV technology.”
Companies are using new tools to identify and log what people are watching as part of an effort to profile consumers and direct ads to other devices in their homes. The letter cited a New York Times article, published last week, that detailed the practices of Samba TV, a San Francisco software company. Privacy advocates have criticized the company for not being transparent with consumers when it seeks permission to track their viewing on internet-connected TVs to sell ads.
“Regrettably,” the senators wrote, “smart-TV users may not be aware of the extent to which their televisions are collecting sensitive information about their viewing habits.” The letter went on to argue that Samba TV “does not provide sufficient information about its privacy practices to ensure users can make truly informed decisions.”
Samba TV, which said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million homes in the United States, has struck deals to place its software on certain sets from Sony, Sharp, TCL, Philips and other brands. The company essentially pays television manufacturers to be included on their sets, saying its business model “does subsidize a small piece of the television hardware,” though it declined to provide further details.
When consumers set up a TV with built-in Samba software, they encounter a screen asking them to enable Samba Interactive TV. The opt-in language reads: “Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way.”
The letter says the language that asks TV owners to activate built-in Samba software “does not clearly convey how much sensitive information about a user will be collected or whether the data will be used for targeted advertisements across different devices.”
Most consumers agree to enable the software, which allows Samba to monitor their TV habits on a nearly second-by-second basis, identifying video games, HBO shows, political debates and more. The company may then use the data to direct ads to phones and laptops that share the TV’s internet connection.
Mr. Markey and Mr. Blumenthal, who are members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said the opt-in language “does not clearly convey how much sensitive information about a user will be collected or whether the data will be used for targeted advertisements across different devices.” The senators noted that data privacy and disclosure rules had long applied to cable operators and satellite carriers but “do not cover data companies using internet connectivity” to track smart-TV viewing.
In a statement on Thursday, Bill Daddi, a spokesman for Samba TV, said that the company shared “Senator Markey’s concerns about data privacy.” He added, “There is more to be done here, and we will work with any member of Congress on this issue, as we have throughout the past few years.”
Mr. Daddi also said that the Federal Trade Commission had “already reviewed our opt-in language and policy” and that Samba TV had made revisions based on the agency’s guidance. However, when asked previously about Samba TV, a spokeswoman for the commission said the agency does not “endorse or bless companies’ practices.”
Privacy concerns have landed companies, from TV manufacturers to outside data companies, in legal trouble. Vizio, for example, paid $2.2 million last year to settle claims by the Federal Trade Commission and the State of New Jersey that it was collecting and selling data from millions of smart TVs without the knowledge or consent of set owners. The company is working toward a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit in California centered on the tracking software in its TVs.
The letter from the two senators does not necessarily mean the Federal Trade Commission will take action, but “there has been a historical recognition that TV viewing can be pretty sensitive,” said Justin Brookman, a former policy director at the commission who is the director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group Consumers Union.
Juliana Gruenwald, a spokeswoman for the Federal Trade Commission, confirmed receipt of the letter and declined to comment further.
The senators’ letter draws attention to the challenging business of TV manufacturing, which provides an opening for data companies. Selling access to consumer data could help companies pad thin margins, particularly on smaller sets.
“If you think of the cheap 32-inch, 40-inch, 50-inch TVs — most of the TV manufacturers are lucky if they break even on those sets,” said Paul Gagnon, an analyst for IHS Markit. Profits typically come from larger sets.
Tracking software has also appeared as part of expensive models. David Kitchen, a software engineer in London who described his frustration with Samba TV’s tracking in last week’s Times article, said he had paid about 1,000 pounds (about $1,300) for a Sony Bravia set that asked him to enable the software.
At the end of last year, about 45 percent of TV households in the United States, or 56 million homes, had at least one smart TV, according to IHS Markit data. Smart TVs accounted for 70 percent of all television shipments to North America last year, said the firm, which forecasts the share to rise to 78 percent this year.
“In terms of practical things the F.T.C. could do, one is filing additional enforcement actions, which, in addition to curtailing individual companies’ practices, can send a powerful ‘clean up your act’ message to industries,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and a former technology adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.
The Federal Trade Commission could also do a “sweep” of the smart-TV industry, which would mean testing smart TVs from major manufacturers and potentially taking enforcement action based on its findings, he said.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has been pressing the Federal Trade Commission on smart TVs and privacy since 2015 and said he was hopeful that the senators’ letter would prompt action.
“A device is a device,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “A person should be able to plug it into the wall, connect into the internet and not worry that what happens next is going to be recorded.”
by:
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/europe/trump-brexit-theresa-may.html
President Trump with Prime Minister Theresa May at the Blenheim Palace Gala on Thursday.
LONDON — President Trump put his brand of confrontational and disruptive diplomacy on full display Thursday, unsettling NATO allies with a blustering performance in Brussels and then, in a remarkable breach of protocol, publicly undercutting Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain in an interview published hours after landing in her country.
In the interview with The Sun, Mr. Trump second-guessed Mrs. May’s handling of the main issue on her plate: how Britain should cut ties to the European Union. He cast doubt on whether he was willing to negotiate a new trade deal between Britain and the United States, and praised Mrs. May’s Conservative Party rival, Boris Johnson, as a potentially great prime minister.
The interview was published as Mr. Trump and Mrs. May were wrapping up what appeared to be a chummy dinner at Blenheim Palace — earlier, they had walked inside holding hands — and a day ahead of the president’s scheduled meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle. There was no immediate response from the British government.
“Well, I think the deal that she is striking is not what the people voted on,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, speaking of the approach Mrs. May is taking to Britain’s exit from the European Union, or Brexit, under which the British economy would effectively continue to be subject to many European regulations.
Speaking of Mr. Johnson, who resigned this week as foreign secretary in protest over Mrs. May’s Brexit strategy and who has long been seen as likely to challenge her for her job, Mr. Trump said: “Well, I am not pitting one against the other. I’m just saying I think he would be a great prime minister. I think he’s got what it takes and I think he’s got the right attitude to be a great prime minister.”
Coming after his combative performance in Brussels with leaders of the 28 other NATO nations, the day amounted to a global disruption tour unlike anything undertaken by any other recent American president.
In Brussels on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he supported NATO but seemed to suggest that the United States could leave if the allies didn’t increase defense spending. He claimed credit for pressing members to pledge increases in their military budgets, though some denied any such promises were made.
Mr. Trump did sign on to a NATO plan to improve military readiness across the Continent, and the allies agreed to take a tough stance against Russia, particularly regarding its annexation of Crimea.
But the NATO meeting created a picture of discord days before Mr. Trump was scheduled to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
The Sun’s interview with Mr. Trump, conducted Wednesday in Brussels, signaled a new twist on the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States. The White House went into damage control mode after it was published on Thursday night.
“The President likes and respects Prime Minister May very much,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, said in a statement. “As he said in his interview with The Sun she ‘is a very good person’ and he ‘never said anything bad about her.’”
The statement said Mr. Trump “is thankful for the wonderful welcome from the prime minister here in the U.K.”
But in the interview with The Sun, Mr. Trump said he had been made to feel unwelcome in London by the large protests planned against him and the hostility of London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has been an outspoken critic of the president.
“I think your mayor has done a terrible job, but when they make you feel unwelcome, why would I stay there?” Mr. Trump said, alluding to his decision to spend little time in London on this trip.
The president’s comments were likely to stoke acute tension within Mrs. May’s Conservative Party, following the publication on Thursday of the government’s plan for exiting the European Union, which would keep Britain tied to European Union rules on goods and agricultural products.
Mrs. May has been making the case for a free trade deal with the United States and argued that Brexit was an “opportunity” to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties and spur economic growth both in Britain and in the United States. British officials hoped that Mr. Trump’s visit would help that process.
The British newspaper The Sun posted an eight minute long excerpt of an interview with President Trump in which he criticized Prime Minister Theresa May’s plans for Brexit. The interview was published as President Trump visited Britain.
4 pages, 0.17 MB
Mr. Trump appeared to dash those hopes. Mrs. May’s plan is intended to minimize the economic impact of Brexit, which could be severe because the European Union is Britain’s biggest trading partner. But Mr. Trump appeared to side with pro-Brexit critics who argue that by keeping many of the European Union’s economic rules, it would inevitably reduce the scope for a separate trade deal with the United States.
Even before it was released as a white paper on Thursday, Mrs. May’s proposal had prompted the resignation of three government ministers, including Mr. Johnson, the foreign secretary who had argued for a cleaner break with the European Union.
“I would have done it much differently,” Mr. Trump was quoted as saying. “I actually told Theresa May how to do it, but she didn’t listen to me.” Instead she went “the opposite way,” he said, and the results have been “very unfortunate.”
If Britain sticks to Mrs. May’s approach toward Europe, Mr. Trump said, “that would probably end a major trade relationship with the United States.”
Before arriving in Britain, Mr. Trump had described Mr. Johnson as a friend and said he might be in contact with him during his visit to Britain, which is scheduled to end on Sunday after the president visits one of his golf resorts in Scotland.
When he resigned on Monday as foreign secretary, Mr. Johnson made a fierce attack on Mrs. May’s strategy for Brexit saying the “dream is dying, suffocated by needless self doubt.”
In his interview, Mr. Trump struck a highly negative tone about the European Union itself, arguing that the United States had “enough difficulty” with the bloc.
“We are cracking down right now on the European Union because they have not treated the United States fairly on trading,” he said.
In recent weeks British business has been increasingly vocal about the risks of a clean break with the European Union, with warnings from Jaguar Land Rover and Airbus among others that they could leave the country, putting thousands out of work.
But hard-line Brexit supporters have been fiercely critical of Mrs. May’s Brexit plan and fear that, after negotiations with the European Union, it could be watered down further.
Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Mr. Johnson are therefore likely to be seen as an implicit criticism of Mrs. May. In his letter of resignation on Monday, Mr. Johnson said that, under Mrs. May’s proposals, Britain was “truly headed for the status of colony.”
Mr. Johnson once described one government Brexit customs plan as “crazy” and, in leaked comments, also accused Mrs. May’s government of lacking “guts.” He compared her negotiating style unfavorably with that of Mr. Trump, and he compared her new Brexit plan to excrement.
In the Sun interview, Mr. Trump also renewed his criticism of Mr. Khan, the mayor of London, with whom he has clashed on several occasions, and who gave protesters permission to launch a giant orange balloon of the president depicted as a baby in a diaper carrying a cellphone in one of its hands.
“Take a look at the terrorism that is taking place,” Mr. Trump said. “Look at what is going on in London. I think he has done a very bad job on terrorism.”
The Sun’s article was published just as a lavish black-tie dinner that Mrs. May was hosting for Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, at Blenheim Palace was breaking up, and guests in formal gowns and tuxedos were leaving the estate.
Chris Ruddy, the chairman of Newsmax and a confidant of Mr. Trump who attended the dinner, said there was no hint of tension between the president and Mrs. May during the event itself, which he called “a love fest between Britain and the United States.”
“The president has always been for Brexit full speed, but I’d really like to see the full interview in context,” Mr. Ruddy said, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s comments may not have been as direct a broadside against Mrs. May as they were portrayed to be in The Sun. “I went over and chatted directly with the president and the prime minister, and he indicated to me that the special relationship between the United States and Britain was better than ever.”
The Sun posted audio recordings of large portions of the interview.
Mr. Ruddy said he learned of the interview as he was driving away from Blenheim, and British friends began texting him expressing shock and surprise about what Mr. Trump had said.
by:
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/europe/trump-britain-visit-theresa-may.html
Protesters gathered at the gates of Blenheim Palace, outside Oxford, England, where President Trump attended a black-tie gala dinner on Thursday.
LONDON — The protesters began assembling even before Air Force One touched down outside London on Thursday. They inflated a giant orange balloon depicting President Trump as a pouting baby, wearing a diaper and wielding a smartphone. They jeered as the helicopter Marine One took off to ferry Mr. Trump to a black-tie gala dinner outside Oxford with Prime Minister Theresa May.
Outside the dinner, at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill was born, a heavy police presence kept around 1,000 chanting demonstrators far away as Mr. Trump and Mrs. May, along with their spouses, were serenaded by trumpeters and other members of a military band.
Mr. Trump’s long-delayed first visit to Britain as president was supposed to cement ties with America’s closest ally, reassure a nation anxious over the chaotic process of exiting the European Union and give Mr. Trump a relaxing weekend in Scotland, where his mother was born and where he owns two golf courses.
But British protesters saw in the visit a chance to register their displeasure at Mr. Trump’s policies. The demonstrations will culminate in a march on Friday — with the baby balloon flying overhead — that is expected to be one of the nation’s largest rallies since the 2003 protests against the American- and British-led invasion of Iraq.
“He needs to be called out,” said Harley Day, 23, a student who was among the protesters assembled in Regent’s Park in West London. “His bigotry, his sexism, his Islamophobia, his general xenophobia and crass inability to empathize.”
The demonstrators received tactical and rhetorical support from Sadiq Khan, a son of Pakistani immigrants who is the first Muslim to serve as mayor of London. The president has accused the mayor of being weak on terrorism; the mayor has called the president a menace to democracy, and also signed off on the flying of the giant balloon.
A security fence around Winfield House, the United States ambassador’s residence in London, where President Trump will spend the night on Thursday. Protesters say they will try to keep him awake.
“The special relationship means we speak out when the values we both hold dear seem under threat,” Mr. Khan wrote on Twitter.
That relationship — personified by the close bonds of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s — is being tested as never before. Mr. Trump’s disdain for the alliances and organizations the United States helped forge after World War II has unsettled the international order. So has his insistence, at a NATO leaders’ summit meeting this week, that America’s partners have taken advantage of the United States by not contributing enough to collective military spending.
Even as the president’s aides choreographed a visit designed to have Mr. Trump spend as little time as possible in London and to keep him out of sight of any protests, he seemed unfazed.
In an interview published on Thursday evening by The Sun, Mr. Trump said he was dismayed by the protests.
“I guess when they put out blimps to make me feel unwelcome, no reason for me to go to London,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “I used to love London as a city. I haven’t been there in a long time. But when they make you feel unwelcome, why would I stay there?”
Mrs. May angered many Britons with her diplomatic overtures to Mr. Trump, including a White House meeting at which he clasped her hands, and he has shown little regard for her. He stoked outrage in Britain and earned a sharp rebuke from Mrs. May last November when he recirculated anti-Islam videos from the far-right group Britain First. And in the interview with The Sun, he criticized Mrs. May’s approach to Brexit and repeated his accusations that Mr. Khan had been soft on terrorism.
The awkwardness may hang over Mr. Trump’s plan to meet with Queen Elizabeth II. He is scheduled to have tea with the queen on Friday.
Critics of Mr. Trump on both sides of the Atlantic have called the meeting an indignity for the monarch, who has met every president since Harry S. Truman, save for Lyndon B. Johnson. “Imagine her revulsion and sadness when her dignity is assaulted by the presence of an American President who represents a spectacular degeneracy of the virtues she embodies,” Steve Schmidt, who advised John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and recently left the Republican Party, wrote on Twitter.
More than 50 British organizations are involved in the protests, which aim to dog the president at nearly every stop of his visit.
“There has never been a president as bad as Donald Trump,” John Rees, a leader of a group called the Stop War Coalition, said in Regent’s Park, where protesters thronged outside metal barriers as men in suits, wearing sunglasses and earpieces, stared back silently.
“The man is a wrecking ball!” Mr. Reed shouted. (“He’s a criminal!” the crowd shouted back.) “He’s a wrecking ball for peace and justice in the world!” (“’Cause all he cares about is money!” they replied.)
The protests outside Blenheim Palace continued even as Mr. Trump, Mrs. May and around 150 guests dined on Scottish salmon, Hereford beef fillet and strawberries with clotted-cream ice cream. Mr. Trump and Philip May, the prime minister’s husband, wore tuxedos, while Mrs. May wore a sleeveless red gown, and Melania Trump, the first lady, wore a pleated pale yellow gown.
On Thursday evening, Together Against Trump, an umbrella organization, planned a “wall of sound,” with a relentless stream of slogans, whistles, banging of pots and drums to disrupt the visit, even though they were kept sufficiently far away from Winfield House, the ambassador’s residence, to make it difficult to keep the president awake.
Kate Gartside, a screenwriter, said she would continue to protest “until I get hungry, which could be midnight.”
She added: “I’m here to show this monster that we really don’t like him. He’s against everything we feel is good about humanity.”
Mr. Khan, the mayor, has endorsed the march.
“Londoners have always chosen hope over fear, unity over division, and have approached challenges with optimism rather than despair,” Mr. Khan wrote in the London Evening Standard. “Time and again our city has chosen hope over fear and unity over division. So now more than ever we have a responsibility to stand up for our values and ensure our voice is heard around the world. We want and need the U.S. to stand by our side as a beacon of tolerance, openness and respect — as it always has before.”
Owen Jones, a left-wing journalist and lead organizer of Britain’s “Stop Trump” protests, said on Wednesday: “We need to show that we abhor everything that Trump represents: the bigotry, racism, anti-Muslim prejudice and misogyny.”
On Friday morning, some protesters plan to follow Mr. Trump to Chequers, the country house of the prime minister, where he and Mrs. May will hold talks on security and trade issues.
The main demonstration, “Together Against Trump,” is planned in London for 2 p.m. on Friday, with the giant balloon. Muslim groups also plan to march in protest after Friday Prayer. The police expect more than 100,000 demonstrators.
On Saturday, supporters plan to march from the United States Embassy to Whitehall, where government offices, including those of the prime minister, are concentrated. The Metropolitan Police said on Thursday that they were imposing restrictions on that rally and a counter-demonstration “in order to prevent serious disorder and disruption to Londoners.”
At Windsor Castle, west of London, where Mr. Trump and his wife are to meet Queen Elizabeth II, protests are expected. The president and the first lady will then travel to the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, where they will spend the weekend. But it will hardly be peaceful.
“Donald Trump is not welcome here,” the Scottish Labour and Scottish Green parties said in a statement. “The horrific scenes at the Mexican border are a repudiation of decent human values. Caging children like animals is barbaric. We cannot roll out the red carpet for a U.S. president that treats human beings this way.”
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/technology/twitter-followers-nyt.html
Ashton Kutcher had 19.1 million followers on Wednesday. As Twitter began cutting fake accounts, that dropped to 18 million on Thursday evening, a loss of 1.1 million or nearly 6 percent.
Many celebrities, politicians and so-called social media influencers found their Twitter followings knocked down a few digits on Thursday as the company slashed tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users’ followers.
For example, the actor Ashton Kutcher, an active member since the company’s early days who led many other celebrities to embrace the platform, lost more than a million of his followers. On Wednesday afternoon, he had 19.1 million. By Thursday evening, that was down to 18 million, a drop of nearly 6 percent.
Oprah Winfrey, who sent her inaugural tweet in 2009, had her following cut by about 1.4 million between Wednesday and Thursday evening. Ellen DeGeneres lost two million, leaving her at 76.1 million followers.
The basketball star Shaquille O’Neal also lost about a million, dropping from 15.3 million followers. Rihanna lost more than two million — but she still has 86.8 million people watching her tweets. Katy Perry saw her count drop by three million to 107 million. Kim Kardashian West also lost a couple of million. She was at 58.5 million late Thursday as the purge continued.
Aly Pavela, a Twitter spokeswoman, said the work of locking and eliminating suspicious accounts from users’ followers would continue over the coming days.
The company is taking the action to restore trust in its platform. Many users have inflated their followings with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers.
When the work is done, Twitter expects it will have reduced the total follower count on the platform by about 6 percent — a substantial drop.
President Trump, who has used Twitter as a way to speak directly to both loyal voters and critics, lost about 340,000 followers in the Twitter purge, knocked down to 53 million from 53.4 millon on Wednesday. His predecessor, President Barack Obama, took a much bigger hit, losing three million followers in about one day. (He started with many more, dropping to 101 million on Thursday from 104 million the day before.)
lost about 300,000 followers, dropping from 10.9 million to 10.6 million in one day’s time.
And in the interest of full disclosure: The main account of The New York Times dropped by nearly 732,000 followers, starting at about 42.3 million on Wednesday and hitting 41.6 million on Thursday evening.
But even more typical users saw losses in the hundreds or thousands. Many journalists with robust Twitter pages saw their followings reduced, although some took it in stride.
Twitter’s move could also be felt in high government offices around the world. Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, lost about one-third of his Twitter followers in one day. On Wednesday, Mr. Kagame, who has been Rwanda’s top leader for nearly two decades, had about 1.8 million followers. On Thursday evening, that number dropped to 1.2 million.
Queen Rania of Jordan lost about 300,000 followers, dropping to 10.6 million in one day’s time. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, lost more than 200,000, leaving him with 13 million.
Even Pope Francis shed 100,000 from his digital flock. He has 17 million remaining.
Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, noticed his shrinking following on his own. “If you are a fake person following me,” he joked, “please raise your hand.”
An investigation by The Times in January found that one small company in Florida sold fake followers and other social media engagement to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, including politicians, models, actors and authors. The revelations prompted calls in Congress for intervention by the Federal Trade Commission and investigations in at least two states.
In the aftermath of this week’s follower purge, people who have built their celebrity on social media platforms took a hit as well. Justin Bieber had been stripped of about three million followers so far, while Ariana Grande lost about 932,000.
Some celebrities saw more than just a meager cut. Kathy Ireland, the onetime swimsuit model who presides over a half-billion-dollar licensing empire, lost a whopping 77 percent of her followers between Wednesday and Thursday evening.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/europe/trump-nato-body-language.html
President Trump and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, exchanged their usual firm handshake in Brussels on Wednesday.
BRUSSELS — As President Trump prepared to leave the NATO summit meeting in his disgruntled wake, the story of his visit could be told in the tight smiles, stiff handshakes and averted gazes he exchanged with the people who are supposed to be some of his closest European allies.
With few leaders willing to publicly push back against Mr. Trump’s aggressive haggling over military spending, observers were left to study his body language, as well as that of his allies and aides. At times, attempts to decipher the mood of the president and other heads of state felt akin to studying a very sophisticated and multilingual high school cafeteria.
For starters, there appeared to be cliques, with a grimacing Mr. Trump often on the outs. As leaders prepared for a so-called (and perhaps dysfunctional) family photo, Mr. Trump’s contemporaries walked ahead and chatted together while the president hung back with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president.
Mr. Trump with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
During a group photo shoot, leaders seemed to glance at Mr. Trump out of the corners of their eyes, if they looked at him at all. The coverage of the icy-appearing exchanges caught the attention of at least two high-profile White House aides, who were quick to declare the analysis “fake news.”
“Fake News Media outlets FAIL to mention the photo of President @realDonaldTrump looking up toward the sky with others,” Dan Scavino, the president’s social media director, wrote on Twitter, “is that of an impressive flyover of helicopters from 13 Alied Nations as seen here off the reflection of the @NATO building. Way to go FAKE NEWS!”
Mr. Scavino’s criticism was also shared by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. On Thursday, the White House had no immediate comment on the photogenic qualities of the president’s relationships.
Aside from awkward group photographs, there was the usual handshake analysis of Mr. Trump’s greeting with allies, including President Emmanuel Macron of France. Last month, Mr. Macron gripped the president’s hand so tightly that he left a thumbprint.
(The verdict this time? Firm, as usual.)
Mr. Trump’s tendency to be good-natured in front of his allies but aggressive behind their backs added an element of chaos and confusion when leaders went before the cameras.
While seated in front of the news media, the president gave a cheery readout of his discussion with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose country he’d eviscerated hours earlier at a breakfast she hadn’t attended. Seated next to him, the German chancellor did not echo the president’s cheery comments about their “very, very good relationship.”
In the glare of the spotlight, even the president’s aides fell under a microscope. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, looked particularly pained during a breakfast at which Mr. Trump said Germany was “captive” to Russia. For months, rumors about Mr. Kelly’s frustrations with his job have feverishly circulated through Washington. (Vanity Fair added to them just two days ago.)
According to one senior White House official, who described private conversations only on the condition of anonymity, rumors of Mr. Kelly’s demise are exaggerated. Mr. Kelly has so far outlasted constant speculation about his ouster because he is able to intervene in staffing dramas and to face an often frustrated president, the official said.
But at NATO, Mr. Trump’s gruff interactions with allies on Wednesday underscored the degree to which Mr. Kelly lacks influence over how the president behaves. When it came to the video of Mr. Kelly’s tight-lipped expressions, the White House told The Washington Post that there was no veiled frustration to decipher: The retired general was simply disappointed in the breakfast offerings.
As the summit meeting progressed, other leaders grew more pointed about Mr. Trump’s habit of reversing course and pulling out sharp elbows after charming his contemporaries in person.
“Trump was in a good mood,” Xavier Bettel, the prime minister of Luxembourg, told reporters about the president’s behavior at a NATO dinner. “He said Europe is a continent he appreciates, and which has to develop its military spending further.”
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/us/emmett-till-death-investigation.html
The federal government has quietly revived its investigation into the murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy whose abduction and killing remains, almost 63 years later, among the starkest and most searing examples of racial violence in the South.
The Justice Department said that its renewed inquiry, which it described in a report submitted to Congress in late March, was “based upon the discovery of new information.” It is not clear, though, whether the government will be able to bring charges against anyone: Most episodes investigated in recent years as part of a federal effort to re-examine racially motivated murders have not led to prosecutions, or even referrals to state authorities.
The Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday, but it appeared that the government had chosen to devote new attention to the case after a central witness, Carolyn Bryant Donham, recanted parts of her account of what transpired in August 1955. Two men who confessed to killing Emmett, only after they had been acquitted by an all-white jury in Mississippi, are dead.
[Read about the woman linked to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till]
Yet the Till case, which staggered the nation after the boy’s open-coffin funeral and the publication of photographs of his mutilated body, has never faded away, especially in a region still grappling with the horrors of its past. Even in recent years, historical markers about the case have been vandalized.
“I don’t think this is something the South is going to forget easily,” said Joyce Chiles, a former district attorney in Mississippi who was involved in a mid-2000s review of the Till case that concluded with no new charges.
For more than six decades, Emmett’s death has stood as a symbol of Southern racism. The boy was visiting family in Money, Miss., deep in the Mississippi Delta, from Chicago when he went to a store owned by Ms. Donham and her then husband, who was one of the men who ultimately confessed to Emmett’s murder. Emmett was kidnapped and killed days later, his body tethered to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire and then cast into a river.
The case — gruesome and shocking — became a catalyst for the broader civil rights movement.
But Ms. Donham’s description of the events leading to the attack has repeatedly shifted. One account had the boy only insulting her verbally. In court, but without jurors present, she claimed that Emmett had made physical contact with her and spoken in crude, sexual language. She later told the F.B.I. that Emmett had touched her hand.
And when she spoke to the researcher Timothy B. Tyson in 2008, she acknowledged that it was “not true” that Emmett had grabbed her or made vulgar remarks. She told Dr. Tyson, who published a book about the case last year, that “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
Emmett TillCreditAssociated Press
Ms. Donham could not be reached for comment on Thursday, but Dr. Tyson said at a news conference that while he supported the inquiry, he believed it to be “a political show” to distract from the Trump administration’s controversies. He said that he had spoken with the F.B.I. last year and complied with a subpoena for his research materials.
Ms. Chiles, the former Mississippi prosecutor, said that Ms. Donham’s recantation should have provoked a new examination by the federal authorities, but she also suggested that even truthful testimony in the mid-1950s would not have changed the legal outcome given the racism of the time.
“I don’t think it would have resulted in a different verdict,” she said.
Airickca Gordon-Taylor, a cousin of Emmett’s who was raised by his mother, said Thursday that some members of the Till family had previously learned of the Justice Department’s inquiry. Ms. Gordon-Taylor, who is president of the Mamie Till Mobley Memorial Foundation, said the news “came as no surprise” and declined further comment.
The Till case is a renewed and prominent test for the Justice Department officials charged with investigating long-ago murders that are thought to have been racially motivated. Since 2006, according to the Justice Department, its efforts have led to five successful prosecutions, including that of Edgar Ray Killen, who was involved in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi and died in prison this year.
The last successful prosecution came in 2010, when a former Alabama state trooper was convicted of manslaughter for the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a protester whose death led to the Selma to Montgomery march.
But prosecutors have faced daunting challenges. Beyond familiar barriers — such as a statute of limitations, the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy and the reality that many people of the era have died — racially motivated attacks committed before 1968 cannot be prosecuted under a federal hate crimes law.
“Even with our best efforts,” the Justice Department told Congress this year, “investigations into historic cases are exceptionally difficult, and rarely will justice be reached inside of a courtroom.”
In the Till case, that could again prove true.
The Justice Department, whose new inquiry was first reported by The Associated Press, last began a significant review of the Till case in 2004, but prosecutors ultimately determined that the statute of limitations had left them without any charges they could pursue in a federal court. The F.B.I. still conducted an inquiry, which included an exhumation of Emmett’s body from an Illinois cemetery, for about two years to settle whether there were any state crimes that could still be prosecuted.
Ms. Chiles presented the case to a grand jury and asked that Ms. Donham be charged with manslaughter, but the panel did not return any indictments.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/us/politics/fbi-agent-house-republicans.html
WASHINGTON — The embattled F.B.I. agent who oversaw the opening of the Russia investigation mounted an aggressive defense of himself and the F.B.I. on Thursday, rejecting accusations that he let his private political views bias his official actions and labeling Republicans’ preoccupation with him “another victory notch in Putin’s belt.”
“Let me be clear, unequivocally and under oath: Not once in my 26 years of defending my nation did my personal opinions impact any official action I took,” the agent, Peter Strzok, told House lawmakers investigating what Republicans say is evidence of rampant bias at the top levels of the F.B.I.
But in defending himself and his agency, Mr. Strzok had to weather hours of blistering attacks by Republicans, who accused him not only of personal animus toward President Trump but also of blatant lying and moral misconduct with a senior F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page.
It was a remarkable day of shouting matches and personal attacks that showcased the deep partisan divide over the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The performance by Republicans, echoing Mr. Trump’s own lines of attack, demonstrated just how far many in the party have moved since the days when they were seen as the party of law enforcement, deferential to its power and prerogatives.
Democrats, on the other side of the now-gaping divide over the F.B.I. and Justice Department, said that Republicans, by launching their own politically motivated investigation of the investigators in an attempt to bolster Mr. Trump, were ignoring an attack by a hostile foreign power on American democracy.
The public comments were Mr. Strzok’s first since volumes of private text messages between him and Ms. Page were disclosed in a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general that found no evidence that their personal views had swayed the outcome on the Hillary Clinton email case. The agent concluded his opening remarks on Thursday with a pointed broadside against his antagonizers.
“I understand we are living in a political era in which insults and insinuation often drown out honesty and integrity,” Mr. Strzok said, continuing: “I have the utmost respect for Congress’s oversight role, but I truly believe that today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”
He concluded: “As someone who loves this country and cherishes its ideals, it is profoundly painful to watch and even worse to play a part in.”
The fiery hearing, convened by the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, devolved into a spectacle almost as soon as it began, as pent-up rage between House Republicans and the F.B.I. broke into the open in spectacular fashion, including with an almost immediate threat to hold Mr. Strzok in contempt of Congress after he said the F.B.I. had barred him from answering certain questions.
As the hearing stretched deep into the afternoon, it broke into pandemonium when Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, invoked Mr. Strzok’s extramarital affair with Ms. Page to question his character.
“I can’t help but wonder when I see you looking there with a little smirk, how many times did you look so innocent into your wife’s eye and lie to her?” he said.
Democrats shouted that the statement was “intolerable witness harassment.” Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, Democrat of New Jersey, demanded, “Do you need your medication?”
Mr. Strzok, visibly irked, insisted that he had “always told the truth” and shot back that Mr. Gohmert’s invocation of “a family member who I have acknowledged hurting goes more to a discussion about your character and what you stand for.”
Republicans were intent on painting Mr. Strzok as seething with contempt for Mr. Trump and his supporters — and by implication, painting the agency’s investigation of the president as motivated by animus.
“He thinks calling someone destabilizing isn’t bias,” said Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, referring to texts sent by Mr. Strzok. “He thinks protecting the country from someone he hasn’t even begun to investigate isn’t bias. He thinks promising to ‘stop’ someone he is supposed to be fairly investigating from ever becoming president isn’t bias.”
Mr. Gowdy dismissed Mr. Strzok’s defenses, saying that the agent had a “most unusual and largely self-serving definition of bias” that had undermined the fair administration of justice.
Peter Strzok, the F.B.I. deputy assistant director, arrived to testify before the House Committees on the Judiciary and Oversight & Government Reform on Thursday.
To a surprising extent, Mr. Strzok appeared just as intent on defending the F.B.I.’s actions, the integrity of the Russia investigation that continues under Robert S. Mueller III and his own behavior.
“At every step, at every investigative decision, there were multiple layers of people above me, assistant director, deputy director, director of the F.B.I., and multiple layers of people below me, section chiefs, unit chiefs and analysts, all of whom were involved in all of these decisions,” he told Mr. Gowdy after the chairman pressed him. “They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them.”
“The suggestion that I, in some dark chamber in the F.B.I., would somehow cast aside all of these procedures, all of these safeguards and do this is astounding to me,” he said. “It couldn’t happen.”
For their part, Democrats tried to run interference for Mr. Strzok, using parliamentary points of order and other tactics to protect him from Republican prying. One Democrat, Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, said Mr. Strzok deserved a Purple Heart.
“All of these inquiries about your political opinions as revealed by these text messages are irrelevant and wrong, unless it can be shown — as it has not been shown, as was found definitively not to be the case in the Hillary investigation and has not been shown in the Russia investigation — that they affected any decisions in the investigation,” Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told Mr. Strzok.
Instead, Democrats accused Republicans of attacking a veteran F.B.I. agent to divert attention from Russia’s effort to promote the election of Mr. Trump.
“There is a criminal investigation into the Trump campaign and possible crimes related to the 2016 presidential election involving collusion with Russian spies to sell out our democracy and hijack the presidency,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York. “My colleagues in the cover-up caucus don’t like that criminal investigation, and therefore, they need to identify a villain. Mr. Strzok, tag, you’re it.”
Mr. Strzok, a career agent, played a pivotal role in two of the bureau’s most politically fraught cases in recent memory: the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email practices as secretary of state and a separate inquiry into Russia’s election interference. He briefly served on Mr. Mueller’s team, as well, before being removed after the discovery of his text messages with Ms. Page.
In one oft-cited exchange from August 2016, Ms. Page, who also worked on both investigations, said to Mr. Strzok that Trump was “not ever going to become president, right?”
“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Mr. Strzok replied.
Mr. Strzok said on Thursday that he deeply regretted the messages, but that they did not amount to more than private political beliefs. He defended that particular text as a late-night, “off-the-cuff” message after “then-candidate Trump” insulted “the immigrant family of a fallen war hero,” Humayun Khan.
“And my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior” was “that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States,” he said.
He added that a broader look at his texts would show disparaging remarks toward all the candidates in the 2016 campaign.
“To suggest we can parse down the shorthand like they’re some contract for a car is simply not consistent with my or most people’s use of text messaging,” Mr. Strzok said.
House Republicans were not placated by such explanations, and repeatedly instructed Mr. Strzok to read select text messages aloud, amid other questions about prosecutorial decisions in the Clinton case and his interactions with Mr. Mueller.
“What does Trump support smell like?” Representative Robert Goodlatte of Virginia, the Judiciary Committee chairman, asked, referring to one message in which Mr. Strzok wrote that he could “SMELL” Trump supporters in a southern Virginia Walmart.
A former Army officer, Mr. Strzok has worked at the F.B.I. for more than two decades. He rose quickly through its ranks, earning a reputation within the bureau as one of its most savvy and reliable counterintelligence agents. It was that reputation and increasingly senior positions that landed him on the teams investigating both Mrs. Clinton and eventually Mr. Trump.
The report on the Clinton case issued last month by the Justice Department’s inspector general was unsparing in its criticism of Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page, but found no evidence that their personal views had affected prosecutorial decisions in the case. The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, continues to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of key aspects of the Russia case.
The committees have also demanded testimony from Ms. Page, issuing a subpoena for her to appear in private for an interview and threatening her with contempt when she did not meet that deadline. Lawyers for Ms. Page said she was happy to testify, but only after the F.B.I. allowed her to review her notes and relevant case files. After two Republican chairmen issued an ultimatum on Wednesday, Ms. Page was scheduled to take part in a private deposition on Friday and Monday.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/arts/slav-quebec-race.html
The singer Betty Bonifassi in “Slav,” a show shut down last week in Montreal following protests over its mostly white production.
MONTREAL — Several theaters in Quebec are forging ahead with plans to stage “Slav,” the show shut down here last week amid accusations of racial myopia, while its director has been lashing out at his critics for “muzzling” artistic freedom.
The Montreal International Jazz Festival closed the production, a “theatrical odyssey based on slave songs,” after only a handful of performances in the wake of an outcry over a majority-white cast portraying black slaves. Only two of the seven people in the show, directed by Robert Lepage and starring Betty Bonifassi, were black.
While critics of the show have welcomed the closure as a necessary cultural reckoning, several leading theater directors in Quebec rallied behind Mr. Lepage this week, citing their concerns that closing a production by such an internationally acclaimed director could have a chilling effect on artistic expression in Canada. At least four theaters are proceeding with productions of “Slav,” even if that means braving protests.
Seldom has a theatrical production in Canada proved so polarizing. The show, which spawned a national debate about cultural appropriation, prompted theater critics and black activists to denounce it for masking black suffering. Protesters heckled audience members in Montreal as “white supremacists” and blocked them from entering the theater, forcing police intervention (the jazz festival said over the weekend that it had shut the show because of security concerns, not censorship).
But David Laferrière, director of the Gilles-Vigneault Theater in St.-Jérôme, north of Montreal, which will show “Slav” in early 2019, said that, while he was sympathetic to the black community’s concerns about casting, canceling the show would mean recklessly silencing dialogue and debate. “I just want to show art,” he said. “The work is fallible but it needs to be seen.”
He added that he wasn’t worried about protests, “as long as no one slaps anyone,” as happened in Montreal, where a white audience member slapped a black protester in the face.
Marie-Pierre Simoneau, director of La Maison des arts Desjardins Drummondville, a theater in central Quebec that will also show “Slav” next year, said she had been shocked by all the fuss. The role of a theater, she argued, was not to adjudicate political issues or get the approbation of minority groups, but, rather, to create a space between art and the public.
“It is a matter of artistic freedom for a theater to show what it wants to show,” she said. Invoking Ms. Bonifassi’s own defense that “Slav” was about slavery in all its incarnations, not just African-American slavery, she added: “I saw the play myself and saw the casting in the context that slavery doesn’t have only one color, it wasn’t just in the cotton fields.”
The backlash against the backlash that shuttered the show reflects a particular Quebecois distaste for orthodoxy or authoritarianism of any kind, including in culture — a legacy of the 1960s, when Quebec society revolted against the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church during a period known as the “Quiet Revolution.”
Indeed, commentators across the political spectrum have defended Mr. Lepage and Ms. Bonifassi after days of their being eviscerated in the media for tone-deafness. Writing in Le Journal de Montréal, an influential tabloid, the columnist Guy Fournier this week blamed “culture appropriation snipers” for shutting down the show, labeling the protesters as extremists who “shoot at anything that moves — if it is white.”
David Laferrière, director of the Gilles-Vigneault Theater in St.-Jèrôme, Quebec, which will show “Slav” in early 2019.
The expressions of support for Mr. Lepage and Ms. Bonifassi came after the two broke their silence about the closing of their show.
Writing on the Facebook page of Ex Machina, his theater production company, Mr. Lepage complained that “Slav” had been “officially muzzled.” “Everything that led to this cancellation is a direct blow to artistic freedom,” he wrote, adding that, “since the dawn of time, theater has been based on a very simple principle, that of playing someone else.”
Mr. Lepage said that over his long career, he had “devoted entire shows denouncing injustices done throughout history to specific cultural groups, without actors from said groups” and “without anyone accusing me of cultural appropriation, let alone of racism.”
Equally unrepentant, Ms. Bonifassi railed against the violent “intimidation” that had greeted the production. In an open letter to La Presse, a leading French language newspaper, she warned that “a theater must be free to shine — and to make mistakes.” She suggested that the pursuit of culture ought to be colorblind: “Are we going to forbid a young Haitian woman from studying Bach, as Nina Simone was able to do?”
But cultural critics, including black artists, accused Slav’s creators of self-serving narcissism and of failing to address the fundamental question of why they had failed to cast black actors as black slaves in the first place.
The hip-hop artist and historian Aly Ndiaye, known by his stage name, Webster, who consulted on the Montreal production, said he was very disappointed that Mr. Lepage had refused to address the critical question of why so few black faces were represented in the theater, in the arts and on television in Quebec. “He missed his opportunity to change history,” he said, calling Mr. Lepage’s Facebook post “insipid” and “egocentric.”
Marilou Craft, a black activist, whose searing critique of “Slav” in Urbania, a cultural magazine, helped spur the protests, accused Mr. Lepage and Ms. Bonifassi of hiding behind the cloak of “freedom of expression” to distract from criticism.
Mr. Lepage’s company has not said whether it plans to make any casting changes for “Slav.” And Mr. Lepage, no stranger to controversy in an august career that has seen him range across theater, ballet, opera and circus arts, could soon be in for another cultural firefight.
His coming show, “Kanata,” created in conjunction with France’s Théâtre du Soleil, examines unsavory aspects of Canadian history, including the assimilation and subjugation of indigenous children at residential schools.
Several critics of the show, which will be shown in Paris in December and in Quebec in 2020, are already complaining that it has a glaring omission: Canadian indigenous actors.
Ex Machina said in a statement that the production consisted of 34 people from multiple backgrounds, and that the show planned to use video testimonials from Canadian indigenous people, including victims of residential schools, and had also consulted widely with indigenous leaders.
But Maïtée Labrecque-Saganash, an indigenous activist in northern Quebec, asked why the show was not hiring indigenous Canadian actors or collaborating with an indigenous theater company “if the goal is to pay tribute and do justice to indigenous peoples.”
by:
2018-07-11
AT&T headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Credit Dylan Hollingsworth for The New York Times
The federal government on Thursday mounted a new effort to unravel AT&T’s deal with Time Warner, a blockbuster merger that has already started to reshape the media industry.
The deal was finalized a month ago, after a federal judge rejected the government’s argument that the $85.4 billion agreement would harm competition and consumers.
The combination of the two companies has created a media and telecommunications giant with television stations, a movie studio, nearly 160 million wireless customers and a nationwide satellite television service, DirecTV. An AT&T executive is already in charge of Time Warner properties like HBO and the news network CNN.
The judge’s decision had almost immediately set off a round of intense deal talks among many of the biggest names in the industry, including Comcast and 21st Century Fox. Many media executives, including those at AT&T and Time Warner, say mergers among their companies are necessary to better compete against tech giants like Netflix and Amazon.
The Department of Justice filed its notice of appeal on the same day that Netflix beat out HBO for the most Emmy nominations — ending the premium channel’s 17-year run as the most-nominated outlet.
The Justice Department declined to comment. But experts say the appeal sends a clear signal that the government, despite its court loss, will be aggressive on deals between companies with complementary businesses, known as vertical mergers. Immediately after the AT&T-Time Warner merger was approved last month, Comcast entered a bidding war with the Walt Disney Company for the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox.
“If they had not appealed it, it would have been a green light for vertical mergers to proceed apace,” said Andrew J. Schwartzman of the Georgetown University Law Center.
AT&T’s general counsel, David McAtee, expressed confidence about the company’s chances in an appeal. “The court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based, and well-reasoned,” he said in a statement. “While the losing party in litigation always has the right to appeal if it wishes, we are surprised that the D.O.J. has chosen to do so under these circumstances.”
The plan to appeal was made public late in the afternoon; shares in AT&T fell 1.3 percent in after-hours trading.
The Justice Department had considered filing an injunction to stop the deal from closing after the judge, Richard J. Leon of United States District Court in Washington, approved it on June 12. But it did not go ahead with the motion because AT&T said the media arm would be operated as a separate group, making it easier to unwind the business should the Justice Department succeed in an appeal.
The latest legal maneuvering will not immediately change the business. But if the Justice Department ultimately prevails in its appeal, AT&T would have to detach the Time Warner business, now renamed Warner Media.
The government’s approach to the AT&T-Time Warner merger contrasts sharply with its relatively quick approval of Disney’s proposed acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment properties. That agreement, in which Disney said it would pay $71.3 billion for Fox’s television and movie business, was approved in June, about six months after it was announced. Transactions of such size typically take a year or longer.
The Justice Department’s decision to appeal could benefit Rupert Murdoch, the Fox chairman, who has supported Disney’s offer over Comcast’s, according to Craig Moffett, a longtime media analyst.
Comcast appeared to already be backing away from its bid, but the government’s appeal could make the giant cable company move away even faster by raising more doubts about whether the Justice Department would approve such a deal.
“Lobbing in this hand grenade right now sort of seals Comcast’s fate,” Mr. Moffett said.
Comcast is locked in a separate bidding war for control of the European satellite broadcaster Sky, which has more than 23 million customers across five countries. After Fox improved its offer to control Sky on Wednesday, Comcast quickly topped that bid with one of its own, valuing the company at $34 billion.
The AT&T and Time Warner merger has generated such intense interest partly because of the political overtones. As a candidate, Donald J. Trump, who had frequently criticized the Time Warner property CNN as “fake news,” vowed to stop the AT&T-Time Warner merger if elected to the White House.
“We will not approve in my administration because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” he said at the time.
The Justice Department, however, said politics had played no role in the decision to oppose the AT&T-Time Warner deal.
Mr. Trump exhibited more rosy feelings for the deal between Disney and Fox. “I know that the president spoke with Rupert Murdoch earlier today, congratulated him on the deal,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in December.
The government sued to block the AT&T-Time Warner deal late last year, saying the combination of companies that distribute and produce content would lead to higher prices for all cable customers. After a six-week trial, Judge Leon concluded that the Justice Department did not provide enough evidence that it would harm consumers and competitors.
“If there ever were an antitrust case where the parties had a dramatically different assessment of the current state of the relevant market and a fundamentally different vision of its future development, this is the one,” Judge Leon wrote in his opinion.
The filing that announced the government’s intention to appeal did not include any details about what arguments the government planned to make to a higher court, the United States Court of Appeals in Washington. If either side disagrees with the appeals court’s decision, the case could then move to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Schwartzman of the Georgetown University Law Center said the odds of winning are low for the side appealing its case. He and other legal experts said Judge Leon’s decision was specifically tailored for AT&T’s merger with Time Warner, limiting potential problems in an appeal.
Gene Kimmelman, president of Public Knowledge and a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department, was likewise skeptical of the Justice Department’s chances, but he said the government’s intention may not ultimately be to win a court appeal.
“It signals to the market the government isn’t throwing in the towel but I think it’s a long shot because the appellate court has to defer to the trial judge on facts,” he said.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/us/trump-migrants-children-border.html
Mirce Alva Lopez, 31, with her 3-year-old son, Adan, at the bus station in Phoenix this week after being reunited.
The Trump administration said Thursday that it had complied with a judge’s order and reunited all of the eligible children under the age of 5 that it had in custody with their migrant parents. But Nazario Jacinto-Carrillo’s desperate voice and haunting questions, repeated over and over on a phone line from Guatemala, made clear that the crisis over child separations remained far from resolved.
“When are they going to give them back?” Mr. Jacinto-Carrillo asked of the thousands of children still in custody. He had trekked to the United States with his 5-year-old daughter, Filomena. He was deported. She remains in foster care in New York, where she recently turned 6. “I want her back in Guatemala,” he pleaded.
Administration officials told reporters that the government had reunited 57 of the 103 migrant children under the age of 5, complying with a judicial order. The other 46 were deemed “ineligible” for a variety of reasons. Some of their parents had been accused of crimes. One parent had a communicable disease. In a dozen cases, the parents had been deported already without their children, making their reunification more challenging.
And that’s just the youngest of the child detainees. There are nearly 3,000 children in detention across the United States, the vast majority from Central America, who fall between ages 5 and 17. Reunification with their parents is now underway as the government scrambles to meet a court-imposed deadline of July 26. Mr. Jacinto-Carrillo’s daughter, given her age, appeared to be in the second group.
Exactly how the government plans to reunify parents such as Mr. Jacinto-Carrillo, who were sent back home without their children, remains to be seen. Officials said they had no plans to allow the parents to re-enter the country.
“We don’t have the legal authority to bring these individuals back into the country for reunification purposes,” said Matthew Albence, executive director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the detention and deportation division.
But there are ways around restrictions on permitting deported parents to return to the United States. The Obama administration, in the rare cases in which such a separation occurred, issued “humanitarian parole” to the mother or father, allowing her or him to enter the United States for the purpose of picking up the child.
In a joint status update filed Thursday in the Federal District Court of San Diego, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the government over family separations, said that it is not aware of any specific steps the Trump administration has taken to locate parents who have been deported without their young children.
The government requested a flexible timetable for locating, contacting and reuniting those families.
Eleven of the 12 children under 5 whose parents were deported are from Central America, and one is from Romania, according to a person who has seen the list.
Reuniting the families also has been challenging for logistical reasons. Many children were sent to facilities thousands of miles away from their parents, and some are too young or scared to provide accurate information about their parents or their journeys. In New York, Phoenix and other cities where reunions took place this week, the authorities had flown in parents from around the country.
To speed up the reunions, the government is expected to no longer insist on fingerprinting all adults in a household where a child would live, or require home visits by a social worker. Instead, the authorities will release children to a parent once a familial tie has been established, provided the parent or guardian does not have a criminal record.
Nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents largely under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement program, which resulted in the criminal prosecutions of their parents for illegal entry. The children were removed from their parents, with whom they had crossed the border, and placed in dozens of government-licensed shelters and foster care homes while their parents remained in detention.
Migrants from Central America arriving at the bus station in McAllen, Tex., after being released from government detention in June.
Of the migrants older than 5, the government officials would not say Thursday how many would be deemed ineligible to be reunited with their families.
Most of the families separated from their children said they were fleeing gang or domestic violence in Central America and planned to seek asylum in the United States.
It has been one month since Mario, a migrant from Honduras, was separated from his daughter, Fabiola, 10. He was released from immigration detention on June 24. He has since delivered a plethora of documents to the authorities to prove parentage, but so far has not recovered his child.
“I am in bad shape because, when I was released, I was told I would be reunited with her,” said Mario, who is in El Paso at a temporary migrant shelter just 10 blocks from where his daughter is living, with other children removed from their parents.
Having heard that the government had started turning over younger children to parents, he said, “I ask God that soon I will also be reunited with my daughter. I hope to experience this joy soon.”
Last month, President Trump ended the policy of separating families amid outcry from the public and political leaders on both sides of the aisle. But his executive order on June 20 did not outline steps for reunification.
Shortly before the government officially announced its “zero-tolerance” policy in May, it issued a memorandum setting stringent new rules for vetting parents, relatives and others who wished to recover a child from government custody.
Among other things, the memo said that the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for the minors, must collect the name, date of birth, address, fingerprint and identification of a potential sponsor, who might be the parent, and of “all adult members in the potential sponsor’s household.” Administration officials said the measures were intended to protect the children from trafficking.
The A.C.L.U. argued in court that the lengthy procedures were unnecessary, given that the parents had already been fingerprinted at the border and that the children had been forcibly removed from them.
Advocates said they began seeing signs that the administration would waive the requirements on Wednesday: Many young children were released to their parents despite the fact that the adults had not fulfilled previously stipulated steps, like fingerprinting. The government performed DNA tests on some, but not all, of them, some advocates said.
For Mr. Jacinto-Carrillo, speaking from Huehuetenango, a town in the western highlands of Guatemala, another day had passed without his daughter.
He says that ICE agents told him when he was deported that his daughter would be put on a plane to rejoin him within two weeks. But two weeks passed, then another, then another. His questions remain. “Why haven’t we heard any news?” he asked.
Mr. Jacinto-Carillo is illiterate. His only news comes from the radio and phone calls that he makes every three or four days to the Guatemalan consulate in Los Angeles, whose employees have told him to be patient. He did not know, for example, that the American government was reporting progress in the reunification of children.
“You’re telling me that the government returned all of the children on Tuesday?” he asked.
He receives updates about Filomena from her social worker in New York. The girl refuses to speak to her parents, or to her 2-year-old brother, who cries for her. The social worker assures Mr. Jacinto-Carrillo that Filomena is being well taken care of, but that does little to relieve his anxiety about a detention that he considers an abduction.
“Do you know how many days?” he asked.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/us/trump-pardons.html
Alan Fields, at his home in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., is seeking a pardon for a felony conviction from 1994 in which he served one day in prison.
Gary Hendler’s application for a presidential pardon runs nearly 80 pages, detailing the places he has lived, the jobs he’s had, the schools attended, any drug use, debts, good works and a full and contrite account of the crime that led him to this point.
He even has a letter of support from his probation officer.
Mr. Hendler, who pleaded guilty in 1984 to a drug charge, was optimistic about receiving a pardon from President Barack Obama, who had pushed a more-forgiving policy for nonviolent crimes. But that opportunity came and went.
A new president took over, and with him, apparently a new way of doing things. First came a pardon for Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff convicted of criminal contempt, whose case had been promoted by the right-wing radio host Alex Jones. Then one for a former Navy sailor whose case was a conservative cause célèbre. And in June, after a trip to the White House by Kim Kardashian West, a commutation arrived for Alice Johnson, who was serving a life sentence on drug charges.
Mr. Hendler realized he needed a new strategy.
“Kellyanne Conway lives just down the beach from me on the Jersey Shore,” he said of the White House counselor. “I could get her to say something to Trump.” He knows how to reach Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor. And oh! Tucker Carlson’s sister-in-law — he rents a place to her. “I guess this is how it works now,” Mr. Hendler said.
Few constitutional powers lie so wholly at the whims of the president as the power to pardon. No details need to be worked out beforehand and no agency apparatus is needed to carry a pardon out. The president declares a person officially forgiven, and it is so.
A layer of government lawyers has long worked behind the scenes, screening the hundreds of petitions each year, giving the process the appearance of objectivity and rigor. But technically — legally — this is unnecessary. A celebrity game show approach to mercy, doling the favor out to those with political allegiance or access to fame, is fully within the law.
The show isn’t new. Absolving political allies is a notorious if decades-old practice, and Bill Clinton was hardly sticking to procedure when he included friends, family and the well-connected in his last-minute clemency spree. But Mr. Trump is not waiting for the last minute.
On Tuesday, he issued more pardons, this time for two Oregon ranchers who had been serving sentences for arson on federal land. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was apparently among the ranchers’ strongest supporters.
Mr. Trump has said he is considering pardons for Martha Stewart, the lifestyle guru, and Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, and people whose cases are championed by professional football players. He has rebuffed questions as to whether he was planning to pardon any of his own associates — or himself, for that matter.
Pardon seekers have been watching all this. Having once put their hopes in an opaque bureaucratic process, they are now approaching their shot at absolution as if marketing a hot start-up: scanning their network of acquaintances for influence and gauging degrees of separation from celebrity. What’s the best way to get a letter to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and close Trump ally? How hard would it be to pull aside Robert Jeffress, the prominent Trump-backing pastor, after a church service?
President Trump posthumously pardoned the boxer Jack Johnson in the Oval Office in May.
“It’s who you know now,” said Weldon Angelos, whose cause for clemency has been supported by politicians, judges and celebrities. At the consent of prosecutors, Mr. Angelos was released from prison in 2016, after serving a quarter of a 55-year sentence on a drug-related conviction. Now he is seeking a full pardon. “Everyone’s now trying to get their names out there, to get some buzz,” he said. “That’s the strategy I’m seeing.”
Self-promotion in pursuit of forgiveness comes naturally to some and strikes others as absurd. But there is broad agreement on one point. The standard, procedural route to presidential clemency — a process that has become ever more impenetrable — has hardly been a portrait of justice itself.
“The system,” Mr. Hendler said, “is terribly broken.”
Clemency petitions go through the Office of Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department, a system set up more than a hundred years ago to lessen the risks and hassles of leaving an entire nation’s pleas for compassion to one person. For decades, the process worked smoothly, and hundreds of clemency grants were issued each year. President Dwight D. Eisenhower alone granted over 1,000 pardons.
But starting about 40 years ago, “the prosecutors really got a hold of the process,” said Margaret Love, who was the Pardon Attorney from 1990 to 1997, and now represents clemency applicants. “They became increasingly hostile to the pardon power.”
Even as laws have grown harsher, the number of pardons has dwindled significantly.
“It is so secretive and the standards are so subjective,” Ms. Love said. “They operate like a lottery. Except a lottery is fair.”
In 2014, the Obama administration set up a clemency initiative that led to 1,715 sentence commutations, by far the most of any president. Still, this accounted for only about 5 percent of the commutation petitions submitted during his two terms. As for full pardons, the Obama administration was stingier than most of its predecessors. The traditional clemency process, as a pardon attorney described in her 2016 resignation letter, remained sidelined and backlogged.
“The process,” wrote Luke Scarmazzo of his attempt at clemency in the Obama years, “was a bureaucratic nightmare.” In 2008 Mr. Scarmazzo was sentenced to more than two decades in prison for running a medical marijuana dispensary in California. He and his co-defendant, Ricardo Montes, spent months working on an application, but in the end Mr. Montes received a commutation, while Mr. Scarmazzo did not.
Now, “instead of support from career politicians and judges, we’re seeking support from celebrities and influential social icons,” Mr. Scarmazzo wrote in an email from prison. “We’re less focused on pleasing the D.O.J. bureaucracy and more focused on grabbing the attention of the Oval Office.”
Much of the recent focus on clemency has either been on those, like Ms. Johnson, who are seeking release from prison, or on the famous pardon recipients like Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former aide to Dick Cheney. But there are countless people living quietly and whose time in the criminal justice system is years in the past, but who, because of the ever-expanding tally of consequences for felony convictions, feel permanently confined.
Alan Fields has been learning this for nearly 25 years. In 1994, he was arrested for working as a cash courier in a drug network overseen by some Detroit high-rollers. He pleaded guilty, testified and was ultimately sentenced to one day in prison. Life was his again, or what was left of it.
A teaching career was not open anymore. Insurance sales was out, given the licensing requirements. Nursing was off-limits, though he eventually married a physician — and he did manage to get work in pharmaceutical sales, because the application asked only about convictions from the previous five years. He could not go hunting, or own a gun. Even his seasons of coaching his son’s youth baseball team were cut short when the league started conducting background checks. Prison or not, a felony conviction, said Mr. Fields, 57, is “a life sentence.”
For years he studied presidential candidates, guessing their inclinations to mercy. Al Gore and Ron Paul seemed promising. Then he saw Barack Obama and thought: “O.K., this is the ideal.”
Mr. Fields’ petition, filed in 2011, was sterling. His sentencing judge wrote in support. He had not gotten so much as a speeding ticket in decades. He was planning on — and is now enrolled in — law school. He seemed to be exactly the kind of person that Mr. Obama wanted to help: a black man with a drug-related conviction who has made the most of his second chance.
The federal agents came around, asking his neighbors and co-workers about him. At the end of 2016 Mr. Fields got a letter from the Justice Department, telling him to make sure his information was up-to-date. Please respond quickly, it said, and he did.
Inauguration Day came, and went.
The soft-spoken Mr. Fields, once too embarrassed about his conviction to lobby his congressional representatives for a pardon, recognizes that the circumstances have changed.
“Now I’ve taken a different position,” he said as he gave a resigned smile across the table. “Obviously.”
On his usual Friday afternoon drive home to Dallas from Houston, a man named Doug Edwards was considering the new strategies himself. “My wife said, ‘Why don’t you send a letter to Franklin Graham?’” he said.
Mr. Edwards, 64, and his wife volunteer as hosts to children flown to the United States for surgical procedures through an organization run by Mr. Graham, the evangelical leader who supports Mr. Trump. This work was part of the case he had made when he applied for a pardon a few years earlier, as evidence that he was trying to lead a productive, rule-abiding life.
He had broken the rules in his wild youth — with a marijuana conviction from 1976 — but he had tried hard ever since, he said, “to be one small cog in a great big wheel.”
Because of his record, he could not re-enlist in the Navy, or join law enforcement, but he did go on to help build hospitals and prisons.
And that is why he won’t contact Mr. Graham.
“What a slap in the face,” he said. “I’d get it because I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. It wouldn’t be because I’m a good citizen, law-abiding, trustworthy, on the merits.”
Mr. Edwards looked up at the highway to Dallas. “Do we abide by the current law or do we take on the assumption that you get things by other avenues?” he asked. “I, Doug Edwards, choose to adhere to the letter of the law.”
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/arts/television/colbert-trump-germany-russia-nato.html
Stephen Colbert said, “I’m not ready to say that our president is a Russian agent, but I have an agent — and he doesn’t do as much for me as Trump does for Russia.”
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
‘Contentious’
President Trump began his trip to Europe by issuing broadside attacks against NATO in general and Germany specifically. Trump suggested that Germany’s reliance on Russia for much of its natural gas meant it was “totally controlled by Russia.” (Read our fact-check here.)
On “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert lamented the president’s remarks, but he didn’t sound surprised.
“As The New York Times put it, ‘Mr. Trump kicked off his meetings on a contentious note.’ Contentious is his only note! He’s a human air horn.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
Colbert said that Trump seemed to be using his claims about Germany to distract from his own relationship with the Kremlin.
“Now, I’m not ready to say that our president is a Russian agent, but I have an agent — and he doesn’t do as much for me as Trump does for Russia.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
Colbert also touched on the latest news about Trump’s dealings with North Korea. Reports emerged on Wednesday about the meeting that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had with North Korean diplomats last week — and the details didn’t sound promising.
“We’re getting reports that ‘Pompeo’s North Korea meeting went “as badly as it could have gone.”’ I’m not surprised — sometimes the second date is rough. You go back to his place, you find out it’s full of executed relatives, or worse: Limp Bizkit CDs.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, quoting from a CNN report
The Punchiest Punchlines (Applause Edition)
“A company has come out with — this is real — a $5,000 robot that applauds for you indefinitely. Yeah, in a related story, I’ll be working from home.” — CONAN O’BRIEN
“President Trump’s new White House communications director has changed the White House lighting so Trump looks younger. Even more impressive, the new lighting makes Melania look happy.” — CONAN O’BRIEN
“Inside the White House, Shine’s hiring has been seen as a way to push out chief of staff John Kelly. One official said, ‘They’ve basically stopped telling Kelly when meetings are. People leave him off the calendar. … When he finds out, he storms into the room and is like, “What’s going on?”’ To be fair, ‘What’s going on?’ is what people say in every meeting with Donald Trump.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to Bill Shine, the White House’s newly hired deputy chief of staff for communications
The Bits Worth Watching
Were these pedestrians drunk after watching the England-Croatia game? Well, mostly, yes.
The comedian Chris Redd explained to O’Brien what he learned working at Olive Garden: “When you work in service jobs, you have to like people even when you don’t.”
Rafael Casal, left, and Daveed Diggs at a taco truck they used to frequent in Oakland. “As artists whose context has always been that city, what’s being lost — erased, ignored — is terrifying,” Mr. Diggs said.
2018-07-11
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/opinion/world-cup-lgbt-activism.html
Gay rights activists wearing football jerseys to form a rainbow flag in Moscow during this year’s World Cup.
My love of football has always placed me in a difficult position.
On one hand, there’s an environment of conflict, oppression and political injustice around the sport. On the other, there are football’s simple, scintillating pleasures. This tension — between the ugliness of the game’s culture and its aesthetic beauty — has always been acute for L.G.B.T. fans, even more so for activists from our community. And at this World Cup, where President Vladimir Putin has presided over a hugely successful global spectacle while jailing and torturing dissidents (notably the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov), the contradiction between the joy of football and the misery of its culture and politics has been especially sharp.
But contradictions can be combated. And in the eight years since FIFA awarded the World Cup to Mr. Putin’s Russia, L.G.B.T. activists have made great strides in their efforts to make the sport more accessible, more welcoming, more truly beautiful.
My own fight against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in football goes back a long way. I joined my local club, Horley Town, when I was 11. I soon found I couldn’t bond with my teammates, an experience replicated when I played, once, for my school. I didn’t play competitively again until I joined the Brighton Bandits, a team on the English South Coast who were part of the world’s only national L.G.B.T. football league, the Gay Football Supporters’ Network League.
At the time, some friends asked why such segregation was necessary. I told them the truth, which was that L.G.B.T. people were unlikely to socialize in the same places as straight teammates and would feel nervous about disclosing same-sex relationships. They had good reason to: Managers such as the English legend Brian Clough and the former Croatian boss Otto Baric publicly denounced gay players. Homophobic chants remain the norm.
[Receive arguments and opinions on the pressing social issues and hidden stories around the World Cup right in your inbox. Sign up for Offsides.]
After my first Bandits match in 2008, I talked to a teammate about Justin Fashanu, who in 1990 became the first (and at the time only) professional player to come out as gay. As the 10th anniversary of Fashanu’s death approached, nobody was discussing it. In part this was because his life was so complicated, and his death — he committed suicide after being accused of sexual assault — so traumatic. But it felt like an impediment to a wider conversation about the gulf between L.G.B.T. fans and professional football.
It was not Fashanu’s only problem, but he suffered from prejudice before and after coming out, so we adopted his name for The Justin Campaign against homophobia in football.
Later, the campaign rebranded as Football v. Homophobia and became an important agent in anti-discrimination initiatives, running workshops for clubs and organizations across Europe about how to create an environment where a professional player might feel able to come out and where fans might be able to challenge the perception that L.G.B.T. people weren’t harmed by homophobic behavior. Though I had left the campaign to begin my gender transition — I had a lot to sort out — its work was vital in spreading the tenets and techniques of inclusion.
But there’s so far to go. Issues like how to include trans players in men’s or women’s divisions have been left to national associations, even though, as the International Olympic Committee urges, they should be allowed to compete without restriction. And despite FIFA’s heartening willingness to engage with activist groups, most of its initiatives have focused on “diversity” rather than concrete actions on L.G.B.T. inclusion.
And then there’s the World Cup. Awarded to Russia — a country ranked second bottom of European countries for L.G.B.T. rights in 2016 — the tournament has been full of contradiction and frustration. FIFA supported Diversity House in Russia, a place for discussions, meetings and, most important, ardent game-watching, but was slow to act on Mexico fans’ homophobic chants during their country’s 1-0 win over Germany.
The organization has, however, allowed fans to take rainbow flags into the stadiums. One supporter to do so, Di Cunningham, experienced a few frosty exchanges with Russian and English fans (including an England supporter who told her to “keep politics out of football”), but plenty of support and exposure, too. Cunningham hopes her example will prompt L.G.B.T. fans from other countries to ask, “Why can’t we do this?”
When I stepped, tentatively, back onto the football field a decade ago, nobody paid much attention to the systematic marginalization of L.G.B.T. fans and players. Our concerns were very far from the mainstream. Now the game’s governing bodies interact with L.G.B.T. activists, and top-level clubs have established links with “gay-friendly” amateur teams and L.G.B.T. supporters’ groups.
This progress proves an activists’ axiom: Changes in public opinion are almost always led by the grass roots, with institutions slowly (and often grudgingly) catching up.
At least at Norwich City — the team I follow devotedly, based in the east of England — the supporters and the club have reached the same place. A month before the World Cup began, I played in a tournament for L.G.B.T. teams, hosted by Norwich City, with Justin Fashanu’s niece Amal as the guest of honor. I realized my childhood dream of scoring at Carrow Road, Norwich’s home ground, where I have spent countless Saturdays. After it finished, I was presented with a pink World Cup trophy last seen at a small Justin Campaign event back in 2010.
It felt like the perfect reward for persevering with a sport, or more accurately a sporting culture, which had told me so many times that I wasn’t welcome.
by:
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/business/papa-johns-racial-slur.html
John Schnatter, center, the Papa John’s founder, with the former N.F.L. quarterback Archie Manning, left, and J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans last year. Mr. Schnatter apologized on Wednesday for using a racial slur in a comment about black people during a conference call in May.
John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s Pizza, has resigned as chairman of the board of Papa John’s International, the company announced late Wednesday, hours after he apologized for using a racial slur in a comment about black people during a conference call in May.
The company, one of the largest pizza chains in the United States, with more than 5,000 locations around the world, said that its independent directors had accepted Mr. Schnatter’s resignation and would appoint a new chairman in the coming weeks. Mr. Schnatter will remain on Papa John’s board, according to a regulatory filing.
Earlier Wednesday, Mr. Schnatter described his comments during the conference call as “inappropriate and hurtful” in a statement provided by the company.
The apology was prompted by a report in Forbes that described the call, which was with the Laundry Service marketing agency. Mr. Schnatter said that Col. Harland Sanders, who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food chain and was its longtime spokesman, used the racial slur to describe black people and never faced backlash for doing so, according to the Forbes report.
He also discussed his youth in Indiana and the violence against black people that took place there, according to the report.
“Regardless of the context, I apologize,” he said in his statement confirming the report. “Simply stated, racism has no place in our society.”
Mr. Schnatter, 56, also resigned from the board of trustees for the University of Louisville, according to the school.
He declined through the company to comment further.
Major League Baseball decided on Wednesday to suspend its Papa Slam promotion, which provided discounts to Papa John’s customers each time a player hit a grand slam.
And the reaction spread to Mr. Schnatter’s hometown Jeffersonville, Ind., where the mayor stripped a local gym of his name. “I made the decision yesterday at 4 p.m., sign was removed at 4:30,” said Mike Moore, the mayor, in an email on Thursday. “John’s comments are not acceptable and I will not allow a building in the city of Jeffersonville to honor his name.”
Mr. Schnatter set off an uproar in November by blaming the National Football League — with which Papa John’s had a sponsorship deal — for a slump in sales during a conference call with investors. He complained about the league’s handling of football players who protested racism and police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem.
“The N.F.L. has hurt us, and more importantly, by not resolving the current debacle to the player and owners’ satisfaction, N.F.L. leadership has hurt Papa John’s shareholders,” Mr. Schnatter said on the investor call, adding that the “ongoing situation” should have “been nipped in the bud.”
The comments were praised by white supremacists, and Papa John’s responded by saying it did not want white supremacists or their groups buying its pizzas. Mr. Schnatter, an outsized figure at the company who appeared frequently in its commercials and owns 30 percent of its stock, stepped down as chief executive in December.
In February, the company said that was giving up a nearly eight-year sponsorship deal with the N.F.L. A day later, the league announced that Pizza Hut, a longtime rival, was its new pizza sponsor.
Forbes reported that the call in May was intended to help Mr. Schnatter avoid future public relations blunders involving race.
Shares of Papa John’s fell nearly 5 percent on Wednesday, after the Forbes report, bringing the stock’s decline since November to about 30 percent. But on Thursday, following news of Mr. Schnatter’s resignation, shares rebounded, closing 11 percent higher.
Casey Wasserman, the chief executive of Wasserman, the talent management company that owns Laundry Service, declined to comment.
Mr. Schnatter started selling pizzas in 1984 out of the former broom closet of his father’s tavern in Indiana. The next year, he opened the first Papa John’s.
He stepped down as chief executive in 2005 after a prolonged sales decline and then returned to the role at the end of 2008.
Papa John’s is the fourth largest pizza chain in the world, behind Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Little Caesar’s, according to the market research company Euromonitor International.
In its most recent quarter, Papa John’s North American units suffered a 5.3 percent same-store sales decline while its international outlets saw a 0.3 percent increase. Systemwide sales for Pizza Hut in its latest quarter increased 1 percent in stores open at least a year.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/opinion/donald-trump-britain-visit.html
The Trump Baby is to fly above Parliament Square in London during President Trump’s visit to Britain this week.
LONDON — When President Trump visits Britain this week, many people here will want to remind him — and the rest of the world — just how nauseating we think he is. He’s new money. He’s perma-tanned. He’s a former reality TV star. He’s American. He’s everything the British, snobs that we are, love to hate. And that’s before we even get started on his ghastly politics.
When it comes to making people feel that they don’t belong, nobody does it better than us. America may be the most powerful nation on earth, but Britain is still the snootiest.
We can be utterly charming when we choose. In 2011, when Barack Obama visited, we put on a great show. President Obama was cool and funny. He met Queen Elizabeth; he had a “sleepover” at Buckingham Palace; he was invited to address Parliament.
But back in 2011, Britain — and the world — was a different place. Nobody really talked about the European Union, aside from U.K. Independence Party bores. Our prime minister was David Cameron, a smooth, aristocratic former P.R. man, who was a conservative, but who revered Mr. Obama, as did most of the country.
Today, in 2018, Mr. Trump is poised to visit an altered nation. Two years ago, Britain voted to leave the European Union, in a referendum that reignited class war, pitting city dwellers against the countryside, the winners of globalization against the losers. Emotions are still raw, and the politics are still messy — witness this week’s Brexit-driven chaos within the government — but immediately after the referendum, tempers ran particularly high. So when Mr. Trump, then still a Republican candidate, arrived in Scotland the day after the referendum vote, and declared Brexit “a great thing,” Britain’s educated metropolitan class recoiled in horror. Then in November 2016, the unthinkable happened.
And so began a year of false starts. Britain’s new prime minister, the more middle-class Theresa May, offered Mr. Trump a state visit early in his term; protests over the invitation, which coincided with the announcement of Mr. Trump’s travel ban targeting Muslim countries, kicked off immediately. British M.P.s vowed never to give Mr. Trump the opportunity to address Parliament. Mr. Trump’s visit was downgraded to a more prosaic-sounding “working trip.” He was meant to visit in January this year but then refused to turn up to open the new American Embassy in London. “He got the message,” said London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan.
This time, though, Mr. Trump really seems to be coming. In response, the Stop Trump coalition is planning what they’re describing as a “carnival of resistance.” Tens of thousands of people are expected to join the protests. There will be a parade in drag, a Vegans Against Trump Bloc and a women’s march, during which pots and pans will be banged on.
It’s worth asking why France was better able to cope with Mr. Trump when he visited last year. The newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron, was quick to offer him a state visit. There were some protests but nothing major. Mr. Macron pulled out all the stops on Bastille Day and Mr. Trump seemed impressed.
Perhaps it’s that France is simply less class-obsessed. To Britons of a certain milieu, Mr. Trump is a bit grubby, a bit common, a bit — as Nancy Mitford, that chronicler of elite British life, would put it — “non-U,” (that is, non-upper class).
It also helped that Mr. Macron saw off Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. France didn’t succumb to populism. Brexit Britain could only look on in envy, wondering what might have been. And now, many Britons see in Mr. Trump a reflection of the Brexit phenomenon, albeit a more orange and sordid one.
In preparation for his visit, some of our most hallowed institutions are being sealed off for fear that Mr. Trump will tarnish them with his presence. Plans are under wraps, but the president is not expected to have a meeting with the queen at Buckingham Palace, which is unusual. Instead, he is scheduled to meet Her Majesty behind closed doors at Windsor Castle. The Duchess of Sussex — or as the new American member of the royal family was known before her marriage to Prince Harry, Meghan Markle — has made it obvious that she does not like Mr. Trump. It is unclear yet whether she will grace him with her presence.
Mr. Trump is not expected to meet the prime minister at Downing Street but will dine with her at her country retreat, Chequers. He is expected to avoid much of London, a city which has become a bastion of both anti-Brexit and anti-Trump sentiment. Instead, he is likely to visit Blenheim Palace, the Oxfordshire birthplace of Winston Churchill, and then head to Scotland to visit his golf course.
The Stop Trump campaign says it intends to “shine a light on Trumpism” in Britain. It also claims it has never taken a position on Brexit. There is, of course, genuine disgust at many of the president’s policies. But Britain is also a country grappling with a lot of its own political anxieties at the moment and it seems fair to wonder if there is some projection going on.
Out of the hundred or so prominent signatories who have backed the Stop Trump campaign — a list that includes the pop star Lily Allen, the former Labour leader Ed Miliband and Mick Jagger’s ex-wife, Bianca — the overwhelming majority are pro-European Union. One gets the sense that the campaign’s members hope that if they can stop Mr. Trump — whatever that may mean — they can stop Brexit too. Or at the very least, they can unite the nation against the horror in the White House.
But just because the Stop Trump movement, like the Stop Brexit movement, shouts loudest, it doesn’t mean it speaks for the nation. Quite a lot of Britons, like quite a lot of Americans, don’t abhor Mr. Trump and everything he stands for. Many would rather welcome him if only because it makes diplomatic sense.
In February, a YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Britons supported a state visit by Mr. Trump, against 39 percent who opposed it. And not everybody is planning on protesting Mr. Trump’s arrival: in Oxfordshire, a barman has said he would happily welcome Mr. Trump in, shake his hand and serve him a free drink. If that happens, it would horrify the snobs, but it could turn out to be the most diplomatic gesture of the entire trip.
Many Britons recognize that Mr. Trump may still be a useful ally. We are snooty but we are also pragmatic. Britain could do with friends right now — even vulgar ones.
Lara Prendergast (@laraprendergast) is an assistant editor at The Spectator.
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/movies/when-black-performers-use-their-white-voice.html
Lakeith Stanfield, left, and Danny Glover in “Sorry to Bother You.”
In “Sorry to Bother You,” the wily satirical debut feature from Boots Riley, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) lands a job at a telemarketing company, where the first rule is “Stick to the script.” He stumbles during his first few calls, unable to connect with the strangers on the other end of the line — that is, until an older colleague named Langston (Danny Glover) shares some advice: “Use your white voice.”
Mr. Riley renders this affectation literally in “Sorry to Bother You,” dubbing white actors’ voices over the black faces onscreen, including David Cross, of “Arrested Development” fame, for Mr. Stanfield.
In doing so, Mr. Riley offers a zany twist on the performance of whiteness by black actors, a tradition stretching back hundreds of years: As long ago as the New World, enslaved and free blacks participated in dramatized communal appropriation of “white-identified gestures, vocabulary, dialects, dress, or social entitlements,” as Marvin McAllister writes in his book “Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African-American Performance.” These performances were in public and private spaces, sometimes on a theatrical stage or in the form of a leisurely stroll in the street alongside white people.
Vocal imitation in particular has proved an especially fruitful creative choice, and is often as subversive as it is in “Sorry to Bother You.” Below, a look at some of the notable ways black performers have used the “white voice” in popular culture.
In an episode of the ’90s sitcom “Martin,” a plumber dies suddenly while fixing Martin’s toilet. The plumber remains in the bathroom for hours because the authorities don’t view the incident as an emergency — “They said if there’s no crime, there’s no rush,” Martin (Martin Lawrence) explains to his friends and girlfriend — and he believes the reason is that he lives in a less affluent, predominantly black part of town. After exhausting all other options, he tries calling 911 again, this time in a manner connoting whiteness (overenunciation; emphasis on a hard “r”), giving his name to the operator as Thurston O’Reilly III.
The person on the other end of the line asks Martin to prove that he is white, quizzing him on topics that only white people are supposed to know: America’s favorite pie, Barry Manilow song titles, the ideal sandwich condiment. With help from his friends, Martin supplies the appropriate answers to the first two questions, but the guise is ruined when Cole (Carl Anthony Payne II) snatches the phone and responds to the third query in his “black” voice, with a “black” answer. The operator promptly hangs up.
Martin’s attempt to sound white and the operator’s reaction shrewdly emphasize how the perception of whiteness grants a measure of access often closed to people of color. The episode also slyly suggests that while cultural differences do exist, black people, by virtue of being in a minority group in America, should understand white people as much as possible; their comfort and livelihood depend on it.
An element of the trickster persona underlies this premise and others: “White Like Me,” Eddie Murphy’s 1984 sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” in which he adopts whiteface and an uptight speaking style for a day; the 2004 movie “White Chicks,” in which two black F.B.I. agents who are brothers go undercover as white sisters; and “BlacKkKlansman,” Spike Lee’s forthcoming feature based on the true story of a black detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan by pretending to be a white racist over the phone.
Unlike “Martin,” these characters mostly manage to pull off the ruse, and when they do, it is simultaneously gratifying and mortifying. The black characters make fools of the racist whites without selling out: They are disguised not because they are ashamed of themselves, but because they’re out on a mission. Yet the treatment they receive when perceived to be white only further emphasizes the systemic disparities they regularly encounter because they are black.
‘Life at the beach is, like, party, party, party, O.K.?’
In a 1984 Vanity Fair profile, Whoopi Goldberg talked about her difficulties getting cast in dinner theaters early in her career. In the interview, she said she was often told, “You are good, but our economy rides on people coming to see what they expect. And they’re not expecting you.” This is what led her to create “The Spook Show,” her breakthrough one-woman act that eventually found its way to Broadway retitled as “Whoopi Goldberg.”
In it, she subverted expectations of the kinds of characters a black actress could portray, morphing into 13 different personalities, including “the surfer chick” who talks in an exaggerated California teenager style — an abundance of “likes,” “O.K.s” and upspeak. As Mr. McAllister points out in “Whiting Up,” there was nothing about the recorded stage performance that explicitly renders Ms. Goldberg’s surfer chick white — viewing her as such arises from the audience’s assumptions about the limitations of blackness.
Ms. Goldberg would adapt this character for NBC’s short-lived 1985 variety series, “Television Parts.” In one segment, she wears a boyish Hawaiian shirt and her signature dreadlocks, standing in stark contrast to the white, blond women in bathing suits who flank her. In another, the extras are predominantly white as well. In each instance, Ms. Goldberg challenges and expands our ideas of blackness by conjuring up an audible signifier typically identified with whiteness.
What it means to be black has frequently been defined and scrutinized by those who are not black, particularly through the performance of blackface. Adapting a white voice as a black performer, then, is sometimes a deliberate attempt to turn the gaze back on white culture. In her viral video “_______ White Girls … Say to Black Girls,” the comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey dons a blond wig and talks like Ms. Goldberg’s surfer chick, calling attention to the uncomfortable interactions she has had with white women.
Two decades before Ms. Ramsey’s video, Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s hit “Baby Got Back” took a similar approach: The rapper’s then-girlfriend, Amylia Dorsey-Rivas, who is black and Latina, narrated the song’s opening, in which a woman criticizes another woman’s body for its curves. “I mean, gross, look,” Ms. Dorsey-Rivas says, in a voice she would recall as inspired by the Paris Hilton-types she grew up around in Seattle. “She’s just so … black!” (In the song’s video, Ms. Dorsey-Rivas’s voice is dubbed over that of a white actress.)
Ms. Ramsey’s video and “Baby Got Back” are critiquing the dominant value system. Ms. Ramsey imitates a white person attempting black slang (“Holler!”) while claiming to appreciate those who aren’t “stereotypical, like, black”; Ms. Dorsey-Rivas’s narration precedes Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s ode to the derrière her character loves to hate. Both deftly unpack the absurdity of a white culture that simultaneously fetishizes, and is repulsed by, blackness.
‘I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.’
In his 2000 comedy special “Killin’ Them Softly,” Dave Chappelle uses observational humor to point out how whiteness translates to an exclusive version of freedom. He describes how his friend Chip manages to get out of a speeding ticket — or potentially worse fate — because he is white. Mr. Chappelle has two distinct voices for Chip and the police officer who pulls them over: The officer gets a high-pitched, nasal Southern drawl reminiscent of cinematic small-town sheriffs. Chip, on the other hand, evinces a calm, if slightly nerdy, demeanor when he tells the officer, “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.”
Chip embodies Langston’s definition of the white voice in “Sorry to Bother You.” That voice, he explains to Cassius, isn’t so much about timbre as it is about a feeling — a carefree nature that comes with having your bills paid. “You’ve never been fired,” Langston says. “Just laid off.”
Once Cassius taps into his inner “white voice,” he quickly becomes a power caller, negotiating deals with the world’s wealthiest people. At the office, power callers must use their white voices at all times. But this begins to take a toll on Cassius as he becomes privy to the company’s evils. The affectation becomes a symbol of conformity, and worse, a betrayal of self.
2018-06-21
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/health/migrant-families-immigration-detention.html
Migrants waiting for asylum hearings outside the port of entry on the American border in Tijuana, Mexico. Traumatic experiences such as family separations or indefinite detention may lead to mental health problems later in life.
The chaotic process of reuniting thousands of migrant children and parents separated by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy poses great psychological risks, both short- and long-term, mental health experts said on Friday. So does holding those families indefinitely while they await legal proceedings, which could happen under the president’s new executive order.
The administration has no clear plan to reunite migrant families, which is sure to carry a psychological price for migrant parents and more than 2,300 children separated from them at the border in recent months. More than 400 are under age 12, and many are toddlers.
But the alternative of keeping those families in camps, on military bases and in other facilities for long periods of time while they work their way through the legal and asylum systems will quite likely impose its own trauma, as it did for families of Japanese descent held by the United States in internment camps during World War II.
“People have been very focused on technical pieces of this process, and the egregiousness of children in cages,” said Jennifer Rodriguez, executive director of the Youth Law Center, an advocacy group based in San Francisco and focused on protecting the rights of children. “But they’re not thinking about most basic fundamental trauma we’re inflicting on people.”
On Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Fiona Danaher, a pediatrician at MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston, warned that traumatic experiences like those experienced by migrants could lead to “changes in physiology that promote physical and mental illness throughout the life course.”
The effects can be felt for generations, she noted.
The risks of reunification
Already, mental health experts said in interviews, two psychological undercurrents are in motion among the separated migrant families: one individual, the other collective.
At the individual level, many of the parents torn from their children will not have easy reunions, experts said.
“I would want to make sure — before any reunion — that the children know that their parents did not want this to happen, and that it was not their own fault, either,” said Brenda Jones Harden, a professor of human development at the University of Maryland.
“Many of these kids will think, ‘There’s something wrong with me, that’s why my parents abandoned me.’”
Children in a tent encampment in Tornillo, Tex. Migrant families may find that re-establishing the parent-child bond can be a long and difficult process, experts said.
In a series of studies, social scientists at the University of Delaware and elsewhere have carefully tracked the experience of young children entering foster families by having new parents keep detailed diaries and closely monitor parent-child interaction using standardized checklists.
Young children often avoid engaging a new caregiver — behavior that can in turn put off a new mother or father, creating more distance and doubt in the relationship.
A similar dynamic can occur when parents are taken away and then suddenly reappear.
“Children often adapt to separations by looking as if they don’t need their parents upon reuniting,” said Mary Dozier, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Delaware, who led some of the separation studies.
Parents may feel rejected and react in kind, by acting as if their children don’t need them, Dr. Dozier said. “A self-perpetuating cycle can begin. It’s usually resolved over time, but it’s helpful if parents can anticipate that their children may not run into their arms and be soothed readily.”
Children reunited with their parents may also turn away or be difficult to soothe, said Kristin Bernard, a psychologist at Stony Brook University who works with foster children.
Those reactions, combined with the desperation washing through their parents, “may get in the way of parents providing the nurturing and responsive care that children need at this critical time,” she said.
For the youngest children especially, a week or two away is a very long time, a period of deepening uncertainty. The visceral memory of a parent can fade quickly in the mind of toddler, compared to more mature youngsters.
By age 9, Jordan Sosa, now 23, had seen both of his parents deported to Mexico on drug-use charges.
“I saw my dad being dragged off, and I’m the oldest. My brothers and sisters kept asking, ‘What happened to Dad? What happened to Mom?’” said Mr. Sosa, who is now a congressional intern. “I remember I’d wait until they went to bed and then just cry.”
He and his siblings entered foster care in Southern California, reuniting with their parents more than a year later.
“For me, with my mom, it was like she was dead and suddenly came back alive. I had had a relationship with her,” Mr. Sosa said. “But for my younger sisters it was like, ‘No, I have a new family now.’”
Lessons from Japanese internment
Following the president’s executive order earlier this week, the Trump administration has asked a Federal District Court in Los Angeles to alter a consent decree that effectively limits the detention of migrant families to no more than 20 days. The Pentagon has been asked to make room for as many as 20,000 migrants.
The collective mental impact of holding hundreds of families in camps or institutions, for months or years, is hard to measure. Writing in The Washington Post, the former first lady Laura Bush, among others, was quick to note that the proposed camps for migrant families are “eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II.”
After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the federal government interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans in about a dozen camps, typically in barracks, one family to a room, and cut off from the outside world by barbed wire. The incarceration lasted up to four years, and most families remained together.
This mass internment is distinct from the current proposal in important ways: The inmates were predominantly United States citizens, and they had committed no crime.
Yet many researchers believe the trauma to migrant families could be similar, in terms of rates of depression and post-traumatic stress.
“There are certainly parallels,” said Donna Nagata, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan whose parents met in a Utah internment camp and who has followed a large group of people who spent time in the camps.
In one study, she had 520 of them fill out extensive questionnaires, detailing aspects of their individual personalities and how they coped with the experience of mass incarceration over time.
While their experiences varied, negative effects of the camps remained. “The sansei — the adolescent and children offspring, born in the United States after the war — lived with this sense of sadness and anger over what happened to their parents, and with the realization that a portion of their lives had been taken away,” Dr. Nagata said.
That is, if they comprehended their parents’ trauma at all. “There was a silence about it, down through the generations, a silence on the part of the parents that only piqued their interest and made them aware that there was a really important gap in their history that they longed to know,” said Dr. Nagata, author of the book “Legacy of Injustice: Exploring the Cross-Generational Impact of the Japanese American Internment.”
A woman named Carola, who lives in Western Canada and asked that her last name be omitted because both of her parents are still alive, said her mother spent four years in an internment camp as a child, “leaving her psychologically scarred for life.”
“She was consumed with rage, suffered flashbacks, depression and paranoia,” Carola said. “The experience left her with no possibility for a ‘normal’ happy life. Obviously, my siblings and I also suffered.”
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/opinion/gay-rights-larry-kramer.html
A crowd of Act Up activists march down a Manhattan street during the 25th anniversary celebration of the Stonewall riots, on June 26, 1994.
I was recently honored for my birthday with an all-star reading of my play “The Destiny of Me.” It was obviously a very emotional experience for me. I’m supposed to be dead by now. Most of the guys who got infected with H.I.V. in the 1980s are long dead.
The play is about a middle-aged man infected with H.I.V. undergoing an experimental treatment at the National Institutes of Health. In his hospital room he finds himself remembering his life since childhood. He realizes his entire life has been one long battle to be accepted as a homosexual:
“Every social structure I’m supposed to be a part of — my family, my religion, my straight friends, my university, my city, my state, my country, my government, my newspaper, my TV, my many shrinks … tells me over and over and over that what I feel and see and think and do is sick.”
We’ve come a certain distance from such a blanket suffocation.
But by the time a modicum of acceptance by the outside world starts to arrive, we are visited with a plague. It is a plague of disease, and with our new president it continues to be a plague of hate. There is not one cabinet member who has supportive or welcoming words for us. Every week, it seems, Mr. Trump appoints another judge who is on record as hating us. They will serve for many years. A new Supreme Court will further echo this disdain.
Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan’s astonishing negligence regarding the crisis back in the ’80s undoubtedly contributed to H.I.V. infections and deaths ballooning into a worldwide plague.
Larry Kramer at home in his Fifth Avenue apartment near Washington Square Park.
I know I’m lucky to be alive. I have fought very hard to get here. I have had a liver transplant. I’ve lived long enough to see an anti-retroviral therapy became available. I have been able to legally marry the man I’ve loved for many years.
Why then do I still feel so destitute and abandoned? Surely all gay people fall into the same category as I.
I know I am getting closer to death and this frightens me. I still have too much work to do. I know one is meant to wake up each day with the positive thought of gratitude that I’m still here for another day. But I wake up each day and realize that I am sad.
I am constantly being thanked, even by people in the street stopping me, for what I have done to save my people. Such thanks make me uncomfortable. I don’t think I have done anything that any gay person could not also have done. Throughout the worst of these plague years we had at the most only several thousand of us fighting all over the country. Out of some 20 million or so of us.
Act Up, one of the organizations I helped start, fought for the drugs to save us, and we got them. (Drugs, I might add, that have many side effects and are prohibitively expensive.) Once we got the life-extending medicines, most of my fellow warriors returned to their lives of trying to be happy, and invisible.
I have never been able to answer one question: Why have relatively few of us — out of so many millions — been willing to fight for their lives? I still can’t answer it and I continue to be very sad because of it. And the biggest fight for our lives is ahead of us.
I still can’t see enough of us, in all our numbers and our splendor and our magnificence. Our activist organizations are a diminished presence. We still have no respected and accepted leaders who can speak for us as a people. And what little power we do have, lobbying or otherwise, in Washington or anywhere else, is woefully inadequate. Our billionaires are funding concert halls and public parks and retirement homes for primates, but not gay rights. If it weren’t for such stalwart defenders as Lambda Legal Defense and the A.C.L.U., we’d probably be jailed by our enemies.
The enemies that the leading character in “The Destiny of Me” rails against have never gone away. And they never will. We will always have enemies. Is that why we’re so invisible as a powerful fighting force? Because too many of us are still afraid to be seen or heard?
Millions of women and straight people are marching on Washington and in other cities and towns and protesting in the offices of elected officials every week of the year. Where are the millions of gay people being angry and vocal and visibly fighting back?
Are we prepared to fight the many fights piling up against us?
Right now, I don’t think so. The worst is yet to come. Again. Yes, it makes me very sad.
And still imploringly angry.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/us/california-today-criminal-justice-reforms.html
San Quentin State Prison. New data is fueling debate about whether California should continue on a path of reform, or take a step back and get tougher, once again, on crime.
Good morning.
(Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.)
In less than a decade, California has gone from being a standard-bearer for the ills of prison overcrowding to a national exemplar of reform, letting tens of thousands of people out of prison and reducing penalties for many crimes.
Important measures were passed by voters in 2014 and 2016, but only now is research starting to show the effects on crime in California. The new data is fueling a continuing debate, with national implications, about whether California should continue on the path of reform, or take a step back and get tougher, once again, on crime.
One recent study showed that an increase in crime in 2015 was not because of reforms. Another study determined that the reforms were not responsible for an increase in violent crime between 2014 and 2016 — that was from changes in reporting crime — but that they may have led to an increase in property crimes, specifically thefts from cars.
Adding to the body of evidence this week was a report on crime in 2017 released by the attorney general, Xavier Becerra. That report showed violent crime had increased 1.5 percent, while property crimes were down 2.1 percent.
The overall picture, according to supporters of criminal justice reform, is that crime is at historic lows in California. And they say that even if some categories have increased, such as thefts from automobiles, it hardly justifies a return to the days of mass incarceration.
“My main takeaway is that criminal justice reform is continuing to advance public safety,” said Lenore Anderson, the founder and executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, which has backed reforms.
Still, it is hardly a settled matter in California. On Monday, groups pushing to rollback reforms succeeded in getting enough signatures for a ballot initiative in 2020 that would reverse some of the reforms, such as expanding the types of crimes that could be charged as felonies.
This would represent a threat to one of the signature legacies of outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown, who wrote on Twitter on Monday: “Read the fine print. This flawed initiative would cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars and endanger public safety by restricting parole and undermining inmate rehabilitation.”
The issue is a rare one that crosses party lines. While liberals tend to fall in line for reform, and Republicans are more likely to emphasize prison over rehabilitation, the lines are not clean.
One of the new ballot initiative’s top supporters is a Democrat in Sacramento — Jim Cooper, a former sheriff’s deputy turned assemblyman. And some Republicans, most prominently the former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been voices of reform.
“This has never been a left-versus-right issue,” said Ms. Anderson, who noted that in the past, “politicians of all stripes rode the bandwagon of increased incarceration.”
California Online
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
Flames threatened an outbuilding as the County Fire burned in Guinda on Sunday.
• In terms of acres burned, California’s fire season is off to its worst start in years. Through Monday morning, 196,092 acres had burned since Jan. 1 — an area more than double the average by July 9 of the previous five years. [The Mercury News]
• A company that runs 46 California shopping malls gives data from automated license plate readers to a surveillance contractor that sells the information to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
• False: President Trump posted a story on Twitter that erroneously claims that Oakland residents protested against federal agents last August as they broke up a child sex trafficking ring. The tweet went to 53 million followers. [SFGate]
• Reunited: Reunions, as ordered by a court in California, broke out as the federal government returned the first wave of migrant children to their parents. There were widespread reports of glitches and delays, and some children failed to recognize their families. [The New York Times]
• “You trust folks; you give folks money, nine times out of 10 they’re not going to do any harm.” That was Stockton’s 27-year-old mayor, Michael Tubbs, whose initiatives include a $500 monthly check for the poor, and cash stipends for men likely to commit violent crimes. [A.P.]
• Southern California’s powerful Metropolitan Water District agreed for a second time to spend nearly $11 billion on a majority stake in the Delta tunnels project, which increases the amount of Northern California river water sent south. [The Sacramento Bee]
• Palo Alto-based Tesla will build a factory in Shanghai, its first outside the U.S., making it the first foreign-owned automaker in China. It said production would eventually reach 500,000 vehicles annually. [A.P.]
• Fact check: Mr. Trump said it’s “impossible” for American farmers to do business in Europe. In fact, the U.S. exported $11.5 billion in agricultural products to the European Union last year. [The New York Times]
• Cisco’s new chief executive, Chuck Robbins, wants to make computer networks simpler. His strategy is giving the Silicon Valley giant momentum. [The New York Times]
Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal have Oakland in their bones.
Mr. Diggs, who won a Tony Award in 2016 for his spirited performance as Lafayette and Jefferson in “Hamilton,” and Mr. Casal, a spoken-word savant, were both born and bred in the gritty East Bay city.
The two men are now the writer-stars of “Blindspotting,” an Oakland-set comic drama that arrives in theaters on July 20.
Our reporter called it “a type of primal howl” — and an apt example of the defiant city’s emergences as an artistic hotbed.
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/technology/twitter-fake-followers.html
Twitter plans to start removing questionable accounts from users’ follower numbers on Thursday, reducing the total follower count on the platform by about 6 percent.
Twitter will begin removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users’ followers on Thursday, signaling a major new effort to restore trust on the popular but embattled platform.
The reform takes aim at a pervasive form of social media fraud. Many users have inflated their followers on Twitter or other services with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers.
Twitter’s decision will have an immediate impact: Beginning on Thursday, many users, including those who have bought fake followers and any others who are followed by suspicious accounts, will see their follower numbers fall. While Twitter declined to provide an exact number of affected users, the company said it would strip tens of millions of questionable accounts from users’ followers. The move would reduce the total combined follower count on Twitter by about 6 percent — a substantial drop.
An investigation by The New York Times in January demonstrated that just one small Florida company sold fake followers and other social media engagement to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, including politicians, models, actors and authors. The revelations prompted investigations in at least two states and calls in Congress for intervention by the Federal Trade Commission. In interviews this week, Twitter executives said that The Times’s reporting pushed them to look more closely at steps the company could take to clamp down on the market for fakes, which is fueled in part by the growing political and commercial value of a widely followed Twitter account.
Officials at Twitter acknowledged that easy access to fake followers, and the company’s slowness in responding to the problem, had devalued the influence accumulated by legitimate users, sowing suspicion around those who quickly attained a broad following.
“We don’t want to incentivize the purchase of followers and fake accounts to artificially inflate follower counts, because it’s not an accurate measure of someone’s influence on the platform or influence in the world,” said Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety. “We think it’s a really important and meaningful metric, and we want people to have confidence that these are engaged users that are following other accounts.”
The market for fakes was also hurting Twitter with advertisers, which increasingly rely on social media “influencers” — mini-celebrities who promote brands and products to their followers — to reach customers. In recent months, advertising and marketing firms have put pressure on Twitter, YouTube and other platforms to help ensure that influencers have the reach they claim. Last month, the consumer goods giant Unilever, which spends billions of dollars a year on advertising, announced that it would no longer pay influencers who purchased followers and would prioritize spending advertising dollars on platforms that took steps to stamp out fraud.
In an interview on Tuesday, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, praised Twitter for its decision. “People will believe more and read more on Twitter if they know there is less bot activity and more human activity,” Mr. Weed said. “I would encourage and ask others to follow.”
For Twitter, the reform comes at a critical moment. Though it is a smaller company with far fewer users than Facebook or Google, Twitter has been sharply criticized for allowing abuse and hate speech to flourish on its platform. And along with other social networks, Twitter was a critical tool for Russian influence during the 2016 election, when tens of thousands of accounts were used to spread propaganda and disinformation. Those troubles dampened Twitter’s prospects for acquisition by a bigger firm, and the company, which went public in 2013, did not turn a profit until the final quarter of last year.
In recent months, Twitter has taken a number of steps to improve what Ms. Harvey and other company officials call “healthy conversation” on the platform, including rooting out fake and automated accounts. Last month, Twitter announced that as of May, its systems were “locking” almost 10 million suspicious accounts per week, far more than last year, and removing more for violating anti-spam policies.
Twitter locks an account — blocking it from posting or interacting with other users — when the company suspects that it is automated spam, or that it has been compromised, usually by having its password hacked or leaked. Most spam accounts are quickly removed. But until now, even after Twitter privately identified an account as suspicious and locked it, that account would still be included among the legitimate followers of a user.
Most of the time, according to Twitter, the locked accounts are not included in the monthly active user count it reports to investors each quarter, a critical Wall Street metric for social media companies. But the locked accounts were nevertheless allowed to inflate the follower counts of a large swath of users.
That choice helped propel a large market in fake followers. Dozens of websites openly sell followers and engagement on Twitter, as well as on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The Times revealed that one company, Devumi, sold over 200 million Twitter followers, drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over.
Tens of thousands of automated accounts were created by stealing profile information from real users, including minors. One such victim, a teenager named Jessica Rychly, had her account information — including her profile photo, biographical information and location — copied and pasted onto a fake account that retweeted cryptocurrency advertisements and graphic pornography.
Twitter officials believe that the new policy will disrupt the marketplace for fake followers and curb abusive practices used to create fake accounts: Since suspicious accounts will now be stripped from users’ followers, the company hopes there will be less incentive to purchase fakes in the first place.
Twitter has also begun to permanently remove more suspicious accounts. After The Times’s investigation was published in January, Twitter removed over a million accounts from the followers of Devumi customers — accounts that the company said violated its spam policies.
The Washington Post reported last week that Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June.
Twitter estimates that as a result of Thursday’s changes, the average user will see his or her follower number drop by four — but that number would be much higher for some accounts.
“As part of our renewed focus on public healthy conversation, and certainly some of the information that The New York Times was able to provide in their story, we felt it was an important step to take,” Ms. Harvey said.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/us/alabama-jail-food-money.html
Lunches being delivered at the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala. For years, sheriffs in Alabama have been able to profit personally by spending less than the state allowance on food for prisoners.
Alabama’s governor has begun to cut off a gravy train for the state’s sheriffs: the unspent money for prisoners’ meals that the sheriffs have long been allowed to keep for themselves.
The practice, born of a bickered-over ambiguity in a state law, has let sheriffs pocket tax dollars that over the decades almost certainly ran into the millions. To curtail the practice, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered in a memorandum to the state comptroller that payments of certain funds related to jail food “no longer be made to the sheriffs personally.” Instead, the governor wrote, the money must be paid to county general funds or official accounts.
“Public funds should be used for public purposes,” Ms. Ivey, a Republican, said in a statement on Wednesday. “It’s that simple.”
Critics of the practice welcomed the governor’s action on Wednesday but said it resolved only part of the problem because it did not apply to every type of payment related to jail food.
Even so, the move is sure to infuriate sheriffs in at least some of Alabama’s 67 counties, and the governor’s order may be tested in the courts. Economic disclosure forms filed by sheriffs suggest that many do not take the leftover money, sometimes because of local laws. But some do: Records show that the sheriff in Etowah County, in northeast Alabama, for example, has taken more than $670,000 in recent years.
The Alabama Sheriffs Association did not respond to a message on Wednesday seeking comment about the governor’s order, and several sheriffs declined to comment.
Some sheriffs and their allies have called in the past for changes to a system that critics said was unique in the United States and created a powerful incentive to cut corners and mistreat prisoners. But barring a change in state law, the sheriffs have argued, retaining the unspent funds for personal use was legal and acceptable.
The practice has been the subject of periodic controversy. In 2009 a federal judge jailed the sheriff of Morgan County after concluding that the sheriff was in “blatant” breach of previous agreements to care adequately for prisoners.
Setting aside dueling opinions about the legality of the practice, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered the state comptroller to stop the payment of jail food allowances directly to county sheriffs.
At the time, the sheriff had retained more than $200,000, while the breakfast that Morgan County was serving to prisoners was sometimes no more than a slice of toast, part of an egg and several spoonfuls of grits. At one point, prisoners were fed corn dogs at every meal for about three months, after two area sheriffs had bought a truckload of sausages at a bargain price.
A later sheriff in Morgan County used unspent jail-food money to invest $150,000 in a used-car dealership.
And this year, when the Alabama Media Group described the Etowah County sheriff’s handling of leftover food money, it reported that he had purchased a beach house for $740,000. The sheriff, who said he was acting in accordance with state law and angrily denied wrongdoing, was defeated last month in a primary. He did not respond to a message on Wednesday.
Ms. Ivey, a former state treasurer who became governor last year, said in her memorandum to the comptroller that “recent events brought this policy to my attention,” and she asked the Legislature to consider changing the wording of the Depression-era statute that sheriffs have relied on to justify their retention of the jail food money.
The governor’s lawyers acknowledged in an internal review that state attorneys general in Alabama had reached conflicting conclusions about the leftover funds.
One, Troy King, ruled in a 2008 opinion that a “sheriff may retain any surplus from the food service allowance as personal income” and noted that “most of the sheriffs in the state have retained the food and service allowances for personal income for years.” Mr. King, who left office in 2011, is running for attorney general again this year; he is competing in the Republican primary runoff on July 17. He was not available for comment on Wednesday.
In the last two decades, though, two other attorneys general have reached the opposite view, that sheriffs were not entitled to excess food money. In the more recent opinion, in 2011, Luther Strange said that “neither the sheriff nor the county may use the surplus for any purpose other than future expenses in feeding prisoners.”
The governor’s office said it was not clear why the practice of paying the food money to sheriffs personally and letting them keep any surplus had remained in effect after that ruling. In an email on Wednesday, Clinton Carter, the state finance director, said Alabama officials had recently “re-evaluated our interpretation” of Mr. Strange’s 2011 opinion.
Advocates for ending the practice called for action by state lawmakers to abolish it completely.
“For decades some Alabama sheriffs have abused the public trust by placing personal profit over meeting the basic human needs of people in their care,” said Frank Knaack, the executive director of Alabama Appleseed, a nonprofit group in Montgomery that works on criminal justice issues. “We thank Governor Ivey for taking the first step to rein in this abuse and urge Alabama legislators to heed her call to end this for good.”
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/us/politics/rosenstein-kavanaugh-document-review-prosecutors.html
Former law enforcement officials described Rod J. Rosenstein’s directive as a troubling precedent.
WASHINGTON — Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, has asked federal prosecutors to help review the government documents of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times on Wednesday.
Mr. Rosenstein’s request was an unusual insertion of politics into federal law enforcement. While the Justice Department has helped work on previous Supreme Court nominations, department lawyers in Washington typically carry out that task, not prosecutors who pursue criminal investigations nationwide.
But in an email sent this week to the nation’s 93 United States attorneys, Mr. Rosenstein asked each office to provide up to three federal prosecutors “who can make this important project a priority for the next several weeks.” Names were to be submitted to Mr. Rosenstein’s office by the end of Wednesday.
Mr. Trump nominated Judge Kavanaugh on Monday to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is retiring. In years of public service — including work for the independent counsel investigation of President Bill Clinton, on the 2000 Florida recount and as a White House aide to George W. Bush — Judge Kavanaugh generated a lengthy paper trail. That had Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, privately expressing concern that it might be used against him in his Senate confirmation hearings.
Mr. Rosenstein’s email, which had the subject line “Personal Message to U.S. Attorneys From the Deputy A.G.,” included the sentence, “We need your help in connection with President Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court.”
Former law enforcement officials described Mr. Rosenstein’s directive as a troubling precedent.
“It’s flat-out wrong to have career federal prosecutors engaged in a political process like the vetting of a Supreme Court nominee,” said Christopher Hunter, a former F.B.I. agent and federal prosecutor who is running for Congress. “It takes them away from the mission they’re supposed to be fulfilling, which is effective criminal justice enforcement.”
Mr. Hunter, who served as an F.B.I. agent and federal prosecutor for nearly 11 years, said he could not recall receiving a similar solicitation to work on a Supreme Court nomination.
While federal prosecutors have not been tapped to help with recent nominations, including Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, “the scope of the production of executive branch documents we’ve been asked for is many, many times as large,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, a Justice Department spokeswoman.
Ms. Flores added that federal prosecutors had been used to vet Supreme Court nominees in the past.
But this is the first time that the deputy attorney general has sent out such a broad request to United States attorneys offices.
Mr. Rosenstein wrote that he expected to need the equivalent of 100 full-time lawyers to work on Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, and that the work would be supervised by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy in Washington.
The office typically helps with judicial nominations; most of its staff is made up of career Justice Department lawyers.
During the confirmation process for Judge Merrick B. Garland, the Obama nominee whom Senate Republicans refused to consider, the office helped pull together the more than 2,000 documents needed for Mr. Garland’s Senate questionnaire.
“When we gathered documents required to be turned over to the Judiciary Committee, we did not ask anyone from outside of the Office of Legal Policy to help out,” said Michael Zubrensky, a former Justice Department lawyer who oversaw the judicial nominations at the time and the current legal director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“But the number of documents for Judge Kavanaugh will be different by an order of magnitude,” Mr. Zubrensky said.
The production of documents could slow down a confirmation hearing that has already shaped up as a sharp partisan battle. Democratic lawmakers say they want to inspect all of Judge Kavanaugh’s documents, including his staff work and over 300 opinions he has issued on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
by:
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/reader-center/trump-catch-and-release.html
Authorities have said that reunited families being released from custody would be equipped with ankle monitors to make sure they appear at scheduled court hearings.
Several readers have written to The Times to express their concern with our use of the phrase “catch and release” in our recent coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration.
“ ‘Catch and release’ is a sport fishing term for the practice of catching fish and releasing them, alive, back into the water,” Tim Pierce from Berlin, Mass., wrote in a letter to the editor on Wednesday. “The Trump administration uses it as part of a strategy to dehumanize immigrants. The Times must not be complicit in this process of dehumanization, and must reject this biased term.”
We asked our deputy national editor Kim Murphy to respond.
The phrase “catch and release” has been used off-and-on to describe immigration policy since at least the administration of George W. Bush.
President Trump has made it a favorite term for what he considers the government’s lack of vigilance in detaining migrants who cross the border illegally. For too long, he argues, the government has allowed migrants in such cases to be released from detention and simply show up for their immigration hearings in order to remain, possibly for years, in the United States. Such a policy, he believes, encourages more migrant families to embark on dangerous journeys, persuaded by precedent that freedom waits at the other end.
Mr. Trump is a master of catchphrases; he uses them so often that news organizations can be tempted to adopt them, often tongue-in-cheek, as shorthand for government policy. “Drain the swamp” (trim government bureaucracy). “Big, beautiful wall” (fortify the border). “Worst trade deal ever” (Nafta). “Greatest theft in the history of the world” (China). “Rocket man” (North Korea). “Fake news” (fill in the blank).
“Catch and release” has had a way of seeping into news coverage because it so succinctly describes a complex set of responses to illegal immigration and asylum law. I personally would never have thought of it as a way of equating human beings to fish. Yet of course by adopting a fishing metaphor, it does precisely that.
Here on the National desk, we’ve asked all our immigration writers to think carefully before using this phrase, making sure they include it only in reference to the administration’s use of the phrase; we don’t want to make it ours.
Please share your thoughts in the comments.
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/nyregion/immigrant-children-reunited.html
Celia Del Carmen Delgado and her 3-year-old daughter, Adela, were reunited in Manhattan on Wednesday.
The reunions in New York began Tuesday night and continued at a trickle Wednesday morning — a handful of families whose children were among the youngest of those separated at the border.
All the adults were fitted for ankle bracelets, their tether to the federal government. They left for the next stages of their journey, released and headed to relatives’ homes all over the country, with little more than the dirty clothes in which they crossed the border. But they had the most important thing.
Denis Rivas was back with Joshua, 4, after not even speaking to him since they were separated a month ago. Maria Guinac was with her three children, too — the youngest, Gustavo, turned 3 while she was being held in Texas. Javier Garrido was with his 4-year-old, William, who had been taken from him in the middle of the night in Laredo, Tex.
A court order had mandated the government to reunify parents with children younger than 5 who had been separated from their families by Tuesday. But in many cases the deadline was missed.
It was still unclear on Wednesday how many of the 63 children under 5 in federal custody across the country, who appeared to be eligible under a court order from a California judge for immediate reunification, had actually been returned to their parents.
But according to a Trump administration official, authorities anticipated that as of early Thursday morning, they will have reunified all children under age 5 who are eligible under the court order for reunification with parents in the United States.
Federal workers had labored late into the night to push through reunifications, but still there were glitches. Several parents flown in to detention centers near New York in the days leading up to the deadline had been taken to 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, only to have to return to detention at the end of the day — because their ankle monitors were not working.
Some of them were stirred again in the wee hours of Wednesday to return to Federal Plaza, where the three parents finally saw their children later that morning. The children were wearing new, unfamiliar clothes; their hair was combed and they carried backpacks so new that some still had the tags on.
They were impassive as their parents embraced them; the tears came slowly. “Mi amor!” Celia Del Carmen Delgado cried as she first saw her 3-year-old, Adela, after more than two months. At first, she said, Adela just stared at her.
“It was as if she was remembering me,” Ms. Delgado said.
Then the little girl started to cry.
Denis Rivas, 25, with his son Joshua Rivas, who is 4. The two reunited on Wednesday.
An agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement handed each parent a stapled packet with the terms of their release, and left. Lawyers, workers from nonprofits and volunteers sat with the parents, going through the paperwork and helping them make arrangements to join relatives. In one case, a parent’s flight had been paid for with airline points donated by volunteers.
As the parents waited for flights and for relatives who were driving in from out of state to pick them up, volunteers arranged for two families to head to a home in Brooklyn to shower, eat and rest. They called other volunteers, asking them to bring fresh changes of clothes, a car seat from Target, and medicine for Adela, who had a nagging cough.
Mr. Rivas and his boy Joshua were driven to the airport by a volunteer, who did not wish to give his name. They were bound for North Carolina, their original destination, where they planned to stay with Mr. Rivas’s mother and sister. On the way to the airport, the volunteer bought Mr. Rivas a burger. He vomited; he hadn’t eaten in three days, and said in detention in El Paso, Tex., he had eaten little more than bread.
At the airport, Mr. Rivas presented the only documents he had: those given to him that day by ICE, which contained their grainy photographs. But he was told they could fly. Mr. Rivas was told he would receive a pat-down and his belongings — his son’s yellow duffel bag — would be inspected.
The volunteer who drove Mr. Rivas to the airport handed him $20 for a snack before the flight. As Mr. Rivas waited in a security line, a guard looked down at the boy, who stood by him, looking sleepy, and commented on how cute he was.
Elsewhere in the city, at a facility affiliated with the nonprofit Catholic Charities, which was providing legal services for the children, two more fathers held their sons in their arms. Believed to be the first children in New York to have been reunited with their parents, on Tuesday, the 4-year-old boys had been living in the same foster home.
One of the men, Javier Garrido, a construction worker from Honduras, broke down in tears as he described being separated from his son in Laredo, Tex. It was 4 a.m., and he and William were asleep in a freezing holding pen known as the “icebox.”
“All of a sudden they came asking for the boy. They told me, ‘He’s going.’
“What do you mean you’re taking him? And me?”
The agents took William by force, Mr. Garrido said through tears, and told him the boy would be put up for adoption.
Like the other families, he would be joining relatives out of state — his were in Louisiana — while lawyers sort out their cases. Both men may have unwittingly agreed to expedited orders of deportation, further complicating their futures, according to Mario Russell, the director of Immigrant and Refugee Services for Catholic Charities.
The immediate concerns for the parents, however, now also include figuring out daily life with an ankle monitor. They were still unclear how the technology worked, having to Google instructions on showering and charging the devices.
by:
2018-07-10
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/us/dozier-execution-fentanyl.html
Scott Dozier’s execution was stayed on Wednesday, after a pharmaceutical company that did not want its product used in lethal injections filed a lawsuit.
Nevada’s execution of a man convicted of murder was halted on Wednesday, after the manufacturer of one of the drugs that was to be used in the lethal injection argued that the state had obtained its product illicitly.
A district court judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Nevada officials from using the drug in the execution. It was the first time that a pharmaceutical manufacturer has been able to stop an execution — at least temporarily. It is likely to intensify the battle between officials in death-penalty states and drugmakers that object to their products being used to kill inmates.
Nevada had planned to use three drugs in the execution of Scott Dozier, who has been on death row since 2007: one as a sedative, one to paralyze him, and the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl to help kill him. The execution would have been the first to use fentanyl, which kills thousands of Americans every year and is at the forefront of the nation’s overdose crisis.
The potential use of commonly abused narcotics like fentanyl in executions has alarmed human-rights organizations. They fear that prison officials in death-penalty states, facing objections from pharmaceutical companies, will turn to the black market to obtain those narcotics, bolstering trafficking networks at the same time authorities are desperately trying to curb them.
But the drug that led to the postponement of the execution on Wednesday was not fentanyl but midazolam, the sedative in the three-drug cocktail, whose use in executions has been bitterly disputed for different reasons. Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez of the Clark County District Court issued the restraining order.
Alvogen, the drug’s manufacturer, had sued to block its use, saying Nevada obtained the drug under false pretenses because the company did not want it to be acquired for use in capital punishment. Alvogen said it would suffer “immediate and irreparable harm” if the medication were used for such purposes.
State officials bought the drug from a wholesale distributor, Cardinal Health, but did so without disclosing that it was to be used in an execution and not for a therapeutic purpose, according to Alvogen’s lawyers.
The plaintiffs said Nevada officials had also instructed Cardinal Health to ship the drug to a state office in Las Vegas instead of to the state prison in Ely, Nev., more than 200 miles away, where the death chamber is. This was done, they said, “to further the implication that the midazolam was for a legitimate medical purpose.”
Nevada had also planned to use a paralytic drug, cisatracurium besylate, whose maker, Sandoz, also tried to stop it from being used in the execution.
The state said it would not proceed with the execution Wednesday night if officials were not allowed to use midazolam. If Nevada were permanently prevented from using the medication, it would have to find another combination of drugs to execute Mr. Dozier.
Judge Gonzalez’s ruling was hailed by human rights groups and anti-death penalty activists.
“This ruling affirms that the makers of medicines have a right to decide how their products are used,” said Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, a human-rights organization based in London. “These lawsuits exposed how Nevada ignored drug-safety laws designed to protect the public and used subterfuge to undermine private contracts.”
In a statement issued after the ruling, the Nevada Department of Corrections said the execution “has been postponed.”
Critics had warned that Mr. Dozier could endure a prolonged and excruciating death. The midazolam, they said, was likely not to render him fully unconscious, and when the fentanyl was injected, he would have to endure the sensation of suffocation. High doses of fentanyl kill by severely depressing the respiratory system.
The third drug to be injected — the paralytic agent — would have prevented Mr. Dozier from writhing on the gurney or showing any outward signs of pain, even as he suffered an agonizing death, the critics added. They argued that the paralytic could potentially mask the suffering involved in a botched execution.
But Mr. Dozier said he was fine with all of that. He has waived appeals of his death sentence and told the judge in his case that he wanted to die, even if he suffered in the process.
In an interview this week with The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mr. Dozier, 47, said his desire to be executed hadn’t waned even after learning that the state intended to use an experimental drug protocol.
“Life in prison isn’t a life,” Mr. Dozier told the newspaper. “This isn’t living, man. It’s just surviving.”
He added: “If people say they’re going to kill me, get to it.”
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/opinion/brexit-meets-gravity.html
An anti-Brexit demonstrator outside the Houses of Parliament in London, in March.
These days I’m writing a lot about trade policy. I know there are more crucial topics, like Alan Dershowitz. Maybe a few other things? But getting and spending go on; and to be honest, in a way I’m doing trade issues as a form of therapy and/or escapism, focusing on stuff I know as a break from the grim political news.
Anyway, as Britain’s self-inflicted Brexit crisis (self-inflicted with some help from Putin, it seems) comes to a head, it seems to me worth trying to explain some aspects of the economics involved that should be obvious – surely are obvious to many British economists – but aren’t, apparently, as obvious either to Brexiteers or to the general public.
These aspects explain why Theresa May is trying to do a soft Brexit or even, as some say, BINO – Brexit In Name Only; and why the favored alternative of Brexiteers, trade agreements with the United States and perhaps others to replace the EU, won’t fly.
Now, many of the arguments for Brexit were lies pure and simple. But their claims about trade, both before and after the vote, may arguably be seen as misunderstandings rather than sheer dishonesty.
In the world according to Brexiteers, Britain needn’t lose much by leaving the EU, because it can still negotiate a free trade agreement with the rest of Europe, or, at worst, face the low tariffs the EU imposes on other non-EU economies. Meanwhile, Britain can negotiate better trade deals elsewhere, especially the US, that will make up for any losses on the EU side.
What’s wrong with this story? The first thing to understand is that the EU is not a free trade agreement like NAFTA; it’s a customs union, which is substantially stronger and more favorable to trade.
What’s the difference? In NAFTA, most Mexican products can enter the U.S. tariff-free. But Mexico and the U.S. don’t charge the same tariffs on imports from third parties. This means that Mexican goods entering the U.S. still have to face a customs inspection, to make sure that they’re actually Mexican, not, say, Chinese goods unloaded in Mexico and trucked across the border to bypass U.S. tariffs.
And actually it’s worse than that, because what is a Mexican good, anyway? NAFTA has elaborate rules about how much Mexican content is required to qualify for zero tariffs, and this adds a lot of paperwork and frictions to intra-NAFTA trade.
By contrast, the EU sets common external tariffs, which means that once you’re in, you’re in: once goods are unloaded at Rotterdam they can be shipped on to France or Germany without further customs checks. So there’s much less friction.
And frictions, not tariffs, are what businesses are complaining about as Brexit draws near. For example, the British auto industry relies on “just-in-time” production, maintaining low inventories of parts, because it has been able to count on prompt arrival of parts from Europe. If Britain leaves the customs union, the risk of customs delays would make this infeasible, substantially raising costs.
These frictions are also why estimates of the cost of Brexit are comparable to estimates of the cost of a global tariff war, even though the predicted reduction in trade volumes is much smaller.
Still, even if leaving the customs union would be costly, couldn’t Britain make up for that by getting a really good deal with Donald Trump’s America? No.
Certainly the U.S. couldn’t offer hugely valuable tariff reductions, for the simple reason that our tariffs on EU products – like EU tariffs on our products – are already quite low. You can find examples of high tariffs, like our 25 percent tariff on light trucks, but overall there just isn’t much to give.
What about a Britain-U.S. customs union? That would be hugely problematic, among other things because given the asymmetry in size Britain would effectively be giving Washington complete control over its policy. Beyond that, no deal with the U.S. could be worth as much as Britain’s customs union with its neighbors, because of gravity.
What? One of the best-established relationships in economics is the so-called gravity equation for trade between any two countries, which says that the amount of trade depends positively on the size of the two countries’ economies but negatively on the distance between them. You can see this very clearly in British exports. Here’s British exports to selected countries as a percentage of the importing country’s GDP, plotted against the distance to that country:
The point is that while America offers a market comparable in size to that of the EU, it’s much further away, so that even if the UK could make an incredible deal with us, it wouldn’t be worth nearly as much as the customs union they have.
All of this explains why May is trying to negotiate a deal that keeps the customs union intact. But that, of course, ain’t much of an exit: Brussels will still set UK trade policy, except that Britain will no longer have a vote. So what was the point of Brexit in the first place?
Good question. Too bad more people didn’t ask it before the referendum.
by:
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/world/asia/thailand-cave-rescue-how.html
This undated photo taken recently and released by the Royal Thai Navy on July 7 shows a group of Thai Navy divers in Tham Luang Cave during the rescue operation for 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach.
MAE SAI, Thailand — It began as a misadventure by 12 boys and their soccer coach in a flood-prone northern Thai cave, which soon seemed destined to end in tragedy.
It turned into a nearly three-week-long story of survival, international collaboration and triumph over the impossible — one that was avidly embraced and followed live across the world.
A team of cave divers rescued the last of the boys and their coach on Tuesday from deep inside the warren of underground passages near Thailand’s border with Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia’s more remote regions.
One by one, the divers brought the final four members of the Wild Boars team and their coach out of the flooded Tham Luang Cave.
How they did it was a mix of trial and error, improvisation, skill, massive water pumps, miles of guide rope and strategically placed air tanks along the two-mile-long escape route, much of it submerged.
It took 10 days for rescuers to even locate the boys, then nearly a week before the rescue could even begin.
One diver died in preparing the evacuation. The other rescuers, laden with scuba gear, carried the boys — who could not swim and wore full face masks — as they squeezed through flooded crevices that would challenge the most seasoned divers. The final trek to freedom took four hours or more per child.
“We are not sure if this is a miracle, or science, or what,” the Thai Navy SEALs posted on their Facebook page. “All the 13 Wild Boars are now out of the cave.”
The rescue of the Wild Boars touched a global nerve, an uplifting counterpoint to the wars, atrocities, ethnic conflicts and crises afflicting countries like Syria, South Sudan and Yemen — not to mention closer to home in Myanmar and in Thailand itself, where there is a long-running war near the southern border.
For many people around the world, Thailand’s extraordinary operation to save 12 boys and their coach was a welcome contrast to the images of the United States separating immigrant children from their parents and locking them up.
The five Wild Boars who emerged Tuesday were immediately taken by ambulance and helicopter to a hospital in Chiang Rai, the nearest large city, and were to be placed in quarantine with the eight boys rescued Sunday and Monday.
They were expected to stay for about a week in quarantine, where family members who once feared they were dead can see them through a window.
Among the last to emerge from the cave was the Boars’ 25-year-old soccer coach, Ekkapol Chantawong, who helped the boys stay alive by conserving their energy during the 10 days before aid arrived.
Family members and friends were predictably ecstatic over the news that everyone was finally safe. Hundreds of millions of others around the world cheered with them.
“It was 18 days but it felt like years,” said Prayuth Jetiyanukarn, the abbot at a temple in the town of Mae Sai where Mr. Ekkapol works.
The abbot’s eyes welled.
“I’m so happy, but it’s not just for Ek and the team,” he said. “The whole world has been watching over these 18 days and they are celebrating with us.”
A group of Thai Navy divers in the cave during an early phase of the rescue operation.
“We have done something that no one expected that we could complete,” he said. “It was an impossible mission.”
Also making their way out of the cave were four Thai divers, an army doctor and three members of the Thai Navy SEALs, who had stayed in the cave with the Boars for more than a week after they were found and helped them prepare for their underwater escape.
Mr. Narongsak said that all four divers were healthy after eight days underground. They are expected to join the Wild Boars and Mr. Ekkapol in quarantine, however, because of the fear of infection.
“This morning, I promised to take nine people out,” Mr. Narongsak said. “We’re a success now.”
Tham Luang Cave, about two miles from the border with Myanmar, is the bed of an underground river that flows during the monsoon season.
The cave also is a maze of passageways and chambers, with side routes and dead ends that make it formidable to navigate, especially when filled with water.
Just reaching the cavern where the group ultimately took refuge was a feat even for the most skilled searchers.
The Wild Boars and their coach entered the cave after their soccer practice on June 23, a week before the rainy season generally begins.
But a heavy rain started falling and the cave complex quickly began to fill with water, forcing them deeper into the maze to avoid drowning.
Mr. Narongsak, then the governor of Chiang Rai Province, began organizing a search, a task that he later said seemed hopeless.
Nonetheless, Mr. Narongsak and other officials threw themselves into it. They mobilized dozens of members of the Thai Navy SEALs, hundreds of soldiers, volunteers and workers from 20 government agencies.
Leaders of the operation tried every approach they could devise.
Some failed, such as searching for a back door to the cave or drilling holes from the mountain above in the hope of lifting the boys out.
But two made a big difference: installing massive pumps to drain water from the cave and building an improvised dam to keep floodwaters from flowing in.
To help the members of the Navy SEALs, who had little experience in cave diving, search leaders turned to a group of highly skilled foreign cave divers, a rare breed of explorer.
The boys and their coach were finally found on July 2 by two British divers who were extending guide lines into the cave.
One diver, John Volanthen, reached the end of his line, fastened it in the mud, and emerged from the water to find 13 pairs of eyes staring at him.
The boys, having no idea of the international fixation over their plight, were surprised to learn that the diver was from Britain.
Had Mr. Volanthen’s line been 15 feet shorter, he would most likely have missed them.
The boys requested food and asked whether they could leave right away. But that operation would take another six days to start, and two more before all were evacuated.
The four Thai divers stayed with them, nursing them back to health and feeding them a high-protein diet.
Officials said that extracting the boys through the treacherous underwater passageways would be more difficult than finding them. Few, if any, of the boys knew how to swim, much less use diving gear.
Ultimately, the rescue officials concocted a plan to have small teams of divers bring out the boys by holding them under their bodies as they swam. The boys wore full face masks, rather than scuba gear, to make it easier for them to breathe underwater.
A successful rescue depended on positioning a supply of air tanks along the route they would take.
Disaster struck early Friday when a volunteer diver, Saman Gunan, 38, a former member of the Thai Navy SEALs, lost consciousness and died as he returned from putting air tanks in place.
“I call him the hero of Tham Luang Cave,” Mr. Narongsak said.
On the first two days of the rescue, 18 divers — 13 foreigners and five Thai — took part, bringing out four boys each time. On the final day, at least 12 divers took part.
Jintrakarn Sriwanithkul, 18, a student at the Mae Sai Prasitsart School attended by six of the Wild Boars, grew excited at word of the successful rescue.
“It’s amazing news,” he said. “When I first heard about them being missing, I thought they’d come out in two to three days because they knew the cave well.”
Foreign journalists converged on the cave by the hundreds in the kind of mass coverage usually reserved for major news events, like the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 four years ago.
For Thailand’s military leaders, who seized power in a coup the same year and have yet to hold promised elections, the rescue was an opportunity to show their concern for residents of the country’s northernmost province.
King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun, who let it be known early on that he was closely following the search effort, donated food and supplies.
Whether the king’s unusual personal interest gave added impetus to the effort is unclear. But a top police official who visited the cave told search leaders to spare no expense.
The prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former general, visited the cave twice to meet with officials, rescue workers and families of the missing boys. He assured relatives that the government would not abandon them.
In the end, the final rescue part of the mission took just under nine hours, starting from the time the divers entered the cave to the time they had emerged with all four boys and Mr. Ekkapol.
“I would like to say thank you to His Majesty and royal family to support us,” Mr. Narongsak said. “I am thankful for all support from Thai people and all around the world.”
Some members of the Thai Navy SEALs stayed near the cave at quarters in Mae Sai. By the end, scuba gear, boxes of instant noodles and wet towels were strewn all around.
One member of the SEALs said that the operation might have looked easy from the graphics in newspapers, but that it was tough. They worked 12-hour days at a minimum and returned to quarters exhausted.
Nangnoung Namun, a weaver by trade who has been cooking hundreds of meals a day for the SEAL team as a volunteer, was elated by the successful rescue.
“Now I can sleep peacefully,” she said. “I’m so relieved.”
The first confirmation that all 13 were finally safe came from the SEAL team with a post on their Facebook page shortly before 7 p.m.
“12 boars and coach are out of the cave,” they announced. “Everyone is safe.”
“Hooyah,” the Facebook post concluded.
by:
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/politics/trump-administration-catch-and-release-migrants.html
Milka Pablo, 35, and her 3-year-old daughter, Darly, were reunited in Phoenix on Tuesday after four months apart.
PHOENIX — One mother had waited four months to wrap her arms around her little boy. Another had waited three months to see her little girl again.
When the reunions finally happened Tuesday in Phoenix, the mothers were met with cries of rejection from their children.
“He didn’t recognize me,” said Mirce Alba Lopez, 31, of her 3-year-old son, Ederson, her eyes welling up with tears. “My joy turned temporarily to sadness.”
For Milka Pablo, 35, it was no different. Her 3-year-old daughter, Darly, screamed and tried to wiggle free from her mother’s embrace.
“I want Miss. I want Miss,” Darly cried, calling for the social worker at the shelter where she had been living since mother and daughter were separated by federal agents at the southwestern border.
The tearful reunions — ordered by a court in California — came as the government said that it would release hundreds of migrant families wearing ankle bracelet monitors into the United States, effectively returning to the “catch and release” policy that President Trump promised to eliminate.
[Traumatic experiences like family separations pose great psychological risks, mental health experts say.]
Faced with a pair of court orders restricting immigration detentions, federal officials said that they could not hold all of the migrant families who had been apprehended. They said that their hands were tied by dueling requirements to release children from detention after 20 days and also to keep them with their parents or other adult relatives.
Denis Espinoza, 33, holding his 13-month-old daughter, Carmen, at a bus station in Phoenix on Tuesday. Mr. Espinoza was released from detention and allowed to reunite with her 20 days after their separation.
Trump administration officials also said that they have stopped referring migrant adults who enter the United States with children for prosecution.
“Parents with children under the age of 5 are being reunited with their children and then released and enrolled into an alternative detention program,” Matthew Albence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations, told reporters on Tuesday.
He said that means the migrants will be given ankle bracelets “and released into the community.”
Government officials said they were struggling to meet Tuesday’s court-ordered deadline to reunite 102 migrant children under 5 with their parents; only about one-third were expected to be reunited by then.
The reunions that did happen were chaotic. Parents were warned that pickup and drop-off times could change throughout the day. The federal agency that oversees the care of migrant children, the Department of Health and Human Services, was still conducting background checks on parents into Tuesday morning.
In Phoenix, the reunions were marked by confusion and heartbreak.
As Ms. Lopez and Ms. Pablo waited at a Greyhound station to board eastbound buses, their children called each other sister and brother. They were yet to utter the word “mami,” Spanish for mother, to the women cuddling, stroking and feeding them. But they were calmer, the mothers said.
Darly, who had been potty-trained before the separation, had regressed to diapers. Ederson bounced up and down on his mother’s lap and downed Doritos with gusto. All of the adults were fitted with ankle monitors.
“I want to go with my little sister,” he said, pointing to a 13-month-old named Carmen in the arms of Denis Espinoza, her Honduran father who was released from detention to recover her 20 days after they were separated.
“See,” said his mother, “he thinks those are his siblings.”
The Justice Department has maintained that its “zero tolerance” immigration policy — which focuses on prosecuting all adults who illegally enter the United States but not necessarily detaining them — is still intact. The department has also said that it is prosecuting all of the cases it receives from immigration agents. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has predicted the tough immigration stance will discourage people from illegally entering the country.
Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, called the return to catch and release unfortunate and said that it would serve “as a pull factor for increased future illegal immigration.”
She added, “D.H.S. will continue to work with Congress to find a solution to this problem.”
Mr. Trump has for years railed against catch and release, blaming it for crimes and violence committed by illegal immigrants during the Obama administration. But the Trump administration has similarly struggled with deterring waves of migrants from Central and South America — and, once they enter the country, processing them through the legal system humanely.
[Read our deputy National editor Kim Murphy’s response to concerns about our use of the phrase “catch and release.”]
Migrants with children who are apprehended in the United States are now given a notice to appear in court and being told, “Welcome to America,” according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified by name.
Mr. Albence said the ankle monitor would track the families being released, but that ICE would consider other methods to ensure migrants show up for court. A total of about 80,000 migrants wearing tracking devices currently live in the United States, including migrants who were released from detention before the zero-tolerance policy was enacted in April.
Soon after the policy was announced, images of children in cages and audio of toddlers crying as they were separated from their parents prompted widespread public outrage, including from the Republican Party and Christian conservatives.
In response, on June 20, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that said migrant children could no longer be separated from their adult relatives. That effectively limited detention to 20 days — a timeline set under a 1997 court settlement known as Flores — for migrant adults apprehended with children.
The Trump administration has asked Judge Dolly M. Gee of Federal District Court in Los Angeles to amend the Flores settlement to allow children to be detained for longer periods of time. It also has asked Congress for new laws to override the court order.
On Monday, Judge Gee refused to amend the settlement.
“Defendants seek to light a match to the Flores agreement and ask this court to upend the parties’ agreement by judicial fiat,” Judge Gee, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote in her order.
She called the Justice Department’s request to amend the settlement “cynical” and said it was an attempt to “shift responsibility to the judiciary for over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to the current stalemate.”
The Trump administration is expected to appeal her decision. But for now, it has little choice but to release families with ankle bracelets and hope they will show up for court appearances.
Catch and release is a term with no legal definition and has been used as a pejorative alternative to jailing illegal immigrants. Leon Fresco, a former senior Justice Department immigration lawyer, said putting ankle bracelets on migrants is a return to what the Trump administration itself has described as catch and release; ending its practice was a top priority of the labor union that represents Border Patrol agents and endorsed Mr. Trump’s 2016 candidacy.
The use of ankle bands for migrant families may be short-lived. Judge Dana Sabraw of Federal District Court in San Diego said that he would consider a motion to let migrant families choose between remaining in long-term detention with ICE or voluntarily giving their children to Health and Human Services while they await legal proceedings.
Chris Rickerd, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, accused the Trump administration of largely manufacturing the current immigration crisis.
“Border residents and people around the country realize it’s this administration making people stand in the sun, waiting to cross into the United States,” Mr. Rickerd said. “It’s this administration separating children from their families. And it’s this administration taking this zero-tolerance policy stance when illegal immigration numbers historically have declined.”
That chaos was highlighted Tuesday by the government’s struggle to comply with the court order in San Diego to reunite children under 5 with their families. Federal officials said that they had reunited four families so far, with another 34 reunions scheduled by day’s end.
Additionally, officials gave no indication of whether they would meet a July 26 deadline to reunite all remaining migrant children who had been separated from their parents.
“These are firm deadlines; they’re not aspirational goals,” said Judge Sabraw, admonishing the government.
Chris Meekins, a senior Health and Human Services Department official, pointed to safety concerns to explain the delay and insisted that the reunifications could not be rushed.
“Our process may not be as quick as some might like, but there is no question that it is protecting children,” Mr. Meekins said in a conference call with reporters.
In some cases, he said, “If we had just reunited kids with the adults, we would be putting them in the care of a rapist, a kidnapper, a child abuser and someone who was charged with murder in their home nation.”
One of the biggest operators of migrant-youth shelters in the United States, Southwest Key Programs, said its staff had dispatched several children on Tuesday from its shelters to return to their parents.
“Our staff came in early, made sure every backpack was full and every child got a hug and a goodbye,” Juan Sánchez, the nonprofit group’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “And the kids hugged us back. They were excited to be on their way to be with their families. And we were thrilled for them.”
The nonprofit declined to discuss how many children under 5 were released.
The reunification process has highlighted how traumatic separations stemming from the zero-tolerance policy have been.
One Honduran father had been warned by border agents that his child would be taken away, and he had been given an opportunity to explain to his son what would happen. He beamed while his son asked questions and played with toys when they were reunited Tuesday at a federal immigration office in Michigan.
A second father was not given a chance to tell his 3-year-old son that they would be separated, according to Abril Valdes, a lawyer for both men. His child had stopped talking soon after being taken into government custody. The father and son cried throughout the reunification meeting. The boy said little and refused to take any toys or leave his father’s arms.
“I feel like he’s still in shell shock,” said Ms. Valdes, their lawyer.
Correction: July 10, 2018
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. It is Rickerd, not Rickard.
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/politics/republican-senators-russia.html
Senator Richard C. Shelby and his colleagues met with members of the Russian Federation Council last week in Moscow.
WASHINGTON — Even for an era of strained relations, the images that crossed back over the Atlantic last week stood out: Seven Republican senators and one Republican congresswoman ushered into a Moscow conference room, exchanging pleasantries with top Russian officials on the eve of American Independence Day.
But if the delegation was intended to help thaw friction between the two countries before a summit meeting between their two leaders, its aftermath has shown just how treacherous diplomacy between Washington and Moscow has become amid Russia’s brazen aggression abroad.
In Moscow, the senators have been portrayed as anything from peacemakers to fools. Democrats in Washington were only slightly more generous.
“It is clear to me that there are members of the Senate who are either naïve or they don’t recognize the real risk factors that Russia imposes on our system of government,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, who led a report on Vladimir V. Putin’s tactical aggression in Europe this year.
Russian commentators and officials, meanwhile, claimed that the senators’ overtures were evidence that the tide of United States-Russian relations were, in fact, moving toward the Kremlin just as President Trump prepared to meet privately with Mr. Putin, the Russian president.
“The wind is blowing in our sails,” Vyacheslav Nikonov, the chairman of the State Duma education committee, told a Russian state television talk show after meeting with the delegation.
The multiday trip, with stops in St. Petersburg and Moscow, amounted to the most senior congressional exchange between the two countries in years, and the first since the Russians undertook an unprecedented and consequential campaign to bolster Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and harm Hillary Clinton’s.
That interference remains the subject of high-stakes investigations in the United States, and it loomed over the trip. On the same day the senators met with officials in Moscow, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report confirming that conclusions reached by American intelligence agencies — that Mr. Putin ordered a campaign to sow American political divisions, harm Mrs. Clinton and aid Mr. Trump — were “sound.” Its release was intended to drive home that Russia is still active in American politics, using digital tools to deepen the country’s social divisions.
In Moscow, the senators traded pledges to work toward better relations with Russian lawmakers and Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister. But they repeatedly found themselves locked in tense disputes over the effects of American sanctions and Russian denials that they had meddled in American politics.
Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, who led the delegation and is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, greeted the officials by saying that though two nations were competitors, they “don’t necessarily need to be adversaries.”
“I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” he told Vyacheslav V. Volodin, the Duma speaker.
Russian officials and commentators signaled that they were delighted with that tone. They declared that they had ceded no ground to the Americans.
“We heard things we’d heard before, and I think our guests heard rather clearly and distinctly an answer that they already knew — we don’t interfere in American elections,” said Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s former ambassador to the United States and a player in the election investigations, according to The Washington Post.
Maxim Suchkov, a foreign policy expert with ties to the foreign ministry, told the RBC newspaper that the delegation’s visit aimed to bring the Republican Party into line on the importance of dialogue with Russia, a policy supported by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Nikonov described the American senators as “Trumpists” who have taken “firmly anti-Russian positions yet are open to dialogue.”
Back in Washington this week, the senators were left to distance themselves from charges that they had allowed themselves to be used as props by a government hostile to American interests — particularly at a time set aside to commemorate American democracy.
Comments by one of them, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, set off howls from Democrats. Mr. Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, returned to Washington questioning the value of punitive American sanctions targeting Russian financial interest and urging his fellow senators to reconsider how to best discourage Russian interference.
“I’ve been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was, and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview with The Washington Examiner. “We’ve blown it way out of proportion.”
Mr. Johnson was forced to clean up his remarks on Tuesday, saying that the senators had delivered a stern warning to Moscow and that the Russians would regret their disparaging comments toward American lawmakers.
Mr. Shelby, too, sounded a more skeptical note back at the Capitol. He and almost all other senators voted on Tuesday to advance a largely symbolic measure meant to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to NATO amid threats by Mr. Trump and to call on the administration to develop a comprehensive strategy to blunt Russian aggression.
“My advice to the president would be, ‘Be careful,’” he told reporters. “You are dealing with a tough man, a smart man, and he probably wants to get something and give nothing in return.”
The episode could serve as something of a cautionary tale for Mr. Trump’s own long-delayed summit meeting with Mr. Putin next Monday. Mr. Trump signaled on Tuesday as he departed for a weeklong visit with European allies that he was looking forward to a meeting with Mr. Putin.
“Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all — who would think?” Mr. Trump said.
by:
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/migrant-children-reunification-immigration.html
Mirce Alva Lopez, 31, with her son Adan, 3, at a bus station in Phoenix. The two were reunited on Tuesday after four months apart.
Facing a legal deadline to return young migrant children separated from their parents at the border, federal officials began reuniting them on Tuesday, with a goal of returning up to 34 children to their families by the end of the day.
There were widespread reports of glitches and delays — in one case, because a computer broke down and five mothers could not be fitted with ankle bracelets — and it was not clear that those initial 34 made it back to their parents.
“We thought this would be a pretty feel-good, easy thing and then it turned into a nine-hour drama,” said Andrea Sáenz, a lawyer in Brooklyn whose clients had to wait at least another day to see their children because of the computer problem.
The relatively slow pace of reversing the Trump administration’s family separation policy fell short of an original court order, which had directed that all children under 5 — a total of 102, by the government’s latest count — be returned to their families by Tuesday.
Chris Meekins, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services, pointed to safety concerns to explain the delay in the reunions and insisted that the process could not be rushed.
“Our process may not be as quick as some might like but there is no question that it is protecting children,” Mr. Meekins, the chief of staff of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, said in a conference call with reporters.
The authorities said that reunited families being released from custody would be equipped with ankle monitors to make sure they appear at scheduled court hearings.
In some cases, he said, “If we had just reunited kids with the adults, we would be putting them in the care of a rapist, a kidnapper, a child abuser, and someone who was charged with murder in their home nation.”
In all cases, the authorities said, reunited families were being released from custody and equipped with ankle monitors to make sure they appeared at scheduled court hearings on their immigration cases.
The scheduled reunions were taking place at various sites around the country. Children have been detained in shelters far from their parents, many of whom were also detained as part of President Trump’s zero-tolerance border enforcement policy.
Also on Tuesday, a plane carrying 24 Guatemalan migrants — families that had been separated after crossing into the United States, then reunited and deported — landed in Guatemala City.
One of the biggest operators of migrant-youth shelters in the country, Southwest Key Programs, said its staff had dispatched several children from its shelters to return to their parents on Tuesday.
“Our staff came in early, made sure every backpack was full and every child got a hug and a goodbye,” Juan Sánchez, the nonprofit group’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “And the kids hugged us back. They were excited to be on their way to be with their families. And we were thrilled for them.”
In Phoenix, white vans with tinted windows pulled out of two shelters around sunrise, and more vans were loaded later in the morning — all presumably loaded with children and bound for an ICE office in central Phoenix where parents awaited, according to immigration attorneys and advocates.
At least four men from Honduras and Guatemala — all of them with children in detention — had been transported to the ICE facility from a detention center in Eloy, Ariz. at about 3 a.m., said their lawyer, Bridget Cambria. “This is life-altering,” she said. “They all have legitimate immigration cases, but haven’t been able to focus on anything else but their children.”
Four Guatemalan boys — ages 6 months, 5, 8 and 12 — were reunified at an Arizona ICE processing facility with their mother, who had been in detention in Texas, said Golden McCarthy, program director at the Florence Project, the only organization that offers legal representation to immigrant detainees in Arizona.
The final number of children who would be returned on Tuesday was still in flux. Mr. Meekins said that 14 adults were disqualified from reunification during the vetting process, including eight with serious criminal backgrounds including histories of child cruelty and drug crimes, five who were determined not to be the actual parent of the child, and one who was being treated for a communicable disease that would have made reunification unsafe.
There were logistical challenges to the reunifications, too, according to officials close to the operation who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The federal agency that oversees the care of migrant children, the Department of Health and Human Services, was still conducting background checks on parents until the very last moment on Tuesday morning. The final number to be reunited had changed as recently as 8 a.m. Tuesday.
Even after the parents were granted approval to take custody of their children, the operation faced other challenges. It required coordination between multiple federal agencies and government contractors — groups that have struggled to work together smoothly since the family separations began weeks ago, to the frustration of immigrant advocates and the federal judge overseeing the court case challenging the Trump administration’s handling of migrant families.
On Monday, the plan had been for the shelters where the children are housed to transport the children to undisclosed locations in various states and to hand the children over to the Department of Homeland Security. But on Tuesday morning, a person familiar with the reunifications said the plan had changed: Officials with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency were now preparing to pick up the children at the various sites and shelters.
As the reunions began, there were new mix-ups.
At one shelter, the plain-clothed ICE personnel who pulled up in vans ran out of child-safety seats, and were preparing to make a second trip to the site in order to pick up all the children eligible for reunifications, causing a delay.
Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego had set a deadline of Tuesday for the youngest children to be returned, but government lawyers said Monday that of the 102 such children now in government custody, the authorities had been able to identify, locate and vet the parents of only 54. The court order requires family reunifications for all 3,000 children in federal custody before the end of the month.
At a status conference on Tuesday, Judge Sabraw was largely satisfied with the government’s progress but urged it to move more quickly in some cases.
“These are firm deadlines; they are not aspirational goals,” Judge Sabraw said, adding, “I would like the process to continue as expeditiously as it has been with paramount focus on the children’s welfare.”
Specifically, the judge said that separated families should not be subject to the same level of scrutiny as friends or extended family members of children who enter the country alone as unaccompanied minors and apply to sponsor the children. In those cases, the government investigates the backgrounds not only of the prospective sponsor, but also everyone else living in the household where the child would live.
“These parents are responsible for their own children,” he said. “Many of these determinations we must assume are subject to the parents’ judgment and consideration.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump weighed in on the pending reunions, claimed Democrats want “open borders” and defended ICE, which has been the focus of protests, with widespread calls for abolishing the agency. Mr. Trump made the remarks before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House. He was asked by reporters for his reaction to officials missing the court-ordered deadline for reunions.
“Well, I have a solution,” Mr. Trump replied. “Tell people not to come to our country illegally. That’s the solution. Don’t come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally.”
A reporter asked him if he was suggesting that the children be punished.
“I’m saying this, very simply: We have laws,” Mr. Trump said. “We have borders. Don’t come to our country illegally. It’s not a good thing. And as far as ICE is concerned, the people that are fighting ICE, it’s a disgrace. These people go into harm’s way. There is nobody under greater danger than the people from ICE.”
The children involved in Tuesday’s reunions are some of the youngest immigrants caught up in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. They had been apprehended with their relatives at the border, separated from their families and detained in so-called tender-age shelters for children under the age of 12. They have been separated from their loved ones, in many cases, for weeks.
The Texas-based nonprofit that has raised more than $20 million to help families separated at the border said Tuesday that it plans to offer the money as bond payments to release thousands of mothers who remain in custody.
Leaders of the group, Raices, said they planned to offer to pay as much of the money as was necessary to reunite an estimated 2,500 children and mothers. They have already paid nearly $100,000 in bonds for roughly 18 people who are in custody with the Department of Homeland Security.
Officials with Raices acknowledge that they may face resistance from the Department of Homeland Security in accepting bond payments. But they hope to use the issue to keep attention on the children who remain scattered across the country, and to press Congress to take action.
“We will not simply fork over a check and hope for the best,” said Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of Raices. “We expect that the government will act in good faith, as the American people are demanding, and sit down with us, put all of our cards on the table.”
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/sports/world-cup/france-vs-belgium.html
France’s players and coaches celebrated after beating Belgium.
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — They were only glimpses, fleeting and flickering and ultimately insignificant, but they were so tantalizing that they were impossible to miss.
Kylian Mbappé, inside the first 10 seconds, burning Belgium’s Jan Vertonghen away, an express train speeding past a bewildered commuter. Paul Pogba striding forward, Antoine Griezmann dancing through challenges. Mbappé again, splitting Belgium’s defense in two with a blink-of-the-eye pirouetting drag-back.
They were moments to drop the jaw and draw the breath, visions of the heights this French generation — now one win away from being crowned champion of the world — might yet scale, images of what this team of all the talents could, and perhaps should, be.
But it was not those flashes of neon brilliance that took France past Belgium in a 1-0 win that sent thousands out to celebrate on the Champs-Élysées. France is not in its third World Cup final in 20 years because of what this team threatens to be, or might become.
[Up Next: Follow our live coverage of England vs. Croatia]
It is there, instead, because of what it does in the long stretches between flashes; it is there not because it shines so brightly but because it dulls whatever it faces; it is there because of what it is: a team that always has much, much more than enough, but only ever does enough, and never any more.
France has, somehow, reached the cusp of greatness without ever really having given the impression it has stretched itself, or reached its full potential. It sleepwalked through its group, with single-goal victories against Australia and Peru, and a mind-numbing goalless draw with Denmark.
In the round of 16, against an Argentina side mired in chaos and permanently on the verge of a meltdown, it roused itself for a few minutes, scored three quick-fire goals, then sank back into itself, eventually winning — again — by just one goal.
It was only in the quarterfinal, against Uruguay, that it finally broke that trend of squeaking by, but only thanks a header off a set piece and an egregious error from Fernando Muslera, the Uruguayan goalkeeper. France reached St. Petersburg, and the semifinal, hardly having broken a sweat.
It was greeted there by Belgium, whose own golden generation was supposed to provide a significantly more exacting test, to force the French out of their shells, to demand that Manager Didier Deschamps’s richly gifted players finally live up to their lofty reputations. For 50 minutes, the Belgians threatened to do just that, to draw this team into the open field. And then Samuel Umtiti scored — slipping his marker to meet Griezmann’s corner — and France drew back once more, content to contain and control.
Deschamps’s players let Belgium burn itself out, deprived it first of hope, and then of life, all the while not expending a drop of energy more than was strictly necessary.
Belgium’s Eden Hazard, in particular, had started the game as a ball of energy, twisting and turning and writhing his way past Benjamin Pavard, France’s right back; Hazard had the look of a player very conscious of the fact that this was his chance to stake a claim for greatness.
By the end, he looked adrift. He had long since wandered into central midfield, craving some sort of space, some sort of peace, only to find neither. His sparkle had gone, and so had his spark.
It was not — as might be expected, in the era of counter-pressing, that frenzied style of harrying and harassing that is so en vogue in European club soccer — because the French had pummeled him and his team into submission, barely allowing a moment’s rest, but because they had done the opposite: They waited as Belgium wandered into their sleeper-hold, and then simply refused to let go.
That has been France’s unexpected forte in this tournament: its defensive strength, its imperturbability, the ease with which it blunts an attack. Only Argentina has scored against the French from open play. They are so assured in defense that none of those single-goal victories felt at all close, or tense; they all seemed to be over long before the final whistle. So, too, here: When the game ended, the explosion of joy from the French players, and their small squadron of fans, felt somehow out of place, out of context, with the torpor that had descended.
France has achieved this not, as the teams of Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino seek to do, by seeking to coil itself around its prey, squeezing the breath from its opponents. Its approach resembles that of a crocodile, rather than a snake: It waits, pounces, and then sinks back beneath the surface, happy to wait again.
Given the personnel at his disposal, it is hard not to feel that Deschamps is forcing his players to do something that does not come naturally to them. This is a squad that could — should — be tearing through opponents; with its abilities, courage should not feel like a risk. There is a lingering feeling that France is not making the most of his resources, a temptation to wonder what this team might achieve, what it might become, with a less conservative, less cautious manager.
It is easy to speculate, too, that France’s passivity, that lack of ambition, might eventually prove its undoing, that in the final it will need to raise its game and will ultimately be unable — or unwilling — to do so.
There is, though, a counter argument that is no less compelling. France has met every challenge and passed them with ease. Lionel Messi could not disrupt its serenity; nor could Luis Suárez; now Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku have failed, too.
True, there has been no flawless performance, no marquee display to rival Croatia’s win against Argentina or even Belgium’s quarterfinal victory against Brazil; true, there has been a reliance on goals from set pieces; true, France has only ever edged through, rather than sweeping past clearly inferior opponents. It has always had enough, and done enough, but never more.
But those moments, those glimpses of what lies beneath, should not be forgotten. They are dangerous precisely because they hint at what might be, at what France has in reserve, should it be needed. This is a team that has another gear, another level that it can find as and when it is required.
Deschamps and his players are in the World Cup final because of what they are: a team designed to draw the sting, to suck the air from a game, to deprive the fire of oxygen. It is hard to believe they will not win it, though, because of what they might be: the team with the sting, with the air, with the fire. France, for the last month, has done what is required. It will be confident it can do so, one last time.
France’s Kylian Mbappe in action with Belgium’s Kevin De Bruyne.
——
Here’s how France beat Belgium, from Victor Mather and Kevin Draper in New York and Andrew Das in St. Petersburg:
FULL TIME: France 1, Belgium 0
That’s it! France has advanced to the World Cup final with a 1-0 victory over Belgium.
The goal was scored by Samuel Umtiti, who dropped his marker Toby Alderweireld, outjumped the very tall Marouane Fellaini and headed home an Antoine Griezmann corner. The ball was in the net before Belgium keeper Thiebaut Courtois could do anything about it.
France will play the winner of the other semifinal on Wednesday, England or Croatia.
90’ + 4: Mbappe Sells It
Vertonghem bumps into Mbappe, who sells it with a leap and a fall. The replay does not appear to show much contact. Still, a yellow for Vertonghen.
90’ +3: Belgium Survives a Killer
France almost put the game away! They dispossessed Belgium in their own half and freed Griezmann for a wide-open shot, but Courtois quickly got down to his right to corral the shot.
90 +2’: Mbappe Stalls
Mbappe, rather than giving the ball to Belgium for a throw-in, dribbles it away for a moment, drawing the ire of Belgium and some shoves. The ref hits him up with a yellow.
Andrew Das: French time-wasting is the new diving.
90’ + 1: Offense for Belgium
Another striker on for Belgium: Batshuayi for Chadli. Another head to lob balls at. But first they have to get it back from France.
90’: Six More Minutes
Belgium will have 6 minutes of stoppage time to find an equalizer.
89’: Lukaku Can’t Convert
De Bruyne lobs from far out, and Lukaku is there unmarked. But he comes a few inches short of getting his head to it.
88’: Yellow for Kante
Kanté caught there for a professional foul — he gets a yellow. But the bigger problem is he’s given De Bruyne a shooting-range free kick in the 88th minute. That’s a kind of regrettable error if it goes wrong.
87’: French Slowing It Down
Matuidi cannot continue after that collision. He’s out and France brings in Tolisso.
Andrew Das: With Matuidi down again, Belgium is furious with the referee Cunha for not speeding this along. The French are A1 at gamesmanship though, and they know exactly what they’re doing here.
86’: France Locks It Down
France has really locked this down nicely since the goal, which initially gave them a bit of life. But as we’ve entered the final minutes they’re really focusing on the job at hand: sucking the life out of the game, not giving Belgium a sniff of an opening, and getting out of here at 1-0.
85’: France Makes a Change
France makes their first substitution, bringing Steven N’Zonzi in for Olivier Giroud.
Kevin Draper: France is doing a very effective job killing this game off. Belgium is attacking desperately — perhaps too desperately, sometimes taking turns taking on three men — but aren’t actually generating anything dangerous.
83’: Collision!
Hazard is definitely down for real this time after a hard collision with Matuidi on a 50/50 ball. It wasn’t so much a challenge as a flying body block by Hazard, though. Rough, rough play there.
82’: Lloris Saves
Witsel of Belgium pounces on a loose ball and drives in a shot from distance. Lloris makes a diving punch save.
Hazard Goes Down
The Uruguayan referee, Andres Cunha, wasn’t buying Hazard’s fall there, but the replay made it look as if Varane hit him knee to knee right at the top of the area.
80’: Carrasco On for Fellaini
Yannick Carrasco, a winger who plays in China, comes in for Marouane Fellaini.
79’: Free Kick for France
Antoine Griezmann lingers over a France free kick. Then he sends a ball that Pogba heads out of play.
76’: Belgium Panicking
De Bruyne, perhaps concerned about the clock advancing to 75 minutes, tries a shot from outside the box but it’s way too high.
Andrew Das: Mertens has been a good addition for Belgium: dangerous crosses and some good width out right. But Fellaini feels like the game has left him behind up there next to Lukaku. Still, a good cross from Mertens, a well-placed head … he’s done it before.
76’: Where’s Lukaku?
Romelu Lukaku has been invisible this game. He has just 16 touches of the ball — Dries Mertens, who came on 15 minutes ago, already has 13 — and one shot. He hasn’t gotten much service and has had a center back draped on his shoulder all game, but he’s got to do better.
73’: Hazard Pushes
Eden Hazard has practically dropped back into defense to receive the ball, as he tries to hurry Belgium into an attack, impatient that his defenders and Axel Witsel aren’t doing so quickly enough.
Andrew Das: Belgium is patiently working the ball, working the ball, working the ball. It all felt a bit like Spain-Russia there, ike they were just looking for an opening. But the opening never came, they lost the ball, and a couple more minutes have ticked off the clock.
71’: More Chances for Belgium
Belgium possessed the ball right outside of France’s goal for a solid minute, pumping quite a few crosses into the box, but aren’t able to get a shot off before Paul Pogba clears it with his head.
68’: Giroud Sails One
Kylian Mbappe passes to Antoine Griezmann, who crosses it beautifully to Olivier Giroud, who … blasts it over the bar.
67’: Yellow for Hazard
Eden Hazard gets a yellow there for breaking up the counterattack by dragging down Matuidi, but he had to do it. Fellaini, by the way, has stayed in his advanced role; it’s Witsel who is picking up all the slack in midfield since Dembélé left. It’s a big job, and he can’t make a single mistake.
66’: Fellaini … Just Wide!
Mertens crosses, and Fellaini is there, single covered by Pogba, with the head that has scored so many goals. This one goes just wide though.
62’: Belgium Grabs Possession
Hazard, Lukaku and Mertens combine on some nice passing, but the final touch is not there.
60’: Belgium Makes a Change
Dries Mertens in, Ousmane Dembele out as Belgium tries to shake things up with the first substitution of the game.
Andrew Das: This will make things a bit more exciting, that’s for sure. But it also will require a bit more defensively from Fellaini now, because France senses blood in the water here, and they’re coming forward fast when they can.
56’: Giroud … Blocked!
Kylian Mbappé sends Olivier Giroud on goal with a spectacular back heel, but Giroud’s shot is blocked at the last moment.
Andrew Das: What a chance that was: brilliant backheel from Mbappe after a quick give-and-go involving Hernandez and Matuidi. Really fun, and Belgium is lucky — and can thank Courtois, I believe — that the ball didn’t end up in the net amid ooohs and ahhhs. It must be nice to be good enough to even TRY that in a World Cup semifinal.
55’: Great Opportunity for France
Greizmann has a free kick just outside of the box and it’s another great opportunity for France. But his effort goes right to several Belgians and it is headed away.
France’s Samuel Umtiti celebrates scoring their first goal.
51’: GOAL! France Leads
After Vincent Kompany blocks an Olivier Giroud shot, a corner comes in from Antoine Griezmann. Samuel Umtiti simply out-jumps the very tall Marouane Fellaini to score. France has a 1-0 lead.
Andrew Das: Disaster for Belgium: Umtiti dropped Alderweireld and nearly had a free header there. Fellaini arrived late to at least make it a contested one, but the damage was already done and the ball was in the net before Courtois could do anything about it.
48’: Varane Clears It
Witsel lobs in a ball to Lukaku, but Varane of France is all over him, so he gets a head on it but can’t fire off a good shot.
Kevin Draper: It seems appropriate that on the same day Cristiano Ronaldo transfers to Juventus, two of his rumored replacements, Eden Hazard and Kylian Mbappé, are the best players in a World Cup match.
Moving the Ball
One stat increasing in popularity is “possession advanced,” which tries to measure which players move the ball forward the most. A player gets full credit for dribbles forward, and half credit for passes. The leader in this game so far is Benjamin Pavard of France at 118 meters. Eden Hazard leads Belgium at 109.
Andrew Das: The stadium does not appear full, especially in some of the best seats near midfield, which seems strange for a World Cup semifinal. But France and Belgium don’t travel like Brazil, which surely thought it’d be here, or a few other countries, and the atmosphere is missing some of the fire we saw when teams from the Americas played earlier in the tournament. Wednesday night’s second semifinal, England and Croatia, ought to have a bit more life as English fans start to arrive in full voice.
The Numbers
Belgium was the short-passing team in this game, controlling possession at 58-42 percent and outpassing France, 318-201. But France’s direct style led to more shots: an 11-3 advantage. Unfortunately for France, only two of those shots were on net. Six were off target, and three were blocked.
Griezmann led the way with four shots for France, although none of those was on target. Belgium has most of its passing coming from the defense, with Alderweireld and Kompany having 50 and 46 passes. Of course, those uncontested sideways passes in Belgium’s end are taking place a long way from where the goals are scored.
Two Halves Within a Half
Andrew Das: You could break that first half into halves of its own. The first one, with Belgium dangerous and on the front foot, was quite a bit of fun. France finally found its feet and had a couple of good chances — a rocket by Matuidi, the Pavard shot late — and a few at the other end, including a late cross that found its way to Lukaku, who seemed so surprised to see it come in (it was the first good one in all 45 minutes) that it hit him like a stone and went out of play.
Both teams will find things to like there: Hazard was excellent, probably the best player on the field, and De Bruyne was dangerous at times, too. But Mbappe’s speed is an undeniable asset running at Vertonghen, and Pogba’s ability to shake off Fellaini in the last 10 minutes is a good sign for France.
Kevin Draper: When France has possessed the ball they’ve played direct. Pogba has played a few 40 yard passes from half field that Kylian Mbappé and Olivier Giroud were almost able to get on the other end of. Antoine Griezmann has taken a few long shots, but hasn’t been nearly as dangerous as he was in previous games.
Halftime: France 0, Belgium 0
in stoppage time, Kevin De Bruyne crossed a ball into the box for Belgium, but Samuel Umtiti got in the way again, altering the course enough that it caroms off the waiting Lukaku’s hip instead of his foot. And that’s halftime!
Kevin Draper: France was a slight favorite before the match began, but on balance Belgium has been the much better team. Belgium has mostly been attacking on the fringes, avoiding N’Golo Kanté in the middle and counting on Romelu Lukaku to keep the center backs occupied. De Bruyne and Hazard have generated a few chances, and Belgium almost scored off a couple of corner kicks.
44’: Free Kick for France
Paul Pogba gets into a dangerous position, and is pulled down from behind. France gets a great free kick chance. But Griezmann boots it right into the wall.
42’: France Shows Up
France has fully come into this match for the first time in the last five minutes. They still look more comfortable counter attacking than possessing the ball, but they’re starting to generate a few dangerous chances.
40’: Courtois Kicks One Out
Kylian Mbappe plays Benjamin Pavard through with a nice ball, but Courtois manages to tip his shot wide with his back heel. France’s corner kick is then cleared by the first man.
Andrew Das: Gorgeous exchange between Pavard and Mbappé there, but it’s the defender who winds up with the ball and closing on Courtois, who gets a toe on the wayward shot and keeps it out.
37’: Giroud Gets the Magic Spray
Olivier Giroud goes down clutching the back of his right leg after getting clipped. The magic freezing spray is liberally applied to the injured leg, and he hops up good as new.
Andrew Das: The contact that brought down Giroud really seemed innocuous, but he’s really hurting. Just got clipped on the heel, but he’s holding his head like it was a sword wound.
34’: Great Chance for France
A long ball finds Kylian Mbappe inside the box, and he crosses it on the ground to Olivier Giroud, a step in front of his defender. But Giroud can only half-slide and swing at the ball, and his shot goes well wide. That was France’s best chance so far.
Andrew Das: Giroud really failed Mbappé on that last cross. He was late getting back onside and was watching as the young forward ran on to an overlapping ball, but only belatedly seemed to realize, ‘You know, that might get cross — oh no.’ And when he did realize, he was a step late to the ball, and the chance was wasted.
Belgium’s Moussa Dembele, left, and France’s Antoine Griezmann in the first quarter.
33’: Giroud Goes Down
The first of what we would expect will be numerous penalty appeals in the game as Giroud goes down. The ref is not having it. Then Griezmann gets the ball and shoots with his less effective right foot and misses.
32’: Hazard and De Bruyne Toying With France
Eden Hazard and Kevin De Bruyne look like the best two players on the pitch. Hazard just filleted Pavard and Pogba but the ball rolled out just before he could control it again, but if he keeps dribbling like that he’s sure to get a goal or assist.
Andrew Das: It’s strange how Fellaini gets involved in so much of what Belgium does up top — crosses, corners — but only with his head. It’s like his teammates won’t pass the ball to his feet. But he’s playing very advanced, just a step or two behind Lukaku, and apparently tasked with winning headers and, failing that, breaking up French attacks before they can start. As soon as he does either of those, he’s off to find Pogba.
32’: Another Miss for France
Antoine Griezmann takes the free kick for France. He sends it in and Pavard chips it in to Giroud, who hits it wide with his head.
29’: Umtiti Saves France!
Samuel Umtiti saves the day for France. Kevin De Bruyne crosses the ball low right in front of net and Romelu Lukaku is right there for the poke in. But Umtiti slides in and clears in a last-ditch move.
26’: Fellaini vs. Pogba
Fellaini and Pogba are effectively attached at the hip, which is probably not altogether new for either of them, since it probably happens in training at Manchester United quite a bit. But Belgium will take that cold war any day; Pogba is a far more dangerous player when he gets loose. But he can’t get loose, and when Fellaini bodies him, he doesn’t seem to like it. Which may be precisely the point of doing it.
25’: Fellaini in the Right Spot
First corner for France (Belgium has four). Felliani easily heads it away.
23’: France Counterattacks
Another long pass from halfway, and this time Olivier Giroud is on it for France. He lunges for it, doesn’t get quite all of it, and it goes wide.
Kevin Draper: It is quite surprising how flat France has begun this game. They have just as many all-world attackers as Belgium and a defense anchored by stalwarts from Real Madrid and Barcelona, and yet they look like they have already conceded that Belgium is the much better team.
22’: Belgium Firing Away
Off of yet another corner, the ball trickles free to Toby Alderweireld at the penalty spot. His left-footed shot is punched out by Hugo Lloris for another corner kick, which amounts to nothing.
Andrew Das: Belgium has come close about four times in the past five minutes — the last on that Alderweireld shot off the corner that Lloris was lucky to save with a dive. It’s been a really entertaining first 20 minutes, but 90 percent of that has been Belgium nearly scoring.That they haven’t may be the one good thing France has done so far.
20’: Scare for France
De Bruyne tries a little chip-shot pass to Felliani, who is just about offsides, although the flag does not go up. Lloris punches it away after a moment of terror for France.
19’: Varane Saves One
Eden Hazard whips a shot toward the outside post from inside the box, but Raphaël Varane barely got the back of his head on it to hit it behind for a corner.
18’: France Fires, but Courtois Is There
Blaise Matuidi, returning to France’s lineup for this game, fires off a shot from outside the box that forces Courtois into a save.
Andrew Das: That was a rocket from Matuidi, and a great sign for France. But it hits Courtois right in the gloves. But once again, Belgium is right back at the other end in seconds, with Hazard lashing a shot that Varane nods jussssst over the crossbar behind a beaten Lloris.
16’: Hazard Misses
Off an interception, Kevin De Bruyne plays a quick one-touch ball to Eden Hazard in the box and he’s unmarked. But Hazard hits it wide right! Good chance.
Kevin Draper: Both Belgium and France have had their best chances of the match in the last few minutes, and perhaps not coincidentally both came quickly after turnovers. This might be a match of intentionally soaking up pressure in order to entice midfielders forward, before hitting back on the counter attack.
14’: De Bruyne Loses One
Kevin De Bruyne just attacked the French defense at speed, but a miscommunication with Romelu Lukaku caused a turnover and ruined the chance.
13’: Pogba Finds Mbappe
A long through ball from halfway by Paul Pogba finds Kylian Mbappe, and he’s a half step ahead of his man. But Courtois slides down to grab it just in time.
Andrew Das: Belgium in a bit of a fluid formation, with Witsel and Dembele protecting the back three, and Chadli dropping in at eight back when France has the ball and he has time.
10’: France Flickers
A rare venture forward by Griezmann and France brings their fans to life — but only briefly, as Kompany clears the first sign of danger with a powerful header. And back down the other end we go …
Kevin Draper: Both teams have shown ruthless counterattacking prowess this tournament, and so each attack seems cautious in throwing numbers forward. Belgium is patiently probing the French defense, with Axel Witsel and Mousa Dembele both staying at home to protect the back three.
9’: Belgium the Better Side Right Now
Belgium’s passing has been crisp and prolific so far, with France going some extended periods without touching the ball.
6’: Corner for Belgium
Nacer Chadli’s corner is a little too strong and goes over his teammates’ heads.
4’: Belgium Keeps Possession
That early burst of brilliance by Mbappe has been followed by a few minutes of Belgium trying whatever it wants on the right.
1’: Mbappe Makes a Statement
it took Mbappe all of five seconds to drop Vertonghen like a bad penny, race down the wing and flash in a cross that ALMOST met Griezmann in stride. Great start for France.
by:
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/politics/democrats-brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court.html
Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday. He said Democrats would use confirmation hearings to drill down on Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s views on executive power.
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats, facing an uphill struggle to defeat the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, opened a broad attack on Tuesday, painting him as an archconservative who would roll back abortion rights, undo health care protections, ease gun restrictions and protect President Trump against the threat of indictment.
But as Judge Kavanaugh arrived at the Capitol to begin making courtesy calls on the senators who will decide his fate, the White House expressed confidence in the man that Mr. Trump introduced to the country as “one of the finest and sharpest legal minds of our time.”
The White House is embarking on an intensive sales campaign that has already enlisted more than 1,000 interest groups, including farmers and religious organizations, to build support for Judge Kavanaugh. Administration officials are pushing for hearings and a confirmation vote by Oct. 1, in time for the court’s new term.
In a sign of how difficult the Democrats’ path will be, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key swing vote, spoke favorably of Judge Kavanaugh on Tuesday, telling reporters, “When you look at the credentials that Judge Kavanaugh brings to the job, it’ll be very difficult for anyone to argue that he’s not qualified for the job.”
Washington is no stranger to bitter and divisive judicial confirmation fights, but the coming battle over Judge Kavanaugh is likely to be intense — and expensive. At a time when the United States is deeply polarized, with the ideological balance of the court at stake, Democrats and Republicans are keenly aware that Judge Kavanaugh, if confirmed, would push the court to the right, cementing its conservative majority and shaping American jurisprudence for decades to come.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh met with Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, on Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
That has galvanized liberal and conservative advocacy groups, who began mobilizing even before the nomination was announced and expect to spend tens of millions through the summer and into the fall.
Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative advocacy group, has already posted a website — ConfirmKavanaugh.com — and is airing television ads. Leading social conservative political groups are rallying the anti-abortion grass-roots to support his confirmation with ads, rallies and online campaigns. Demand Justice, a liberal group, is running advertisements in Maine, aimed at Ms. Collins, as well in Alaska, the home state of another swing-vote Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski.
But the positive comments from Ms. Collins — who voted in favor of Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, two of President Barack Obama’s nominees — may have already shifted the pressure from leery Republicans to skittish Democrats running for re-election in states won handily by Mr. Trump in 2016.
Three of those Democrats — Senators Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia — voted to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch, nominated by Mr. Trump last year. None gave any hint on Tuesday of how they would vote on Judge Kavanaugh, but all will undoubtedly face intense pressure at home.
“I thought he came across as a good family person, good, decent human being,” Mr. Manchin said of his initial reaction to Judge Kavanaugh. But he said he would not be making a hasty decision about a Supreme Court appointment mere hours after the announcement, noting his concern about Judge Kavanaugh’s views of the Affordable Care Act given the “lives at stake” in West Virginia.
Republicans are already delighting in watching Democrats like Mr. Manchin squirm.
“You’ve got red-state Democrats who are up for re-election this year who are going to be faced with some pretty significant challenges with this vote,” said Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, the chairman of the committee charged with electing Republicans to the Senate. “I think it’s a hot potato.”
In picking Judge Kavanaugh to fill the seat vacated by the retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Mr. Trump has turned to an experienced jurist with an Ivy League pedigree (Yale undergraduate and Yale Law), a deep conservative bent and a past in politics. Judge Kavanaugh worked under Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton; served in the administration of President George W. Bush; and joined the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006.
Administration officials are betting that Judge Kavanaugh’s record of around 300 court decisions, combined with his ability to speak fluently on a range of complex issues, will make it impossible for Democrats to cast him as unqualified for Justice Kennedy’s seat. His effusive praise on Monday night of his mother and wife — and his coaching of his daughter’s basketball team — seemed aimed at defusing Democratic efforts to make him appear anti-woman.
“Judge Kavanaugh has impeccable credentials and interprets the law as it was written and intended,” said Raj Shah, a White House spokesman. “His record sells itself.”
Among them: a 2017 case, Garza v. Hargan, where Judge Kavanaugh delayed an abortion for a 17-year-old immigrant who was in the United States illegally; a 2015 case, Priests for Life v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where Judge Kavanaugh said the Affordable Care Act’s requirement for contraceptive coverage violated the religious freedom of religious nonprofits; and a 2011 dissent in Heller v. District of Columbia, where he argued the Second Amendment included the right to own a semiautomatic rifle.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, joined all of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday to deliver a direct appeal to Americans to rise up in opposition to Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. One by one, they ticked off warnings.
“If you are a young woman in America or you care about a young woman in America, pay attention to this,” said Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California. “Because it will forever change your life.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, issued a specific plea to the survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.: “If you care about common-sense gun violence protection, Judge Kavanaugh is your worst nightmare.”
Republicans, in turn, excoriated Democrats for not giving Mr. Trump’s nominee a chance.
“We’re less than 24 hours into this, and folks are already declaring that if you can’t see that Brett Kavanaugh is a cross between Lex Luthor and Darth Vader, then you apparently aren’t paying enough attention,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. “The American people are smarter than that.”
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, complained that Democrats had declared their opposition to Judge Kavanaugh even before his nomination was announced.
“They wrote statements of opposition only to fill in the name later,” the ordinarily staid Mr. McConnell said, growing exercised as he delivered his customary morning remarks on the Senate floor. “Senate Democrats were on record opposing him before he’d even been named! Just fill in the name! Whoever it is, we’re against.”
But Democrats were quick to call Mr. McConnell hypocritical, noting that when Mr. Obama nominated Judge Merrick B. Garland — a colleague of Judge Kavanaugh’s on the federal appeals court in Washington — many Republicans refused even to meet with Judge Garland, and denied him the opportunity to have a hearing.
Before Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination on Monday night, Democrats had centered their strategy on abortion rights and health care, warning that anyone Mr. Trump picked would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision legalizing abortion, and would imperil protections for people with pre-existing conditions under the Affordable Care Act.
But Judge Kavanaugh has given them a new line of attack: his past writings on the powers of the presidency, which go to the heart of the special counsel’s investigation of Mr. Trump. In 1998, Judge Kavanaugh wrote a law review article that raised doubts about whether a sitting president could be indicted. In another article, he argued that a sitting president should not be distracted by civil suits or criminal proceedings.
Democrats said Tuesday that those views would be a central focus of questioning during Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings; already, some Democrats were calling for Judge Kavanaugh to pledge that he would recuse himself from any Supreme Court proceedings involving the president.
“We knew with any of the 25 nominees that health care and women’s health, right to choose would be important,” Mr. Schumer said, referring to the list of potential candidates drawn up for Mr. Trump by conservative groups during the 2016 campaign. “But Kavanaugh brings a new prominence to the issue of executive power because he is almost certainly the most hard right of all of the 25. He is almost certainly the one who would most yield to presidential power.”
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/world/europe/trump-nato-summit-latvia-baltics.html
Some of the 16,500 singers at the Latvian Song and Dance Festival in Riga on Saturday. Latvia’s struggle to break free from the Soviet Union is known as the Singing Revolution.
RIGA, Latvia — Near midnight on the outskirts of the Latvian capital, close to 100,000 spectators joined 16,500 singers last week in a song about a mystical castle that is submerged when foreign powers hold sway only to rise again.
The castle is a metaphor for their nation. The foreign powers?
Well, from the 20th century, take your pick. First it was the Russians. Then the Germans. Then the Russians again. Only in the last quarter-century has Latvia been able to reclaim its nationhood, and only in the last decade has it felt secure in that claim.
The security came from one thing: joining NATO, an alliance of nations forged after the fires of World War II and expanded during the Cold War as a buffer against Soviet aggression.
Now, with Russia once again on the prowl, that alliance seems to be at risk in ways that were virtually inconceivable when Latvia joined in 2004.
As President Trump joins his second NATO summit meeting — having called the alliance “obsolete,” derided its members as deadbeats and suggested that American military protection is negotiable — there is deep unease on the alliance’s eastern flank. And that sense has only been heightened by Mr. Trump’s scheduled one-on-one meeting next week with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
The United States ambassador to Estonia, James D. Melville Jr., became so exasperated with the constant statements from Mr. Trump disparaging the alliance and the European Union that late last month he quit in disgust.
And as the Trump-Putin meeting approached, a popular Russian-language Latvian newspaper ran a picture of the two men, cheek by jowl, with the ominous headline: “What Will Trump and Putin Agree On: The End of the E.U.?”
For the nations of Latvia and Estonia, nestled between Russia and the Baltic Sea and with large ethnic Russian populations, NATO is no abstraction.
Long before the debate over the Kremlin’s interference in the American election, there was alarm in the Baltic nations over Russian attempts to influence public opinion and exploit the complicated issues of ethnic identity in a region reshaped by war and occupation. In both the annexation of Crimea and its actions in Ukraine, the Russian government has used protecting the rights of ethnic Russians as a pretext for intervention. About one-third of the populations of Latvia and Estonia are ethnic Russians.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada visited NATO troops at the Adazi Military Base in Latvia on Tuesday.
Even as Mr. Trump has railed against NATO, the United States military has continued to lead the alliance in combating what is now commonly referred to as Russian hybrid warfare: asymmetric and nontraditional military capabilities used to destabilize democracies through cyberattacks, disinformation and propaganda campaigns.
NATO member nations have also devoted energy and resources to improving battle readiness and the speed of deployment, in the event they should face a sudden crisis with their aggressive neighbor to the east.
During a visit to Latvia on his way to the NATO meeting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada acknowledged that “these are uncertain times” and said that NATO must remain alert to “changing threats.”
He condemned Russia for its annexation of Crimea, its actions in Ukraine and what British intelligence says is its involvement in the use of a nerve agent in England, which has evolved into a murder case after the death of a British woman last Sunday.
Mr. Trudeau sidestepped questions about his relationship with Mr. Trump, who derided the Canadian leader as “very dishonest and weak” after the Group of 7 summit meeting in June. But he said that Canada’s decision to increase its military spending 70 percent over the next decade was not the result of pressure from Washington, but rather a response to new and emerging threats.
But for all the fighting over financial contributions to NATO from member states, the struggle in the Baltics to confront sophisticated propaganda campaigns aimed at ethnic Russian populations showed that it will take more than money and beefed up military forces to counter the emerging threat.
In that new fight, culture is a battleground — and music is a weapon. The Czech Republic had its Velvet Revolution, but Latvia’s struggle to break free from the Soviet Union is known as the Singing Revolution.
Last week, in what organizers described as “a national cultural vaccination that’s administered every five years,” the country held its Latvian Song and Dance Festival, a seven-day extravaganza expected to draw nearly 500,000 people, about a quarter of the country’s total population.
Latvia’s culture minister, Dace Melbarde, said the festival, which stretches back about 145 years, was about much more than singing and dancing. “It is about the awakening of the national consciousness in the 19th century that set the framework to become a nation,” she said.
That this year’s festival fell on the 100th anniversary of the nation’s founding has given more resonance to what is already a deeply emotional event. Even when Latvia was occupied by foreign powers and not allowed to fly its flag, the tradition continued.
The festival culminates with a final concert, described as “a cosmic journey through destiny, history, nature and family that ends with a return home along the Milky Way,” and the singing of “Gaismas pils,” the song about the magic castle.
In conversations with dozens of people at the festival and around Riga, worries about NATO were not the top concern, but there was a nagging sense that the world was off-kilter and the guarantees of recent years might not be as solid as they once seemed.
Edgars Vilumsons, 29, has grown so used to Russian provocations that he sees them as part of the background noise of daily life.
“It’s like if your neighbor had a mean dog and every day you walk past that dog but all it does is bark,” he said. “You are not going to stop what you are doing.”
His 85-year-old grandmother, he said, was not as sanguine. She often talks of being caught between Russian and German artillery fire, which destroyed the family home. After the annexation of Crimea, which shook Latvia, the theoretical seemed possible. Mr. Trump has suggested that he might be open to recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which the international community uniformly condemned as an act of blatant aggression.
Ms. Melbarde, still a bit bleary eyed from singing until dawn, said that one had to understand Latvia’s ethnic makeup and generational divide to understand its anxiety.
Most of the ethnic Russians arrived after the war, when the country was under Soviet domination. They have long been educated in separate schools and formed different social bonds as the nation has struggled to integrate them into society.
But the assimilation process has been made harder by increasingly aggressive propaganda campaigns in the Russian-language news media, narratives widely believed to be directed from Moscow with the intent of heightening divisions.
For example, Ms. Melbarde said, an annual summer festival based on ancient pagan traditions celebrating nature was portrayed as something sinister. “They reported that a bunch of neo-Nazis got together in the woods and set fires,” she said.
Ms. Melbarde said that more work needed to be done to combat the disinformation flowing to Russian speakers. NATO’s new strategic communication center in Latvia provided crucial help in fighting false and malicious narratives, she said.
Her hope is that in the near future, Russian speakers will feel that they can be proud of their ethnic identity but also feel a shared sense of national identity.
Indeed, research conducted by the Latvian government indicates that many younger ethnic Russians are willing to see themselves as Latvian.
The government hopes to capitalize on that sense by starting to integrate the schools, a move that failed in 2003 because of political opposition but that was recently approved by the legislature.
Anastasia Stankevich, 18, said that prospect terrified people like her parents, who are afraid that their children will forget their culture in Latvian schools.
Ms. Stankevich, who is deciding whether to attend college outside Latvia, said she shared the ambivalence of many Russian speakers.
“I feel a bit different than the Latvians,” she said. “We like different jokes.”
They also celebrate different holidays, including one that deeply divides the country: May 9. For Russian speakers, that was the day that World War II ended and is a cause for celebration. For Latvians, it was the day the occupation started.
Russia has never acknowledged itself as an occupying force, and lawmakers in Moscow passed a law specifically stating that Latvia’s being a part of the Soviet Union was justified by international law.
“On this day, I read the Latvian news and see one thing and then read the Russian news and see something totally different,” Ms. Stankevich said.
She said she understood the different perspective and just wanted to live in a country “where everyone respects each other’s culture.”
by:
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/world/asia/india-gay-decriminalization.html
L.G.B.T. activists speaking to reporters after the hearing on Tuesday.
NEW DELHI — India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday started hearing a challenge to one of the world’s oldest laws criminalizing consensual gay sex, a debate that has raised broader questions about how far to extend equal rights in the country.
Lawyers representing a cluster of gay and lesbian Indians who petitioned the court said the law, known as Section 377, was an archaic holdout from India’s colonial era.
“We are asking for a declaration that our rights are protected,” one of the lawyers, Mukul Rohatgi, argued before five judges. The court will most likely reach a verdict in a few weeks.
The question of how far safeguards should stretch for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Indians pumped a bit of tension into the courtroom. When Mr. Rohatgi veered into a discussion of other rights for gay people, saying that “what happens in a bedroom is not the end-all, be-all,” Dipak Misra, the chief justice of the court, swiftly steered him back to the constitutionality of Section 377.
“I think you are questioning whether they can marry,” he said. “We’re plunging into the sea.”
Laws similar to Section 377 have been overturned in the United States, Canada, England and Nepal, India’s neighbor, Mr. Rohatgi said. He argued that the law was not in keeping with a ruling last year that guaranteed the constitutional right to privacy, including for gay people, and that it made no distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sex.
For much of its precolonial history, India was at ease with depictions of same-sex love and gender fluidity. In Hinduism, the country’s predominant religion, gods transform into goddesses and men become pregnant. But acceptance of homosexuality eroded when the British settled in India, bringing with them laws that reflected a rigid, Victorian morality.
In the 1860s, the British introduced Section 377, imposing up to a life sentence on “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” The law is usually enforced in cases of sex between men, but it officially extends to anybody caught having anal or oral sex.
It also offers cover for those who want to blackmail, harass or sexually assault gay and transgender people. Although prosecution is unusual, many Indians fear that if they report crimes such as rape, they, too, will be arrested.
After a long legal battle, the Delhi High Court ruled in 2009 that the law could not be applied to consensual sex, essentially decriminalizing gay sex — but the decision technically applied only to the New Delhi region.
Shortly after, Hindu, Christian and Muslim religious groups appealed the ruling and in 2013, the Supreme Court restored the law, saying Parliament, and not the Delhi High Court, should take up the issue. The court said only a “minuscule fraction of the country’s population constitute lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders.”
A pride march in New Delhi last November.
Responding to that ruling, a group of gay and lesbian citizens stepped forward to challenge the law on the basis that it violated their rights to equality and liberty, among other infractions, under India’s Constitution.
The initial group included Navtej Singh Johar, a dancer; Sunil Mehra, a journalist; Ritu Dalmia, a celebrity chef; Ayesha Kapur, a businesswoman; and Aman Nath, a hotelier. Over the last few months, at least 26 others have joined them.
On Tuesday, the Indian Psychiatric Society called for decriminalization, saying homosexuality was not a disorder. And at the hearing, Justice Indu Malhotra noted that homosexuality has been observed in animals, a remark that was interpreted as sympathetic to the petitioners’ case.
Mr. Rohatgi, the lawyer, cataloged legal advances for gay people in the United States, including the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 that struck down sodomy laws. That ruling became one of the fundamental pillars in the framework of legal protections afforded to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the United States today.
Justice R.F. Nariman interjected to offer advice.
“At some point, are you going to cite the European courts?” he asked. “Those are also important.”
When lawyers from the central government asked the court to delay hearings to give them more time to prepare despite months of notice, the bench refused.
Keshav Suri, a hotelier who filed one of the petitions against Section 377, said he was frustrated by the limitations of “conservative India.” He said it projected the message that the country cannot take steps that butt up against the mores of the traditional Indian family even when human rights hang in the balance.
“Conservative India needs to get out of being conservative,” Mr. Suri said.
But the country is changing, he said.
For a decade, pride parades have threaded through New Delhi’s streets. At The LaLiT, the hotel chain that Mr. Suri runs in India, stars from the American television series “RuPaul’s Drag Race” shimmy onstage at his dance parties. Recently, Mr. Suri married a Frenchman.
Among Mr. Suri’s own staff, a patchwork of Indians from mixed economic and social backgrounds, views have evolved over the years, he said. Now, Mr. Suri has “an army behind me of 3,500 people,” many of who are ready for the end of an “ugly law” like Section 377.
“I’m hopeful,” he said. “These judges are very capable.”
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/puerto-rico-woman-harassed.html
An officer with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County Police Department appeared to keep his distance while a man harassed a woman over her Puerto Rican flag shirt in a Chicago park.
Caught on video last month, an Illinois police officer appears to ignore a woman’s pleas for help as a man harasses her over a Puerto Rican flag shirt. The governor of Puerto Rico himself stepped in on Monday, demanding that the officer — currently under investigation — be fired.
“I am appalled, shocked and disturbed by the officer’s behavior,” Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló said on Twitter on Monday. “He failed to de-escalate the situation and therefore did not ensure a citizen’s safety.”
A police spokeswoman identified the officer on Tuesday as Patrick Connor, who has been with Forest Preserve District of Cook County Police Department since 2006. The district said on Twitter on Monday that there was an internal investigation into Mr. Connor’s conduct and that he had been placed on desk duty in the meantime.
A widely shared video of the confrontation, which took place in Caldwell Woods, a park in northern Chicago, was recorded by the woman last month. It shows a man, identified in a police report as Timothy Trybus, demanding to know why she has on the shirt and if the woman, Mia Irizarry, is a United States citizen. While Mr. Trybus shouts at her, points at her face and follows her around part of the park, Officer Connor can be seen standing about 20 feet away with his hands against his chest.
Ricardo A. Rosselló, the governor of Puerto Rico, said that an Illinois police officer should be fired after a video showed the officer appearing to ignore a woman’s pleas to stop a man from harassing her over her Puerto Rican flag shirt.
“You are not going to change us, you know that, right?” Mr. Trybus, 62, says to Ms. Irizarry, 24, as he walks up to her. “Are you a United States citizen? Then you should not be wearing that.”
Ms. Irizarry, who was at the park with friends for a birthday party, can be heard on the video telling Mr. Trybus that she is indeed an American citizen. Her friends can be heard telling him that Puerto Rico is part of the United States. At one point in the video, Ms. Irizarry tries to move away from Mr. Trybus and walks out from under a pavilion, but he follows her as Officer Connor appears not to approach them.
“Officer, officer, I feel highly uncomfortable,” Ms. Irizarry tells Officer Connor, who does not appear to respond to her as he is addressed, and can be seen turning his back and walking toward his police car.
The video shows Mr. Trybus continuing to confront Ms. Irizarry and her friends for about 10 minutes before additional police officers arrive and eventually arrest him. Mr. Trybus was charged with disorderly conduct and assault, the Forest Preserve District said in a tweet. He could not be reached for comment on Tuesday afternoon.
“That officer did absolutely nothing — he did absolutely zero,” Ms. Irizarry said in the video. “I told him I was uncomfortable multiple times. He did not do anything.”
She did not respond to multiple requests for an interview on Tuesday.
The nearly 30-minute video, capturing an incident similar to recent episodes of white people confronting black people (and other minorities) engaged in everyday activities and calling the authorities, was streamed from Ms. Irizarry’s Facebook profile on June 14, but it gained a wider audience this week.
Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, an Illinois Democrat who represents part of Cook County, said on Tuesday that he had asked the civil rights division of the Justice Department to open an investigation. He said that the video of the encounter reminded him of when a police officer 25 years ago denied him entry into the United States Capitol with his daughter, who was holding a Puerto Rican flag.
“I understand this incident on a gut level because almost exactly the same thing happened to me when I was a freshman in Congress,” Mr. Gutiérrez said in a statement. “This kind of incident is unfortunately not unusual.”
In the Facebook video, Mr. Trybus, who was riding bikes with another man at the park, said he lived not far away. A police report identified the second man as Thomas Craft and stated that he was arrested on an unrelated charge.
Toward the end of the video, an officer with a badge that says “P. Connor,” who can be seen taking statements from Ms. Irizarry and her friends, tells the group that the men had a history of causing problems at the park.
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/citizenship-question-census.html
Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. has offered shifting explanations for why the Trump administration added a question about citizenship to the 2020 census.
From the moment it was announced in March, the decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census was described by critics as a ploy to discourage immigrants from filling out the form and improve Republican political fortunes. The Commerce Department, which made the decision, insisted that sound policy, not politics, was its sole motivation.
Now a federal lawsuit seeking to block the question has cast doubt on the department’s explanation and the veracity of the man who offered it, Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. And it has given the plaintiffs in the suit — attorneys general for 17 states, the District of Columbia and a host of cities and counties — broad leeway to search for evidence that the critics are correct.
In a hearing last week in the United States District Court in Manhattan, Judge Jesse M. Furman gave the plaintiffs permission to search government files and take sworn testimony from up to 10 administration officials in an effort to discover how and why the citizenship decision was made.
The administration has claimed that better data on the citizenship of voting-age adults was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act. But additional evidence could cast doubt on that explanation and potentially lay the groundwork for the question’s removal from the 2020 census.
After Mr. Ross’s explanation for the citizenship question’s origin shifted, Judge Furman said it appeared that the Commerce Department had acted in “bad faith” in deciding to add the question.
Mr. Ross said in a statement on March 26 that the Justice Department, which oversees enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, had asked that the question be placed on census forms. But late last month he reversed course, stating in a memo that he actually had been discussing the citizenship question “with other government officials” since shortly after taking office in February 2017 — and that the Justice Department had made its request only after he or his aides asked it to.
Judge Furman called Mr. Ross’s March explanation of his decision both “potentially untrue” and improbable because, he said, the Justice Department “has shown little interest in enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”
In an emailed response to questions, a Commerce Department spokeswoman, Rebecca Glover, said there was no inconsistency between the two statements. “Characterizations of the secretary’s prior public statements as somehow misleading are false,” she wrote. Whatever the run-up to the Justice Department’s request, she said, it remained the trigger that led to Mr. Ross’s “thorough and transparent assessment” of the need for a citizenship question.
Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional expert on the census who is a private consultant to groups seeking an accurate 2020 count, called Mr. Ross’s revised timeline “disappointing and deeply troubling.”
“This seems to confirm that the Justice Department request for the citizenship question was a pretense to achieve a political goal through the census,” she said. “The pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together, going back to when President Trump took office.”
In their lawsuit, which is led by the New York attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, the plaintiffs imply that enforcing the Voting Rights Act was a pretext for another goal: ensuring that the nation’s 11 million-plus undocumented immigrants are not counted for the purpose of drawing congressional and other political districts, which are required to have equal populations.
The practical impact would be to reduce the number of congressional districts, and therefore Electoral College votes, in states with large numbers of noncitizens — often, though not always, Democratic strongholds.
Mr. Ross has not named the administration officials with whom he discussed the citizenship question after taking office. But other lawsuit documents released last month show that Mr. Ross received an email in July 2017 from Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has taken a strong position against illegal immigration. Mr. Kobach urged Mr. Ross to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census because undocumented immigrants “do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States” but are counted for reapportionment purposes.
Mr. Kobach noted in the email that he had recently reached out to Mr. Ross “on the direction of Steve Bannon,” who was then the White House chief strategist. Documenting the extent of outsiders’ role in the citizenship decision will be a priority when the plaintiffs’ search for new evidence begins, experts said.
“That suggests very strongly that the directive here was ultimately a directive that came from the White House,” said Thomas Wolf, counsel at the democracy program of the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law.
The census tally, which includes everyone living in the United States regardless of immigration status, is used to reapportion political boundaries every 10 years to account for population changes. But a growing movement on the far right seeks to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted during reapportionment; Alabama’s Republican secretary of state filed a lawsuit in May seeking to do exactly that.
If only citizens were counted for reapportionment, “California would give up several congressional seats to states that actually honor our Constitution and federal law,” one leader of the anti-immigrant movement, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, said in February.
That is, for now, a distant prospect. But some experts say they believe asking about citizenship could accomplish the same goal by discouraging undocumented immigrants, even legal ones, from being counted.
“Their actions can produce a census that leaves out many of the people they don’t want counted for political representation,” Ms. Lowenthal said. “And there will be consequences, perhaps, well beyond what immigration hard-liners believe will only be reduced numbers in selected states.”
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/politics/supreme-court-elections.html
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, spoke to demonstrators outside the Supreme Court after President Trump announced his nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, on Monday.
President Trump’s selection of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as his second Supreme Court nominee could be a consequential moment for the midterm elections. Republicans hope a confirmation battle will galvanize voters on the right, while Democrats are balancing their own energized liberal base against the political pressure on some red-state Democrats to side with Mr. Trump.
Here is how the elections in November could affect the confirmation process — and vice versa.
The clock is running
With 12 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and stints as a White House staff secretary, under President George W. Bush, and as an assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, Judge Kavanaugh has quite the résumé in government.
And that could create complications for President Trump and Senate Republicans.
When Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, offered his guidance about the court pick to Mr. Trump last week, he cautioned the president that the sheer volume of Judge Kavanaugh’s paperwork from a career in law and politics could hand Democrats the chance to stall a vote.
That could mean that Judge Kavanaugh would not be seated by the time the next court session begins in October and, if controversial matters arise from his background, perhaps even push a vote until after the November elections. And that is not what Mr. McConnell, who because of Senator John McCain’s absence has just 50 Senate Republicans available, would prefer.
[What happens next? We’ve got you covered with a Supreme Court F.A.Q.]
Holding the vote before the midterms would allow Mr. McConnell to put more pressure on those red-state Democrats who are facing re-election and have little desire to incur Mr. Trump’s wrath. But should those senators be liberated from such pressure — either by winning or losing on Nov. 6 — and not face a vote until after the election, the president’s leverage would be diminished.
Some Democrats have already argued that no nominee should be voted on before the midterms, and that argument may grow more plausible closer to Election Day.
First, there are the women of the Senate, including two Republicans supportive of abortion rights, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, and two red-state Democrats up for re-election this year, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Claire McCaskill of Missouri. With the abortion right protections of Roe v. Wade at stake, Judge Kavanaugh and his backers cannot afford to lose even one Republican vote if Democrats put up a wall of opposition against him.
Second, there are the women who vote in November: Female voters have swung hard toward Democrats in recent elections and polls show a potentially historic gender gap emerging in the midterm campaign. Mr. Trump and his party must avoid a confirmation process that alienates women any further.
Signaling that he recognizes this political context for his nomination, Judge Kavanaugh repeatedly stressed his respect for women as role models and peers. In his remarks Monday evening, he cited his mother’s example as a prosecutor and judge in inspiring his own legal career, and thanked Justice Elena Kagan for having hired him during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law School. And Judge Kavanaugh noted that most of the clerks he has hired while a judge have been women.
But Judge Kavanaugh will face a sterner test in the coming weeks. Already, his role in a recent case involving an undocumented immigrant seeking to have an abortion has come under scrutiny, and Senate Democrats have indicated they will press him hard to commit to preserving Roe — a commitment Judge Kavanaugh cannot make without alienating the right, even in the uncertain event he wanted to do so.
2018-07-09
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/opinion/the-gops-wobbly-hold-on-texas-latinos.html
Outside a polling center in Austin.
HOUSTON — Listening to President Trump try to explain away his indefensible policy on family separations the other week — and his latest attempts to get an immigration bill passed ASAP — I couldn’t stop thinking about Cynthia, whom I have known for most of her 35 years. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, she’s a pretty woman with a head of shiny black waves and a broad smile that obscure her killer competence and ambition. She didn’t want me to use her last name because she’s now a bigwig at a Fortune 500 Company that might not want the publicity.
What I can’t stop thinking about, in particular, is how different Cynthia’s life would have been if she had been separated from her mother while trying to cross into Texas in recent weeks instead of arriving undocumented in 1989.
Unlike Mr. Trump’s depictions of Mexican immigrants as violent drug traffickers, Cynthia’s family was like so many I knew growing up in South Texas. The family had struggled financially in Mexico — at one point Cynthia’s mother, Eva, tried to make ends meet by opening a food stand in front of their house, but they continued their slide toward destitution. First, Cynthia’s father, Jose, left for Houston in December 1989, catching a break because his own mother had crossed over in 1970 and eventually became a United States citizen, so Jose could stay here legally to care for her.
The rest of the family — Eva, Cynthia and her older sister and infant brother — piled into a car driven by a cousin and came to Houston on a tourist visa and the end of 1989. Then, like so many others, they just stayed here. In other words, the family was already separated and trying to reunite with the help of extended family already living in the United States. Cynthia could have just as easily come with a cousin or an aunt or any other trusted relative who, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, wasn’t really family at all.
For more than a decade, Eva worked as a nanny while her husband was a clerk in one of Houston’s large corporations, and the family disappeared seamlessly into the city’s crazy quilt of diversity. After 16 years of waiting, Eva was granted citizenship in 2015. During those years, the family could never return to Mexico for fear that they wouldn’t be allowed back in the United States. “This is the only country I’ve ever known,” explained Cynthia, who was naturalized just a year ago.
Her parents saved enough to send all their children to Catholic private schools — they feared the racism and low quality of the public schools in their neighborhood would be a deterrent to opportunity. In high school, Cynthia fell in love with engineering and came to accept unquestioningly the American precept that if she studied hard and did well, there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t become an engineer. She was an A student, aced high school calculus, graduated from a public university with an engineering degree and found a job with a multinational company.
After 10 years, Cynthia is not just the only Latina in her division, but also the only woman and the only Latina executive. “We are trying to adapt,” she said of the company. “That’s one of the things I question my boss about.” In the meantime, she drives a shimmering $43,000 Audi A5 Sportback and complains about the millennials who can’t follow instructions at work. She took her mother on a trip to Rome to see the pope on his balcony at the Vatican. It’s all good. “People leave their cultures and their families for years, sometimes they end up losing their identity for a chance,” she said.
Maybe it won’t surprise you that Cynthia is also a Republican. The party’s up-by-your-bootstraps ethos appealed to her, she’s anti-abortion and she hates paying taxes. She’s one of those people Democrats can’t depend on to turn Texas blue.
And she isn’t alone: The Republican Party of George W. Bush understood that people living south of the border wanted to come here to work and that businesses on the other side depended on them for cheap labor. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was one that often made a pathway to economic success for the second generation, like Cynthia.
But that was before Mr. Trump. From the beginning, the talk of a wall and bloodthirsty gangs has sent what could have been a growing voter bloc of the Republican Party into a serious identity crisis — even if they don’t say so in public.
Some, like George Antuna, a co-founder of the Hispanic Republicans of Texas, insist that border crime is real if you consider both sides of the border as one place and that much of what Mr. Trump says — referring to Latino immigrants as “animals” and “bad hombres” — is merely “rhetorical.” Still, Mr. Antuna is putting his efforts into local races: When Hispanic Republicans win in their cities and counties, he said, “that rhetoric on the national level becomes noise. The guy I know as my county judge, he’s not like that.”
Artemio Muniz, a Bush loyalist who started the Federation of Hispanic Republicans in Texas in 2008, is far less cautious and has been banned from the White House for his trouble. “The days of Republican delegates from Texas singing in Spanish and waving cowboy hats at the convention — those days are gone,” he said, along with any chance to bring Latinos into the party anytime soon. “The stereotype, the broad brush used to describe Mexicans is just horrible. It’s offensive. There’s no two ways about it.”
Being offensive doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. Democrats lost to Republicans statewide in the last two presidential elections, but the margins have been shrinking: 16 percent in 2012; only 9 percent in 2012. If Texas isn’t blue, the urban areas certainly are. By 2022, Hispanics will be the majority in Texas. Fifty percent of their vote is in the two largest cities, Dallas and Houston.
Assuming Latinos can and will vote in future elections, the old notion that the fiscal and social conservatives among them will stick with the Republican Party is up for debate. “I’m trying my hardest to change the direction of a bus that’s going off the cliff,” Mr. Muniz explained. It won’t be easy: There were once three Latino Republicans in the Texas Legislature; now that sorry number is down to one.
Voter suppression and gerrymandering aside, Mr. Muniz believes more grass-roots work and encouragement of civic engagement could build the party’s Latino wing, but today’s Republican leadership — in Texas and nationally — can’t even find those places with a map. Mr. Muniz is a Bush-era Republican and knows its smaller South Texas towns and urban neighborhoods where the battles have to be waged. Old-style Republicans — moderate, Bush-era people — have to learn new ways. “This is not Midland, Tex., where you jump off a golf cart,” Mr. Muniz said.
As for Cynthia? She was busy when I called the other day, giving a tour of her plant to some vice president of something or other, another white guy she’d have to convince of her competency as a woman and as a Mexican-American. She gave me a long sigh when I asked about President Trump.
“I think the Republican Party is in the middle of a change, just like everything else in the world,” she told me, sounding like the conservative she is. She wasn’t angry, she said, just disappointed. She wants to be a loyal Republican, but she has come to see that the people leading the party these days don’t speak to the ideals that fueled her dreams.
“You have to adapt to change. We have not been able to adapt our Republican beliefs to the world we live in,” she said, and I started to hear just a hint of doubt as she spoke about the party she loves, the one that clearly wants nothing to do with her. “We need the Republicans who made America different. Where are the Lincolns of the world? That’s not them anymore.”
Correction: July 11, 2018
An earlier version of this essay misstated a detail of presidential election results in Harris County in 2012. Barack Obama narrowly won the county; he did not lose it by a million votes, which is the margin by which he lost Texas.
by:
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/us/migrants-family-separation-reunification.html
Migrants who were separated from their children after crossing the border were dropped off at a shelter in El Paso, Tex.
LOS ANGELES — The Trump administration on Monday lost a bid to persuade a federal court to allow long-term detention of migrant families, a significant legal setback to the president’s immigration agenda.
In a ruling that countered nearly every argument posed by the Justice Department, Judge Dolly M. Gee of the Federal District Court in Los Angeles held that there was no basis to amend a longstanding consent decree that requires children to be released to licensed care programs within 20 days. The government said that long-term confinement was the only way to avoid separating families when parents were detained on criminal charges.
Judge Gee said the administration’s request to modify the decree, the 1997 Flores agreement, was “a cynical attempt” to shift immigration policymaking to the courts in the wake of “over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to the current stalemate.”
In another setback, federal authorities were preparing Monday to unwind the administration’s family separation program, with 54 young migrants scheduled to be returned to their parents as a result of an earlier court ruling from a federal judge in San Diego. The secretive operation set to unfold on Tuesday involves transporting children hundreds of miles to undisclosed locations around the country.
The reunions cover a little more than half of the youngest children — those under age 5 — who had been separated from their families under the administration’s program to jail adults who crossed the border illegally.
The operation will be carried out with an unusual level of secrecy under the oversight of the Department of Homeland Security, according to federal lawyers and others familiar with the plan.
A parallel effort is underway to deport some of the migrants: 11 reunified families will be returned to their home country, Guatemala, on Tuesday, the country’s vice minister of foreign relations said at a news conference.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen was scheduled to travel to Guatemala City the same day, with illegal immigration one of the topics on her agenda, department officials announced.
President Trump had pledged to end what he called the “catch-and-release” policies adopted by previous administrations for undocumented immigrants apprehended at the border, but the two court rulings have left few good policy alternatives to achieve his goal.
The attempt to jail illegal border crossers and hold their children in less-restrictive facilities, ordered in May, led to widespread public outrage and was effectively reversed by the ruling in San Diego; but holding parents and children together for lengthy periods, one of the few alternative methods of confining migrants who arrive with children, has now been ruled out by the court in Los Angeles.
President Trump now faces the same dilemma that President Barack Obama’s administration confronted when Central American migrants began surging across the southwest border in 2014. After exploring options for longer-term detention — including their own attempt in 2015 to amend the Flores agreement — Obama administration officials eventually permitted many migrant families to be released with orders to appear in court, with judges often imposing additional restrictions such as bond or ankle monitoring devices.
In her ruling, Judge Gee said the Trump administration’s petition to amend the Flores agreement, both by allowing longer-term detention of families and providing for housing them in facilities other than those licensed by child welfare agencies, raised no significant new argument that Obama lawyers had not already tried unsuccessfully.
She rejected the contention that the court’s refusal to amend the agreement in 2015 had spurred thousands of new migrants to flock toward the United States, believing they could avoid detention if they arrived with children.
“Any number of other factors could have caused the increase in illegal border crossings, including civil strife, economic degradation, and fear of death in the migrants’ home countries,” the judge wrote.
Lawyers who opposed any change to the original decree applauded the ruling.
“The court clearly finds that the attorney general’s efforts to strip detained immigrant children of their fundamental rights were completely unfounded and based on an intentional misreading of the 1997 Flores agreement,” said Peter Schey, president of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, who was a co-lead counsel on the initial lawsuit, which was filed in 1985.
Contrary to assertions from the Trump administration, he said, nothing in the Flores agreement required separation of families. “On the contrary, the settlement has offered detained children the right to humane treatment and reasonably prompt release from custody, unless they are a flight risk or a danger, for some 20 years without incident,” he said.
Brenda Garcia was reunited with her 7-year-old son at Dulles Airport in Washington in late June.
The Justice Department said in a statement that it was reviewing the court’s ruling.
“We disagree with the court’s ruling declining to amend the Flores Agreement to recognize the current crisis of families making the dangerous and unlawful journey across our southern border,” the department said, “but the court does appear to acknowledge that parents who cross the border will not be released and must choose between remaining in family custody with their children pending immigration proceedings or requesting separation from their children so the child may be placed with a sponsor.”
In preparation for the family reunifications on Tuesday, most parents have already been transferred to detention facilities in the vicinity of where their children are currently held, Sarah B. Fabian, a Justice Department lawyer, said in court on Monday. She said the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would oversee the transfers.
“The children will be brought to an ICE location where the parents are. ICE will assume custody and then release the parent and children together,” she said. “We have agreed it is best to not talk publicly about location too much for the safety of children, to ensure the orderly and safe release for everyone.”
Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego had set a deadline of Tuesday for the youngest children to be returned, but government lawyers said Monday that of 102 such children now in government custody, the authorities have been able to identify, locate and vet the parents of only 54. The court order requires all 3,000 children to be returned to their families before the end of the month.
A person familiar with the reunification plan said managers at the sites where younger children are being housed have been instructed that they are to put the children in vans on Tuesday and take them to locations that are as yet unknown to them.
The 54 children are scattered around the country, and the operation calls for the children to be driven to nearby locations in different states, where they will be handed over to Homeland Security officials. The children will be reunited with their parents or relatives there, or will be taken to nearby ICE facilities for the reunifications.
The plan for Tuesday was unusual not only for its secrecy, but for its oversight: The Homeland Security Department is not typically involved directly in family reunifications. Until now, most such reunifications have occurred at migrant youth shelters, many of which are run by contractors. Those contractors, however, do not appear to be actively involved in the reunifications planned for this week.
“This is new ground being plowed,” said the person familiar with the plan, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely.
The government has tapped two faith-based organizations to support families during and after the reunions. But they have also been tight-lipped about details out of concern over potential protests and a potential large news media presence.
The operation comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which last month won a preliminary injunction ordering speedy reunification of migrant families separated under the “zero-tolerance” policy on border enforcement that was put into place in May.
Amid mounting political pressure and public outrage, President Trump issued an executive order on June 20 ending the separations.
Judge Sabraw did not grant the government’s request to extend Tuesday’s deadline for returning all children under 5, but during the court conference on Monday, he said he recognized that some cases “will necessitate additional time.”
Ms. Fabian told the court that nine parents of children who are under the age of 5 have been deported, making immediate reunification difficult. In the case of nine others, the parents have been released and their locations are unknown, she said. Other parents have criminal records that prevent the families from being reunited, Ms. Fabian said.
The children have been housed in shelters from California to New York, licensed by the Health and Human Services Department. Ms. Fabian said these families would not remain in detention once they are reunited. The government has limited family-style detention space compliant with standards under Flores. The three family detention facilities, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, can hold about 3,000 people.
Mr. Trump said in his executive order that the government intended to keep families detained together, and tent camps and other facilities were being prepared to accommodate thousands of them.
The Justice Department said in a statement on Monday that the administration had “worked tirelessly” since the latest court conference on Friday “toward the shared goal of promptly reunifying families while ensuring the safety of the children.”
The government announced last week that it would be using DNA testing to expedite confirmation of familial ties between adults coming forward to claim children, given that several agencies had been involved in the separation of families and that databases were not complete.
by:
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/technology/facebook-facial-recognition-privacy.html
Minh Uong/The New York Times
When Facebook rolled out facial recognition tools in the European Union this year, it promoted the technology as a way to help people safeguard their online identities.
“Face recognition technology allows us to help protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you,” Facebook told its users in Europe.
It was a risky move by the social network. Six years earlier, it had deactivated the technology in Europe after regulators there raised questions about its facial recognition consent system. Now, Facebook was reintroducing the service as part of an update of its user permission process in Europe.
Yet Facebook is taking a huge reputational risk in aggressively pushing the technology at a time when its data-mining practices are under heightened scrutiny in the United States and Europe. Already, more than a dozen privacy and consumer groups, and at least a few officials, argue that the company’s use of facial recognition has violated people’s privacy by not obtaining appropriate user consent.
The complaints add to the barrage of criticism facing the Silicon Valley giant over its handling of users’ personal details. Several American government agencies are currently investigating Facebook’s response to the harvesting of its users’ data by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm.
Facebook’s push to spread facial recognition also puts the company at the center of a broader and intensifying debate about how the powerful technology should be handled. The technology can be used to remotely identify people by name without their knowledge or consent. While proponents view it as a high-tech tool to catch criminals, civil liberties experts warn it could enable a mass surveillance system.
Facial recognition works by scanning faces of unnamed people in photos or videos and then matching codes of their facial patterns to those in a database of named people. Facebook has said that users are in charge of that process, telling them: “You control face recognition.”
But critics said people cannot actually control the technology — because Facebook scans their faces in photos even when their facial recognition setting is turned off.
“Facebook tries to explain their practices in ways that make Facebook look like the good guy, that they are somehow protecting your privacy,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “But it doesn’t get at the fact that they are scanning every photo.”
Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman, said its system analyzes faces in users’ photos to check whether they match with those who have their facial recognition setting turned on. If the system cannot find a match, she said, it does not identify the unknown face and immediately deletes the facial data.
At the heart of the issue is Facebook’s approach to user consent.
In the European Union, a tough new data protection law called the General Data Protection Regulation now requires companies to obtain explicit and “freely given” consent before collecting sensitive information like facial data. Some critics, including the former government official who originally proposed the new law, contend that Facebook tried to improperly influence user consent by promoting facial recognition as an identity protection tool.
Facebook notified users in Europe this year that they could choose to turn on the social network’s facial recognition services. Some critics say Facebook tried to manipulate consent by promoting the service as an identity protection tool.
“Facebook is somehow threatening me that, if I do not buy into face recognition, I will be in danger,” said Viviane Reding, the former justice commissioner of the European Commission who is now a member of the European Parliament. “It goes completely against the European law because it tries to manipulate consent.”
European regulators also have concerns about Facebook’s facial recognition practices. In Ireland, where Facebook’s international headquarters are, a spokeswoman for the Data Protection Commission said regulators “have put a number of specific queries to Facebook in respect of this technology.” Regulators were assessing Facebook’s responses, she said.
In the United States, Facebook is fighting a lawsuit brought by Illinois residents claiming the company’s face recognition practices violated a state privacy law. Damages in the case, certified as a class action in April, could amount to billions of dollars. In May, an appeals court granted Facebook’s request to delay the trial and review the class certification order.
Nikki Sokol, associate general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement, “This lawsuit is without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Separately, privacy and consumer groups lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in April saying Facebook added facial recognition services, like the feature to help identify impersonators, without obtaining prior consent from people before turning it on. The groups argued that Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree that prohibits it from deceptive privacy practices.
“Facebook routinely makes misrepresentations to induce consumers to adopt wider and more pervasive uses of facial recognition technology,” the complaint said.
Ms. Nadhiri said Facebook had designed its consent process to comply with the new European law and had previewed its approach with European regulators. As to the privacy groups’ complaint, she said the social network had notified users about expanded facial recognition services.
“We provide clear information to people about how we use face recognition technology,” Ms. Nadhiri wrote in an email. The company’s recently updated privacy section, she added, “shows people how the setting works in simple language.”
Facebook is hardly the only tech giant to embrace facial recognition technology. Over the last few years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have filed facial recognition patent applications.
In May, civil liberties groups criticized Amazon for marketing facial technology, called Rekognition, to police departments. The company has said the technology has also been used to find lost children at amusement parks and other purposes. (The New York Times has also used Amazon’s technology, including for the recent royal wedding.)
Critics said Facebook took an early lead in consumer facial recognition services partly by turning on the technology as the default option for users. In 2010, it introduced a photo-labeling feature called Tag Suggestions that used face-matching software to suggest the names of people in users’ photos.
People could turn it off. But privacy experts said Facebook had neither obtained users’ opt-in consent for the technology nor explicitly informed them that the company could benefit from scanning their photos.
“When Tag Suggestions asks you ‘Is this Jill?’ you don’t think you are annotating faces to improve Facebook’s face recognition algorithm,” said Brian Brackeen, the chief executive of Kairos, a facial recognition company. “Even the premise is an unfair use of people’s time and labor.”
The huge trove of identified faces, he added, enabled Facebook to quickly develop one of the world’s most powerful commercial facial recognition engines. In 2014, Facebook researchers said they had trained face-matching software “on the largest facial dataset to date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images.”
Ms. Nadhiri said Facebook had consulted with privacy experts on its photo-tagging feature. It also recently notified users in the United States who had the site’s face-identification services turned on that they could turn them off, she said. “We have always respected people’s choices,” she said.
But Facebook may only be getting started with its facial recognition services. The social network has applied for various patents, many of them still under consideration, which show how it could use the technology to track its online users in the real world.
One patent application, published last November, described a system that could detect consumers within stores and match those shoppers’ faces with their social networking profiles. Then it could analyze the characteristics of their friends, and other details, using the information to determine a “trust level” for each shopper. Consumers deemed “trustworthy” could be eligible for special treatment, like automatic access to merchandise in locked display cases, the document said.
Another Facebook patent filing described how cameras near checkout counters could capture shoppers’ faces, match them with their social networking profiles and then send purchase confirmation messages to their phones.
In their F.T.C. complaint, privacy groups — led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research institution — said the patent filings showed how Facebook could make money from users’ faces. A previous EPIC complaint about Facebook helped precipitate a consent decree requiring the company to give users more control over their personal details.
“Facebook’s patent applications attest to the company’s primary commercial purposes in expanding its biometric data collection and the pervasive uses of facial recognition technology that it envisions for the near future,” the current complaint said.
Ms. Nadhiri said that Facebook often sought patents for technology it never put into effect and that patent filings were not an indication of the company’s plans.
But legal filings in the class-action suit hint at the technology’s importance to Facebook’s business.
The case was brought by Illinois consumers who said that Facebook collected and stored their facial data without their explicit, prior consent — in violation, they claim, of a state biometric privacy law.
If the suit were to move forward, Facebook’s lawyers argued in a recent court document, “the reputational and economic costs to Facebook will be irreparable.”
by:
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/world/europe/trump-uk-protests.html
The Trump Baby, a 19-foot balloon that protesters plan to float near Parliament during President Trump’s visit to Britain this week.
LONDON — In London, a giant orange balloon depicting him as a baby having a tantrum will float over Parliament. There will be a “wall of sound” featuring mariachi music and the cries of children in detention centers calling out for their parents. In Scotland, a newspaper has demanded that he leave, and a “Carnival of Resistance” involving throwing rubber boots at a Trump doll is being planned.
Protesters across Britain are playing a cat-and-mouse game with President Trump as he embarks on a four-day visit to the country, following talks in Brussels with NATO allies and ahead of a meeting in Finland with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Campaign groups have organized a packed schedule reflecting an angry national mood, one reminiscent of protests against the Iraq War more than a decade ago. But those protests were aimed at American foreign policy more than at the person of former President George W. Bush.
This time, demonstrations will be against the man himself.
Mr. Trump has generated “the greatest amount of unease and tension against a single individual as opposed to an administration,” said Scott Lucas, a professor of international and American studies at the University of Birmingham.
In Britain, Trump’s ban on travel to the United States from several primarily Muslim countries and his remarks blaming “many sides” for far-right violence in Charlottesville, Va., helped create a groundswell of opposition. So did his sharing of anti-Muslim videos made by a British far-right group.
Wake Up With The Times, Anywhere in the World.
Get the Morning Briefing in your inbox. What you need to know to start your day, each weekday morning.
Jan. 29, 2018
Just last month, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, urged Prime Minister Theresa May to cancel the presidential visit. A petition last year to prevent Mr. Trump meeting Queen Elizabeth, on the grounds that an official state visit would “cause embarrassment to Her Majesty,” gathered more than a million signatures.
“The man is the focus here,” said Professor Lucas. The protests, he said, would be less about the office of the presidency, than “really, to uphold the presidency and American values against him.”
Mr. Trump is expected to largely avoid London, which has the potential to host the largest protests, and will not visit Downing Street, Buckingham Palace or Parliament. Demonstrations will take place in several cities across the country, including Cardiff in Wales and Glasgow in Scotland.
On Thursday evening, as the president dines at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace, near Oxford, protesters will be waiting for him at the gates.
Later, he will face what organizers describe as a “wall of sound” blasted from loudspeakers in front of Winfield House, the American ambassador’s official residence in London, where he is expected to stay overnight.
The following morning, protesters will be waiting for him, again, in front of Chequers, the country house outside London where he is expected to meet Mrs. May for breakfast. Later in the day, tens of thousands are expected to gather at Trafalgar Square at the heart of London.
But Mr. Trump is due to meet the queen at Windsor Castle, which is regarded as more sheltered than Buckingham Palace.
“We want to show our opposition to Donald Trump and everything that he represents,” said Shabbir Lakha, an organizer for Together Against Trump, an umbrella group for protest organizations.
Various “blocks” representing groups and minorities targeted by the president are expected to show up, Mr. Lakha said, including trade unions, environmental campaigners, organizations representing Latin Americans, Muslims and asylum seekers, and even a group opposing Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
Police expect more than 100,000 demonstrators. Mr. Lakha said he hoped the nationwide demonstration on Friday would be one of the biggest weekday protests the country has ever seen.
“The police have largely approved the protests, but it took a lot of negotiating and they’ve been quite obstructive,” Mr. Lakha said. “But because of the huge number of expected people they’ve been forced to back off to some extent.”
In Scotland, rallies will be held in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and outside the Trump Turnberry, the luxury golf resort where the president is expected to spend much of the weekend. In Edinburgh, a “Carnival of Resistance” will feature “Toss the Wellie at Trump,” presumably a game that involves throwing Wellington boots at a Trump figurine. (Scottish summers are generally wet.)
Last weekend, The Sunday Mail, a Scottish tabloid, published a headline that read “Send him home to think again,” a play on a Scottish anthem. Mr. Trump’s mother was born in Scotland.
“We have a great respect for the office of the president and affection for American presidents, but not the incumbent,” said Gordon Robertson, a news editor at The Daily Record, which publishes The Sunday Mail.
Mr. Robertson said Mr. Trump was “a threat to international stability, and he has a tenuous relationship with the truth,” adding, “We want to let him know that we don’t appreciate what he stands for.”
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/business/mckinsey-ends-ice-contract.html
Several agencies are involved in carrying out President Trump’s immigration policies, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees detention centers across the country, has come under the most criticism.
McKinsey & Company, the prominent management consultancy, has stopped working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the disclosure last month that the firm had done more than $20 million in consulting work for the agency. The revelation prompted questions from employees at the firm.
McKinsey’s decision was conveyed in a note from the firm’s new managing partner, Kevin Sneader, to former employees. He said the contract, which was not widely known within the company until The New York Times reported it in June, had “rightly raised” concerns.
While stating that McKinsey’s work for the agency did not involve carrying out immigration policies, Mr. Sneader wrote that the firm “will not, under any circumstances, engage in any work, anywhere in the world, that advances or assists policies that are at odds with our values.”
Complaints about the contract come at a time when McKinsey is under fire in South Africa for its role in a vast government corruption scandal that led to the resignation of the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma. The resulting crisis at McKinsey, the most serious in its 92-year history, was the focus of The Times’s article. On Monday, in a speech to a business school in Johannesburg, Mr. Sneader apologized to the nation for McKinsey’s handling of the episode.
“We came across as arrogant or unaccountable,” he said. “To be brutally honest, we were too distant to understand the growing anger in South Africa.”
Kevin Sneader, McKinsey’s new managing partner, told former employees that the firm “will not, under any circumstances, engage in any work, anywhere in the world, that advances or assists policies that are at odds with our values.”CreditSiphiwe Sibeko/Reuters
McKinsey’s decision to end work with ICE comes amid widespread anger, across the political spectrum, over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration that led to the separation of children from their parents — a practice that was ended in June. While Mr. Sneader acknowledged the concerns about McKinsey’s contract, a spokesman said the firm had already finished the job.
However, when asked about the contract before the story was published, McKinsey did not say that the work was ending. What’s more, federal records show that the contract was modified three days after The Times’s story.
The disclosure that McKinsey was working with ICE “caused a lot of discussions and alumni reactions,” one former partner said in an interview. It “caused a bit of drama.”
While several government agencies are involved in carrying out Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, ICE, which oversees detention centers across the country, has come under the most criticism. At least three other consulting companies — Deloitte Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz Allen Hamilton — have also advised ICE, according to federal contracting records.
James Fisher, a spokesman for Booz Allen, said in a statement that the company’s work with ICE involved “information systems, data integration and analytics,” and that it did not involve “the separation of children from adults.” Deloitte declined to comment, and PricewaterhouseCoopers did not respond to a request for comment.
McKinsey’s contract is for “management consulting services” for the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, though neither McKinsey nor ICE gave details on what that meant.
McKinsey is under fire in South Africa for its role in a vast government corruption scandal, stemming from its consulting contract with Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider.
“Our support, which has ended, has never been focused on developing, advising or implementing immigration policies, including the child-separation policy,” Mr. Sneader said in the note to former employees, whom McKinsey, adopting the practice of universities, calls “alumni.” The note was sent to The Times by a former employee.
McKinsey’s current contract with ICE began during the Obama administration. Most of the work was done after Mr. Trump took office, records show.
McKinsey’s involvement in the South African corruption scandal stemmed from its consulting contract with Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider. McKinsey came under fire because of the size of the payout and because its partner was linked to a business associate of three Indian immigrant brothers who have been accused of using their relationship with Mr. Zuma’s family to siphon money from the state.
McKinsey has paid back the 1 billion rand (about $74.7 million) in fees it took for its work with Eskom. In his speech in Johannesburg on Monday, Mr. Sneader said the contract went against McKinsey’s policy of putting the client’s interests ahead of its own.
“Our commercial approach led to a fee that was too large,” he said. “The fee was weighted towards recovering our investment, rather than being in line with Eskom’s situation. In that context, the fee was too large.”
He added: “This all amounts to an unacceptable breakdown in our governance processes. It should not have happened.”
by:
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/editorials/britain-brexit-boris-johnson.html
Boris Johnson outside 10 Downing St. last week.
Britain’s foreign secretary and its chief Brexit negotiator caused quite a stir when they resigned within 24 hours of each other because they considered Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposal too accommodating to Europe. But if her government weathers the resulting storm, their departures could help resolve the tortuous divorce negotiations with the European Union, which are approaching crucial deadlines.
This crisis took shape after Mrs. May summoned her ministers to her official retreat at Chequers on Friday and hammered out what she called a “responsible and credible” proposal far short of the clean break she previously mooted. Though details are still to come, the plan would have Britain try to enter into a free-trade agreement with the bloc by a “common rule book for industrial goods and agricultural products,” and accept partial jurisdiction by the European Court of Justice.
Not surprisingly, Mrs. May’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Davis, a proponent of a “hard Brexit,” quit on Sunday, along with his deputy. The greater shock came on Monday, when the flamboyant foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, followed suit after declaring with typical cheek that selling the prime minister’s Brexit plan would be akin to “polishing a turd.” Mr. Johnson had been a fierce advocate of a total break with the European Union, and during the Brexit referendum campaign he notoriously spread the false claim that Britain would save more than 350 million pounds a week if it left the union.
The resignations immediately set off speculation about more defections, the potential fall of Mrs. May’s government and even new elections. All that could happen. But it is doubtful that hard-line Brexiteers in Mrs. May’s Conservative Party can muster the 48 votes that party rules require to force a vote of confidence, much less the votes needed to force her into a leadership contest (in which Mr. Johnson would be a potential candidate).
A greater certainty is that Mrs. May cannot continue to spin her wheels on Brexit, as she has been forced to do by the sharp divide in her own party and government. Britain will officially leave the union next March, but for the exit not to be a total disaster for Britain, the two sides need to agree on a broad range of issues by October, including the terms of transition, customs arrangements and the basic shape of a future trade relationship. The deal, moreover, needs the approval of the British Parliament and 27 European Union members. Time is running out.
Deliberately or not, therefore, Mrs. May called the hard-liners’ bluff at Chequers. Now if she survives the ensuing storm, she will no longer have to please Tories who ideologically oppose adherence to all of the union’s laws and regulations. That does not mean an agreement with the union is imminent or easy. Mrs. May’s new package is still far from anything the union can accept. And the hard-liners will not relent.
Yet an injection of common sense is welcome in a political fray that has defied all warnings, many of them from industries, of the enormous damage that would come from a break with the European Union, and especially of an abrupt and uncontrolled break. It raised the possibility of an extension of the Brexit deadline, and, among ardent opponents of a break, even hopes of a new referendum (rejected, for now, by Mrs. May).
“I can only regret that the idea of #Brexit has not left with Davis and Johnson,” tweeted Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council. “But … who knows?” A slight uptick in financial markets suggested a similar glimmer of hope.
President Trump, who arrives in London on Thursday, is unlikely to give common sense a greater boost, but … who knows?
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-trump.html
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, shown here in 2004, is President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Supreme Court justice is President Trump’s finest hour, his classiest move. Last week the president promised to select “someone with impeccable credentials, great intellect, unbiased judgment, and deep reverence for the laws and Constitution of the United States.” In picking Judge Kavanaugh, he has done just that.
In 2016, I strongly supported Hillary Clinton for president as well as President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. But today, with the exception of the current justices and Judge Garland, it is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh. He sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the most influential circuit court) and commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.
Judge Kavanaugh, who is 53, has already helped decide hundreds of cases concerning a broad range of difficult issues. Good appellate judges faithfully follow the Supreme Court; great ones influence and help steer it. Several of Judge Kavanaugh’s most important ideas and arguments — such as his powerful defense of presidential authority to oversee federal bureaucrats and his skepticism about newfangled attacks on the property rights of criminal defendants — have found their way into Supreme Court opinions.
Except for Judge Garland, no one has sent more of his law clerks to clerk for the justices of the Supreme Court than Judge Kavanaugh has. And his clerks have clerked for justices across the ideological spectrum.
Most judges are not scholars or even serious readers of scholarship. Judge Kavanaugh, by contrast, has taught courses at leading law schools and published notable law review articles. More important, he is an avid consumer of legal scholarship. He reads and learns. And he reads scholars from across the political spectrum. (Disclosure: I was one of Judge Kavanaugh’s professors when he was a student at Yale Law School.)
This studiousness is especially important for a jurist like Judge Kavanaugh, who prioritizes the Constitution’s original meaning. A judge who seeks merely to follow precedent can simply read previous judicial opinions. But an “originalist” judge — who also cares about what the Constitution meant when its words were ratified in 1788 or when amendments were enacted — cannot do all the historical and conceptual legwork on his or her own.
Judge Kavanaugh seems to appreciate this fact, whereas Justice Antonin Scalia, a fellow originalist, did not read enough history and was especially weak on the history of the Reconstruction amendments and the 20th-century amendments.
A great judge also admits and learns from past mistakes. Here, too, Judge Kavanaugh has already shown flashes of greatness, admirably confessing that some of the views he held 20 years ago as a young lawyer — including his crabbed understandings of the presidency when he was working for the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr — were erroneous.
Although Democrats are still fuming about Judge Garland’s failed nomination, the hard truth is that they control neither the presidency nor the Senate; they have limited options. Still, they could try to sour the hearings by attacking Judge Kavanaugh and looking to complicate the proceedings whenever possible.
This would be a mistake. Judge Kavanaugh is, again, a superb nominee. So I propose that the Democrats offer the following compromise: Each Senate Democrat will pledge either to vote yes for Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation — or, if voting no, to first publicly name at least two clearly better candidates whom a Republican president might realistically have nominated instead (not an easy task). In exchange for this act of good will, Democrats will insist that Judge Kavanaugh answer all fair questions at his confirmation hearing.
Fair questions would include inquiries not just about Judge Kavanaugh’s past writings and activities but also about how he believes various past notable judicial cases (such as Roe v. Wade) should have been decided — and even about what his current legal views are on any issue, general or specific.
Everyone would have to understand that in honestly answering, Judge Kavanaugh would not be making a pledge — a pledge would be a violation of judicial independence. In the future, he would of course be free to change his mind if confronted with new arguments or new facts, or even if he merely comes to see a matter differently with the weight of judgment on his shoulders. But honest discussions of one’s current legal views are entirely proper, and without them confirmation hearings are largely pointless.
The compromise I’m proposing would depart from recent confirmation practice. But the current confirmation process is badly broken, alternating between rubber stamps and witch hunts. My proposal would enable each constitutional actor to once again play its proper constitutional role: The Senate could become a venue for serious constitutional conversation, and the nominee could demonstrate his or her consummate legal skill. And equally important: Judge Kavanaugh could be confirmed with the ninetysomething Senate votes he deserves, rather than the fiftysomething votes he is likely to get.
2018-07-07
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/opinion/14th-amendment-african-americans-citizenship.html
Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban; Photographs by LPETTET via Getty Images, and Library of Congress
Why are some events forgotten while others loom large in national memory? The Civil War, the deadliest American conflict, is a formative part of our history. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Mathew Brady’s photographs of soldiers remain etched in the public consciousness. We remember the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that slaves in Confederate-held territory were from that point free.
But the fundamental story of the 14th Amendment, which extended citizenship to African-Americans, has been overlooked. One hundred and fifty years since the amendment’s ratification, that story is worth remembering.
When the Civil War began in 1861, approximately four million African-Americans were enslaved. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, left three-quarters of a million people in bondage. Because the proclamation presaged slavery’s demise, however, African-Americans across the nation joyfully celebrated its anniversary in the years after.
Only after Confederate defeat in the spring of 1865 did the United States formally and entirely end slavery — ratifying the 13th Amendment later that year. At last, the A.M.E. bishop and former slave W. J. Gaines remembered, “the dark night, so full of suffering and unrequited toil, was gone forever.” Even so, African-American freedmen and women were not yet citizens. They remained in a kind of legal limbo in which they lacked constitutionally based civil rights.
For them, the decade of rebuilding that followed the Civil War was at once a time of trepidation and of hope for a better future. Called Reconstruction, it was characterized by political strife, economic peril and racial violence. In 1865, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, welcomed former Confederates back into the Union, many of whom sought to re-establish control over emancipated African-Americans. Former Confederate states created laws known as “black codes” that restricted former slaves’ mobility and choice of employment and denied them civil and political rights. Black codes created conditions that were startlingly similar to slavery in parts of the South.
Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that anyone born in the United States was a citizen, and promised African-Americans equal protection under law. Johnson, sparring with Congress, vetoed the bill, but the legislators overrode him. Still, the law did not go far enough to guarantee rights to freed slaves. The Republican-led Congress consequently urged the passage and ratification of an amendment to the Constitution that would make unassailable the definition of American citizenship by birthright.
On July 9, 1868, the required majority of states ratified the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to anyone born in the country, including African-Americans. Now, every American born or naturalized in the United States was promised due process and equal protection of the laws. The 14th Amendment also forbade states from passing legislation that restricted the “privileges and immunities” of citizens, without precisely defining what these were.
Would the 14th Amendment adequately safeguard the rights of the nation’s black citizens? The abolitionist Frederick Douglass had feared that white Southerners would hardly “consent to an absolutely just and humane policy toward the newly emancipated black people so long enslaved and degraded.” Indeed, in the years that followed Reconstruction, Southern states enacted oppressive laws that segregated blacks and undid the work of the 15th Amendment, in 1870, that granted black men the right to vote.
Some scholars see the 14th Amendment’s ambiguity as a weakness. The historian Stephen Kantrowitz argues that “the amendment’s failure to specify equality of political rights would haunt the next century of American history.” In addition, the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment narrowly during the late 19th century. In a series of rulings that included Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment in a way that did not require the federal government to protect blacks from violence and allowed seemingly race-neutral laws to be applied in unequal ways.
By the turn of the century, black disenfranchisement was nearly complete in the South. In a letter to Harper’s Weekly in 1904, a Georgian declared that “the vast majority of Southern Negroes today do not even know that they are entitled to vote.”
During the civil rights era beginning in the 1950s, however, the Supreme Court reversed course. It found sizable new meanings in the 14th Amendment, holding that it guaranteed desegregated public schools, permitted interracial marriage and ensured equal political representation at the state level. The 14th Amendment also served as the basis for decisions striking down policies that discriminated against pregnant women and denied funding for undocumented children to attend public schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gave Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
An even broader interpretation of the 14th Amendment may reshape American society in the 21st century. In Zadvydas v. Davis in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that indefinite government detention of aliens violated the Constitution’s due process clause. More recently, Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 led to the overturning of states’ bans on gay marriage. The court cited the due process clause of the 14th Amendment in the majority opinion, arguing that “the fundamental liberties protected by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices defining personal identity and beliefs.”
In the last 50 years, the Supreme Court’s evolving interpretations of the 14th Amendment have led to an expansion of civil rights. Its decisions have also produced a system of federalism that significantly differs from that of 1868 through the reallocation of power from the states to the federal government. Thanks to the 14th Amendment, with its plain text authorizing Congress to act in perpetuity, the contours of our federal system continue to shift.
The question remains: How will the Supreme Court interpret the rights promised by this critical amendment in future cases of national importance? We can only hope that, in the words of Frederick Douglass, it will continue to “give full freedom to every person without regard to race or color in the United States.” While 150 years have passed since the ratification of the 14th Amendment, it is not too late to give this powerful document its due.
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/smarter-living/eisenhower-box-productivity-tips.html
CreditDavid Ramos/Getty Images
Here’s a list of things I did before starting this newsletter: I filled out the documents to renew my passport; clipped my cat’s nails; bought some household items; responded to a few Instagram DMs; and ate a snack because I was hungry.
Sound familiar?
Some of those tasks were relatively urgent — I need to get my passport in order soon, and those Instagram DMs were weighing on me. But none of those tasks were as important as writing this newsletter. I know I needed to get this done, but the call of those minor-yet-urgent tasks was too strong.
To all of my procrastinators out there, I offer an explanation: Your brain is working against you, and it’s because of a phenomenon called the urgency effect.
Our brains tend to prioritize immediate satisfaction over long-term rewards (you probably remember this from the famous marshmallow experiment). But a study from February found that subjects were more likely to perform smaller-but-urgent tasks that had a deadline than they were to perform more important tasks without one. This was true even if the outcome of the smaller task was objectively worse than that of the larger one.
“Normatively speaking,” the researchers wrote, “people may choose to perform urgent tasks with short completion windows, instead of important tasks with larger outcomes, because important tasks are more difficult and further away from goal completion, urgent tasks involve more immediate and certain payoffs, or people want to finish the urgent tasks first and then work on important tasks later.”
In other words: Even if we know a larger, less-urgent task is vastly more consequential, we will instinctively choose to do a smaller, urgent task anyway. Yet again, thanks for nothing, brain.
So what are we to do? To answer that, let’s talk about boxes — specifically, one developed by our 34th president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Picture a 2x2 square with four boxes. At the top of the square are two labels: Urgent and non-urgent. On the left are two other labels: Important and not important.
[Like what you’re reading? Sign up here for the Smarter Living newsletter to get stories like this (and much more!) delivered straight to your inbox every Monday morning.]
On any given day, try to put every task you have to do into one of those four boxes. You’ll quickly see that the things tied to approaching deadlines are quite often not the most important things you have on your plate. Accordingly, schedule time to finish them later or, if possible, delegate them.
Similarly, it’s very likely you’ll wind up with tasks that don’t have a deadline and aren’t important. Immediately and aggressively remove them from your to-do list.
Two crucial bits I’ll leave you with:
• If you’re struggling to figure out whether something is important to you, spend some time looking inward to see if it’s truly core to who you are and what your ambitions are.
• Once you’ve mapped out all of your tasks, embrace the magic of micro-progress and slice them up into tiny goals to make them more manageable.
What are your systems for finding out what’s important to you? Tell me on Twitter at @timherrera or email me at tim@nytimes.com.
Have a great week!
— Tim
Best of Smarter Living
How to Clean Those Pesky Summer Stains It’s the season of hot dog condiment blobs, stubborn sunscreen residue and sweat stains … everywhere. Here’s how to clean things up.
The Rise of the Millennial Prenup Engaged? Congrats! Here’s when to consider a prenuptial agreement — and how to get started.
What Travel Insurance Does and Doesn’t Cover When you book travel with a credit card, you usually get some kind of travel insurance — but what it doesn’t cover can leave you vulnerable. Here’s what you really get, and why you might want to buy additional coverage.
5 Cheap(ish) Things to Get You Started With Trail Running Trail running is like stepping into a different world. Here’s the gear to get you there.
18 Ways to Navigate Stress at the Airport Even before takeoff, the airport itself can be a stressful phase of travel. Here are strategies for dealing with anxieties and annoyances, large and small.
What We’re Reading
As you probably know, I’m a Twitter obsessive, so I eagerly lapped up this look at “Local Twitter” from Taylor Lorenz, ace tech reporter at The Atlantic.
A certain generation remembers the “away status” from our angsty youths — intimate places where we could post inane-yet-personal messages meant more to broadcast a feeling than any particular message, whether that was excitement, heartbreak or simply boredom. (I posted my fair share of lyrics to Brand New when I was feeling particularly emotive.)
“Though most users do mainly follow people from their hometowns, local Twitter has more to do with what you tweet than where you live,” Ms. Lorenz writes. “The typical local Twitter user is a teen who is ‘in their own bubble of simple life pleasures and desires,’ doesn’t live their entire life online, ‘and uses Twitter to connect to their real-life friends like they used to do on Facebook,’ explains Raeequaza, a 22-year-old in New York.”
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/us/politics/trump-supreme-court-nominee.html
• President Trump selected Brett M. Kavanaugh as his nominee to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
• The choice of Judge Kavanaugh will galvanize Democrats and Republicans in the months before the midterm elections and set up a contentious nomination process. His long record of legal opinions and his work in fierce partisan battles is likely to offer Democrats plenty of ammunition for tough questions.
• Mr. Trump considers the pick a key moment of his presidency, and pushed his decision into the final hours before his self-imposed Monday night announcement deadline.
• The selection of Judge Kavanaugh brings within reach the culmination of a 30-year effort by conservative activists to install a reliable conservative majority on the nation’s highest tribunal.
President Trump with Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, his nominee for the Supreme Court, in the White House residence on Monday.
Kavanaugh’s path to confirmation promises to be difficult and contentious.
Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination will galvanize Democrats and Republicans in the months before the midterm elections. Justice Kennedy, who is retiring, held the swing vote in many closely divided cases on issues like abortion, affirmative action, gay rights and the death penalty. Replacing him with a committed conservative, who could potentially serve for decades, will fundamentally alter the balance of the court and put dozens of precedents at risk.
Judge Kavanaugh’s long history of legal opinions, as well as his role in some of the fiercest partisan battles of the last two decades, will give Democrats plenty of ammunition for tough questions. Nearly 20 years ago, working for the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, he laid out broad grounds to impeach Mr. Clinton — words that Democrats can now seize on to apply to Mr. Trump and the Russia investigation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who leads the barest of Republican majorities, had also expressed misgivings about his path to confirmation. Read more »
Schumer wants a clear answer from the nominee on Roe v. Wade.
Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said in an interview that he would urge Democrats to ask the nominee pointedly whether he or she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion.
“I think people should ask,” Mr. Schumer said. “And I think the American people should expect a direct answer.”
In the past, senators have often couched questions on Roe by asking nominees if they accept the decision as “settled law,” and whether they respect legal precedent. But Mr. Schumer said Mr. Trump has upended the old rules by declaring openly that he would only pick nominees who would overturn Roe, and by publicizing a list of potential candidates.
And he noted that past nominees who have said they respect precedent — including Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, named to the court last year by Mr. Trump, who said he would “follow the law of the judicial precedent” — have voted to overturn past decisions, most recently last month in a case that diluted the power of unions.
“No one believes that nominees from a preordained list will simply follow existing law,” Mr. Schumer said. “It’s become a dodge. It’s become a bar so low as to be meaningless, given that nominees have made previous pledges and walked right back on them.”
Of course, there is nothing to stop the nominee from delivering the traditional dodge: “With all due respect, I cannot answer a hypothetical question.”
— Sheryl Gay Stolberg on Capitol Hill
Abortion opponents celebrate with champagne and cheese.
Shortly before Mr. Trump’s much-anticipated announcement, staff members of the Susan B. Anthony List gathered in a colorful lounge at their headquarters in Arlington, Va., turned down the volume on the large televisions playing both Fox and MSNBC, and circled to pray.
“We ask you to send your spirit into this room, into the Oval Office and into the hearts of every senator who will vote soon, and most of all into the hearts and minds of the American people so they realize what is at stake,” prayed Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion political group. “We pray this be a pivotal night in that journey,” she said, “to win this great human rights battle of our time.”
When Mr. Trump announced Judge Kavanaugh as has pick, everyone applauded and celebrated over a spread of cheese and wine — and someone even brought champagne.
Social conservatives have long said they would be happy with any of the anti-abortion candidates on Mr. Trump’s list, and many conservative evangelicals and Catholics chose to vote for him because he promised to nominate “pro-life” judges to the bench.
But this week, many had hoped until the final moments on Monday that Mr. Trump would pick Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, who is Catholic and has seven children including two adopted from Haiti and a son with special needs.
— Elizabeth Dias
For conservatives, a three-decade dream is within reach.
Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh culminates a three-decade project unparalleled in American history to install a reliable conservative majority on the nation’s highest tribunal, one that could shape the direction of the law for years to come.
All of the years of vetting and grooming and lobbying and list-making by conservative legal figures frustrated by Republican appointees who drifted to the left arguably has come down to this moment, when they stand on the precipice of appointing a fifth justice who, they hope, will finally establish a bench committed to their principles. Read more »
Ahead of the announcement, party leaders issued dueling statements on the Senate floor.
The Senate convened Monday afternoon ahead of the court announcement, which is sure to consume the chamber for months. Mr. Schumer took the moment to warn that Mr. Trump was virtually guaranteed to put forth a nominee who would be hostile to abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act.
“At this critical juncture, with so many rights and liberties at stake, U.S. senators and the American people should expect an affirmative statement of support for the personal liberties of all Americans from the next Supreme Court nominee,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, countered with his own warning about the attacks from the left that will be directed at Mr. Trump’s nominee.
“We don’t know who he will name, but we already know exactly what unfair tactics the nominee will face,” Mr. McConnell said. “They won’t be new, and they won’t be warranted. We can expect to hear how they’ll destroy equal rights, or demolish American health care, or ruin our country in some other fictional way.”
—Thomas Kaplan on Capitol Hill
Democrats declined to be presidential props.
President Trump invited a few Senate Democrats to the White House for Monday night’s announcement of his Supreme Court nominee, hoping to at least project an image of bipartisan support from the Democrats who might, just might, vote to confirm his pick.
Alas, they declined to attend.
As Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana put it, “While I appreciate the invitation from the White House to attend this evening’s announcement, I declined so that I can meet first with the nominee in a setting where we can discuss his or her experience and perspectives. In the coming days, I will be reviewing the record and qualifications of the president’s nominee.”
If anything, Senator Joe Manchin III signaled that he could be a hard sell when he picked up an issue that Democratic leaders are pressing: making sure any nominee will protect the Affordable Care Act.
And a key Republican kept her distance.
Also invited to attend the White House rollout: Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and a key abortion rights moderate. “I look forward to seeing the choice,” she said. “I appreciate being invited, but I’m not going to be present. I can get a better sense of it watching it.”
Ms. Collins and Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, may be the most essential votes. The loss of a single Republican vote could doom the nomination — if Democrats can hold together.
Senator Bob Casey looks like a “no.”
Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania is the chamber’s most famous Democratic foe of abortion. His father, Bob Casey Sr., a former governor of the Keystone State, is the Casey on Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the landmark 1992 ruling that affirmed the basic tenets of Roe v. Wade — and on which Justice Kennedy was the key vote.
But the younger Casey does not look like a vote in play — even with Roe possibly in the balance. “It’s a corrupt process and I can’t support it,” Mr. Casey said. “I wasn’t elected to genuflect to the hard right.”
— Sheryl Gay Stolberg on Capitol Hill
Democrats want to put up a fight, but may not be able to.
Democrats made it clear over the weekend that the bar is high for their votes. But they acknowledged how hard it would be to stop a nominee who has unanimous support among Senate Republicans.
Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, admitted on Sunday that Democratic opposition could be futile. Even if all 49 members of their caucus united in opposition, they would still need at least one Republican to join them to block the nomination.
“It will be very difficult,” Mr. Coons said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “If all the Republicans stick together, along with the vice president, they’ll be able to confirm whomever President Trump nominates.”
Senator Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s nominee would most likely be in the mold of Justice Gorsuch, who received unanimous Republican support in his confirmation vote and who Mr. Durbin said had voted “in lock step on the Republican conservative side.”
“They want to fill this vacancy to give them an advantage in any future rulings,” Mr. Durbin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The nomination vote will be difficult for Senate Democrats in red states who are up for re-election in November, including Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia. A decision by one or all of them to try to bolster their standing with Republican-leaning voters would undermine Democratic leaders.
Democrats fear that Mr. Trump’s nominee could favor the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion. Here is what each of the four finalists has had to say on the topic.
— Noah Weiland
2018-07-08
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/mexico-migrants-deportation.html
A young man in Tijuana, Mexico, who said he was deported after having lived in the U.S. since the age of five.
Mexico City — To hear the Trump administration talk about the immigrants it has deported back to Mexico, you would think they were all criminals and potential drains on the nation’s economy and welfare system, with no interest in participating in what used to be called the American dream.
In fact, none of that is true. We know, because the two of us talked to hundreds of them.
Over the last few weeks we were in Mexico, beginning an oral history project documenting the migrant experience. Over the course of three weeks our team surveyed and interviewed more than 200 returning Mexican migrants, the vast majority of them deportees. Some were caught in roadblocks. Others were pulled over for running a stop light or for speeding. They were detained in American county jails and immigration detention centers before being sent to Mexico. Many had lived in the United States almost their entire lives.
And yet, despite that experience, when we asked them what they missed about the United States, their responses were automatic: “everything.” “I feel American,” they told us over and over again. And why wouldn’t they? They grew up as the kids next door. They went to our children’s schools and birthday parties. They attended our churches, played on our sports teams. As high schoolers they flipped hamburgers at McDonald’s.
But they also always had it a little rougher. Occasionally they faced discrimination. Their parents worked multiple jobs, often seven days a week. They left home before their children woke up and returned long after they were asleep. Children as young as 8 shouldered the burdens of caring for younger siblings. They began working as soon as they reached high school. But their unauthorized status limited their job opportunities; they couldn’t get a driver’s license and college was a remote possibility. Some got into the same kind of trouble native-born children do, but most worked hard to keep their families afloat.
Still, the American dream meant everything to them. In optimistic terms rarely heard from native-born Americans, they described the United States as a place where success was possible. Whether they lived in a big city or small town, in a red state or a blue state, they overwhelmingly recall an American society that was genuine, open, diverse and accepting.
One man teared up remembering his childhood friend, Matthew, with whom he played baseball, swam in the neighborhood pool and shared tacos and mac and cheese. Another missed ice fishing on frozen Minnesota lakes, using snowmobiles fashioned with special drills that he helped assemble through his work at a fiberglass factory. He shared another memory: After introducing his friends to guacamole, they insisted on eating at his place. “We had an arrangement: They’d bring the avocados,” he’d make the dip.
A young woman recalled being terrified of having her friends discover her unauthorized status. When she finally found the courage to tell them, they reassured her that they couldn’t care less, and laughingly nicknamed her the “alien.”
Each deportee stressed the kindness of ordinary Americans who lent a helping hand. Bosses who gave them a chance, appreciated their hard work, mentored their success. Teachers whose names are etched in their memories: Mr. McDonald, Mrs. Wilson, Miss Annie — all went the extra mile to help them succeed in school. Coaches made it possible for them to play on club soccer or mighty mites football teams by paying their dues and buying them the uniforms their parents couldn’t afford. A young man cried, remembering the marine who helped him find his way as a troubled adolescent.
Back in Mexico, these returning migrants are desperately struggling to find their place in a foreign country. One young woman returning from Fort Myers, Fla., said, “I didn’t even know what Mexican earth was like and whether the sun shone.”
The returnees stand out. They dress differently, they think differently, they speak broken Spanish and they dream in English. They miss everyday American life and its special occasions. They long for American food, rattling off every conceivable American chain restaurant. Several insist that Mexican tacos couldn’t begin to compete with Taco Bell. They are American football fans rather than soccer aficionados. A handful confess they aren’t following the World Cup because the United States didn’t qualify.
They can still proudly recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the United States national anthem. They loved observing United States holidays and several still do even back in Mexico. On Thanksgiving they expressed gratitude for opportunities the United States provided them. On July 4, they celebrated a country where “everyone praises each other’s successes.”
They reminisce about living in a country governed by the rule of law. Our survey asks them whether they were fearful of United States authorities. Except for the newest deportees who experienced the recent crackdowns, respondents react with a quizzical look, followed by an almost universal “no.” They surprise themselves with their answers, because as undocumented migrants they had every reason to be fearful. Yet the vast majority contrast the crime, corruption and lawlessness that pervades Mexico with the safety they felt in the United States, a place they describe as one “where police can’t be bribed,” “where people obey rules” and “where kids can play safely outside.”
Separated from their families and friends, many live immersed in childhood memories. Others, like Israel Concha, the director of New Comienzos, an organization of returning migrants with which we collaborated, have become activists committed to bringing the American dream to Mexico. They enact practices and values they acquired in the United States, notably volunteerism, a custom foreign to many Mexicans but “something we all learned to do in the United States,” Mr. Concha explains.
We watched these volunteer workers reach out to the scores of returning Mexican migrants who pass through their doors every day. They are always welcoming and upbeat. They encourage those who feel isolated to join their team. They link those who suffer depression with counseling centers. They provide clothing to the destitute, accompany battered women to shelters and help returning migrants find job training and work opportunities.
These memories of migrant life in the United States stand in stark contrast to the inhumane crackdown simultaneously unfolding at the border. The returning migrants we met are products of an American society that is forgetting its identity. In a cruel irony, organizations like New Comienzos are importing to Mexico the American values of mutual respect, open-mindedness and generosity their volunteers were raised with. Meanwhile, American children are growing up in a society where aggression, prejudice and turning a blind eye to human suffering are increasingly condoned.
2018-07-07
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillance-technology.html
A video showing facial recognition software in use at the headquarters of the artificial intelligence company Megvii in Beijing.
ZHENGZHOU, China — In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station.
In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival.
In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor.
With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.
“In the past, it was all about instinct,” said Shan Jun, the deputy chief of the police at the railway station in Zhengzhou, where the heroin smuggler was caught. “If you missed something, you missed it.”
China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a great democratizer, bringing people more freedom and connecting them to the world. In China, it has brought control.
Megvii employees at the company’s offices in Beijing.
In some cities, cameras scan train stations for China’s most wanted. Billboard-size displays show the faces of jaywalkers and list the names of people who don’t pay their debts. Facial recognition scanners guard the entrances to housing complexes. Already, China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras — four times as many as the United States.
Such efforts supplement other systems that track internet use and communications, hotel stays, train and plane trips and even car travel in some places.
Even so, China’s ambitions outstrip its abilities. Technology in place at one train station or crosswalk may be lacking in another city, or even the next block over. Bureaucratic inefficiencies prevent the creation of a nationwide network.
For the Communist Party, that may not matter. Far from hiding their efforts, Chinese authorities regularly state, and overstate, their capabilities. In China, even the perception of surveillance can keep the public in line.
Some places are further along than others. Invasive mass-surveillance software has been set up in the west to track members of the Uighur Muslim minority and map their relations with friends and family, according to software viewed by The New York Times.
“This is potentially a totally new way for the government to manage the economy and society,” said Martin Chorzempa, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“The goal is algorithmic governance,” he added.
The Shame Game
The intersection south of Changhong Bridge in the city of Xiangyang used to be a nightmare. Cars drove fast and jaywalkers darted into the street.
Then last summer, the police put up cameras linked to facial recognition technology and a big, outdoor screen. Photos of lawbreakers were displayed alongside their names and government I.D. numbers. People were initially excited to see their faces on the board, said Guan Yue, a spokeswoman, until propaganda outlets told them it was punishment.
“If you are captured by the system and you don’t see it, your neighbors or colleagues will, and they will gossip about it,” she said. “That’s too embarrassing for people to take.”
China’s new surveillance is based on an old idea: Only strong authority can bring order to a turbulent country. Mao Zedong took that philosophy to devastating ends, as his top-down rule brought famine and then the Cultural Revolution.
His successors also craved order but feared the consequences of totalitarian rule. They formed a new understanding with the Chinese people. In exchange for political impotence, they would be mostly left alone and allowed to get rich.
It worked. Censorship and police powers remained strong, but China’s people still found more freedom. That new attitude helped usher in decades of breakneck economic growth.
Today, that unwritten agreement is breaking down.
China’s economy isn’t growing at the same pace. It suffers from a severe wealth gap. After four decades of fatter paychecks and better living, its people have higher expectations.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has moved to solidify his power. Changes to Chinese law mean he could rule longer than any leader since Mao. And he has undertaken a broad corruption crackdown that could make him plenty of enemies.
For support, he has turned to the Mao-era beliefs in the importance of a cult of personality and the role of the Communist Party in everyday life. Technology gives him the power to make it happen.
“Reform and opening has already failed, but no one dares to say it,” said Chinese historian Zhang Lifan, citing China’s four-decade post-Mao policy. “The current system has created severe social and economic segregation. So now the rulers use the taxpayers’ money to monitor the taxpayers.”
Mr. Xi has launched a major upgrade of the Chinese surveillance state. China has become the world’s biggest market for security and surveillance technology, with analysts estimating the country will have almost 300 million cameras installed by 2020. Chinese buyers will snap up more than three-quarters of all servers designed to scan video footage for faces, predicts IHS Markit, a research firm. China’s police will spend an additional $30 billion in the coming years on techno-enabled snooping, according to one expert quoted in state media.
Government contracts are fueling research and development into technologies that track faces, clothing and even a person’s gait. Experimental gadgets, like facial-recognition glasses, have begun to appear.
Judging public Chinese reaction can be difficult in a country where the news media is controlled by the government. Still, so far the average Chinese citizen appears to show little concern. Erratic enforcement of laws against everything from speeding to assault means the long arm of China’s authoritarian government can feel remote from everyday life. As a result, many cheer on new attempts at law and order.
“It’s one of the biggest intersections in the city,” said Wang Fukang, a college student who volunteered as a guard at the crosswalk in Xiangyang. “It’s important that it stays safe and orderly.”
The halls of its offices are dotted with cameras, looking for faces. From desk to break room to exit, employees’ paths are traced on a television screen with blue dotted lines. The monitor shows their comings and goings, all day, everyday.
In China, snooping is becoming big business. As the country spends heavily on surveillance, a new generation of start-ups have risen to meet the demand.
Chinese companies are developing globally competitive applications like image and voice recognition. Yitu took first place in a 2017 open contest for facial recognition algorithms held by the United States government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A number of other Chinese companies also scored well.
A technology boom in China is helping the government’s surveillance ambitions. In sheer scale and investment, China already rivals Silicon Valley. Between the government and eager investors, surveillance start-ups have access to plenty of money and other resources.
In May, the upstart A.I. company SenseTime raised $620 million, giving it a valuation of about $4.5 billion. Yitu raised $200 million last month. Another rival, Megvii, raised $460 million from investors that included a state-backed fund created by China’s top leadership.
At a conference in May at an upscale hotel in Beijing, China’s security-industrial complex offered its vision of the future. Companies big and small showed off facial-recognition security gates and systems that track cars around cities to local government officials, tech executives and investors.
Private companies see big potential in China’s surveillance build-out. China’s public security market was valued at more than $80 billion last year but could be worth even more as the country builds its capabilities, said Shen Xinyang, a former Google data scientist who is now chief technology officer of Eyecool, a start-up.
“Artificial intelligence for public security is actually still a very insignificant portion of the whole market,” he said, pointing out that most equipment currently in use was “nonintelligent.”
Many of these businesses are already providing data to the government.
Mr. Shen told the group that his company had surveillance systems at more than 20 airports and train stations, which had helped catch 1,000 criminals. Eyecool, he said, is also handing over two million facial images each day to a burgeoning big-data police system called Skynet.
At a building complex in Xiangyang, a facial-recognition system set up to let residents quickly through security gates adds to the police’s collection of photos of local residents, according to local Chinese Communist Party officials.
Wen Yangli, an executive at Number 1 Community, which makes the product, said the company is at work on other applications. One would detect when crowds of people are clashing. Another would allow police to use virtual maps of buildings to find out who lives where.
China’s surveillance companies are also looking to test the appetite for high-tech surveillance abroad. Yitu says it has been expanding overseas, with plans to increase business in regions like Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
At home, China is preparing its people for next-level surveillance technology. A recent state-media propaganda film called “Amazing China” showed off a similar virtual map that provided police with records of utility use, saying it could be used for predictive policing.
“If there are anomalies, the system sends an alert,” a narrator says, as Chinese police officers pay a visit to an apartment with a record of erratic utility use. The film then quotes one of the officers: “No matter which corner you escape to, we’ll bring you to justice.”
Enter the Panopticon
For technology to be effective, it doesn’t always have to work. Take China’s facial-recognition glasses.
Police in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou recently showed off the specs at a high-speed rail station for state media and others. They snapped photos of a policewoman peering from behind the shaded lenses.
But the glasses work only if the target stands still for several seconds. They have been used mostly to check travelers for fake identifications.
China’s national database of individuals it has flagged for watching — including suspected terrorists, criminals, drug traffickers, political activists and others — includes 20 million to 30 million people, said one technology executive who works closely with the government. That is too many people for today’s facial recognition technology to parse, said the executive, who asked not to be identified because the information wasn’t public.
The system remains more of a digital patchwork than an all-seeing technological network. Many files still aren’t digitized, and others are on mismatched spreadsheets that can’t be easily reconciled. Systems that police hope will someday be powered by A.I. are currently run by teams of people sorting through photos and data the old-fashioned way.
Take, for example, the crosswalk in Xiangyang. The images don’t appear instantaneously. The billboard often shows jaywalkers from weeks ago, though authorities have recently reduced the lag to about five or six days. Officials said humans still sift through the images to match them to people’s identities.
Still, Chinese authorities who are generally mum about security have embarked on a campaign to persuade the country’s people that the high-tech security state is already in place.
China’s propagandists are fond of stories in which police use facial recognition to spot wanted criminals at events. An article in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, covered a series of arrests made with the aid of facial recognition at concerts of the pop star Jackie Cheung. The piece referenced some of the singer’s lyrics: “You are a boundless net of love that easily trapped me.”
In many places, it works. At the intersection in Xiangyang, jaywalking has decreased. At the building complex where Number 1 Community’s facial-recognition gate system has been installed, a problem with bike theft ceased entirely, according to building management.
“The whole point is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored, and that uncertainty makes people more obedient,” said Mr. Chorzempa, the Peterson Institute fellow.
He described the approach as a panopticon, the idea that people will follow the rules precisely because they don’t know whether they are being watched.
In Zhengzhou, police were happy to explain how just the thought of the facial recognition glasses could get criminals to confess.
Mr. Shan, the Zhengzhou railway station deputy police chief, cited the time his department grabbed a heroin smuggler. While questioning the suspect, Mr. Shan said, police pulled out the glasses and told the man that what he said didn’t matter. The glasses could give them all the information they needed.
“Because he was afraid of being found out by the advanced technology, he confessed,” said Mr. Shan, adding that the suspect had swallowed 60 small packs of heroin.
“We didn’t even use any interrogation techniques,” Mr. Shan said. “He simply gave it all up.”
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/well/exercise-may-aid-in-weight-loss-provided-you-do-enough.html
CreditiStock
Can working out help us to drop pounds after all?
A provocative new study involving overweight men and women suggests that it probably can, undercutting a widespread notion that exercise, by itself, is worthless for weight loss.
But the findings also indicate that, to benefit, we may need to exercise quite a bit.
In theory, exercise should contribute substantially to weight loss. It burns calories. If we do not replace them, our bodies should achieve negative energy balance, use stored fat for fuel and shed pounds.
But life and our metabolisms are not predictable or fair, as multiple exercise studies involving people and animals show. In these experiments, participants lose less weight than would be expected, given the energy they expend during exercise.
The studies generally have concluded that the exercisers had compensated for the energy they had expended during exercise, either by eating more or moving less throughout the day. These compensations were often unwitting but effective.
Some researchers had begun to wonder, though, if the amount of exercise might matter. Many of the past human experiments had involved about 30 minutes a day or so of moderate exercise, which is the amount generally recommended by current guidelines to improve health.
But what if people exercised more, some researchers asked. Would they still compensate for all the calories that they burned?
To find out, scientists from the University of North Dakota and other institutions decided to invite 31 overweight, sedentary men and women to a lab for measurements of their resting metabolic rate and body composition.
The volunteers also recounted in detail what they had eaten the previous day and agreed to wear a sophisticated activity tracker for a week.
The scientists then randomly divided them into groups. One group began a program of walking briskly or otherwise exercising five times a week until they had burned 300 calories, which took most of them about 30 minutes. (The sessions were individualized.)
Over the course of the week, these volunteers burned 1,500 extra calories with their exercise program.
The other group began working out for twice as long, burning 600 calories per session, or about 3,000 calories per week.
The exercise program lasted for 12 weeks. The researchers asked their volunteers not to change their diets or lifestyles during this time and to wear the activity monitors for a few days.
After four months, everyone returned to the lab and repeated the original tests.
The results must have been disconcerting for some of them.
Those men and women who had burned about 1,500 calories a week with exercise turned out to have lost little if any body fat, the tests showed. Some were heavier.
But most of those who had walked twice as much were thinner now. Twelve of them had shed at least 5 percent of their body fat during the study.
The researchers then used mathematical calculations, based on each person’s fat loss (if any), to determine whether and by how much they had compensated for their exercise.
The men and women in the group that had burned 1,500 calories a week with exercise proved to have compensated for nearly 950 of those calories, the numbers indicated.
Interestingly, those in the other group had also compensated for some of the calories they had burned, and to almost the exact same extent as those who had exercised less, adding back about 1,000 calories a week, the calculations showed.
But since they had expended 3,000 calories a week, they had wound up with a weekly deficit of about 2,000 calories from exercise and lost fat, the researchers concluded. The findings were published in the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.
How the volunteers had compensated was not absolutely clear, says Kyle Flack, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, who conducted the experiment as part of his graduate research.
People’s resting metabolic rates had not changed during the study, he says, whichever group they had been in. Their activity monitors also showed few differences in how much or little they moved during the day.
“Their food recall did not show differences” in how much they reported eating at the start and end of the study, Dr. Flack says.
“I think they just did not realize that they were eating more,” he says.
There probably also are complicated interconnections between exercise, appetite and people’s relationships to food that were not picked up during this study and can affect eating and weight, he says. He hopes to study those issues in future studies.
But already, the results from this experiment are encouraging, if cautionary.
“It looks like you can lose weight with exercise,” Dr. Flack says.
But success may require more exertion of our bodies and will than we might hope, he adds.
“Thirty minutes of exercise was not enough” in this study to overcome the natural drive to replace the calories we burn during a workout.
“Sixty minutes of exercise was better,” he says.
But even then, people replaced about a third of the calories they expended during exercise.
“You still have to count calories and weigh portions” if you hope to use exercise to control your weight, he says.
Correction: July 5, 2018
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that study participants walked on a treadmill. While some used a treadmill, others used an elliptical machine or a stationary bicycle.
by:
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/opinion/sunday/trump-politics-hope-sojourner-truth.html
An 1864 photograph of Sojourner Truth. Credit Library of Congress
I have been feeling so much despair that, even as a media scholar, I’m often tempted to avoid the news.
The unending stream of political developments that I know will deepen the suffering of my fellow Americans and others around the world is heartbreaking: migrant children separated from their parents, mass shootings that don’t inspire gun control, the crisis in Yemen, threats to women’s rights, and so much more.
It might be surprising to hear that what’s been keeping me going lately is meditating on slavery. I’ve been reading Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.”
Truth reportedly said: “I could work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
When Truth asked the group of mostly white women in her audience whether she was a woman, she was not simply pointing to the hypocrisy of Western thought in which nations and “civilized” societies were built on the enslavement, murder and exploitation of women and children. Truth’s question was a provocation, a challenge to a racial structure built on the dehumanization of an entire group of human beings. It was a philosophical gauntlet. Like Black Lives Matter, it was a call to bring clarity to American oppression. Today, it’s also a reminder to me that black people have lived through the very worst of what this country has inflicted. That we have survived.
The barbarity of American slavery should be recalled more often, if only to truly understand the significance of its demise. It was the grief of losing one’s child, being raped, beaten, tortured and separated from your own language, family and friends at a whim. It was a system that normalized and codified its everyday brutality. It was life in constant fear and punishing, exacting labor. And it was completely legal.
For someone like Truth, to see it come to an end must have felt like a miracle. Freedom. The woman who escaped slavery in New York with her baby daughter just so that at least one couldn’t be stolen away. Who successfully sued a white man to get back her son. Who felt called by God to go “testifying the hope was in her.”
A hard-fought, long-fought miracle.
The historian Nell Irvin Painter cautions that Truth has become more symbol than reality in public imagination. For example, Truth, in fact, had only five children, not 13 — an embellishment attributed to those who later transcribed the speech for the illiterate former slave. My own meditation on her mostly substantiates Ms. Painter’s claim — I find myself looking at images of Truth, drawing strength from my imaginings of her surrounded by white women, boldly challenging their hypocrisy and racism. Many nights as I put my son to sleep in my arms, I think of her standing in a courtroom to claim her child and I remind myself that this is what freedom means.
It took a war, radicals, lawbreakers, advocates who risked their lives and careers, a shift in power, economic opportunity, profoundly oppressive conditions —— but things changed.
Six years ago I participated in the Occupy movement, during which a crossracial coalition of people from New York to Honolulu protested income inequality, gentrification, police brutality and unjust incarceration. The movement had many successes, but in its immediate aftermath we saw widespread crackdowns in cities around the country on people’s ability to interact and exist in urban outdoor spaces — policies that have aided efforts to criminalize the nation’s homeless and pre-emptively arrest other vulnerable populations. Similarly, I think it’s useful to think of President Trump’s election and the policies of his administration as a backlash to progress. In order to have hope, I have to believe that, after the backlash, things — for black Americans and other oppressed people here and around the world — will change again.
In part, searching for hope by reflecting on slavery requires meditating on how little progress we’ve made toward liberation, too. As Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton University notes in her writing on contemporary black activism, exactly 150 years passed between the day in 1865 when the Civil War came to an end and the day in 2015 when Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, was killed by Baltimore police officers. A Department of Justice investigation later found that the department routinely violated the civil rights of residents of the predominantly black city. “Freedom in the United States,” Prof. Taylor notes, “has been elusive contingent, and fraught with contradictions and unattainable promises — for all almost everyone.” She’s right. And yet, we push toward freedom.
For black Americans, the struggle of emancipation is riddled with its failures: sharecropping, lynching, segregation, disenfranchisement and brutal, unfair treatment by the criminal justice system. This suffering demands rage and anguish, but it also provides the fuel to push forward. It serves as a reminder of what is at stake if we stop. As the civil rights hero Representative John Lewis said in a recent tweet, “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.”
For many of us, justice and equality remain elusive. And, yet, we have hope. If we are to be the people we aim to be, it is really our only option. There is a quote borrowed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attributed to a 19th-century minister, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I’m not sure if that’s true or not. But if it is, we will be the ones to bend it.
by:
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/nyregion/statue-of-liberty-protester-july-4.html
A protester who scaled the base of the Statue of Liberty forced the shutdown of the monument. The island was cleared of an estimated 4,500 tourists, and the climber was taken safely into custody several hours later.
The authorities cleared visitors from the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July after a woman protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policies climbed onto its base and refused to come down. About three hours later, police officers followed the woman onto the statue and took her safely into custody.
The standoff created an unexpected spectacle in New York Harbor that culminated not long before the planned Independence Day fireworks were set to start nearby on the Hudson River. Television networks aired live coverage through the afternoon, showing a continuous video feed of the protester as she moved around the base of the statue.
The woman started climbing shortly after 3 p.m. on what officials described as one of the busiest days of the year for the national monument. National Park Service officials said that more than 20,000 tourists typically visit the monument each July 4.
Throughout the afternoon, the woman, identified by federal officials as Therese Okoumou, waved what looked like a T-shirt and reclined in a crease of the statue’s robe. The copper is only about one-tenth of an inch thick, and officials feared she could damage the statue.
Before long, police officers and park rangers gathered beneath Ms. Okoumou after she refused their orders to come down. Attached to ropes, rescuers from the New York Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit climbed up and cornered her at about 6:30 p.m.
Ms. Okoumou is in federal custody and is expected to appear in Manhattan federal court on Thursday, a spokesman for the United State’s attorney’s office said.
Jerry Willis, a spokesman for the National Park Service, said that park officials, prompted by security concerns, started evacuating visitors from the island about 3:30 p.m. About 4,500 people were on the island at the time, and they had all left within about an hour, Mr. Willis said.
The episode came after the arrest of seven people in a separate demonstration at the statue on Wednesday. The earlier protest involved members of Rise and Resist, a group formed after the 2016 presidential election, who hung a banner calling for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished. Members of the group, angered by the Trump administration’s immigration policies, called the agency a “threat to our liberty and way of life.”
Organizers of the Rise and Resist protest said that Ms. Okoumou’s actions were separate from the group’s planned demonstration, which she had participated in.
Jay W. Walker, one of the group’s organizers, said that Ms. Okoumou, who is known to other members as Patricia, had been involved with Rise and Resist for several months. He described her as active, regularly taking part in the group’s events. But on Wednesday, he said, other members were not aware of her plans to climb the statue.
“She’s a free citizen in the world — it’s a choice she made,” Mr. Walker said. “I think the choice she made is certainly bringing more attention to the overall protest.”
He added, “We don’t condemn her for the choice she made, and we’re going to do anything we can to support her.”
The Statue of Liberty, the colossal mint-green monument and one of the most visible attractions linked to New York City, has long been a potent protest symbol, with a history about as old as the statue itself as a stage for political demonstrations.
Suffragists protested at its unveiling in 1886, circling the island in a boat. In 1976, members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War barricaded themselves inside the monument to protest cuts in education benefits, and last year, a group hung a banner that said “refugees welcome.”
“On a day like Independence Day, we felt that it was the perfect melding of these huge symbols of what this country stands for,” Mr. Walker said of Rise and Resist.
But the Statue of Liberty is also a draw for visitors who have come from around the world, and Mr. Willis said that Ms. Okoumou’s actions, which he described as a stunt, ruined the plans of the many others who tried to visit the island.
“It is their one and only chance to come here,” he said. “Unfortunately, we had to clear the island.”
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/business/media/tv-viewer-tracking.html
A detail from a slide from a marketing presentation by Samba TV looking at how it can analyze what viewers are watching, determine how many connected devices they have in the house and then target them with ads.
The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones. But people’s data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge.
In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet-connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users.
Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized show recommendations. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised $40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner, the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban.
Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands — including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips — to place its software on certain sets. When people set up their TVs, a screen urges them to enable a service called Samba Interactive TV, saying it recommends shows and provides special offers “by cleverly recognizing onscreen content.” But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations.
Samba TV declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 percent of people opted in.
Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched.
The big draw for advertisers — which have included Citi and JetBlue in the past, and now Expedia — is that Samba TV can also identify other devices in the home that share the TV’s internet connection.
Samba TV, which says it has adhered to privacy guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, does not directly sell its data. Instead, advertisers can pay the company to direct ads to other gadgets in a home after their TV commercials play, or one from a rival airs. Advertisers can also add to their websites a tag from Samba TV that allows them to determine if people visit after watching one of their commercials.
If it sounds a lot like the internet — a company with little name recognition tracking your behavior, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads — that’s the point. But consumers do not typically expect the so-called idiot box to be a savant.
“It’s still not intuitive that the box maker or the software embedded by the box maker is going to be doing this,” said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy at the advocacy group Consumers Union and a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission. “I’d like to see companies do a better job of making that clear and explaining the value proposition to consumers.”
The opt-in screen for Samba Interactive TV that many users see when setting up their smart TVs. They need to click through to another screen for the terms of service, which exceed 6,500 words, and the privacy policy, more than 4,000 words.
About 45 percent of TV households in the United States had at least one smart TV at the end of 2017, IHS Markit data showed. Samba TV, which is based in San Francisco and has about 250 employees, competes against several companies, including Inscape, the data arm of the consumer electronics maker Vizio, and a start-up called Alphonso.
It can be a cutthroat business. Samba has sued Alphonso for patent infringement. Last year, Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle claims by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey that it was collecting and selling viewing data from millions of smart TVs without the knowledge or consent of set owners. In December, The New York Times reported that Alphonso was using gaming apps to gain access to smartphone microphones and listen for audio signals in TV ads and shows.
Samba TV’s language is clear, said Bill Daddi, a spokesman. “Each version has clearly identified that we use technology to recognize what’s onscreen, to create benefit for the consumer as well as Samba, its partners and advertisers,” he added.
Still, David Kitchen, a software engineer in London, said he was startled to learn how Samba TV worked after encountering its opt-in screen during a software update on his Sony Bravia set.
The opt-in read: “Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way.”
The language prompted Mr. Kitchen to research Samba TV’s data collection and raise concerns online about its practices.
Enabling the service meant that consumers agreed to Samba TV’s terms of service and privacy policy, the opt-in screen said. But consumers couldn’t read those unless they went online or clicked through to another screen on the TV. The privacy policy, which provided more details about the information collected through the software, was more than 4,000 words, and the terms exceeded 6,500 words.
“The thing that really struck me was this seems like quite an enormous ask for what seems like a silly, trivial feature,” Mr. Kitchen said. “You appear to opt into a discovery-recommendation service, but what you’re really opting into is pervasive monitoring on your TV.”
Ashwin Navin, Samba TV’s chief executive, said that the company’s use of data for advertising is made clear through the reference to “special offers,” and that the opt-in language “is meant to be as simple as it possibly can be.”
“It’s pretty upfront about the fact that this is what the software does — it reads what’s on the screen to drive recommendations and special offers,” Mr. Navin said. “We’ve taken an abundance of caution to put consumers in control of the data and give them disclosure on what we use the data for.”
Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said few people review the fine print in their zeal to set up new televisions. He said the notice should also describe Samba TV’s “device map,” which matches TV content to mobile gadgets, according to a document on its website, and can help the company track users “in their office, in line at the food truck and on the road as they travel.”
Mr. Brookman of the Consumers Union, who reviewed the opt-in screen, said the trade-off was not clear for consumers. “Maybe the interactive features are so fantastic that they don’t mind that the company’s logging all the stuff that they’re watching, but I don’t think that’s evident from this,” he said.
Citi and JetBlue, which appear in some Samba TV marketing materials, said they stopped working with the company in 2016 but not before publicly endorsing its effectiveness. JetBlue hailed in a news release the increase in site visits driven by syncing its online ads with TV ads, while Christine DiLandro, a marketing director at Citi, joined Mr. Navin at an industry event at the end of 2015. In a video of the event, Ms. DiLandro described the ability to target people with digital ads after the company’s TV commercials aired as “a little magical.”
The Times is among the websites that allow advertisers to use data from Samba to track if people who see their ads visit their websites, but a Times spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, said that the company did that “simply as a matter of convenience for our clients” and that it was not an endorsement of Samba TV’s technology.
Companies like Samba TV are also a boon for TV makers, whose profit margins from selling sets can be slim. Samba TV essentially pays companies like Sony to include its software. Samba TV said “our business model does subsidize a small piece of the television hardware,” though it declined to provide further details.
Smart TV companies aren’t subject to the stricter rules and regulations regarding viewing data that have traditionally applied to cable companies, helping fuel “this rise of weird ways to figure out what someone’s watching,” said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and a former technology adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.
The smart TV companies are overseen by the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Mayer said, meaning that “as long as you’re truthful to consumers, even if you make it really hard to exercise choices or don’t offer choices at all, you probably don’t have much of a legal issue.”
Mr. Daddi said the trade commission had held up Samba TV as “an exemplary model of data privacy and opt-in policies,” pointing to its participation in a smart TV workshop the agency held in late 2016. A commission spokeswoman said that it invited a diverse array of panelists to events and that “an invitation to participate in an F.T.C. event does not convey an endorsement of that company or organization.” She added that the agency does not “endorse or bless companies’ practices.”
Mr. Daddi added: “We have millions of viewers who have explicitly opted into our service and have continued to use it for years. So it is a fair argument to make that far more consumers are satisfied with Samba than surprised by it.”
Some worry, more broadly, about the TV industry’s increasing ability to use and share information about what people are watching with the internet ad ecosystem.
"I think people have rebelled to the online targeted ad experience,” Mr. Brookman said, “and I think they wouldn’t necessarily expect that from their TV.”
Correction: July 5, 2018
An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the investors that contributed venture funding to Samba TV. It was Time Warner, not Time Warner Cable.
Correction: July 10, 2018
An earlier version of this article, relying on marketing materials from Samba TV and comments by its chief executive, said Samba TV could track programs viewers were watching on Netflix. After publication, Netflix said it had agreements with smart TV manufacturers that precluded third-party tracking like that done by Samba TV. Samba TV did not respond to repeated requests for comment about Netflix.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/trump-democrats-children.html
For years, I’ve held onto a memo that a professional mentor gave me around 1990, a typewritten document by the pollster Stanley Greenberg with the title “Kids as Politics.” Mr. Greenberg, who has shown the sharpest understanding of traditionally Democratic voters drawn to the appeal of Ronald Reagan then or Donald Trump today, argued that a political agenda centered on children could not only improve kids’ lives but also open the door to a broader liberalism and to Democrats more generally; kid-centered politics would help Americans “rediscover government.”
Politics centered on children went beyond a few federal programs. “When candidates talk about kids,” Mr. Greenberg wrote, “they are talking about the fundamental economic and social terrain on which Democrats must run.”
Mr. Greenberg’s memo, now more than 30 years old, is strikingly relevant to the current moment. The practice of separating children from their parents at the border galvanized a level of outrage, including among prominent Republicans, that exceeds even the protests spurred by Mr. Trump’s travel ban early in his term. As part of Mr. Trump’s move to chip away at the enormous federal deficit by cutting money already allocated by Congress — the “rescissions” battle — he has proposed slashing support for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, one of the most consistently popular federal programs since its creation in 1997.
Whether Democrats choose the path or not, children are likely to be at the center of political fights in 2018 and beyond.
In the Reagan era, the idea of a political vision centered on children influenced many Democrats and some Republicans, including conservatives. As Democratic governor of Arizona, Bruce Babbitt declared 1985 “The Year of the Child,” earning mockery from The Arizona Republic for offering voters “quiche” rather than the “meat and potatoes” of Arizona politics, such as water rights and economic development. (A book called “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” was popular in the mid-1980s.) A National Commission on Children was started, where liberals and social conservatives such as Kay Coles James, now president of the Heritage Foundation, found common ground on an ambitious agenda that included a child tax credit and the children’s health program that Mr. Trump now proposes to cut. While the commission’s 1991 recommendations were widely derided as overly ambitious, most of them were enacted within a few years.
Kid-centered politics, in its first phase, was quite successful — at least if judged by the standards of whether it helped create programs that improved life for children, established some basis for bipartisan consensus, and in a few cases gave politicians an issue to run on. CHIP funding, for example, was a winning issue for Democrats in both the 2006 and 2008 elections, and restoring funding for the children’s health program was one of Barack Obama’s first moves in the White House. Between 1980 and 2010, funding for children’s programs more than tripled, in current dollars, according to the Urban Institute’s annual “Kids’ Share” report.
For all that success, children-centered politics alone didn’t quite live up to Mr. Greenberg’s promise of its transformational power. Kids didn’t open the door to a broader recognition of the value of government. They don’t force voters to confront the imbalances of power in the workplace and the larger economy that have led to stagnant or declining wages for the majority of working families. Those underlying conditions limit life chances for children, as well as for young adults and parents, in ways that government redistribution programs can’t compensate for. Children can be carved out, as a kind of special vulnerable category, without challenging the underlying structures that lead to inequality.
A focus on children could even be, and was, compatible with the sort of business-friendly and Wall Street-friendly politics that Democrats adopted in the Clinton era — the very brand of politics many young Democrats are eager to relegate to the past. Democrats of the current era, including most of the prospective 2020 presidential candidates, are unlikely to be satisfied with a political language that focuses mainly on children. They’re on to bigger ideas that get to the core of the economy and fairness, like a job guarantee or universal basic income. Even universal child care seems to have slipped from the agenda.
There’s also a dangerous strain of kids-first politics, one that focuses on the relative benefits of programs for the elderly and disabled, Social Security and Medicare, compared with those for kids. That makes sense if the only resources to increase benefits for kids could come from those programs rather than, for example, closing the tax loopholes for private equity.
But while kids-first politics has its pitfalls, sometimes history doesn’t let us choose the agenda. Children being pulled away from or locked in a detention facility with their parents and programs that have vastly improved children’s health being slashed aren’t issues to ignore. They’ve galvanized voters past and present around substance rather than scandal in unmatched ways.
The role of women in the current Democratic revival is related to the new opportunity to put kids at the center of the agenda. Yet kids’ politics is not limited to women. As men play a larger role in caregiving, kids are, as Mr. Greenberg promised, a universal value.
The success of “kids as politics” in the 1990s and the power of children as a political theme today can still offer the beginnings of an agenda for progressive renewal. The lesson to take from the previous round is that children don’t automatically open the doors to a rediscovery of active government or a robust social safety net.
The challenge today is to take the next step, to show how protecting kids and giving them a sound start in life requires more than just government spending programs but a real reassessment of old assumptions about the economy and how all families can share in its benefits.
Mark Schmitt (@mschmitt9) is the director of the political reform program at the research organization New America.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/military-transgender-recruits.html
Nicholas Bade, a transgender man who is trying to enlist in the Air Force, outside the recruitment office in Chicago. His application has been pending for six months.
Nicholas Bade showed up at an Air Force recruiting office on an icy morning in January, determined to be one of the first transgender recruits to enlist in the military.
He was in top shape, and had earned two martial arts black belts. He had already aced the military aptitude test, and organized the stack of medical records required to show he was stable and healthy enough to serve. So he expected to be called for basic training in a month, maybe two at the most.
Six months later, he’s still waiting. And so are nearly all other transgender recruits who have tried to join up since a federal court ordered the Trump administration not to ban them from the military.
The Obama administration announced a plan in 2016 for the armed services to begin accepting transgender recruits at the start of this year. But before the plan could take effect, President Trump abruptly reversed course, announcing on Twitter in July 2017 that the military would “no longer accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity,” because the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.” Military leaders were given little notice of the change, which has left a wake of controversy and confusion.
Civil rights groups immediately sued, claiming that a blanket ban was unconstitutional, and the courts blocked the new rules. Three federal judges hearing separate cases issued injunctions against the ban last fall that cleared the way — in theory at least — for transgender recruits to start enlisting on Jan. 1.
Since then, scores have applied — but it appears almost none are being accepted.
The Defense Department refused requests for statistics on transgender enlistments. But Sparta, an organization for transgender recruits, troops and veterans, says that out of its 140 members who are trying to enlist, only two have made it into the service since Jan. 1.
Others have been stymied by the Military Entrance Processing Command, which has rejected some of the applicants and kept others in limbo for months by requesting ever more detailed medical documentation. Other advocates said the Sparta members’ experiences probably reflected the overall picture for transgender enlistment.
The applicants are being stalled or turned away at a time when some branches of the military face a shortage of recruits, and when recruiters have been ordered to work Saturdays to try to make up the shortfall.
“I’m now on round five of rejections,” said Mr. Bade, 38, a waiter and martial arts instructor who lives in Chicago. “Each time, they say they need even more medical information. My last one was a minor document from years ago.”
Mr. Bade began taking hormones in 2014, and had breast-removal surgery a year later. He has had so few issues since then, he said, that he often forgets he is transgender. His ambition is to become a dog handler in the Air Force’s security forces, but he is beginning to wonder if it will ever happen.
Other applicants now in limbo say their transgender status rarely hinders them in civilian life. One is a rugby coach. One is a substitute teacher. One repairs tractors and heaves bales of hay for the cattle that he and his grandmother keep on a small hillside farm in Appalachia. Another moves 200-pound tanks of carbon dioxide for a job creating special effects for Broadway shows.
Most say that military recruiters have supported their enlistment, but their applications have gotten hung up in the medical review.
“We’re hesitant to speak up, because we don’t want to be treated as special, but this has become a huge headache,” said one 26-year-old who is trying to join the Coast Guard Reserve. He said he has spent months gathering medical notes, lab results, hormone records and doctors’ credentials going back four years to support his application. He asked not to be identified for fear that any public attention would hurt his chances of acceptance.
Transgender groups like Sparta initially hailed the court injunctions last fall as victories. But their optimism has melted as months have passed with so few recruits actually being allowed to enlist. Most advocacy groups are trying to be patient, chalking the delays up to the inevitable inertia of a giant bureaucracy forced to change. But some are beginning to question whether the delays are evidence of a concerted effort to keep transgender recruits out, despite the court rulings.
A 26-year-old transgender man who is trying to join the Coast Guard Reserve said he had spent months gathering medical notes, lab results, hormone records and doctors’ credentials to support his application.
“We’ve heard people are meeting with mystifying obstacles,” said Shannon Minter, a lawyer with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which sued the Trump administration over the ban. “We want to give the military the benefit of the doubt, but at this point so few applicants have been accepted, there is reason to be concerned that there is some passive resistance to the injunctions, and people are getting slow-walked.”
Mr. Minter also worries that the military may seize on unrelated medical issues as a pretext for rejecting transgender recruits.
One applicant in Ohio spent five months submitting more and more medical records, and then was rejected in late May because of knee surgery he had as an infant. The applicant, who asked not to be named because he still hopes to join the military, said he was dumbfounded at the rejection, because he has had no issues stemming from the surgery for 25 years.
The Defense Department declined to make any officials available for interview, citing pending litigation. It refused to say how long recruits have been kept waiting or how many have been rejected on medical grounds. But it said in a written statement that it “continues to comply with the court order,” and that “the time it takes to review each individual record will vary based upon the individual.”
Thousands of transgender troops, who officially came out or transitioned in the military when the Obama administration decided in 2016 to lift a ban, are serving now. A RAND Corporation study in 2016 estimated their number at between 2,000 and 11,000. Many are in demanding jobs and have deployed overseas.
Leaders of the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard told Congress this spring that they have seen no issues with the transgender troops. “As long as they can meet the standard of what their particular occupation was, I think we’ll move forward,” Gen. Robert Neller, the commandant of the Marine Corps, said in his testimony.
But the Trump administration continues to oppose any transgender military service. Before it was blocked by the court injunctions, the administration sought not only to keep transgender troops from joining, but to discharge those already in the ranks. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis issued a memo in February saying their presence threatened to “undermine readiness, disrupt unit cohesion, and impose an unreasonable burden on the military.”
Last month, the Justice Department filed a motion to overturn one of the injunctions, arguing that the panel of Defense Department experts who created the Trump administration policy had the necessary authority to ban particular categories of recruits, and that the court had “provided scant explanation for disregarding that reasoned and reasonable military assessment.”
Opponents of transgender service have argued that transgender recruits could shoulder the Pentagon with huge medical costs, and could be sidelined from duty for long periods by surgical procedures.
Those eager to enlist counter that transgender people serve without problems now in police and fire departments and in federal law enforcement. For many, they say, the only continuing medical care they need are inexpensive hormone doses that they can administer themselves at home.
Regulations for transgender recruits require them to show that they have been mentally and physically stable for 18 months before enlisting; a similar standard is applied to recruits who have had other medical procedures. Applicants must also have a civilian doctor certify that their transition is complete and does not limit their ability to serve.
“I think the requirements are reasonable,” said Paula Neira, who heads the Center for Transgender Health at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Ms. Neira is a former Navy officer who transitioned after she left the military in 1991; she helped write the Obama-era guidelines that were kept in place by the courts.
The long delays, she said, are less likely to be caused by an intentional and illegal effort to exclude transgender recruits than by simple bureaucratic caution over a new policy.
“There is no one doing these assessments that is an expert in transgender health, so they have to figure things out as they go along,” she said. “If you are that far outside your expertise, you are going to be very conservative.”
If the medical evaluations continue to drag on, she said, there could well be cause for alarm. But she urged patience.
“I know how hard it is to wait — I waited for 25 years,” she said. “If it had been different, I’d still be in the Navy. But it took so long to change the regulations that the clock ran out on me.”
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/immigration-family-separation-zero-tolerance.html
Sandra Dionisi
In the Italian film “Life Is Beautiful,” a Jewish bookstore owner uses creative stunts to distract his child from the horrible reality of being held in a Nazi concentration camp. I was reminded of that movie recently as I found myself part of an eerily similar heartbreaking moment.
As lawyers with the Texas Civil Rights Project, my team has been working around the clock to document hundreds of cases of children taken from their parents since the Trump administration started its “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Under that policy, the government charges every immigrant apprehended at the border with illegal entry, a misdemeanor offense — regardless of whether they’re fleeing violence and seeking asylum, or traveling with children.
Before zero tolerance, immigration and Department of Justice officials exercised their discretion on whether to press criminal charges against some immigrants and asylum seekers, particularly those traveling with children and those with special circumstances.
Each morning for the last three weeks, my colleagues and I have gone to the federal courthouse in McAllen, Tex., seven miles from the Mexican border. We arrive no later than 7:45, pass the metal detectors at the security check, and make sure to get to the eighth floor by 8.
By that time, the courtroom is already nearly full. On a typical morning, some 70 to 80 men and women are brought to court and put in handcuffs with shackles around their ankles. A vast majority are first-time border crossers. A public defender asks the group whether any are traveling with children and have been separated from them. Struggling with the handcuffs, it’s not easy for them to raise their hands. Sometimes, to answer in the affirmative, they must stand up.
The criminal proceeding begins at 9 a.m., and depending on how many separated parents are there each day, we have maybe five to seven minutes to speak with each parent beforehand. Hopefully, that’s enough to get the most basic information about them and the children taken from them — names, dates of birth, country of origin. They’re frightened and confused, and most don’t speak English. I tell them in Spanish that I’m a lawyer working on family separations and that I can try to help get their children back.
The parents ask when they’re going to see their children again. I try to calm them and tell them I’ll do my best to make sure it happens soon. The truth is I don’t have an answer. And I can’t make a promise I’m not sure I can keep.
The stories they tell are all devastating. But as a father, I was really hit in the gut by one a few weeks back.
I was talking with a single father whose wife left him several years ago when his daughter was 3 years old. They were fleeing violence in Honduras in search of a better life. But it didn’t work out that way. Once they crossed the border, the United States charged him with a crime, and agents told him they had to take his daughter away.
As they were leaving, his daughter asked where she was going. What can a father possibly tell his daughter in that situation?
Like the character in “Life Is Beautiful,” this dad’s priority was to try to shield his little girl from pain. So he made up a story: He told her she was going to summer camp.
The girl, only 7 years old and oblivious to her plight, walked away with a big smile. She was so excited for her first day of camp.
I’ve encountered so many awful stories like this that I’ve become desensitized. I almost see them as normal.
The first time a crying parent asked me when she would see her son again, I struggled to find an answer. But many weeks after the Trump administration started its zero-tolerance policy — and hundreds of separated families later — I’ve become hardened to these conversations because I’ve had them over and over, day after day.
Plus, there’s no time for those feelings in the courtroom. We have to get as much information as we can, and it’s a race against the clock. If we don’t quickly complete the intake and interview process to later track them down, no one except the government will know that a separation occurred. And without the information about these children and their parents, how will we look for them? How will anyone?
Of 381 families we interviewed, 278 are still separated. At least two children have been deported without their parents. And at least five parents have been deported without their children, who remain in the United States. This is only a small fraction of the more than 2,000 families that remain separated today.
Parents seeking asylum and safety for their families need meaningful access to lawyers and the courts. They shouldn’t be forced into a Hobson’s choice between seeing their children again or pursuing their asylum claim. Some of the parents we’ve interviewed tell us these illegal pressures from the government are increasing.
The way to end this nightmare is to rescind the zero tolerance policy that criminalizes immigrants and asylum seekers. The solution is not to detain these families indefinitely as the government currently plans. Rather, immigrants and asylum seekers should be allowed to pursue their cases in immigration court without being detained, as was done under the Family Case Management Program, which was highly successful in terms of people appearing for their court hearings, which this administration terminated.
In effect, the administration can end this crisis today with the stroke of a pen. Until then, my colleagues and I will be in the courthouse bright and early tomorrow morning, and each one thereafter.
Dozens of frightened immigrants and a courtroom full of heartbreaking stories will be waiting for us at 8.
by:
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/climate/pruitt-epa-calendar-morris.html
Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, appeared before Congress earlier this year and faced questions about his management of the agency.
Want the latest climate and environment news in your inbox? Sign up here to receive Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
WASHINGTON — Before he resigned on Thursday, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was facing new questions about whether aides deleted sensitive information about his meetings from his public schedule and potentially violated the law in doing so.
Last summer one of his senior schedulers, Madeline G. Morris, was fired by Mr. Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff, Kevin Chmielewski, who said he let her go because she was questioning the practice of retroactively deleting meetings from the calendar. Mr. Chmielewski has emerged as a harsh critic of Mr. Pruitt after a bitter falling out that led to his departure from the agency as well.
Ms. Morris, who started work as Mr. Pruitt’s scheduler in June 2017, confirmed Wednesday that she was fired after she raised objections about the deletions, which she believed were illegal, although she said that Mr. Chmielewski did not tell her his reasons for firing her. One case involved the deletion of several of Mr. Pruitt’s meetings during a spring 2017 trip to Rome, including one with a controversial cardinal then under investigation for sexual assault.
President Trump announced on Thursday that Mr. Pruitt, who had been the subject of numerous investigations into claims that he used agency resources for personal benefit, had resigned.
The E.P.A. acknowledged in a series of legal memos last year that it did in fact direct an agency scheduler — although it did not name the person — to revise Mr. Pruitt’s daily calendar retroactively. The agency said it was doing so to remove errors that had been left in the electronic record after various events were canceled or happened differently than expected.
Ryan Jackson, Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, dismissed Mr. Chmielewski’s criticism as a fabrication by a disgruntled former employee. “Whatever he’s telling you about altering calendars is not correct,” Mr. Jackson said.
Ms. Morris was called last July by two agency lawyers, who told her that the changes she was making to Mr. Pruitt’s schedule might be illegal, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The following month, Ms. Morris noticed that a number of changes had been made to the record of a trip Mr. Pruitt had taken to Italy. Ms. Morris questioned the legality of the changes to Mr. Chmielewski and Mr. Jackson, and a few days later was fired, he said.
A retroactive deletion of meetings and attendees from a cabinet official’s public records could violate the Federal Records Act, which requires agencies to maintain and preserve public documents, as well as a law prohibiting intentional distortion of federal records. In another potential violation of federal law, the E.P.A. continued to pay Ms. Morris for six weeks after she was fired from the agency.
Asked to explain Ms. Morris’s departure from the E.P.A., as well as his own email correspondence indicating that she was being paid for time not worked, Mr. Jackson declined to comment. He also declined to comment on whether Ms. Morris was simply being asked to reconcile calendars.
The E.P.A. spokesman and the agency’s general counsel declined to comment.
Ms. Morris had nearly a decade of experience in Washington and solid Republican credentials, according to her résumé. She worked for former Representative Denny Rehberg, a Montana Republican, as an assistant and scheduler, before working as a federal affairs specialist for Koch Companies Public Sector, the lobbying arm of Koch Industries, the conglomerate long run by the conservative brothers David H. and Charles Koch.
Ms. Morris, whose start date at the E.P.A. was June 18, was an executive scheduler with an annual salary of $90,350. She handled a variety of planning needs for Mr. Pruitt, including requests for meetings with executives from Toyota and Chevron.
The account of the calendar deletions and the aftermath is based on interviews with four people who were working at the agency at the time, including Mr. Chmielewski and three others who asked not to be identified out of concern for retaliation.
In July 2017, according to Mr. Chmielewski, Ms. Morris was instructed by him and Mr. Jackson to retroactively delete some meetings Mr. Pruitt held with lobbyists and replace them with staff meetings in the calendar, which was maintained in Microsoft Outlook. He and other people familiar with the calendar also said Ms. Morris was asked not to enter some of Mr. Pruitt’s meetings on the official calendar.
Mr. Chmielewski cited an August 2017 meeting with billionaire Denver-based businessman Philip Anschutz, a prominent donor to Republican Senate candidates and owner of an energy company regulated by the agency. Mr. Pruitt’s calendar for that day, which was publicly released, does not include the meeting.
Mr. Anschutz declined to comment, and didn’t dispute that the meeting occurred.
Three agency memos drafted last year as these changes were being made offer an alternative explanation for the work that Ms. Morris was doing.
Pruitt is Trump’s Fifth Cabinet Official To Be Forced Out
Since President Trump’s inauguration, staffers of the White House and federal agencies have left in firings and resignations, one after the other.
March 16, 2018
“Scheduling staff corrected inaccurate entries by adding meetings that occurred but were not originally reflected on the schedule, removing meetings that were on the schedule but did not occur or that Administrator Pruitt did not attend,” said one memo from last September, signed by Mr. Jackson.
But the agency, as it undertook this process, realized itself that it was doing something wrong: It was deleting items from Mr. Pruitt’s calendar, meaning it was wrongly modifying a public record. Moving forward, the agency agreed to block out incorrect details, instead of deleting meetings, before it made the schedule public.
After Ms. Morris made earlier deletions, the two E.P.A. attorneys — who became aware of the issue after receiving Outlook emails notifying them that their names had been removed from a past meeting — told Ms. Morris to stop making deletions to the calendar, according to a person familiar with the call.
About a month later, Ms. Morris noticed that a number of meetings had been deleted from a trip Mr. Pruitt had taken to Italy, according to Mr. Chmielewski. The Rome events that were removed from the official calendar included a series of visits at the Vatican — including a special tour of the necropolis below St. Peter’s Basilica — as well as one meeting with Cardinal George Pell, a prominent Vatican leader who was then being investigated on allegations of sexual abuse. (He has denied the allegations.)
Mr. Jackson in May told The Times that he did not know why Cardinal Pell’s name was not on Mr. Pruitt’s calendar and denied any discussion about removing him.
But last week Mr. Jackson acknowledged to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, one of the bodies investigating Mr. Pruitt’s management practices, that he instructed staff to remove references to Cardinal Pell from the public schedule. According to a committee aide familiar with the interview, Mr. Jackson told investigators that he ordered Cardinal Pell’s name to be removed because he considered it a “personal dinner” and because no E.P.A. business was conducted. About 15 people attended the dinner at which Mr. Pruitt discussed climate change, according to agency emails.
Ms. Morris pointed out the changes and the possibility that they were illegal to Mr. Chmielewski, he said, as well as to Mr. Jackson. On Aug. 31, a few days after Ms. Morris raised these objections (and two and a half months after she had started at the agency), Ms. Morris was told that it would be her last day.
Mr. Chmielewski confirmed the sequence of events and acknowledged that by firing Ms. Morris for refusing to modify the calendars he was in effect endorsing the practice. “She refused — and I didn’t blame her — she refused to falsify the schedule,” Mr. Chmielewski said in an interview, adding, “It was me and Ryan that fired her.”
Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.
We know. Global warming is daunting. So here’s a place to start: 17 often-asked questions with some straightforward answers.
Sept. 19, 2017
Asked why Ms. Morris was fired, Mr. Jackson said, “I don’t really think Maddy would appreciate me talking about the circumstances of her separation from here.”
After being fired, Ms. Morris stayed with her sister’s family in Pittsburgh, and described to them what had happened.
“She told us that she had alerted her chief of staff that some things had disappeared from the schedule, and that it was illegal, and that later that week she was called in and they told her she was being dismissed,” said Christopher Marshall, Ms. Morris’s brother-in-law. “She was told she would never find out why.”
He added, “Maddy thought it was probably because of the scheduling thing, but we could never be sure.”
In an unusual arrangement, Ms. Morris also continued to receive pay for six weeks after she left the E.P.A., according to agency emails that were released as part of a public records lawsuit by the Sierra Club, an environmental group, as well as a United States Office of Personnel Management document obtained by The New York Times.
The personnel record shows Ms. Morris remained on the payroll through Oct. 14. Paying a federal employee for work not performed is prohibited by federal law. Under the government’s personnel policy, neither political appointees nor employees who work for the federal government for less than 12 months are entitled to severance pay.
“We have not put in any paperwork on you so no one is aware of any actions,” Mr. Jackson wrote in a Sept. 22, 2017, email to Ms. Morris. Earlier that day, she had asked about not having received a paycheck she was expecting after she had stopped working at the agency. “I just wanted to see if something has changed since our conversation about being paid a few months,” she wrote.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this — this is highly irregular and appears to flout the rules,” said Jeffrey Lubbers, a professor of administrative law at American University, of the terms of Ms. Morris’s dismissal and payment.
Mr. Pruitt is facing 13 federal investigations over ethics and other issues, including an inquiry by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency, which is examining Mr. Pruitt’s personnel practices and allegations that he may have used his E.P.A. office for political purposes, people with knowledge of the investigation have told The Times.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said of Mr. Pruitt: “The reports that have come out are something the president is concerned about, and there are many of those reports.” But he added that Mr. Trump felt the administrator had done a “really good job at deregulating the government.”
by:
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/world/europe/migrants-merkel-kurz-austria.html
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria took office last year as part of a wave of populist leaders propelled to power on anti-migration platforms.
VIENNA — Austria’s young chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, was only 9 when most of Europe dismantled its border checkpoints. Like others of his generation, he took for granted that he could study in other European countries and cross the Continent by rail without his passport.
But now Mr. Kurz, 31, who took office last year as part of a wave of populist leaders propelled to power on anti-migration platforms, is among those forcing the European Union to confront a stark quandary: Can it maintain one of its most cherished principles — open borders among its members — and still provide citizens with a sense of security and identity?
It is the latest in a long series of challenges to strain the bloc. Europe has begun to understand that there is a growing backlash against the very policies, including a unified currency and open borders, that were intended to draw the people of Europe together.
Sitting in his wood-paneled office on Thursday, days after a fight over resurrecting a hard border between Bavaria and Austria that almost brought down the German government, Mr. Kurz said the only hope of preserving borderless, visa-free travel in Europe was to get tough on the Continent’s external frontiers — a step that raises its own practical and moral issues.
“A Europe without internal borders can only exist,” he said, “if it has functioning external borders.”
The free movement of people and goods, a principle central to the idea of a confident, unified, liberal new order, is under attack, threatened by a growing public revolt against immigration from the Middle East and Africa. While the number of migrants has fallen sharply in recent years, public anger has not, and the question remains whether Europe can preserve its borderless domain and, in a sense, its reason for being.
It is vital that Europe accomplish that, Mr. Kurz said in the interview, because free movement across borders “is the basis of the European idea, and we have to do everything to keep it alive.”
The borderless area, known as the Schengen zone, covers 26 countries, 4.3 million square kilometers and about 420 million people and is the most iconic achievement of the European project. The free movement of people has been central to how many Europeans want to see themselves: tolerant, open and diverse.
Mr. Kurz wants to effectively shut down Europe’s southern border, ramping up patrols in the Mediterranean and systematically returning migrant boats to the countries — Libya and Egypt, for example — from where they embarked.
But is this the Europe of its founders, or is it something harsher, less optimistic and self-confident?
Mr. Kurz, whose country has just taken over the revolving presidency of the European Union, declined to answer this directly, but he acknowledged that this was “an important moment, a very sensitive time.”
The issue burst into the headlines this week when Germany’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, a conservative Bavarian, threatened to resign unless Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to create something like a hard border between Germany and Austria.
Under European rules, migrants are supposed to remain in the country where they first landed, but once they are there — inside the Schengen zone — they can travel freely to where they really want to go, which is very often Germany, Sweden or Austria.
Ms. Merkel refused at first, saying that would produce a cascade of hard borders in other countries, destroying the Schengen zone. Migration, she said, needed a European solution.
In the end, to preserve her coalition, Ms. Merkel agreed with Mr. Seehofer to speed up asylum procedures and turn back asylum seekers who are already registered in other European countries. As part of that deal, Germany would run camps along the Austrian border to assess their status and arrange their deportation if necessary.
The German deal came into sharper relief on Thursday night after the Social Democrats, Ms. Merkel’s other governing partners, signed off on it on the condition that instead of in new camps, migrants would be processed in existing police stations along the border and that they would be held for no longer than 48 hours. In addition, Germany will pass an immigration law by the end of the year that gives would-be immigrants the chance to apply for a work visa.
Still, many details remain to be resolved, not least agreements with other countries to take back migrants who do not qualify for entry to Germany. Mr. Seehofer came to Vienna on Thursday to begin discussions with the Austrians, while the Hungarian prime minister, Victor Orban, was in Berlin meeting with Ms. Merkel.
Mr. Kurz said he had been a critic from the start of the 2015 decision by Ms. Merkel, to welcome in Syrian refugees, prompting more than 1.4 million people to stream on foot through Europe.
A Syrian man reads inside his tent at a makeshift camp outside Moria on the island of Lesbos, Greece.
He and other conservative and populist leaders — Mr. Orban; the Italian deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, and Mr. Seehofer — have recommended a series of measures to control Europe’s borders: to set up screening facilities for migrants outside Europe; to return those rescued at sea to the country of embarkation; and to decide, country by country, who will be allowed to come to Europe — including, he emphasized, legitimate refugees fleeing war and persecution.
Once dismissed as inhumane, all these ideas were endorsed by European leaders last week in Brussels, he said, though so far, no country outside Europe has agreed to set up centers for migrants and no country inside Europe has established transit centers where migrants can be held and screened to see if they are legitimate refugees.
But Mr. Kurz’s idea of patrolling the Mediterranean and systematically returning migrants to the countries — now reinforced by the ascension of a populist government in Italy that is turning back ships bearing migrants, raises moral and legal questions.
“They are doing this in the name of Europe,” said Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based research group. “But that is a very different kind of Europe.”
Returning asylum seekers to countries in chaos or that are judged to be dangerous also violates international law.
There are practical issues, too. No border is impermeable. “The people who made it to Germany in 2015 crossed many hard borders to get there,” Mr. Knaus said. “So they pick up West Africans and send them back to Egypt?”
Mr. Kurz acknowledged that, but emphasized that the European Union had taken steps that had reduced the numbers of migrants significantly, including the deal Ms. Merkel had cut with Turkey. “It shows that it is possible to reduce numbers dramatically, and now we have to go further this way,” he said.
Officials estimate that 300 to 600 migrants cross the German border a week, with half of them registered elsewhere. Germany gets about 6,000 asylum seekers a month now, half of whom are estimated to have been registered elsewhere. Indeed, Mr. Seehofer acknowledged on Thursday night that the number of migrants he expected to be processed in police stations along the borders would amount to no more than three to five people a day.
Still, populists like Mr. Kurz, echoing counterparts in neighboring countries, warn that even if the numbers are down now, a new surge could come any time, and so the borders must be reinforced immediately.
There are a lot of difficulties with the global asylum system, said Elizabeth Collett, director of the Migration Policy Institute Europe, a study group. “But the idea that there is something wrong about claiming asylum in Europe — that’s quite a shift from a group of countries that created the Geneva convention 60 years ago” that governs refugees, she said.
Mr. Kurz’s focus on external borders is too simple when Europeans cannot agree on a common asylum policy, Ms. Collett said. “It’s not just about what happens on the border, but what happens after the border,” she said.
Europe’s border dilemma was on display in Berlin on Thursday, where Ms. Merkel stood side by side with Mr. Orban at a news conference.
Protecting Europe’s borders must not mean keeping out the needy, Ms. Merkel said. “If Europe with its values is to continue to play a role in the world, then Europe cannot simply turn its back on hardship and suffering.”
Mr. Orban, who has long spoken about migration as an existential threat to European civilization, struck a different tone, saying, “The strategic goal of Hungary is to protect Europe.”
Pierre Vimont, a former French ambassador to the United States, said it was often overlooked that the Schengen system allowed the reintroduction of national border controls as a temporary measure. Such controls have existed for some time between France and Belgium and France and Italy, too. “If this can appease some of the populists for the moment, so be it,” Mr. Vimont said.
“So we can say we’re still inside the Schengen system,” he said. “It’s not very satisfactory but it’s a way of dealing with current pressure.” But temporary measures tend to last, he conceded.
He noted that the open-border zone, like the euro, was only half-built. European leaders eliminated internal borders without reinforcing external borders — because that was expensive, or touched on the sovereignty of countries like Greece and Italy or simply because they did not foresee the problems of terrorism or a migration crisis like 2015.
But the days of magical thinking are over, Mr. Kurz insisted. No state or group of states can fail to protect its borders, he said. “The European Union is not only a great idea, but it’s also an idea we must keep working on,” he said. “What every generation must do is try to make Europe better than it was in the past.”
Whether that will change it beyond recognition is anyone’s guess.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/opinion/trump-australian-refugees.html
A display at a vigil in Melbourne, Australia, for refugees who died at the Manus Island detention center.
The Trump administration retreated last month when faced with outrage over its separation of refugee and migrant families at the Mexican border. President Trump said he hated taking children away from their parents, and soon abandoned his claim that only Congress could stop it.
Such a reversal is hard to imagine here in Australia, where the ruthless deterrence of asylum seekers has provided a template for other countries in an era of hardened attitudes. Australia does not separate the children of “unauthorized arrivals” from their parents, but it does detain entire families in horrible conditions, sometimes for years.
Because these families are held in prisonlike centers on islands hundreds of miles away, Australians rarely get to see the kinds of images that provoked widespread anger in America. But even if we did, it is unlikely that public opinion or government policy would change. We Australians understand, and many of us accept, that discouraging migrants from landing on our shores means cruelty.
Deterrence is a seductive policy. It promises a sense of security and sovereignty in return for atrocious costs on a relatively small number of people, people often stigmatized as lawbreakers who need to be stopped for their own safety.
The only way to deter people desperate enough to risk death on their journey to a new country is to threaten them with conditions worse than the ones they fled. The United States has so far been unwilling to do this explicitly, and Americans seem unprepared to face the human consequences of such an approach.
But if political leaders in the United States keep talking about a humanitarian crisis as nothing more than a violation of America’s laws, Americans could become inured to the suffering of migrants and more receptive to brutality. Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with foreigners “taking advantage” of Americans could still usher in an Australian-style future.
Australia has imposed mandatory detention on immigrants without valid visas since 1992. The government of Prime Minister John Howard toughened this policy in 2001 with the “Pacific Solution.” Under this system, asylum seekers arriving by boat cannot apply for protection visas in Australia. Instead they are taken to detention centers in the island country of Nauru or, until recently, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea while their claims are examined. Since 2013, it has been government policy that they cannot be resettled in Australia.
And while they wait to be processed, they languish in conditions that are often horrifying. A United Nations report from 2017 cites isolation, overcrowding and limited access to basic services on Manus and Nauru, along with “allegations of sexual abuse by the service providers” and continuing reports of self-harm and suicide.
This year, the Department of Home Affairs contested a federal court order that a 10-year-old who repeatedly attempted suicide on Nauru must be brought to Australia for treatment. In 2015, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture found that Australia’s processing centers violated the rights of asylum seekers to be free from torture. The prime minister at the time, Tony Abbott, responded that Australians were “sick of being lectured to by the United Nations.”
About 80 percent of the asylum seekers detained on Nauru and Manus are ultimately found to be refugees. But with no prospect of ever being allowed into Australia, hundreds decide to return to their countries of origin. Australia has sought other locations for resettlement, including Cambodia and the United States. Canberra has so far refused offers by New Zealand to resettle refugees, arguing that this option would be too appealing to asylum seekers.
Almost no boats have arrived in Australia since 2014, though the Australian government has turned back an unknown number at sea. There are still some 225 people in detention on Nauru, and an estimated 515 in “transition centers” on Manus Island.
Some of Australia’s politicians openly defend the brutality of deterrence policies. For many years, they have preferred to talk about “people smugglers” rather than asylum seekers themselves. Forever banishing boat-borne asylum seekers from Australia, they say, destroys the business of those who carry refugees on dilapidated vessels for profit. The politicians warn that people smugglers are watching and waiting for a moment of weakness by Australia to resume operations. Last month, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned that “the hard-won success of the last few years could be undone overnight by a single act of compassion.”
Many people’s attitudes about asylum seekers changed in 2008. That year, the Labor Party government of Kevin Rudd closed the Pacific detention centers and began processing asylum seekers in Australia. This coincided with deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and there was a surge in boat arrivals, resulting in many deaths at sea. Some progressives were finally convinced of the moral need for harsh policies.
A former Labor immigration minister, Tony Burke, describes how he kept the name of a 10-week-old boy who died at sea on his desk as a reminder of why he came to support policies to discourage people from getting on boats. Labor reinstated offshore processing in 2012, but lost an election the following year to the Liberals and Mr. Abbott, who pledged to “stop the boats.” The Australian Greens, a smaller progressive party, is the only one in Parliament that consistently opposes offshore processing.
The severe stances of the major parties are popular. A recent study found that about two-thirds of Australians support offshore processing, and growing numbers support measures to turn back intercepted boats at sea. While a quarter of the population say policies are too tough, higher numbers usually say policies are too soft. Some Australians see refugees from predominantly Muslim war-torn countries as national security threats, and believe they must be dealt with as harshly as possible. Many others resent those who arrive by boat as “queue-jumpers” who have unfairly circumvented Australia’s laws, unlike the “legitimate” refugees who wait for years in United Nations refugee camps.
Government statements and public opinion reinforce each other. Politicians justify draconian measures with appeals to Australians’ sense of fairness and safety, and in turn they face an electorate that they fear would punish them if they did otherwise.
If American public opinion turns toward accepting cruel deterrent measures, it will be political rhetoric that leads the way. Warnings by the Trump administration that criminals use children to exploit legal loopholes would sound familiar to Australians, whose government once claimed that asylum seekers threw children into the sea to force the navy to take them to Australia.
While some Americans compared Mr. Trump’s separation policy to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” when Australians seek fictional dystopias to account for our asylum policies we often reach for Ursula Le Guin. Her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” describes a peaceful and idyllic city-state whose happiness depends on the cruel imprisonment of a child in a basement. Everyone knows the child is there.
The citizens of Omelas may be disturbed by the predicament of the child, but they are convinced of its necessity. In the words of the journalist Jeff Sparrow: “Le Guin intended her story as a cautionary tale. How did we end up with two political parties using it as an instruction manual?”
David T. Smith is a senior lecturer at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/politics/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court-impeachment.html
From right: Brett M. Kavanaugh during a meeting with Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel, and John Bates, Mr. Starr’s deputy, in 1996 in Washington.
WASHINGTON — Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, the front-runner to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, once argued that President Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying to his staff and misleading the public, a broad definition of obstruction of justice that would be damaging if applied to President Trump in the Russia investigation.
Judge Kavanaugh’s arguments — expressed in the report of the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, which he co-wrote nearly 20 years ago — have been cited in recent days by Republicans with reservations about him and have raised concerns among some people close to Mr. Trump. But Judge Kavanaugh has reconsidered some of his views since then, and there is no evidence that they have derailed his candidacy.
A federal appeals judge and onetime law clerk for Justice Kennedy, Judge Kavanaugh, 53, is one of only two or three candidates Mr. Trump is still considering for the opening on the court, people familiar with his thinking said. The others are Judge Raymond M. Kethledge of the Sixth Circuit and Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that he would announce his choice at 9 p.m. Monday, a day before leaving for Europe.
“I have it down to four people, and I think of the four people, I have it down to three or two,” he told reporters on Air Force One as he flew to a rally in Montana. “I think they’re all outstanding.”
But Judge Kavanaugh’s role in the investigation of Mr. Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, which resulted in his impeachment in 1998, has raised a red flag among some people close to Mr. Trump. At a minimum, his views about when to impeach a president are sure to come up during a Senate confirmation hearing and would allow Democrats to shine a spotlight on Mr. Trump’s handling of the Russia investigation.
Judge Kavanaugh, who after working for Mr. Starr served as an aide to President George W. Bush, has since expressed misgivings about the toll investigations take on presidents. In 2009, he wrote that Mr. Clinton should have been spared the investigation, at least while he was in office. Indicting a sitting president, he said, “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national-security crisis.”
White House officials said Mr. Trump was aware of Judge Kavanaugh’s views, but they played down the effect on his candidacy. While some people close to Mr. Trump said Democrats could try to exploit his Clinton-era statements, they did not believe this issue would torpedo his chances of getting the nomination.
Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him to make a final decision on his choice for the court before he left Washington on Thursday morning for Montana, so they could begin preparing a rollout of the nomination, complete with a prime-time address. But several said they had resigned themselves to the likelihood that Mr. Trump would change his mind several times before Sunday.
“We fully expect the Senate will find the president’s choice to have the qualifications, intellect and temperament to serve in the Supreme Court,” said a deputy press secretary, Raj Shah.
As a Yale Law graduate in his early 30s, Judge Kavanaugh was one of the primary authors of Mr. Starr’s report to Congress, which said Mr. Clinton had lied under oath and concealed evidence of his relationship with an intern, Monica Lewinsky.
The report laid out 11 possible grounds for impeachment, two of which are drawing scrutiny in the context of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is looking into whether Trump associates aided Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — in an investigation that has been expanded to include whether the president tried to obstruct the inquiry itself.
First, the Starr report said that Mr. Clinton lied to his aides about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, “knowing that they would relay those falsehoods to the grand jury.” Second, it said he lied to the American public, and that senior officials, including the press secretary, then relied on those denials in their own misleading public statements.
“The president’s emphatic denial to the American people was false,” the prosecutors wrote. “And his statement was not an impromptu comment in the heat of a news conference. To the contrary, it was an intentional and calculated falsehood to deceive the Congress and the American people.”
By that standard, Mr. Trump’s misleading statements to the news media, his miasma of tweets and his protracted public debate over whether to speak with Mr. Mueller could all be used against him, even if the special counsel declines to accuse the president of obstruction of justice.
The Starr report faulted Mr. Clinton for refusing six invitations to testify before a grand jury, saying the refusals substantially delayed the investigation. Mr. Trump has been debating for months whether to accept Mr. Mueller’s invitation to give an interview, and his lawyers have argued against it. Under the standard set by the Starr report, Congress should consider that as potential grounds for impeachment.
Mr. Trump also personally dictated a misleading statement to The New York Times about a secret meeting that his son arranged with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then repeatedly and falsely denied that Mr. Trump dictated the statement.
The Starr report faulted Mr. Clinton for turning his press secretary and other White House officials into “unwitting agents of the president’s deception.” It named four aides — John Podesta, Erskine Bowles, Sidney Blumenthal and Harold Ickes — whom it said were lied to by Mr. Clinton about Ms. Lewinsky and who repeated those falsehoods to a grand jury.
The House ultimately did not adopt these two grounds when it voted to impeach Mr. Clinton. But Judge Kavanaugh’s involvement in drafting them creates the possibility that Democrats would try to make his confirmation hearing a referendum on the standards of impeachment. And it would force the White House to talk about the Russia investigation during what would otherwise be a welcome reprieve.
Colleagues of Judge Kavanaugh said they did not recall whether he pushed for these two passages to be included — or if he resisted them. They noted that there was lively debate on Mr. Starr’s team about what to include in the report, but that in the end, it was the independent counsel’s call.
“I don’t think it’s a fair conclusion to draw that everyone’s name who appeared on the report agreed with everything written there,” said Andrew D. Leipold, one of Judge Kavanaugh’s co-writers, who is now a law professor at the University of Illinois College of Law.
“Our job was to emphasize the grounds for impeachment,” he added. “We’re not the decision maker; Congress is the decision maker.”
Another of Judge Kavanaugh’s co-writers, Julie Myers Wood, said the decision on how to define obstruction of justice was made by more senior members of the team.
“It was not my recollection that any of us were the thought drivers on obstruction,” said Ms. Wood, who now runs an investigative firm. “The seasoned and experienced prosecutors were the ones driving what was reasonable in terms of obstruction.”
Some legal experts said the broad language in the Starr report merely reflected a recognition that impeachment is a political, not a legal, judgment. “Lying to the American people might be impeachable, but it might not be a crime on the statute books,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University.
Mr. Amar, who supports Judge Kavanaugh, said the judge’s misgivings about the Starr investigation were welcome evidence of maturity. “I’d rather have someone who has experience and has made mistakes than someone with no track record of difficult decision making,” he said.
In rethinking his views, Judge Kavanaugh wrote in 2009 in the Minnesota Law Review that Congress should pass laws that would protect a president from civil and criminal law suits until they are out of office. In any event, he said, there was always a way to remove a “bad-behaving or lawbreaking President.”
“If the president does something dastardly,” he wrote, “the impeachment process is available.”
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/charlottesville-plea-hate-crimes.html
James Alex Fields Jr., accused of killing one person and injuring multiple others after ramming his car into a crowd during a white supremacist rally last year, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to multiple federal hate crime charges.CreditCharlottesville Police Department, via Reuters
The Ohio man accused of killing one person and injuring multiple others after ramming his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during a white nationalist rally last year pleaded not guilty on Thursday to multiple federal hate crime charges.
The man, James Alex Fields Jr., entered his plea to all 30 charges brought against him last month by federal officials for his actions during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12.
During a hearing at United States District Court in Charlottesville, Judge Joel Hoppe asked Mr. Fields if he had ever been treated or if he was currently being treated for a mental illness, Brian McGinn, a spokesman for the United States attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said Thursday.
Mr. Fields responded affirmatively and listed bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D., and added that he was taking medication, Mr. McGinn said.
Among the charges, Mr. Fields faces one count of a hate crime resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who died after he drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, according to the indictment.
One person died and several more were injured as a vehicle was driven into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year.
Two of Mr. Fields’s lawyers, Denise Lunsford and Lisa Lorish, declined to comment on Thursday about their client’s plea.
The indictment alleges that on the day of the protest, Mr. Fields had engaged in chants promoting or expressing white supremacist, racist and anti-Semitic views. Mr. Fields later drove toward the crowd of counterprotesters, many of whom were carrying signs promoting equality and decrying discrimination, the indictment says.
Mr. Fields then accelerated and slammed his car into the crowd, hitting multiple people, including Ms. Heyer, before reversing and fleeing, the indictment says.
Ms. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was in the courtroom when Mr. Fields announced his plea. She said in a phone interview on Thursday that Mr. Fields hardly showed any emotion in the courtroom. When he pleaded not guilty, she said, she stayed silent amid gasps from victims who had been injured in the attack and who were in the courtroom.
Ms. Bro said that although she had expected the not guilty plea, “it was still sort of a punch to the gut.”
She said she planned to attend every court appearance until the trial is over, even if it takes years.
“The wheels of justice turn slowly,” she said, “but they do turn.”
by:
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/world/europe/trump-putin-summit-election-meddling.html
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month in Moscow. Mr. Putin will meet with President Trump this month in Helsinki, Finland.
WASHINGTON — President Trump will speak one-on-one with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia this month when they meet in Helsinki, Finland, the administration confirmed Thursday, injecting an element of unpredictability and mystery into an encounter that White House advisers describe as a chance to reset a tense relationship.
Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the United States envoy to Moscow, said Mr. Trump would use the meeting to “continue to hold Russia accountable for its malign activities,” including Mr. Putin’s election meddling and his military incursion into Ukraine. The leaders also are expected to discuss arms control and the conflict in Syria.
But there is no telling what Mr. Trump — a president who abhors long briefing papers and often disregards or defies the advice of his advisers — will choose to say while he is alone with Mr. Putin, a prospect that puts some of his aides and experienced diplomats inside and outside the government on edge.
“Putin is very clever in giving a distorted and self-serving version of history on some of these substantive issues,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former United States ambassador to Russia. “He can charm Trump into changing his position or dropping longstanding U.S. positions if he’s alone with him for too long.”
At a campaign rally on Thursday in Great Falls, Mont., Mr. Trump dismissed the concerns about the upcoming meeting, mocking skeptics for noting that Mr. Putin is a former chief of Russia’s feared intelligence service.
“‘You know, President Putin is K.G.B.,’ and this and that,” Mr. Trump said, affecting a serious voice. “You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people. Will I be prepared? Totally prepared. I’ve been preparing for this stuff my whole life.”
Such meetings are commonly referred to as one-on-one because no advisers are present, but translators for each leader would be expected to attend.
John R. Bolton, left, President Trump’s national security adviser, and Jon Huntsman Jr., the United States envoy to Moscow, before a meeting last week with Mr. Putin at the Kremlin.
Mr. Huntsman said Mr. Trump and his administration were approaching the Putin meeting “with our eyes wide open” — the same phrase they used in the run-up to Mr. Trump’s summit meeting in Singapore with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. That session was convened to discuss nuclear disarmament by Pyongyang.
“You can’t solve problems if you’re not talking about them,” Mr. Huntsman said Thursday during a briefing for reporters about the meeting. Mr. Trump thinks a better relationship between Russia and the United States would be good for both, he said, “but the ball really is in Russia’s court, and the president will continue to hold Russia accountable for its malign activity.”
He said that Mr. Trump saw a one-on-one exchange as vital to starting a dialogue with Mr. Putin. But Mr. Huntsman played down the prospects for any breakthroughs, saying, “The fact that we’re having a summit at this level at this time in history is a deliverable in and of itself.”
Still, there are serious issues to be discussed. Mr. Trump is likely to raise the prospect of extending the New Start arms reduction treaty, Mr. Huntsman said, and to urge Russia to return to compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, after Moscow tested and deployed a cruise missile prohibited under the pact.
Yet Mr. Trump’s advisers concede they cannot be certain of what he will choose to say or do.
Mr. Huntsman said the United States and Russia have yet to hold the kind of “direct conversations, across-the-table conversations — about things like election meddling and malign activity — that really do need to take place.” But he said it would be up to Mr. Trump to choose how he wished to broach those topics with Mr. Putin.
The Trump administration over all has been far tougher on Russia than the president himself has been willing to be, at least in public. Mr. Trump in recent weeks has spoken openly about readmitting Russia into the Group of 7, the club of industrialized democracies from which it was expelled in 2014 after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea.
In the past, Mr. Trump’s informal meetings with Mr. Putin appear to have played down points of friction, particularly over the topic of Russia’s election meddling, which Mr. Putin has vehemently denied. Mr. Trump has often contended that talk of Russian election meddling is an overblown accusation meant to undercut his legitimacy, even though such statements are contrary to the findings of the United States intelligence community, which concluded that it was a serious effort by Mr. Putin himself.
When the two met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting about a year ago in Hamburg, Germany, American officials said Mr. Trump confronted Mr. Putin about the election meddling, but the Russian president denied it and both agreed it was time to move beyond the matter. Russian officials said Mr. Trump had “accepted” Mr. Putin’s denial and told him that certain people in the United States were “exaggerating” the issue.
Mr. Trump said that he had raised the subject with Mr. Putin again during a discussion on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering in November in Danang, Vietnam, and that he believed the Russian president’s denials were sincere. Mr. Trump said then that the continued focus on election meddling was “insulting” to Mr. Putin, and called the special counsel investigation about it a Democratic “hit job” that was hindering progress between the two countries on other issues.
2018-07-04
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/politics/trump-montana-rally-warren-tester.html
GREAT FALLS, Mont. — President Trump lobbed personal and derogatory attacks at two Democratic senators, mocked the #MeToo movement and vouched for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday during a freewheeling, raucous rally ostensibly intended to solidify support for Montana’s Republican Senate candidate.
Taunting Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, with a refusal to apologize for calling her “Pocahontas,” Mr. Trump imagined a debate during which he would gently throw an ancestry testing kit at Ms. Warren to make her prove the Native American heritage she has controversially claimed.
“We are going to do it gently because we’re the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very careful,” the president said to scattered laughter, adding that he would donate $1 million to charity if Ms. Warren followed through. Mr. Trump, who has faced accusations of sexual assault and harassment, announced earlier in the day that Bill Shine, who was ousted from Fox News over his handling of the network’s harassment scandals, would take a position on his administration’s communications staff.
Mr. Trump was in Montana, he unabashedly told the crowd, to settle a political score with Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is tangled in a tough re-election campaign with Matt Rosendale, the state auditor. The president blamed Mr. Tester for the failed nomination of Dr. Ronny L. Jackson as head of the Veterans Affairs Department because he raised concerns about Dr. Jackson’s professional conduct.
“Jon Tester said things that were horrible and that weren’t true,” Mr. Trump said, even as he conceded that he had pushed a reluctant Dr. Jackson to accept the nomination and endure the confirmation process. “That’s probably why I’m here. I won Montana by so many points, I don’t have to come here.”
The president criticized Mr. Tester’s voting record, which included opposition to the Republican tax overhaul and Mr. Trump’s judicial nominees, a critique later offset by his praise of “landmark” veterans legislation that Mr. Tester pushed for. But Mr. Trump eventually broadened his verbal assault to include a number of familiar Washington opponents: the news media (“75 percent of those people are downright dishonest”), his own Justice Department (Hillary Clinton “gets special treatment”) and Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California (a “low I.Q. individual”).
“Democrats want anarchy, they really do,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he intentionally called the party “the Democrat Party” because “Democratic Party sounds too good.”
“And they don’t know who they’re playing with, folks,” he added.
As the crowd cheered and pounded on the bleachers during the roughly 70-minute speech at the Four Seasons Arena in Great Falls, Mr. Trump embellished on his favorite exaggerations and falsehoods, including his margin of victory in the Electoral College, the country’s trade deficits and crowd size. He teased the announcement of his Supreme Court pick and a possible slogan for his 2020 campaign. He complained about negative coverage of his relationship with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, claiming that President Barack Obama “would have loved” to have had a meeting with Mr. Kim.
Supporters waiting for Mr. Trump before his roughly 70-minute speech.
“Putin’s fine,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people. Will I be prepared? Totally prepared. I’ve been preparing for this stuff my whole life.”
“Getting along with Russia, and getting along with China and getting along with other countries is a good thing,” he added, “not a bad thing.”
The notion that the United States should get along with other countries did not appear, however, to extend to NATO, as Mr. Trump vowed to demand more payment from the countries in the alliance during a summit meeting next week.
“We’re the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing,” he said. “I’ll see NATO and I’ll tell NATO, ‘You’ve got to start paying your bills.’”
Without mentioning either man by name, Mr. Trump also disparaged Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and President George Bush, who are both in poor health: Mr. McCain for his vote against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Mr. Bush for his campaign slogan “a thousand points of light,” one that Mr. Trump said he “never quite got.”
There were notable caveats to Mr. Trump’s riffs: He hailed his administration’s deregulation push, but made no mention of his pre-rally announcement that Scott Pruitt would resign as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. And while the president continued his public defense of his administration’s immigration crackdown, he did not address the outcry surrounding the separation of migrant families at the southwestern border — something Ms. Warren pointed out on Twitter.
“While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas & you are too incompetent to reunite them in time to meet a court order,” she wrote. “Maybe you should focus on fixing the lives you’re destroying.”
Late in the rally, Mr. Trump pivoted to a condemnation of the National Football League’s new national anthem policy — which requires players to stand or remain in the locker room (“that’s worse than not standing”) — before eventually returning to the reason for the rally: campaigning against an embattled Democrat in a state he won by a sizable margin.
“Get your ass out to vote,” he said to the roaring crowd. “We will never, ever surrender. We will never, ever quit. We go forward to victory.”
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/us/politics/fact-check-trump-montana.html
President Trump at a rally in Great Falls, Mont., on Thursday.
what was said
“But I will tell you, the secretary general, Stoltenberg, is Trump’s biggest fan. He says, ‘Those NATO nations are going like this: less money, less money. Why not? And when you started talking, it went like a rocket ship.’”
— President Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Great Falls, Mont., on Thursday
the facts
It’s unclear what Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, has said to Mr. Trump. But the notion that Mr. Trump single-handedly and drastically reversed military spending by members is inaccurate.
As The New York Times has previously explained, each of NATO’s 29 members has pledged to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on its own defense each year. Just four countries — the United States, Britain, Greece and Estonia — met that goal in 2017, according to NATO. (Poland reached 1.99 percent.)
Average spending by members other than the United States has generally been declining since the end of the Cold War, dipping to 1.4 percent of G.D.P. in 2014 and 2015 before increasing to 1.42 percent in 2016 and 1.45 percent in 2017.
So NATO members began to spend more on their militaries before Mr. Trump took office. It’s possible that Mr. Trump’s dedication to the issue has spurred NATO members to continue to do so, but they are also motivated by Russia’s aggressive actions, experts have previously told The Times.
what was said
“They make the sources up. They don’t exist in many cases. Any time you say — you know, I saw one of them said ‘15 anonymous sources’ — I don’t have 15 people in the White — I mean, forget it.”
the facts
False.
As he accused news outlets of quoting nonexistent sources, Mr. Trump cut himself off before he could finish his incorrect claim that the White House employs fewer than 15 people.
The “White House” can broadly refer to the Executive Office of the President, which includes the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of the United States Trade Representative, among other domestic policy arms and support staff. Mr. Trump’s budget for the 2019 fiscal year estimated that more than 1,800 full-time employees work for these offices.
The term can also refer specifically to the White House Office, which is one of the oldest sub-agencies of the executive office and where many of the president’s personal aides work. It alone employs 374 people, according to its latest report to Congress on salaries, which was dated June 29.
what was said
“Since the election, we have lifted three million people off of food stamps.”
the facts
Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program did decline to 40.1 million people in March 2018 from 43.2 million in November 2016, according to the most recent data from the Agriculture Department.
Mr. Trump, of course, was not yet president in November 2016. From February 2017, his first full month in office, to this March, nearly 2.2 million fewer people participated in SNAP.
It’s also worth noting that participation has been declining in recent years as the economy improves from the financial recession. For example, in the year before Mr. Trump became president, SNAP enrollment declined by more than 2.4 million from December 2015 to January 2017.
OTHER CLAIMS
Mr. Trump also repeated more than a dozen false or misleading claims that The Times has previously debunked:
• He exaggerated the United States’ trade deficit with the European Union as $151 billion (it’s $101 billion).
• He falsely said the United States was “exporting energy for the first time” (it has been doing so for decades).
• He misleadingly accused President Barack Obama of paying Iran $1.8 billion in cash to release hostages (the money was a payment related to a decades-long dispute).
• He misleadingly accused President Bill Clinton of giving “billions and billions” to North Korea and getting “nothing” (the amount, in energy aid, was far less, and the 1994 nuclear agreement did produce some results).
• He falsely claimed to be the first Republican presidential candidate to win Wisconsin “since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952” (Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon both won Wisconsin).
• He exaggerated the number of MS-13 members who have been deported as being in the “thousands” (this is not possible).
• He hyperbolically said “getting military funding from these Democrats is almost impossible” (most Democrats voted for the latest military spending bill).
• He misleadingly claimed “we are already building the wall” (construction on the wall has not begun).
• He falsely said wages were rising “for the first time in 18 years” (they’ve been rising for years).
• He falsely claimed that the tax cuts he signed into law in December were “the biggest in American history” (they rank 12th).
• He claimed to have “saved family farms” by raising the threshold for the estate tax (the tax previously affected around 80 family farms and small businesses).
• He falsely claimed “millions” are already signing up for association health care plans (they will not be available until at least Sept. 1).
• He said the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines will produce 48,000 jobs (all but 75 will be temporary jobs).
• He exaggerated the United States’ trade deficit with China as $507 billion (it’s $336 billion).
Sources: NATO, the White House, the president’s budget for FY2019, the Agriculture Department, The New York Times
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/us/migrant-children-court-families.html
Children at a United States Border Patrol facility in Tucson, Ariz., in June.
LOS ANGELES — The Trump administration on Friday asked a federal judge for more time to reunite migrant families separated by authorities at the southwest border, highlighting the challenge of confirming familial relationships between parents and children who now may be thousands of miles apart.
Parents of 19 of the 101 detained children who are under the age of 5 have been deported, a lawyer for the Justice Department reported Friday, though the government has said it was taking precautions not to deport parents whose children are still in custody.
In the case of 19 others, the parents have been released and their whereabouts are unknown, government lawyers said.
Judge Dana M. Sabraw of Federal District Court in San Diego had set a deadline of Tuesday for reuniting the youngest children with their parents, and in a conference Friday, the judge did not issue a blanket extension. Instead, he gave the government until Saturday evening to come up with a list naming all 101 of the youngest children, along with an explanation of why it would be impossible to promptly restore them to a parent.
Only after the government provided such a list, Judge Sabraw said, “can we have an intelligent conversation Monday morning about which child can be reunited by July 10, which will not — and then the court can determine whether it makes sense to relax the deadline. But I need more information.”
The Trump administration has been scrambling to streamline the process of reuniting migrant children and their families, as the human toll of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy becomes apparent and the political pressure grows to quickly address it. But administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity portrayed the operation as a bureaucratic nightmare involving different computer systems, databases and filing systems, and staffs that have been at odds with one another about how to proceed and what information to share with the public.
One administration official involved in the effort said on Friday that the process of reuniting migrant children with their parents had been sped up considerably with the use of DNA screening instead of consular records. This had shortened the period for confirmations to a few days from a couple of weeks.
But the process has been complicated because the judge’s ruling applied not only to children taken from their parents under the “zero-tolerance” border policy, but those separated for other reasons, several officials said.
In a motion filed late Thursday, the Justice Department said it had devoted “immense” resources to reunifying parents and children since June 26, when the judge imposed deadlines on the government for returning children to their families.
During the conference on Friday afternoon, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit challenging the separation of families, said the process was proceeding more slowly than necessary because the government is insisting on using the same vetting procedures that it uses for so-called unaccompanied minors — children, typically adolescents, who enter the United States alone and are released to an adult who claims to be a parent. In those cases, protections are needed to make sure children are not handed over to adults seeking to exploit them.
But such exhaustive protections, including home visits and the fingerprinting of every member of a household where a child will be residing, are slowing down reunifications, said the lawyer, Lee Gelernt.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Gelernt said. “You have taken the child from the parent.”
Last week, Judge Sabraw gave the government until July 10 to reunite children younger than 5 with a parent. He set July 26 as the deadline for older children.
The Trump administration began separating families who crossed the border illegally in the spring as part of its stepped-up enforcement measures along the border. Last month, the president issued an executive order halting the practice after it drew outrage from elected officials from both sides of the aisle as well as from the general public.
“There really has been a massive effort to get the resources in place and on the ground to make reunification happen,” Sarah B. Fabian, a government lawyer, said on Friday.
However, she added, “There are some groups for which the reunification process is more difficult.” In those cases, she said, more time would be necessary to link parent and child.
“The government does not wish to unnecessarily delay reunifications or burden class members,” the Justice Department said in its motion. “At the same time, however, the government has a strong interest in ensuring that any release of a child from government custody occurs in a manner that ensures the safety of that child.”
Mr. Gelernt, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, questioned the need for DNA testing and suggested that it should be used exclusively for the purpose of reunification and then should be expunged.
“DNA testing is intrusive and makes parents nervous,” he said. ”The government is saying DNA every single person. We would say that DNA is the last resort.”
Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, said in a conference call with reporters on Thursday that nearly 3,000 children were in federal custody as a result of family separations intended to deter illegal immigration and that about 100 of them were under the age of 5. But records connecting children to their parents have in some cases disappeared, according to some of those working on the reunifications, leaving the authorities struggling to confirm connections between family members.
Mr. Azar said the logjam was due to previous policies and court decisions that prevent migrant families from being held in detention for extended periods.
“Any confusion is due to a broken immigration system and court orders,” Mr. Azar said. “It’s not here.”
Some parts of the federal judge’s ruling are already being complied with, the government said: Families are no longer being separated at the border, and arrangements have been made for children and parents to communicate with each other, a provision which the judge had specified was to be in place by Friday.
The government’s lawyer said that reunification was happening more rapidly when parents were still in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement rather than after they were released.
In its motion, the administration asked the judge to clarify whether the court’s order on reunifications applies to parents who have been deported. There are reports that some migrants agreed to be quickly deported, believing it would speed up the recovery of their children — only to board a plane and realize that their child would be left behind.
“ICE does not have the ability to go into those countries,” said Ms. Fabian of the immigration enforcement agency.
Other problems have occurred because parents and children are so widely separated. Many children were sent to facilities thousands of miles away from their parents, and some are too young or scared to provide accurate information about their parents or their journey.
The executive order that ended family separations did not lay out steps for reuniting families.
The ACLU had filed a lawsuit before the separation practice was officially in place and before the president’s executive order.
In his ruling on June 26, Judge Sabraw said that children can be separated at the border only if the adults with them present an immediate danger to them. He also said that adults cannot be deported from the United States without their children.
In his written opinion, the judge criticized the government, saying, “The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government’s own making.”
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/us/politics/john-fitzgerald-holocaust-denial.html
John Fitzgerald, a Republican candidate for the House in California. The state party distanced itself from him after learning of anti-Semitic statements on his campaign website.CreditJohn Fitzgerald’s campaign website
A Republican congressional candidate in a reliably blue California district managed to capture nearly a quarter of votes cast in the state’s open primary last month — just after the state Republican Party caught wind of his anti-Semitic comments and rescinded its automatic endorsement.
The candidate, John Fitzgerald, urged people on his campaign website to pay attention to “Jewish supremacism,” among other anti-Semitic views, which led party leaders to rescind their support in May, about two months after the official endorsement.
In the weeks since, Mr. Fitzgerald has increased the frequency of his anti-Semitic statements and has appeared on podcasts in which he claimed the Holocaust was a fabrication.
“Everything we’ve been told about the Holocaust is a lie,” Mr. Fitzgerald said last week on a radio show hosted by Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, an anti-Semitic commentator who has glorified Hitler.
“My entire campaign, for the most part, is about exposing this lie,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The brief endorsement of a Holocaust denier by a major political party in California has prompted Republican leaders there to take candidate vetting more seriously, and comes at a time when extremist and anti-Semitic candidates are receiving increased exposure on the national political stage.
Mr. Fitzgerald received 23 percent of the vote to finish second in the 11th Congressional District’s June primary, which is open to all candidates regardless of party and allows the top two finishers to qualify for the general election. He is running against Representative Mark DeSaulnier, a Democrat, in a district northeast of San Francisco that has not elected a Republican to the House since 2004.
The state’s Republican Party automatically endorsed Mr. Fitzgerald in March because party rules say the organization will automatically back the only Republican in the field, said Matt Fleming, a spokesman for the California Republican Party. The party reversed its decision in May and issued a statement denouncing his candidacy.
“Once we learned of Mr. Fitzgerald’s anti-Semitic worldview in late May, we moved immediately to undo the unfortunate automatic endorsement,” Mr. Fleming said in an email.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Fitzgerald said that he was not surprised the Republican Party had disavowed his candidacy because both major political parties in America are run by “Jewish elitists.”
Mr. Fitzgerald, 54, said he was a small-business owner but would not disclose what kind of business he runs. A LinkedIn page for a John Fitzgerald that links to the candidate’s campaign website lists the page’s user as a painting contractor.
The comments that alerted the party to Mr. Fitzgerald’s views were in a post on his campaign website asserting that Jewish people played a “prominent role” in the Atlantic slave trade and urging awareness of “Jewish supremacism.” Scholars have countered historical claims that Jewish people dominated the slave trade with research showing that their role was marginal.
Mr. Fleming said the initial endorsement of Mr. Fitzgerald was preceded by minimal vetting of his views. Now, he said, the party is bolstering its vetting process by thoroughly surveying candidates’ public comments and the content of their campaign websites.
Mr. Fitzgerald’s qualification for the state’s general election makes him the latest in a series of high-profile extremist candidates across the nation — including Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier described as a Nazi by the Illinois Republican Party. Mr. Jones won the Republican congressional primary in March in a heavily Democratic district that includes part of Chicago. In Wisconsin, a white nationalist and anti-Semite, Paul Nehlen, is running for Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s vacated House seat.
In both instances, the state Republican Party distanced itself from the candidate and condemned his views.
In the Thursday interview, Mr. Fitzgerald said that the Holocaust was a “complete fabrication” and that the Israeli government was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
“There are a few other people being honest in this country, and they’re all being lambasted for telling the truth,” Mr. Fitzgerald said, referring to Mr. Jones and Mr. Nehlen.
Mr. Fitzgerald ran for Congress in California as a Democrat in 2010 and 2012, but did not receive the party’s endorsement in either case. He is running as a Republican in November but said he identifies more as an independent.
“Am I a Republican?” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “What is a Republican anymore?”
Mr. DeSaulnier said in an interview on Thursday that he believed California voters — more than 36,000 of whom voted for Mr. Fitzgerald — were unaware of Mr. Fitzgerald’s views when they went to the polls. “People see ‘R’ and they see ‘D’ and that’s how they vote,” he said.
Mr. DeSaulnier, who was elected to office in 2014 and received 68 percent of the vote in the June primary, said anti-Semitism is an “ugly and evil” set of beliefs that he does not believe the residents in his district will ultimately support.
On a podcast called “The Realist Report,” released last month and hosted by John Friend — a self-described independent journalist whom the Anti-Defamation League has called an anti-Semite — Mr. Fitzgerald lamented “Jewish control and supremacy.” In a blog post on his website, Mr. Fitzgerald wrote that Jewish people are behind a push for “multiculturalism, diversity and inclusiveness” throughout the United States and other “once predominantly white nations.”
Media Matters, a liberal nonprofit publication, drew attention this week to Mr. Fitzgerald’s podcast appearances.
Mr. Fleming, the state Republican Party spokesman, said that if only one Republican joins the race in California’s open primary system — often called the “jungle primary” — the state party’s bylaws say the organization will automatically endorse that candidate. He said that before the California Republican Party endorsed Mr. Fitzgerald in late March, one of the few “red flags” on his campaign website was conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Fleming said he would have alerted state Republican leaders if he had seen those statements before the endorsement process.
Ron Nehring, a former chairman of the California Republican Party and spokesman for Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, said he was the first person to alert the organization to the views expressed on Mr. Fitzgerald’s campaign website, prompting discussion about disavowing the candidate. Mr. Nehring said he planned to propose a change to the state Republican Party rules to eliminate automatic endorsements.
Mr. Fleming said the transition to the “top-two” primary system, adopted by voters in 2010, has required an adjustment period for the endorsement process.
The local Republican Party in Contra Costa, a county encompassing the 11th District, never endorsed Mr. Fitzgerald because he did not attend any of their meetings or request an endorsement, said Matt Shupe, the chairman of the organization. Mr. Fitzgerald said he had been unsuccessful in trying to reach local Republican leaders.
Mr. Shupe called Mr. Fitzgerald’s views unwelcome in the party, but said there was “no legal way” to prevent a person from getting on the ballot.
Mr. Fitzgerald denied that his views were anti-Semitic.
“I have friends that are Jewish,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “I have no issue with any people. I have issues with people who lie. It’s the elitists who control it all.”
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/us/army-immigrants-discharge.html
A ceremony for Mavni recruits in 2009. In recent years the Defense Department has tightened regulations for the program, and thousands have been caught up in extra layers of security vetting.
Recruit Zhang, an immigrant from China, joined the United States military on the promise that enlisting would lead to American citizenship. He swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and was handed an Army T-shirt. But, after two years of delays, there came a sudden discharge that has left him reeling.
“They just said one word: I was ‘unsuitable,’” said the 30-year-old, who has a wife and child and a business management degree. He asked that only his last name be used. “I came here legally, made an agreement to stay legally, and they have not kept the agreement.”
A growing number of foreign-born recruits who joined the United States military through a special program created to recruit immigrant troops with valuable language and medical skills are being terminated before they can qualify for citizenship. Lawyers for the recruits say at least 30 have been discharged in recent weeks and thousands more are stuck in limbo — currently enlisted but unable to serve — and may also be forced out.
They are being cut even as the Army has been unable to meet its 2018 recruiting goals.
Mr. Zhang’s parents, a factory worker and a city official in southeast China, sold their house to support him while he waited two years to be called to boot camp. Now he may be deported, and worries he could be punished by the Chinese government for enlisting in a foreign army.
“There’s no explanation for this except xenophobia,” said Margaret D. Stock, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and immigration lawyer who helped create the program. Known as the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest or Mavni, the program, created during the George W. Bush administration, allows legal, nonpermanent resident immigrants to join the military and get fast track citizenship.
More than 10,000 troops have joined the military through the program — almost all of them in the Army. At its start, the Army touted its foreign recruits, holding naturalization ceremonies with top brass in places like Times Square. But in recent years the Defense Department has tightened regulations, and thousands have been caught up in extra layers of security vetting. Increased scrutiny for the program began in the last months of the Obama administration over national security concerns.
To screen out possible terrorist or espionage threats, the military requires extensive background checks that have grown more complex in the last two years. The C.I.A. and F.B.I. do background checks, and screenings include criminal history and credit, a review of at least a decade of finances, an exhaustive questionnaire and numerous lengthy interviews. Relatives, employers and neighbors are also interviewed.
“There’s no explanation for this except xenophobia,” said Margaret D. Stock, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who helped create the program, of the recent discharges of immigrant recruits.
The layers of clearance have grown so complex that a backlog of several thousand cases has piled up. A Defense Department official testified in a recent deposition that it would take 10 years to clear those currently waiting to serve.
“We were told they didn’t have the resources to go through all the investigations,” said Robin Jung, a South Korean immigrant and college student who enlisted through the program. In 2014, his brother went through the program and was given citizenship in just a few months. Mr. Jung has been waiting two years.
A number of recruits have filed lawsuits claiming the delays and denials violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection.
The Defense Department responded to interview requests about the delays and increase in the number of discharges with a short statement, saying that any recruit, including those recruited through the Mavni program, “who receives an unfavorable security screening is deemed unsuitable for military service and is administratively discharged. Each recruit undergoes an individualized suitability review and the length of time for the review is dependent upon each individual’s unique background.”
So far, though, recruits in the 10-year-old program have not posed an undue security threat, according to a 2017 report by the RAND Corporation. The report, which was never officially released, found that the program’s recruits were generally better educated and better performing than the average enlisted soldier. It also found that there had been no instances of terrorism or espionage connected to an immigrant recruit.
Before the Vietnam War, all legal immigrants could enlist regardless of permanent status, and throughout American history a large slice of the troops who fought the nations battles have been immigrants, from Lt. Col. Alexander Hamilton to the more than 700 immigrants who have been awarded the Medal of Honor.
Still, very few recruits have made it through the vetting process in the last two years, Ms. Stock said. They are kept waiting, unable to work civilian jobs or go to basic training and start their military careers.
In the past two months, lawyers have seen a stark uptick in troops getting discharged after being notified they have failed background checks. Ms. Stock said it could be a result of an effort to clear the backlog.
Recruits say they are not told why they failed background checks and have no way to appeal.
One Pakistani immigrant, worried about the long wait, was able to get his security report in May through a Freedom of Information Act request. The report noted the immigrant, an electrical engineering student recruited to repair generators, had dreamed of moving to the United States since he was 5, and had an American flag cover on his cellphone.
The recruit, the report stated, “has such a deep and longstanding loyalty to the U.S., that he can be expected to resolve any conflict of interest in favor of the U.S.”
“I jumped for joy, I was literally dancing when I read this because I knew there would be no problem,” said the recruit, who asked not to be named because he fears he could be harmed in Pakistan if he is deported.
In June he was told he had failed his security background check and was being discharged.
“I cried,” he said. “I feel like I have been kicked out of my own home.”
Private Second Class Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who moved to the United States with his parents when he was 12, was discharged this spring after enlisting in the Army Reserve two years ago.
Since enlisting, he had been going through drills regularly in Massachusetts, where his unit had supported him, he said.
In June he was abruptly discharged for “personnel security,” according to a form. He was given no other explanation.
Last week he sued the Defense Department in federal court, saying the discharge, with no warning and no explanation, violated department regulations and “the fundamental requirements of due process.”
“It was my dream to serve in the U.S. military. Since America has been so good to me, I wanted to give back and serve in the United States Army,” Private Calixto said in an email. “I know this is not coming from my military unit. They have been very nice to me. It seems as if the decision is being made by higher-ups who don’t know me and are just trying to complicate things.”
Correction: July 6, 2018
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of years a Defense Department official testified it would take to clear those currently waiting to serve. The official said it would take 10 years, not 50.
by:
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/us/anne-frank-family-escape-usa.html
A new report described how Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, ran into roadblocks when he tried to escape the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. He was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust.
Attempts by Anne Frank’s father to escape the Nazis in Europe and travel to the United States were complicated by tight American restrictions on immigration at the time, one of a series of roadblocks that narrowed the Frank family’s options and thrust them into hiding, according to a new report released on Friday.
The research, conducted jointly by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, details the challenges faced by the Frank family and thousands of others looking to escape Europe as Nazi Germany gained strength and anti-refugee sentiment swept the United States.
Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was never outright denied an immigration visa, the report concludes, but “bureaucracy, war and time” thwarted his efforts.
In order to obtain a visa, Mr. Frank would have had to gather copies of family birth certificates, military records and proof of a paid ticket to America, among other documents, and be interviewed at the consulate.
In one instance, an application that Mr. Frank said he submitted in 1938 languished in an American consulate in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, amid a swell of similar applications and was lost in a bombing raid in 1940. Mr. Frank wrote to a friend that the extensive papers he had gathered as part of a visa application “have been destroyed there.”
In 1941, as Mr. Frank was again attempting to navigate the matrix of paperwork and sponsors necessary to immigrate, the United States government imposed a stricter review of applications for visas, grew suspicious of possible spies and saboteurs among Jewish refugees, and banned applicants with relatives in German-occupied countries.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned at the time that Jewish refugees could be “spying under compulsion,” and the report states that “national security took precedence over humanitarian concerns.”
Mr. Frank had sought help from an influential friend, Nathan Straus Jr., who was the head of the United States Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the son of a Macy’s co-owner. Despite Mr. Straus’s connections, Mr. Frank wrote to him that “all their efforts would be useless” given the immigration climate, the report states.
“We wanted to learn more about the process in itself and what documentation an applicant (e.g. Otto Frank) had to produce,” said Gertjan Broek, a researcher with the Anne Frank House who worked on the latest findings. “In the report, we point out how complex and tedious the process was and how the bombing of the Rotterdam consulate disrupted things.”
The report was released 76 years after the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942. Researchers drew on dozens of pages of correspondence between Mr. Frank and friends, much of which was first made public in 2007, as well as records involving United States immigration policy.
Anne Frank’s diaries describing her time in hiding gave a voice to millions who died at the hands of the Nazis. She was eventually discovered and she died in a concentration camp in 1945, when she was 15.
Mr. Frank was the only member of the immediate family to survive the concentration camps.
News about the Frank family continues to captivate the public, despite challenges in educating younger generations about the Holocaust.
“She has allowed millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions of people, to identify with persecution at the worst level,” said Richard Breitman, a professor emeritus at American University who has written about the family’s attempts to immigrate to the United States. “Any time there is a glimmer of new information, it’s a big story.”
The new research comes at a time when President Trump’s attempts to curb immigration have been likened to those in the World War II era. Mr. Trump has repeatedly sought to justify letting fewer people into the country by arguing that criminals and terrorists could be among the immigrants and refugees seeking to enter.
Mr. Breitman underscored those similarities, pointing to debates over immigration policy today and after Sept. 11. Mr. Breitman said that as Mr. Frank was trying to get to the United States, the country was instituting an “extreme cutback” on immigration.
“It wasn’t just extremists and wackos who believed that there was a serious threat to the security of the United States in 1940 that justified an immigration cutback,” Mr. Breitman said. “You can fill in the rest of it after 9/11 and today.”
Mr. Broek said the researchers did not intend to highlight parallels.
“The Anne Frank House researches into the life of Anne Frank and her family, to tell her story as accurate as possible,” Mr. Broek said. “The attempted immigration is a part of that story too.”
Anne Frank in 1942. Two pages of her diary, which had been covered by brown paper, were uncovered by researchers in Amsterdam and presented at a news conference on Tuesday.
AMSTERDAM — Anne Frank tried to cover up two pages of writing in her diary that contained dirty jokes and a description of what she referred to as “sexual matters,” pasting brown paper over the pages in her red-and-white plaid notebook.
But researchers here have revealed the hidden text using new digital technologies, the Anne Frank House and two other Dutch cultural institutions announced on Tuesday.
Frank, the teenage diarist who wrote about coming-of-age in a secret attic annex while in hiding from the Nazis during World War II, may have camouflaged the two pages because they contained prurient content that she didn’t want her father or someone else in the cramped quarters to discover.
“I sometimes imagine that someone might come to me and ask me to inform him about sexual matters,” Frank wrote in Dutch. “How would I go about it?” She attempts an answer, addressing an imaginary listener with a lofty tone, using phrases such as “rhythmical movements” to describe sex, and “internal medicament,” to refer to contraception.
She also touches on menstruation, “a sign that she is ripe,” and prostitution: “In Paris they have big houses for that.”
A video shows the text underneath two taped-off pages from Frank’s diary at a news conference at the Anne Frank Foundation’s office in Amsterdam.
Peter de Bruijn, a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, one of the partners in the research, said that the newly uncovered pages are not significant for their sexual content — because Frank explores similar matters in other parts of the diary, often in even more explicit terms. He said these pages were important because they show Frank’s first foray into trying to write in a more literary tone.
“She starts with an imaginary person whom she is telling about sex, so she creates a kind of literary environment to write about a subject she’s maybe not comfortable with,” he said.
In an interview, Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House, said, “It is really interesting and adds meaning to our understanding of the diary.”
“It’s a very cautious start to her becoming a writer,” he said. “It’s still very early stages.”
The two newly revealed pages were written in Frank’s first diary, with a red plaid cover, on Sept. 28, 1942, when she was 13 years old. During her time in hiding, she wrote two versions of the diary. The first was written in a series of small notebooks, from her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942, until Aug. 1, 1944, and was intended strictly for herself.
But one day she heard on the radio that the Dutch government in exile was planning to publish eyewitness accounts of people’s suffering under the German occupation, and she resolved to write a new book that she called “The Secret Annex,” based on her diaries, which she hoped to submit after the war. She completed 215 loose pages in a couple of months, but in August 1944, she and her family were discovered, arrested and deported; she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three months shy of her 16th birthday, in 1945.
Mr. de Bruijn said Frank may have also pasted over the pages as a form of self-editing as she revised her diary in preparation for the second, public version.
Researchers at the Anne Frank House discovered the two hidden pages in the original version of the diary while they were checking its condition and photographing the pages in 2016. The notebooks are in storage for safekeeping and only examined once every 10 years.
Until now, the technology that would have allowed researchers to look at the covered pages without destroying them wasn’t available. “When you touch the pages they can be damaged, so we don’t touch them,” said Teresien da Silva, head of collections at the Anne Frank House. Using photo-imaging software, they were able to decipher text beneath the brown paper without any contact with the pages.
Could it be considered disrespectful to reveal pages that Frank wanted to hide?
“You can compare it, for example, with finding out that there’s something painted underneath a Rembrandt masterpiece,” Ms. da Silva said. “When you discover that you want to know what’s underneath, because it can tell you about how he worked.”
She also compared it to salvaging the writings of Franz Kafka, who wanted to destroy many of his own literary works. “It’s not always good to follow the wish of an author,” she said. “It’s important sometimes for scientific research and also good to know for the public what she didn’t want to publish.”
A spokeswoman for the Anne Frank House said that the museum would make the new text available on its website, but only in Dutch at the moment, because of copyright restrictions. She said she did not know when the text would be available in English.
by:
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/opinion/democrats-fight-trump-supreme-court.html
Claire Merchlinsky
With Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.
This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather” and go to the mattresses on this issue. Because this battle is about more than a single seat on the nation’s highest court. With public attention focused on all that is at stake with this alignment, this is the moment for Democrats to drive home to voters the crucial role that the judiciary plays in shaping this nation, and why the courts should be a key voting concern in Every. Single. Election.
This call to arms may sound overly dramatic. It’s not. As hyperpartisanship, gridlock and a general abdication of responsibility have rendered Congress increasingly dysfunctional, the judiciary is taking an ever-greater hand in policy areas ranging from immigration to guns to ballot access to worker rights. As John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, mused in 2016: “The legislative process, the political process in Washington, is at a standstill and will be regardless of who wins. The only thing that really matters over the next four years or eight years is who is going to appoint the next Supreme Court nominees.”
Of course, it’s not only Supreme Court picks that count. Lower-court appointments matter enormously as well, a reality of which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is exquisitely aware, as demonstrated by his efforts to ram through circuit court nominations at a dizzying clip. Thanks to Mr. McConnell’s labors, Mr. Trump installed a record number of federal appeals judges in his first year. This bench packing will be one of the Republican lawmakers’ prime talking points on the campaign trail this fall.
The trillion-dollar question is whether Democrats can also use this battle to turn out their voters. This is not a given. If progressives wind up feeling as though their team didn’t fight fiercely enough against Mr. Trump’s nominee, they could be less inspired to show up at the polls. But even if Senate Democrats pull out all the stops, the political reality is that Republicans have been far more effective than Democrats at galvanizing their base around the judiciary.
Certainly this was the case in 2016: Whatever impact the former F.B.I. director James Comey or Russian hackers had on the race, Mr. Trump owes a big chunk of his win to Mr. McConnell for shamelessly refusing to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s empty seat until after the election. Even conservatives turned off by Mr. Trump’s sexual creepiness could be rallied around the prospect of claiming that seat. In his endorsement of Mr. Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas listed the Supreme Court as his top reason, warning supporters, “We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices.” Even the maverick, country-before-party Senator John McCain of Arizona vowed that, if Hillary Clinton won the presidency, a Republican-controlled Senate would block any nominee that she put forward. Despite Democratic outrage over the blockading of President Barack Obama’s court pick, more Trump supporters than Clinton supporters cited the appointment of justices as “very important” to their vote.
This is not to suggest that Democrats don’t care about the judiciary. The issue just hasn’t resonated as widely and viscerally with their base as it has with Republicans, where the threat of judicial activism has become a reliable, enduring motivator. At least since early in the Obama era, Democratic voters have held a generally more positive view of the Supreme Court than their Republican counterparts. Survey data also show that Democrats, at least until recently, have tended to see the court more as what it is supposed to be, a neutral, independent arbiter. Republicans, by contrast, have been more likely to see it as a hostile force to be overcome. And, of course, the dream of one day overturning Roe v. Wade helps keep social conservatives fixated on remaking the judiciary.
The rise of Mr. Trump has created an imperative to change all this. Even before Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement last week, nervous progressives had started working to close the urgency gap. This spring, the Committee for a Fair Judiciary, which advocates progressive judicial values, beefed up its lobbying shop. Around the same time, a gaggle of Democratic operatives formed a nonprofit group, Demand Justice, aimed at energizing voters around the courts. Demand Justice hopes to change the current political dynamic, in which Democrats and progressive interest groups typically mobilize to battle a specific court nominee, after which their energy and attention quickly dissipate. Through a combination of education and activism, the group wants to make judicial appointments a core electoral concern for progressive voters and a standard talking point for Democratic politicians. Among other efforts, they plan to set up a database that enables the public to track which Democratic senators vote for which jurists at all levels, making it easier to hold lawmakers accountable at election time. Yes, that seems like a pretty obvious and basic tool — and the fact that it doesn’t already exist speaks volumes about Democrats’ failure to draw attention to the radicalization of the judiciary.
The fire now raging against Mr. Trump and his nominees can’t be sustained indefinitely. Before it burns out, Democrats need to tap some of the energy to help make the courts an enduring cause for their voters. Because of the destructive game played most cynically, and with the greatest indifference to judicial integrity, by Mr. McConnell, the notion of jurists as unbiased umpires in robes has become, for now, dangerously naïve. We wish it weren’t.
Long after Mr. Trump is nothing but a toxic memory, the federal judiciary — from the Supreme Court on down — will bear the smear of his fingerprints. The coming confirmation battle will be fierce, but no matter what happens, the fight cannot end there. On Nov. 6, voters will have their first chance to arrest Mr. Trump’s warping of the judiciary. Reversing the damage already done will require a much longer-term commitment.
2018-07-05
A new volume offers insight into the personal and political life of one of the 20th century’s most influential freedom fighters.
During the 27 years of his imprisonment — from Nov. 7, 1962 to Feb. 11, 1990 — Nelson Mandela wrote hundreds of letters — to prison officials, family and friends. The most complete collection of these letters to date, “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” will be published next week. The publication coincides with what would have been Mandela’s 100th birthday, on July 18, 2018.
The volume contains more than 250 letters — well more than half of them previously unpublished. The excerpts below, provided exclusively to The New York Times, offer a first look at these unpublished letters.
An essay by the novelist on why the letters, with their detailed account of family separation, resonate so powerfully today.
Mr. Mandela was 44 years old and the father of five young children when he was first sent to prison. The writing and receiving of letters during his incarceration allowed him to maintain his political purpose of overturning South Africa’s apartheid government, to nurture his relationships with his family and friends, and to express in words his deeply held convictions and beliefs.
Many of the letters speak directly to the pain and challenges of being held apart from his family. Letter writing and mail was severely restricted by prison authorities, and many of Mr. Mandela’s letters were censored or never delivered.
Photos of Nelson and Winnie Mandela on their wedding day in June 1958.
In an official letter of complaint to officials 12 years into his imprisonment, Mr. Mandela wrote, “I sometimes wish science could invent miracles and make my daughter get her missing birthday cards and have the pleasure of knowing that her Pa loves her, thinks of her and makes efforts to reach her whenever necessary. It is significant that repeated attempts on her part to reach me and the photos she has sent have disappeared without trace whatsoever.”
These letters provide detailed accounts of the personal, ethical and political life of Mr. Mandela during the nearly 10,000 days of confinement and punishment he endured in South Africa’s prisons.
April 2, 1969
‘Hope Is a Powerful Weapon’
Writing to his wife Winnie nearly seven years into his imprisonment, Mr. Mandela shares his thoughts on the power of positive thinking.
“The Power of Positive Thinking” and “The Results of Positive Thinking” both written by the American psychologist Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, may be rewarding to read. The municipal library should stock them. I attach no importance to the metaphysical aspects of his arguments, but I consider his views on physical and psychological issues valuable. He makes the basic point that it is not so much the disability one suffers from that matters but one’s attitude to it. The man who says: I will conquer this illness and live a happy life, is already halfway through to victory.
… Remember that hope is a powerful weapon even when all else is lost. You and I, however, have gained much over the years and are making advances in important respects. You are in my thoughts every moment of my life. Nothing will happen to you darling. You will certainly recover and rise.
Nov. 3, 1969
‘The World for Which I Am Fighting’
In 1969, Mr. Mandela was not permitted to attend the funeral of his son Thembi, who had died in a car accident. In this letter to Adelaide Sam Mase, the sister-in-law of his first wife, Evelyn Mandela, he reflects on the loss of his son, and on his reading of Christian scriptures, during which he refers to St. Paul as a “perfect pest” who would not quit in his persistence and mission.
Thembi’s death was a painful experience to all of us. This was particularly so for me, especially when one takes into account the fact that I had not seen him for 5 years, and that my application for permission to attend the funeral was not granted. I will never forget Thembi.
… I read the fresh and meaningful passages from the scriptures to which Mqwati kindly referred me. …[T]he importance of the passages quoted by him lies in the fact that they tell us of a way of life which would have brought us peace and harmony many centuries ago, if mankind had fully accepted and faithfully practiced the teachings they contain. They visualize a new world where there will be no wars, where famine, disease and racial intolerance will be no more, precisely the world for which I am fighting …
The lives and actions of prominent religious men show that those who fight for a new order need not divorce theory from practice. Moses shared common hardships with his countrymen in Egypt and eventually led them physically from slavery to the Promised Land. In his efforts to establish the Christian Church, St. Paul came into conflict with established authority and vested interests. The advocate who prosecuted him is reported to have said: “The plain truth is that we find this man a perfect pest; he stirs up trouble amongst the Jews the world over, and is ringleader of the Nazarene Sect.” Thereafter this “Nazarene Sect” was to spread to almost every corner of the globe and be embraced by many nations as their state religion. The man who was described as a perfect pest later became a saint loved and respected by millions of Christians throughout the world.
Feb. 4, 1969
‘I Do Not Know, My Darlings, When I Will Return’
Mr. Mandela wrote many letters to his children, and often attempted to soften the confusion and feeling of abandonment his young daughters must have felt, before they could understand why their father was not at home. This letter was written to his daughters Zenani and Zindzi.
Zindzi says her heart is sore because I am not at home and wants to know when I will come back. I do not know, my darlings, when I will return.
You will remember that in the letter I wrote in 1966, I told you that the white judge said I should stay in jail for the rest of my life.
It may be long before I come back; it may be soon. Nobody knows when it will be, not even the judge who said I should be kept here. But I am certain that one day I will be back at home to live in happiness with you until the end of my days.
Do not worry about me now. I am happy, well and full of strength and hope. The only thing I long for is you, but whenever I feel lonely I look at your photo, which is always in front of me. It has a white frame with a black margin. It is a lovely photo. For the last two years I have been asking Mummy to send me a group photo with Zindzi, Zeni, Maki, Kgatho, Nomfundo and Kazeka. But up to now I have not received it. The photo will make me even more happy than I am at the present moment.
‘Our Cause Is Just. It Is a Fight for Human Dignity’
Mr. Mandela wrote to his wife Winnie after a visit from Thoko, the widow of his son Thembi, whose father had recently died. He reflects on the persistence of hope in the face of repeated tragedy, and restates his commitment to the cause of the anti-apartheid struggle.
When I think of the disasters that had invaded us over the past 21 months, I very often wonder what gives us the strength and courage to carry on. If calamities had the weight of physical objects we should long have been crushed down, or else, we should by now have been hunchbacked, unsteady on our feet, and with faces full of gloom and utter despair. Yet my entire body throbs with life and is full of expectations. Each day brings a fresh stock of experiences and new dreams. I am still able to walk perfectly straight and firmly. What is even more important to me is the knowledge that nothing can ever ruffle you and that your step remains as fleet and graceful as it has always been — a girl who can laugh heartily and infect others with her enthusiasm. Always remember that this is how I think of you.
… We fight against one of the last strongholds of reaction on the African Continent. In cases of this kind our duty is a simple one — at the appropriate time to state clearly, firmly and accurately the aspirations that we cherish and the greater South Africa for which we fight. Our cause is just. It is a fight for human dignity and for an honorable life. Nothing should be done or said which may be construed directly or indirectly as compromising principle, not even the threat of a more serious charge and severe penalty. In dealing with people, be they friends or foe, you are always polite and pleasant. This is equally important in public debates. We can be frank and outspoken without being reckless or abusive, polite without cringing, we can attack racialism and its evils without ourselves fostering feelings of hostility between different racial groups.
Aug. 31, 1970
In this letter to his son Makgatho, Mr. Mandela regrets that he cannot be with him to celebrate his 20th birthday. He reminisces about Makgatho’s childhood and reveals his thoughts on fighting poverty.
I have been reminiscing a great deal … Those were the days when you lived a happy life free of problems and fenced from all hardships and insecurity by parental love. You did not work, grub was galore, clothing was plentiful and you slept good. But some of your playmates those days roamed around completely naked and dirty because their parents were too poor to dress them and to keep them clean.
Often you brought them home and gave them food. Sometimes you went away with double the amount of swimming fees to help a needy friend. Perhaps then you acted purely out of a child’s affection for a friend, and not because you had become consciously aware of the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterized our social life. I hope you’re still as keen today to help those who are hard-hit by want as you were then.
It’s a good thing to help a friend whenever you can; but individual acts of hospitality are not the answer. Those who want to wipe out poverty from the face of the earth must use other weapons, weapons other than kindness. …
This is not a problem that can be handled by individual acts of hospitality. The man who attempted to use his own possessions to help all the needy would be permanently ruined and in due course himself live on alms. Experience shows that this problem can be effectively tackled only by a disciplined body of persons, who are inspired by the same ideas and united in a common cause.
March 1, 1971
‘You Felt I Had Deserted You and Mummy’
This letter was written by Mr. Mandela to his daughter Zenani not long after her 12th birthday. He recalls a painful episode from her early childhood, and attempts to explain his separation from her, and why he was not able to live at home.
… Your birth was a great relief to us. Only three months before this, Mummy had spent 15 days in jail under circumstances that were dangerous for a person in her condition. We did not know what harm might have been done to you and to her health, and were happy indeed to be blessed with a healthy and lovely daughter. Do you understand that you were nearly born in prison? Not many people have had your experience of having been in jail before they were born. You were only 25 months old when I left home and, though I met you frequently thereafter until January 1962 when I left the country for a short period, we never lived together again.
You will probably not remember an incident that moved me very much at the time and about which I never like to think. Towards the end of 1961 you were brought to the house of a friend and I was already waiting when you came. I was wearing no jacket or hat. I took you into my arms and for about ten minutes we hugged, and kissed and talked. Then suddenly you seemed to have remembered something. You pushed me aside and started searching the room. In a corner you found the rest of my clothing. After collecting it, you gave it to me and asked me to go home. You held my hand for quite some time, pulling desperately and begging me to return. It was a difficult moment for both of us. You felt I had deserted you and Mummy, and your request was a reasonable one. It was similar to the note that you added to Mummy’s letter of the 3rd December 1965 where you said: “Will you come home next year. My mother will fetch you with her car.”
Your age in 1961 made it difficult for me to explain my conduct to you, and the worried expression that I saw in your face haunted me for many months thereafter. Luckily, however, you soon cooled down and we parted peacefully. But for days I was lost in thought, wondering how I could show you that I had not failed you and the family. When I returned to South Africa in July 1962 I saw you and Zindzi twice and this was the last time we met. In 1964 you were brought to the Supreme Court in Pretoria and I was quite disappointed when you were not allowed to see me. I have been longing to see you ever since. You will be able to pay me a visit me in 1975 when you will have turned 16. But I am growing impatient and the coming five years seem longer than eternity.
‘A Saint Is a Sinner Who Keeps On Trying’
Prisoners spent long periods in solitary confinement. This passage from a letter to Winnie expresses Mr. Mandela’s ability to find positive aspects in isolation, and in prison as a place to cultivate a spiritual life.
… [Y]ou may find that the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings. In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education. These are, of course, important in measuring one’s success in material matters and it is perfectly understandable if many people exert themselves mainly to achieve all these. But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others — qualities which are within easy reach of every soul — are the foundation of one’s spiritual life.
Development in matters of this nature is inconceivable without serious introspection, without knowing yourself, your weaknesses and mistakes. At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you. Regular meditation, say about 15 minutes a day before you turn in, can be very fruitful in this regard. You may find it difficult at first to pinpoint the negative features in your life, but the 10th attempt may yield rich rewards. Never forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying. … No ax is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise and win in the end.
Aug. 19, 1976
The Power of Writing
Mr. Mandela writes to Winnie after learning that she had been arrested. He reflects on the power he acquires from writing, and a future that will produce “saints” motivated by love.
It’s always given me plenty of satisfaction and joy to write to you. I sincerely don’t know whether you’ll ever get this particular one nor those of July 18, Aug 1 and 18 and, if you do, when that’ll be. Nonetheless, the act of writing to you at this moment removes all the tensions and impurities in my feelings and thoughts. It’s the only time I ever feel that some day in the future it’ll be possible for humanity to produce saints who will really be upright and venerable, inspired in everything they do by genuine love for humanity and who’ll serve all humans selflessly.
May 27, 1979
Words That Cut Through Iron and Stone
Mr. Mandela wrote to his friend Peter Wellman, a journalist, who recently sent him a telegram asking him to be godfather to his daughter. Here, he emphasizes the solace that communications from the outside world had given him.
[T]hroughout the many years of incarceration numerous messages of good wishes and hope sent by people from different walks of life, have cut through massive iron doors and grim stone walls, bringing into the cell the splendor and warmth of springtime. No two messages are ever the same and each one has struck a special note. Yours was typical. Frankly, there are moments, like now, when I feel as if the whole world, or at least the greater part of it, has been squeezed into my tiny cell. I have comparatively more time to think and dream; obsessed with a sense of involvement and with far more friends than ever before.
Tayari Jones on the prison letters of Nelson Mandela: An essay by the novelist on why the letters, with their detailed account of family separation, resonate so powerfully today.
These excerpts are adapted from “The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela,” to be published next week by Liveright Publishing Corp., in cooperation with the Estate of Nelson Mandela and the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa.
2018-07-05
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/nyregion/ocasio-cortez-effect-election-democrat.html
After her stunning upset of Representative Joseph Crowley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately began leveraging her overnight fame to promote other progressive candidates.
In the afterglow of her upset over Representative Joseph Crowley in the New York Democratic primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made it clear that her campaign work was not done.
As she stood atop a table in a packed Bronx billiards hall to deliver her victory speech, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — who by morning would be one of the most talked-about names in American politics — reeled off a list of other progressive candidates she said needed to be sent to Congress: Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, for example, or Cori Bush in Missouri.
By morning, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had also trumpeted Ms. Bush and Ms. Pressley to her fast-growing Twitter following. Within the week, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had dispatched her volunteers to canvass for Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout and Julia Salazar, candidates for New York governor, attorney general and State Senate.
Ms. Pressley gained 5,000 Twitter followers in 24 hours. More than 120 volunteers have signed up for Ms. Teachout’s campaign this week. In the same period, Ms. Salazar has raised more than $20,000.
“All my social media went nuts, my email went nuts, and donations took off exponentially,” said Ms. Bush, who watched the victory speech in tears from her home in Missouri. Like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Ms. Bush is challenging a longtime Democratic incumbent. “It has totally changed our race.”
Cori Bush led protests after the acquittal of a white former police officer in St. Louis, who shot and killed a black driver. Ms. Bush is now running for Congress in Missouri.
It is by no means certain that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Mr. Crowley, the No. 4 Democrat in the House, can be replicated. Her grass-roots organizing, politics and persona were an ideal match for a district that has undergone sharp demographic and geographic changes since Mr. Crowley was first elected; other candidates may also find that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s brand of democratic socialism will be a harder sell outside New York.
Nonetheless, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old community organizer who has never held political office, is trying to leverage her fame to promote other progressive candidates — many female, and almost all viewed, as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was, as long shots. She has waded into races on the federal, statewide and local levels, with the same message: The time for discounting female and outsider candidates has passed.
Women in politics have long banded together to craft formal policy and to share informal tips. Emily’s List, the influential national organization that works to elect Democratic women, runs a 5,000-member Facebook group for women who are seeking office, considering a bid or supporting other female candidates. Several of the candidates Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has embraced noted that their collaborations predated last Tuesday’s primary.
But female candidates and veteran strategists agreed that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory had lent fresh energy to — and public recognition of — a new collaborative model of politics, one that unfolds both in private group chats and on public Twitter posts, in which grass-roots candidates share everything from volunteer lists to tips for handling criticism of their physical appearance.
“What I’ve seen is a lot of activity on Twitter and Facebook of women saying, ‘Hey, pay attention to these other women,’” Ms. Bush said. “We were doing it before, but after Tuesday, now it’s like, ‘Hey, no, pay attention, because this is for real. These women can win if we just get behind them.’”
Ms. Teachout, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, remembered the feeling of being snubbed by community leaders at the time, even though she would go on to win more than a third of the vote.
“There’s this tradition of not taking outsider women seriously,” said Ms. Teachout, who endorsed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in May. For those women now to support each other, she continued, is “to say, ‘We’re not going to allow that to happen anymore.’”
The most visible manifestations of this support have unfolded on social media, where Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has also touted several other insurgent candidates, such as Kerri Harris, a Senate candidate in Delaware. But the cross-pollination has taken more logistical forms, too.
In the week before New York’s primary, Ms. Salazar helped Ms. Ocasio-Cortez with get-out-the-vote efforts, as did an organizer for Ms. Pressley, who traveled from Boston to participate. Since the election, volunteers for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (who is virtually guaranteed victory in November’s general election in her predominantly Democratic district) have migrated to those of Ms. Teachout and Ms. Salazar; Ms. Teachout’s aides, who previously coordinated volunteers via phone calls, have begun dispatching them through a group chat on WhatsApp, a tactic adopted from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign.
Ms. Salazar, who like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, said she had heard from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s volunteers before their campaign was even over.
“There used to be a tendency to operate with this vision of scarcity, rather than a vision of abundance, when it comes to political capital,” Ms. Salazar said. “I think that we see a shift.”
[Read about Amy McGrath, who set her sites on the Marines and now Congress. Her mother is the reason.]
Our Revolution, the progressive organization led by alumni of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is planning to unroll a project, called Our Revolution(ary) Women. The effort is designed to help the female candidates in New York it has endorsed, including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Ms. Salazar and Ms. Nixon, amplify each other’s platforms.
Rebecca Katz, an adviser to Ms. Nixon’s campaign to unseat Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in New York, said such a spirit of partnership was previously unthinkable in the transactional world of politics.
“Do you know how long it takes for someone to send an email on your behalf?” said Ms. Katz, a veteran strategist who has worked for Mayor Bill de Blasio and the former Nevada senator, Harry Reid. “For women candidates, especially, that has been extremely hard. There’s usually so much back and forth, back and forth, please, can I have an endorsement?”
Ms. Nixon had struggled to attract the endorsements of prominent elected officials. But since Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s win, she has secured the support of several, including the former New York City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who cited Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in her announcement.
Kelly Dittmar, a professor at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics, said alliances among female politicians, while not unprecedented, appeared to have increased significantly in pace, profile and extent this election cycle. She attributed the change to technology, the proliferation of female candidates and the heightened attention they have attracted.
And while past collaborations had often focused on more intangible goods such as encouragement or ideas, “what goes a little bit further, which is the sharing of actual resources, in some ways, of the campaign — that, I’m not aware of historically,” Professor Dittmar said.
It is also uncertain if the nationwide excitement she has generated for candidates such as Ms. Nixon or Ms. Bush will energize the specific constituencies they need to elect them.
But with many of these female candidates facing challengers whose fund-raising dwarfs theirs, collaborating may be a product not just of camaraderie but also of necessity.
“They’re folks that aren’t necessarily endorsed by the party or don’t have access to the party networks,” Professor Dittmar said. “So in order to build that support base — among voters, but especially in terms of finances and volunteers — they have to build something new or at least draw from existing infrastructure for progressive candidates.”
The ties among women’s campaigns are far from limited to those in the radius of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s star power. Liuba Grechen Shirley, who won the Democratic nomination for a House seat on Long Island, said she had spoken to other candidates across the country, as well as women who said they were considering running because of the Federal Election Commission’s landmark decision that she could use campaign funds for child care.
An informal cheering group has emerged among three female congressional candidates who all graduated from the Naval Academy: Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, Amy McGrath of Kentucky, and Elaine Luria of Virginia have frequently exchanged encouraging Twitter posts.
“I trust them in ways that I just don’t have the trust from regular politicians,” Ms. McGrath said of her fellow Naval Academy graduates. “They aren’t one, and I’m not one.”
But most female candidates agreed that the most important outcome of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was the legitimacy it lent to networks of women that many had previously dismissed.
“I do sense a huge difference now,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.
“I think when people see that we are using this bullhorn for something that’s not self-interested,” she added, “they’re more likely to pay attention.”
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/world/europe/poland-court-protests.html
Justice Malgorzata Gersdorf addressed protesters and journalists before entering the Supreme Court building in Warsaw on Wednesday.
WARSAW — Surrounded by cheering supporters, Poland’s top Supreme Court justice took a defiant stand on the courthouse steps here Wednesday morning, hours after the government purged the tribunal. She vowed to keep fighting to protect the Constitution and the independence of the nation’s courts.
“I’m doing this to defend the rule of law and to testify to the truth about the line between the Constitution and the violation of the Constitution,” the justice, Malgorzata Gersdorf, told the crowd. “I hope that legal order will return to Poland.”
At the stroke of midnight, the government had effectively forced her and more than two dozen other justices out of their jobs, but on Wednesday morning, the authorities did not prevent her from entering the building.
The courthouse confrontation was followed by dueling news conferences, fiery speeches and more street protests.
The only thing that seemed certain was that the Supreme Court itself was in disarray, with the purged judges refusing to recognize their dismissal, and government officials saying that they would no longer be allowed to hear cases.
In a reflection of the chaos, the jurist named by the government as Justice Gersdorf’s successor, Justice Jozef Iwulski, 66, said: “President Andrzej Duda neither appointed me, nor did he entrust any duties to me. He didn’t make any decision in a concrete manner.”
In fact, it was Justice Gersdorf who had recommended that Justice Iwulski fill in for her — a move experts thought would make it harder for the party in power to stack the court.
After giving yet another press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Justice Gersdorf said she would take a “vacation,” leaving Justice Iwulski in charge.
By day’s end, with even Polish legal experts admitting utter confusion about where things stood, crowds once again gathered in front of the Supreme Court.
Lech Walesa, who led the Solidarity labor movement in the 1980s that helped topple the Communist government and who later served as Poland’s president, joined the demonstrators.
In a radio interview earlier in the day, Mr. Walesa said he would pursue peaceful means to protect the Constitution, but warned of dire consequences if the governing party did not back down.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s governing party, Law and Justice, which has sought for years to exert control over the judiciary.CreditKacper Pempel/Reuters
“What will happen is what I predicted at the very beginning: There will be a civil war, there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said. “This is the path of civil war. I’d like to avoid it.”
The new rules lower the mandatory retirement age for judges to 65 from 70, which could force out up to 27 of the 72 Supreme Court justices, and also call for a disciplinary chamber to be established, raising fears that the governing Law and Justice Party will use the new directive to intimidate judges.
Law and Justice, which has sought for years to take over the judiciary and resorted to authoritarian means to maintain and enhance its grip on power, said it would soon name judges to replace those now obligated to retire.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party leader, said that Justice Gersdorf and her supporters were “doomed to fail miserably,” according to the right-wing newsmagazine Gazeta Polska, which published an interview with him on Wednesday.
Mr. Kaczynski was also undeterred by the threats of sanctions by the European Union, which he accused of trampling on Poland’s sovereignty, with the larger members of the bloc using their power to “brutally exert pressure” on smaller and weaker ones.
The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, speaking at the European Parliament on Wednesday, defended the new laws and added his own criticisms of the bloc.
“Many Europeans don’t like the direction the European Union is going in,” Mr. Morawiecki said. “When they feel that they’re losing influence on the future of Europe and the world, then they’re going to oppose what’s happening.”
“You can call that populism,” he said, “but at the end of the day, we are going to have to ask questions asked by citizens and their expectations.”
On Monday, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, referred the case to Europe’s highest court, but Poland has a month to respond, and any ruling might come too late to stop the overhaul.
When Law and Justice came to power, it campaigned against what it saw as a corrupt bureaucracy, calling for Poland to “get up from its knees.”
The message found widespread appeal in villages and towns, especially in eastern Poland, where many people felt left behind as the country moved rapidly to embrace Western values and capitalism.
Many of the safety nets that were part of the old, Soviet-style system had disappeared, and rapid economic growth mainly helped better-educated city dwellers.
Demonstrators held cardboard signs inscribed with the word “Konstytucja,” or Constitution, in Warsaw on Wednesday.
While Law and Justice’s emotional appeal lay in its nationalist rhetoric and frequent reminders of historic betrayals of Poland, it has also been bolstered by generous social policies, including the establishment of a monthly stipend for new mothers.
But for Mr. Kaczynski, transforming the courts was always a central goal.
When his party was in power from 2005 to 2007, many of its legislative efforts were blocked by judges. He came to believe that the transition to democracy that started in 1989 was flawed because many former Communists were allowed to hold onto their positions. Although the number of people from the Communist era still in judicial positions has dwindled, the party says that Communist thinking still infects the system.
So when the party returned to power in 2015, it moved swiftly to rebuild the judicial system. It stacked the Constitutional Court, which decides if legislation violates the Constitution. Once that court was under the party’s control, its lawmakers passed a series of measures aimed at other parts of the court system.
But their first effort to reshape the Supreme Court, a year ago, was met with widespread protests. The government backed down.
Last winter, it proposed new measures, slightly watered down, that critics said would have the same effect — turning the Supreme Court into an instrument of the party.
In December, after a devastating report by the Venice Commission, which monitors rule-of-law issues for the European Union, the bloc of nations invoked Article 7 of its founding treaty to take action against Poland. It became the first country in the history of the union to be threatened with losing its voting rights.
This time, however, the government would not be deterred.
Under the legislation, President Duda can grant exemptions to the mandatory retirement age, but judges must ask him to do so. The president did so for Justice Iwulski on Tuesday.
Justice Gersdorf and many colleagues refused, setting the stage for the standoff on Wednesday morning.
The country’s deputy minister of justice, Michal Wojcik, told the Polish Press Agency that Justice Gersdorf had been allowed into the court because no citizen is barred entry, but he said she would not be allowed to rule on cases.
The “recruitment procedure” to fill vacant seats has started, Mr. Wojcik said, and they are expected to be filled “in a matter of weeks.”
Outside the court, young and old gathered to make their voices heard. Among them was Adam Strzembosz, 87, who helped draft the Constitution and was the first president of the Supreme Court after the fall of Communist rule.
Struggling to be heard above the crowd, he said that the Constitution was clear: Every judge has the right to serve a full six-year term, and a new age limit should not be used to cut terms short.
by:
2018-07-02
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/nyregion/migrant-mother-reunited-children.html
A migrant mother separated from her children at the border traveled across the country to join them in New York.
Yeni González left her home in rural Guatemala in mid-May. Days later, she crossed the United States border, by night, with her three young children. They were picked up by Border Patrol, she said, and taken to a detention center near Yuma, Ariz.
At 5 one morning, agents woke the children there and took them away.
Ms. González’s children — Deyuin, Jamelin and Lester — are among more than 2,000 young migrants who were separated from their adult relatives under the Trump Administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.
Despite President Trump’s executive order ending separations and a judge’s order calling on federal authorities to put families back together in no more than 30 days, most families have not been reunited.
This week, Ms. González’s family became the rare exception.
“New York,” she said in Spanish when she spotted the skyline from a car. “My whole heart is there.”
While she was held in detention centers in Arizona, Deyuin, Jamelin and Lester were sent to a shelter in New York, along with more than 300 children. Children separated at the border were scattered across 17 states.
Ms. González cannot yet retrieve her children because of a long list of requirements from the federal government, but she saw them again on Tuesday, after more than five weeks apart.
The relatively swift reunion was the result of Ms. González’s family’s efforts — they contacted a New York immigration lawyer after learning where the children were — and the energetic work of a group of New York-area mothers who heard Ms. González’s story on the radio.
The group launched a crowdfunding campaign to cover her $7,500 bond and organized a volunteer-powered caravan to drive her to New York. (She couldn’t fly because immigration authorities had confiscated her identification.)
We covered the first and last legs of Ms. González’s four-day journey from Arizona to New York, learning, along the way, about what she had been through.
Deyuin, Jamelin and Lester, ages 6, 9 and 11, at Cayuga Centers in Manhattan.
While Ms. González was in detention, her children were placed at Cayuga Centers, the largest of 10 social services agencies in the New York City area where separated children have been assigned. They have been living with a foster family, along with other children.
They spoke to their mother just twice in their time apart. Jamelin, the little girl, told her mother she had to brush her own hair, and that she had chest pains. Suspecting it was pent-up emotion, her mother told her to get it all out — to cry. Jamelin said she was not allowed to cry. Her caretakers scolded her. “They told her if she cried, it would slow down her case,” her mother said.
Ms. González was held in two detention centers in Arizona. At the first, outside Tucson, she was kept in a chilled area she called the “hielera” — or “ice box” — for more than two weeks. She said she was held with dozens of other women, with no beds and only foil emergency blankets for warmth.
With the lights constantly on, the women lost track of the hour, Ms. González said, and would often be startled to learn it was the middle of the day, not the dead of night. “We didn’t even have the right to know the time of day,” she said.
On June 28, Ms. González’s bond was posted in New York City by the woman who had started the crowdfunding campaign, Julie Schwietert Collazo, a writer and a mother of three. Hours later, Ms. González was released and emerged from the sprawling Eloy Detention Center with her lawyer from New York, José Xavier Orochena.
She kept her head down and had tears in her eyes as they spoke to a few journalists who had gathered.
The night she was released, Ms. González met with Janey Pearl Starks, an immigration activist based in Phoenix, who was the first of several hosts and drivers. That night, in Phoenix, Ms. Pearl Starks settled Ms. González into her hotel room.
At all hours in the detention center, Ms. González said, you could hear women crying. For comfort, they gathered and sang religious songs. “Quietly,” she said, so as not to attract the guards’ attention.
After setting off from Arizona, Ms. González was handed off between volunteers in several states. With just a backpack, she switched cars every day. Her favorite place on the route, she said, was Chicago, where she marveled at the tall buildings and the lake.
In Pennsylvania, Ms. González sat with Sarah Menkedick on a Pittsburgh porch before Ms. Menkedick’s husband, Jorge Santiago, set out to drive her toward New York. They talked about Ms. González’s work cleaning houses in Guatemala and about their children.
The people she met on the trip wanted to impart the message that there were people in the United States who cared about what had happened to her, Ms. González said. Their meetings often ended with tearful hugs — the human touch Ms. González said she missed while in detention.
With every day on the road, Ms. González opened up a bit more. She sobbed as she recalled being separated from her children.
On Monday, Ms. González arrived in New York City, on a sweltering summer night. At one of two rallies, in Long Island City, Queens, she was embraced by a woman carrying a sign that said, “Yeni, my new American sibling, we are here to welcome you.”
The woman said she was a mother of three from Queens. “I can’t even imagine,” said Mary Jobaida. “We American families are here for her. We are all here for Yeni — and for all those who are still waiting to be reunited with their families, we are finger-crossing for them.”
Finally, on Tuesday morning, Ms. González saw her children. Accompanied by her lawyer, Ms. Pearl Starks, and Representative Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Harlem, she made her way into Cayuga Centers.
More than an hour later, she walked out, holding a blue-and-white lollipop. She had words of thanks for everyone who helped. “Thanks to them, I’m here, free, seeing my children. Thank you to all the people who helped to bring me here from Arizona.”
She added: “Thank you to the City of New York.”
The lollipop was a gift from her daughter, Jamelin.
Even as they had played that day, there lurked doubts about the long road ahead. Ms. González’s lawyer filed two sponsorship applications, so that either Ms. González or a relative in North Carolina could take custody of the children, but he was told that there was a backlog on fingerprinting, and it might be 60 days before they were released. Meanwhile, in Arizona, representatives attended hearings in immigration court on Ms. González’s behalf, so that she would not be deported for failing to appear.
by:
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/us/migrant-families-contractors-campaign-contributions.html
A dust storm blew through CoreCivic’s Eloy Detention Center in Arizona last month.
Many of the nonprofits, corporations and religious groups watching over migrant children detained at the southwest border have been in this business for years — and they have a history of political connections, donating millions of dollars to Democrats and Republicans alike.
Now, as new federal policies greatly expand the number of migrants held in detention, it is also becoming clear that some of the players in this billion-dollar industry have particularly strong ties to the Trump administration.
The president’s education secretary provided funding to one of the groups. His defense secretary sat on the board of another. Mr. Trump’s own inauguration fund collected $500,000 from two private prison companies housing detained migrant families. And some of the contractors employ prominent Republican lobbyists with ties to Mr. Trump and his administration, including someone who once lobbied for his family business.
There is no indication that political favors or influence motivated any of the contracts, and the service providers have no apparent ties to the agency awarding most of the contracts, the Department of Health and Human Services. Many of the groups had federal contracts to work with migrant children long before President Trump took office.
Yet the administration’s new focus on ending the practice of “catch and release,” under which an ever-larger number of those apprehended at the border are held in detention, has meant that the business of housing and caring for migrant children is booming. A review of regulatory filings, campaign donations and lobbying records reveals a number of important links between people in Mr. Trump’s orbit and the groups poised to earn financial rewards from his immigration policies.
Migrant youths detained at the border are housed at more than 100 government-contracted shelters, detention centers and other facilities across the country.
Jose Xavier Orochena, a lawyer, entered the Eloy center to bond out his client, a Guatemalan immigrant who had been separated from her three children at the southwest border.
The groups operating them have hauled in more than $1 billion in contracts in recent years to house, transport and watch over migrant children in federal custody. Although some of the contractors have spoken out against the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy on border enforcement and the separation of more than 2,300 migrant children from their families, most have made few public remarks and have instead quietly defended themselves, saying they housed and cared for undocumented youths during the Obama administration without controversy, and remain dedicated to protecting vulnerable children.
Mr. Trump’s recent executive order to scale back the policy and keep migrant families together as much as possible will not necessarily undercut this business. The existing shelters will still house children who cross the border alone, and the president’s order called for migrant families to be detained together, which could spur another round of contracts to expand the number of family detention centers.
Two private prison companies are already operating a pair of family detention centers in Texas. Planned new emergency shelters at military bases are also likely to be operated by contractors, as were similar facilities that opened temporarily on bases as a result of a surge in border crossings during the Obama administration.
The two private prison companies that run family centers, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, are among the politically connected contractors. Each donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund. And the Geo Group’s political action committee, while bipartisan in its giving, allocates many of its biggest donations to Republicans. These include $170,000 to a joint fund-raising committee set up between the Republican Party and the Trump campaign; $50,000 to a “super PAC” supporting the president; and, more recently, donations to Republican Party organizations focusing on the House and Senate.
The Geo Group also hired a lobbyist, Brian Ballard, who lobbied for Mr. Trump’s golf courses in Florida before he became president. A recent disclosure form shows that, on behalf of the Geo Group, Mr. Ballard’s firm was registered to lobby about “immigration regulation.”
In a statement, the Geo Group said that its family center has “cared exclusively for mothers together with their children since 2014 when it was established by the Obama administration.”
The company said the political contributions “should not be construed as an endorsement of all policies or positions adopted by any individual candidate,” adding that it does “not take a position on nor have we ever advocated for or against criminal justice or immigration policies.”
Steve Owen, a spokesman for CoreCivic, said that the company’s donation to Mr. Trump’s inauguration was “consistent with our past practice of civic participation in and support for the inauguration process.” He added that “under longstanding policy, CoreCivic does not draft, lobby for, promote or in any way take a position on proposals, policies or legislation that determine the basis or duration of an individual’s incarceration or detention.”
In contrast to deep-pocketed private prison companies, many of the groups winning government contracts to care for migrant children are nonprofits and religious groups. Some of those groups are operating shelters for children separated from their families, as well as running transitional foster care after the children leave the shelters.
Although these nonprofits are not doling out campaign donations, some nonetheless have ties to the Trump administration.
Bethany Christian Services, a social services group that provides foster care to migrant children, has long been backed by the family foundation of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary. Over the years, the group has received more than $419,000 in grants from the foundation, tax records show.
Bethany has said it was “deeply troubled and concerned” at the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement policy, and said, “We believe that all children belong with their families.” The group said it works with federal agencies to “reunify unaccompanied and separated children with their families as soon as possible.”
More broadly, Bethany said that it has been working with unaccompanied migrant children for more than 20 years, long before the Trump administration, and rejected any suggestion that its work might be influenced by the support it receives from the DeVos family.
“Decades of hard work has provided us with the know-how required to support children and families in crisis,” the organization said in a statement. “While we are extremely grateful to our donors and supporters, the idea that any single individual or organization could cause us to change practices is simply false and diminishes the incredible work of all those firmly focused on the well-being of displaced children.”
Ms. DeVos’s personal spokesman, Greg McNeilly, said that the family was proud to invest in Bethany’s work, and that the organization had a “great reputation.”
Another member of the Trump cabinet, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, once sat on the board of General Dynamics, which over the last 18 years has received millions of dollars in contracts from the Department of Health and Human Services office that works with migrant children. The company does not operate or construct any migrant shelters, but instead offers training and technical assistance to the shelters and provides other administrative services to the government. The company, which has a number of government contracts unrelated to the migrant children program, said it has “no role in the separation of children and families.”
Mr. Mattis, who resigned from the board upon entering the Trump administration in early 2017, is not the company’s only connection to the president. A General Dynamics employee served on Mr. Trump’s transition team, and the company’s chief executive, Phebe Novakovic, attended a meeting at the White House last year with Mr. Trump and other corporate executives. On two occasions, Ms. Novakovic has praised Mr. Trump’s trade actions.
General Dynamics, which has registered to lobby on the issue of “border security,” also operates a PAC that has donated to members of both parties, including more than $1.1 million to Republican candidates and causes during this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company, which says its PAC “supports Congressional candidates who support a strong national defense, regardless of their party affiliation,” made one of those donations to the congressional campaign of Greg Pence, the brother of Vice President Mike Pence.
BCFS — a nonprofit group that operates a number of shelters housing migrant children, including a tent city outside of El Paso that has been the focus of protests — counts a former Republican congressman, Henry Bonilla, as a longtime board member and a lobbyist. In December 2016, Mr. Bonilla met with Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, to discuss joining his cabinet as agriculture secretary. BCFS has also long retained Ray Sullivan, a lobbyist and onetime chief of staff to Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who is now Mr. Trump’s energy secretary.
In a statement, BCFS said its “children sheltering mission has spanned Democratic and Republican Administrations, and comes with proper government procurement and oversight built in.” Mr. Bonilla and Mr. Sullivan, BCFS said, help the group “respond to community needs and help inform federal, state and local officials about the BCFS System’s capabilities and work.”
2018-07-03
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/books/captain-america-ta-nehisi-coates-annotated.html
Captain America enjoys a rarefied position in the superhero pantheon. Since his 1940 debut (in which he punches Adolf Hitler in the face), Captain America has been defined as the quintessential patriot. In stories that have riffed on divisive political moments — Watergate, the War on Terror — the Captain, also known as Steve Rogers, has emerged as a complex man, one willing to question the direction his country takes.
Marvel announced in February that the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates would assume writing duties on a new Captain America series, with the first issue rolling out on Independence Day. Mr. Coates, now in his second year of working on the acclaimed “Black Panther,” noted that he relishes the chance to adapt “a walking emblem of greatest-generation propaganda” for the contemporary moment.
For Coates, taking on this icon was not about leaving his mark on the character but embodying what he called the character’s “Lincolnesque optimism.”
“The opportunity of writing ‘Captain America’ wasn’t to make Steve Rogers talk like the son of somebody who had been in the Black Panther Party,” he said in a phone interview with The Times. “The opportunity was the son of somebody who had been in the Black Panther Party to talk like Steve Rogers. To get into that perspective.”
Nuke, Captain America’s enemy, killing protesters at the National Mall.
Captain America is “trying to say, ‘What happened?’ How can it be that this country that he loves and believes in was taken over by Hydra?” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
In last year’s “Secret Empire” series, Steve Rogers revealed himself as the supreme leader of Hydra, an ancient terrorist organization once allied with the Nazis and long depicted as the enemy to Marvel’s greatest heroes. That the good guy was in fact one of the bad guys struck characters and even fans as a kind of blasphemy.
The one, true, Captain America did finally return (it’s a complicated story), and managed to defeat his evil doppelgänger. In this issue, Cap is fighting new enemies, but wondering if something deep in the American psyche made the nation susceptible to Hydra’s power. For Mr. Coates, the story is informed by the current climate — just as past Captain America stories were informed by theirs. “Captain America is a political hero,” he said. “It’s impossible to write an apolitical Cap story. My dude has a flag on his chest. It’s not incidental.”
“The idea is that Cap almost stands apart in many ways from the organs of the country. Really, he is supposed to be about something bigger, and that is the ideal of what America is supposed to be. So what he is doing when he talks about these stories is he’s trying to figure out — and this is a consistent notion in Captain America stories — is how can he operate in a country that falls so far?” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
In this installment, Cap is attacked at Washington’s National Mall; his enemies are a group of clones of Nuke, a flag-faced super soldier he first encountered in 1986’s “Daredevil” No. 233.
If the clones represent a nation tipping into chaos, so, too, did Captain America, at least in his last outing as the leader of Hydra. America fell, and he, in a sense, fell with it. Even the dialogue is an explicit echo of that earlier story, in which our hero affirmed that he was loyal to nothing — “except the Dream.” His belief in the American ideal is unwavering.
Leinil Yu for Marvel Entertainment
Leinil Yu for Marvel Entertainment
“I think what we were trying to do, more than anything, was to get some sense of what the wreckage had been. What damage this attack by these Nukes, who are this warped vision of Captain America, had actually wrought on the Mall. It was the literal storytelling.”— Ta-Nehisi Coates
The challenge faced by Mr. Coates and the artist Leinil Yu in the panels above is to convey scale; to establish that “something really bad had happened,” Mr. Coates said.
Even amid this destruction, Cap finds a way to tell a small child to be brave for his father and for all Americans. This moment shows the writer choosing to embody the character’s “Lincolnesque optimism” about his nation, reminding fans that he stands for something good.
“This is a comic book about ideals in actual crisis. What happens when we stray too far from our ideals? Cap is interrogating that. Hydra was able to take over — in his view, we had forgotten something.”— Ta-Nehisi Coates
The book’s final scene takes place in Russia. Selene, an X-Men supervillain, is seen draining the life force from a Hydra agent. The moment is framed as neither glorious nor righteous, but as horrific. Even despite the scale of the destruction the artist and writer set out to convey, it’s obvious that something worse is on the horizon.
In the months ahead, Mr. Coates plans on exploring the idea that America may have forgotten something ineffable about itself. “Captain America” No. 1 isn’t the start of his treatise on the Trump era nor is it making a case against the character. Instead, Mr. Coates seems committed to approaching his hero thoughtfully, untroubled by comics fans’ political leanings.
“You have to write what you feel,” he said. “Comics are art. So the art that is conceived strictly to make people happy, that’s not art I’m interesting in consuming.”