Sunday, June 24, 2018

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, SUNDAY, JUNE 24, 2018







On Thursday, June 28thWomens March and partners are organizing a mass civil disobedience in Washington, D.C.

We call on women from all communities to descend on our nation's capital and demand the safety and freedom of immigrant families and children.We will put our bodies on the line to demand an end to this administration's the zero-tolerance policy that automatically criminalizes undocumented immigrants and tears families apart.

We will take escalated action in D.C. on June 28th demanding lawmakers and federal officials do everything in their power to #EndFamilyDetention. On Saturday, June 30, we will rise up in cities across the nation to say #FamiliesBelongTogether. These children and families are counting on us. We can not allow these atrocities to go unchallenged. The time to ACT is NOW.

Marching is no longer enough, not when this administration is enacting policies that violently separate families, incarcerate children in prison camps and automatically criminalizes their parents. Not when we see photos and videos of children separated from their families and held in child prison camps. Not when we hear their cries for their parents and see their fear and trauma.

​This is a DEFINING moment. One that will shape our generation. We need bold, strategic and targeted action. We cannot be silent.

*Direct action training and legal support will be provided to all women participating in nonviolent civil disobedience*
https://www.endfamilyseparation.us
Endorsed by: 
Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity
Latino Community Foundation
NAACP SF
On June 30th join a FAMILIES BELONG TOGETHER action in Washington, DC and around the country
On June 30, we're rallying around the country and in Washington, DC to tell Donald Trump and his administration to stop cruelly separating kids from their parents.

https://front.moveon.org


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Action Alert – PA Parole Board Must Grant Janet and Janine Africa Parole
https://www.facebook.com/events/261542041062217/?notif_t=plan_user_invited&notif_id=1529701055653220

Take action Monday, June 25th - Wednesday, June 27th

Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole: 717-787-5699

Send Email message: ra-pbppopc@pa.gov

On Saturday, June 16, MOVE member Debbie Africa was released on parole from State Correctional Institution (SCI) Cambridge Springs after 39 years and 10 months of incarceration.

Fellow MOVE members Janet and Janine Africa, however, were denied parole despite having virtually identical Department of Corrections records as Debbie.

Janet, Janine, and Debbie all:

- Have gone more than 20 years without a misconduct for any rule violation

- Were recommended for parole by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

- Were recommended for parole by former PA DOC Secretary Martin Horn

- Were recommended for parole by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office

- It is beyond dispute that Debbie, Janet and Janine present zero threat to public safety

The Parole Board has denied them the opportunity to return home based on unlawful factors. Claiming the two minimized the offense and did not express remorse, the Board ignored the only relevant assessment under Pennsylvania law: that the two do not present a threat to public safety.

The Parole Board also lied, claiming that Janet and Janine received the negative recommendation of the prosecuting attorney, when in truth Philadelphia's District Attorney, Larry Krasner, recommended all three women – Debbie, Janet, and Janine – for parole, his office stating that it "was "confident" that Janet and Janine "will not pose a threat to the Philadelphia community" and that their "continued incarceration does not make our city safer."

Take Action – Call the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons and Parole Chairman Leo Dunn:

Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole: 717-787-5699 – Ask for Chairman Leo Dunn's office

Send Email message: ra-pbppopc@pa.gov

Talking Points:

- Janet and Janine have not had any rule violation in more than 20 years
- Each has the support of the DOC, former DOC Secretary and nationally-renowned corrections expert Martin Horn, and the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office
- Janet and Janine do not present a threat to public safety and should be released just like Debbie
- The Board must stop making political decisions in the MOVE cases: when judged on their record in the DOC and community support Janet and Janine have a right to be released

Demand:

- That Leo Dunn agree to have the Board reconsider its denial
- Grant Janet and Janine Africa release on parole
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
Questions and comments may be sent to claude@freedomarchives.org



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Listen to 'The Daily': Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?

By Michael Barbaro, May 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/podcasts/the-daily/kevin-cooper-death-row.html?emc=edit_ca_20180530&nl=california-today&nlid=2181592020180530&te=1




Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile deviceVia Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher

The sole survivor of an attack in which four people were murdered identified the perpetrators as three white men. The police ignored suspects who fit the description and arrested a young black man instead. He is now awaiting execution.

On today's episode:
• Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California for three decades.



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Feds extend deadline for public comments on future draft

The feds initially provided only a few days for the public to submit comments regarding the future of the draft in the United States. This mirrored their process of announcing public hearings with only a few days notice. Due to pressure, they have extended the deadline for your online comments until September. 

They need to hear from us!

  • It's time to end draft registration once and for all.
  • Don't expand the draft to women. End it for everyone.
  • No national service linked to the military--including immigration enforcement.
  • Until the US is invaded by a foreign power, stop pretending that the draft is about anything other than empire.
  • Submit your own comments online here.
As we have been reporting to you, a federal commission has been formed to address the future of draft registration in the United States and whether the draft should end or be extended.
The press release states "The Commission wants to learn why people serve and why people don't; the barriers to participation; whether modifications to the selective service system are needed; ways to increase the number of Americans in service; and more."
Public hearings are currently scheduled for the following cities. We encourage folks to attend these hearings by checking the commission's website for the actual dates and locations of these hearings (usually annouced only days before).
  • June 26/27, 2018: Iowa City, IA
  • June 28/29, 2018: Chicago, IL
  • July 19/20, 2018: Waco, TX
  • August 16/17, 2018: Memphis, TN
  • September 19/21, 2018: Los Angeles, CA
For more background information, read our recent post "Why is the government soliciting feedback on the draft now?"

Courage to Resist Podcast: The Future of Draft Registration in the United States

We had draft registration resister Edward Hasbrouck on the Courage to Resistpodcast this week to explain what's going on. Edward talks about his own history of going to prison for refusing to register for the draft in 1983, the background on this new federal commission, and addresses liberal arguments in favor of involuntary service. Edward explains:
When you say, "I'm not willing to be drafted", you're saying, "I'm going to make my own choices about which wars we should be fighting", and when you say, "You should submit to the draft", you're saying, "You should let the politicians decide for you."
What's happening right now is that a National Commission … has been appointed to study the question of whether draft registration should be continued, whether it should be expanded to make women, as well as men register for the draft, whether a draft itself should be started, whether there should be some other kind of Compulsory National Service enacted.
The Pentagon would say, and it's true, they don't want a draft. It's not plan A, but it's always been plan B, and it's always been the assumption that if we can't get enough volunteers, if we get in over our head, if we pick a larger fight than we can pursue, we always have that option in our back pocket that, "If not enough people volunteer, we're just going to go go to the draft, go to the benches, and dragoon enough people to fight these wars."
The first real meaningful opportunity for a national debate 
about the draft in decades . . .
Courage to Resist -- Support the Troops Who Refuse to Fight!
484 Lake Park Ave. No. 41, Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559

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Incarceration Nation
Emergency Action Alert:
RELEASE DRAFTERS OF THE AGREEMENT TO END HOSTILITIES FROM SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
In October, 2017, the 2 year court monitoring period of the Ashker v. Governor settlement to limit solitary confinement in California expired. Since then, the four drafters of the Agreement to End Hostilities and lead hunger strike negotiators – Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, Arturo Castellanos, George Franco, and Todd Ashker, have all been removed from general population and put in solitary in Administrative Segregation Units, based on fabricated information created by staff and/or collaborating "inmate informants." In Todd Ashker's case, he is being isolated "for his own protection," although he does not ask for nor desire to be placed in isolation for this or any reason. Sitawa has since been returned to population, but can still not have visitors.
Please contact CDCr Secretary Scott Kernan and Governor Edmund G. Brown and demand CDCr:
• Immediately release back into general population any of the four lead organizers still held in solitary
• Return other Ashker class members to general population who have been placed in Ad Seg 
• Stop the retaliation against all Ashker class members and offer them meaningful rehabilitation opportunities
Contact Scott Kernan. He prefers mailed letters to 1515 S Street, Sacramento 95811. If you call 916-324-7308, press 0 for the Communications office. Email matthew.westbrook@cdcr.ca.gov and cc: scott.kernan@cdcr.ca.gov
Contact Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.,  c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814; Phone: (916) 445-2841Fax: (916) 558-3160; Email: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov39mail/
As a result of the administrative reviews established after the second prisoner hunger strike in 2011 and the Ashker settlement of 2015, California's SHU population has decreased from 3923 people in October 2012 to 537 in January 2018.  Returning these four men and many other hunger strikers back to solitary in the form of Ad Seg represents an intentional effort to undermine the Agreement to End Hostilities and the settlement, and return to the lock 'em up mentality of the 1980's.
Sitawa writes: "What many of you on the outside may not know is the long sordid history of CDCr's ISU [Institutional Services Unit]/ IGI [Institutional Gang Investigator]/Green Wall syndicate's [organized groups of guards who act with impunity] pattern and practice, here and throughout its prison system, of retaliating, reprisals, intimidating, harassing, coercing, bad-jacketing [making false entries in prisoner files], setting prisoners up, planting evidence, fabricating and falsifying reports (i.e., state documents), excessive force upon unarmed prisoners, [and] stealing their personal property . . ." 
CDCr officials are targeting the Ashker v. Governor class members to prevent them from being able to organize based on the Agreement to End Hostilities, and to obstruct their peaceful efforts to effect genuine changes - for rehabilitation, returning home, productively contributing to the improvement of their communities, and deterring recidivism.
Please help put a stop to this retaliation with impunity. Contact Kernan and Brown today:
Scott Kernan prefers mailed letters to 1515 S Street, Sacramento 95811. If you call 916-324-7308, press 0 for the Communications office. Email matthew.westbrook@cdcr.ca.gov and cc: scott.kernan@cdcr.ca.gov
Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.,  c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173, Sacramento, CA 95814; Phone: (916) 445-2841Fax: (916) 558-3160; Email: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov39mail/
Read statements from the reps: 
Todd – We stand together so prisoners never have to go through the years of torture we did  (with Open Letter to Gov. Brown, CA legislators and CDCR Secretary Kernan)




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"There Was a Crooked Prez"
By Dr. Nayvin Gordon

There was a crooked Prez, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked lawyer upon a crooked isle,
They bought a crooked election which caught a crooked mission,
And they both lived together in a little crooked prison.

April 28, 2018

Dr. Gordon is a California Family Physician who has written many articles on health and politics.


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It is so beautiful to see young people in this country rising up to demand an end to gun violence. But what is Donald Trump's response? Instead of banning assault weapons, he wants to give guns to teachers and militarize our schools. But one of the reasons for mass school shootings is precisely because our schools are already militarized. Florida shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was trained by U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program while he was in high school.
Yesterday, Divest from the War Machine coalition member, Pat Elder, was featured on Democracy Now discussing his recent article about the JROTC in our schools. The JROTC teaches children how to shoot weapons. It is often taught by retired soldiers who have no background in teaching. They are allowed to teach classes that are given at least equal weight as classes taught by certified and trained teachers. We are pulling our children away from classes that expand their minds and putting them in classes that teach them how to be killing machines. The JROTC program costs our schools money. It sends equipment. But, the instructors and facilities must be constructed and paid for by the school.
The JROTC puts our children's futures at risk. Children who participate in JROTC shooting programs are exposed to lead bullets from guns. They are at an increased risk when the shooting ranges are inside. The JROTC program is designed to "put a jump start on your military career." Children are funneled into JROTC to make them compliant and to feed the military with young bodies which are prepared to be assimilated into the war machine. Instead of funneling children into the military, we should be channeling them into jobs that support peace and sustainable development. 
Tell Senator McCain and Representative Thornberry to take the war machine out of our schools! The JROTC program must end immediately. The money should be directed back into classrooms that educate our children.
The Divest from the War Machine campaign is working to remove our money from the hands of companies that make a killing on killing. We must take on the systems that keep fueling war, death, and destruction around the globe. AND, we must take on the systems that are creating an endless cycle of children who are being indoctrinated at vulnerable ages to become the next killing machine.  Don't forget to post this message on Facebook and Twitter.
Onward in divestment,
Ann, Ariel, Brienne, Jodie, Kelly, Kirsten, Mark, Medea, Nancy, Natasha, Paki, Sarah, Sophia and Tighe
P.S. Do you want to do more? Start a campaign to get the JROTC out of your school district or state. Email divest@codepink.org and we'll get you started!

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October 20-21, 2018

Cindy Sheehan and the Women's March on the Pentagon

A movement not just a protest

By Whitney Webb
WASHINGTON—In the last few years, arguably the most visible and well-publicized march on the U.S. capital has been the "Women's March," a movement aimed at advocating for legislation and policies promoting women's rights as well as a protest against the misogynistic actions and statements of high-profile U.S. politicians. The second Women's March, which took place this past year, attracted over a million protesters nationwide, with 500,000 estimated to have participated in Los Angeles alone.
However, absent from this women's movement has been a public antiwar voice, as its stated goal of "ending violence" does not include violence produced by the state. The absence of this voice seemed both odd and troubling to legendary peace activist Cindy Sheehan, whose iconic protest against the invasion and occupation of Iraq made her a household name for many.
Sheehan was taken aback by how some prominent organizers of this year's Women's March were unwilling to express antiwar positions and argued for excluding the issue of peace entirely from the event and movement as a whole. In an interview with MintPress, Sheehan recounted how a prominent leader of the march had told her, "I appreciate that war is your issue Cindy, but the Women's March will never address the war issue as long as women aren't free."
War is indeed Sheehan's issue and she has been fighting against the U.S.' penchant for war for nearly 13 years. After her son Casey was killed in action while serving in Iraq in 2004, Sheehan drew international media attention for her extended protest in front of the Bush residence in Crawford, Texas, which later served as the launching point for many protests against U.S. military action in Iraq.
Sheehan rejected the notion that women could be "free" without addressing war and empire. She countered the dismissive comment of the march organizer by stating that divorcing peace activism from women's issues "ignored the voices of the women of the world who are being bombed and oppressed by U.S. military occupation."
Indeed, women are directly impacted by war—whether through displacement, the destruction of their homes, kidnapping, or torture. Women also suffer uniquely and differently from men in war as armed conflicts often result in an increase in sexual violence against women.
For example, of the estimated half-a-million civilians killed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of them were women and children. In the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the number of female casualties has been rising on average over 20 percent every year since 2015. In 2014 alone when Israel attacked Gaza in "Operation Protective Edge," Israeli forces, which receives $10 million in U.S. military aid every day, killed over two thousand Palestinians—half of them were women and children. Many of the casualties were pregnant women, who had been deliberately targeted.
Given the Women's March's apparent rejection of peace activism in its official platform, Sheehan was inspired to organize another Women's March that would address what many women's rights advocates, including Sheehan, believe to be an issue central to promoting women's rights.
Dubbed the "Women's March on the Pentagon," the event is scheduled to take place on October 21—the same date as an iconic antiwar march of the Vietnam era—with a mission aimed at countering the "bipartisan war machine." Though men, women and children are encouraged to attend, the march seeks to highlight women's issues as they relate to the disastrous consequences of war.
The effort of women in confronting the "war machine" will be highlighted at the event, as Sheehan remarked that "women have always tried to confront the war-makers," as the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the men and women in the military, as well as those innocent civilians killed in the U.S.' foreign wars. As a result, the push for change needs to come from women, according to Sheehan, because "we [women] are the only ones that can affect [the situation] in a positive way." All that's missing is an organized, antiwar women's movement.
Sheehan noted the march will seek to highlight the direct relationship between peace activism and women's rights, since "no woman is free until all women are free" and such "freedom also includes the freedom from U.S. imperial plunder, murder and aggression"that is part of the daily lives of women living both within and beyond the United States. Raising awareness of how the military-industrial complex negatively affects women everywhere is key, says Sheehan, as "unless there is a sense of international solidarity and a broader base for feminism, then there aren't going to be any solutions to any problems, [certainly not] if we don't stop giving trillions of dollars to the Pentagon."
Sheehan also urged that, even though U.S. military adventurism has long been an issue and the subject of protests, a march to confront the military-industrial complex is more important now than ever: "I'm not alarmist by nature but I feel like the threat of nuclear annihilation is much closer than it has been for a long time," adding that, despite the assertion of some in the current administration and U.S. military, "there is no such thing as 'limited' nuclear war." This makes "the need to get out in massive numbers" and march against this more imperative than ever.
Sheehan also noted that Trump's presidency has helped to make the Pentagon's influence on U.S. politics more obvious by bringing it to the forefront: "Even though militarism had been under wraps [under previous presidents], Trump has made very obvious the fact that he has given control of foreign policy to the 'generals.'"
Indeed, as MintPress has reported on several occasions, the Pentagon—beginning in March of last year—has been given the freedom to "engage the enemy" at will, without the oversight of the executive branch or Congress. As a result, the deaths of innocent civilians abroad as a consequence of U.S. military action has spiked. While opposing Trump is not the focus of the march, Sheehan opined that Trump's war-powers giveaway to the Pentagon, as well as his unpopularity, have helped to spark widespread interest in the event.

Different wings of the same warbird

Sheehan has rejected accusations that the march is partisan, as it is, by nature, focused on confronting the bipartisan nature of the military-industrial complex. She told MintPress that she has recently come under pressure owing to the march's proximity to the 2018 midterm elections—as some have ironically accused the march's bipartisan focus as "trying to harm the chances of the Democrats" in the ensuing electoral contest.
In response, Sheehan stated that: 
"Democrats and Republicans are different wings of the same warbird. We are protesting militarism and imperialism. The march is nonpartisan in nature because both parties are equally complicit. We have to end wars for the planet and for the future. I could really care less who wins in November."
She also noted that even when the Democrats were in power under Obama, nothing was done to change the government's militarism nor to address the host of issues that events like the Women's March have claimed to champion.
"We just got finished with eight years of a Democratic regime," Sheehan told MintPress. "For two of those years, they had complete control of Congress and the presidency and a [filibuster-proof] majority in the Senate and they did nothing" productive except to help "expand the war machine." She also emphasized that this march is in no way a "get out the vote" march for any political party.
Even though planning began less than a month ago, support has been pouring in for the march since it was first announced on Sheehan's website, Cindy Sheehan Soapbox. Encouraged by the amount of interest already received, Sheehan is busy working with activists to organize the events and will be taking her first organizing trip to the east coast in April of this year. 
In addition, those who are unable to travel to Washington are encouraged to participate in any number of solidarity protests that will be planned to take place around the world or to plan and attend rallies in front of U.S. embassies, military installations, and the corporate headquarters of war profiteers.
Early endorsers of the event include journalists Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh and Margaret Kimberley; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly; FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley; and U.S. politicians like former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Activist groups that have pledged their support include CodePink, United National Antiwar Coalition, Answer Coalition, Women's EcoPeace and World Beyond War.
Though October is eight months away, Sheehan has high hopes for the march. More than anything else, though, she hopes that the event will give birth to a "real revolutionary women's movement that recognizes the emancipation and liberation of all peoples—and that means [freeing] all people from war and empire, which is the biggest crime against humanity and against this planet." By building "a movement and not just a protest," the event's impact will not only be long-lasting, but grow into a force that could meaningfully challenge the U.S. military-industrial complex that threatens us all. God knows the world needs it.
For those eager to help the march, you can help spread the word through social media by joining the march's Facebook page or following the march'sTwitter account, as well as by word of mouth. In addition, supporting independent media outlets—such as MintPress, which will be reporting on the march—can help keep you and others informed as October approaches.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer forMintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, theAnti-Media, and21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.
MPN News, February 20, 2018
https://www.mintpressnews.com/cindy-sheehan-and-the-womens-march-on-the-pentagon-a-movement-not-just-a-protest/237835/

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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.

Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.

Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms.
In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.
Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence.
The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.
This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense.
Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new  "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support.
Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years
The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court.
During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison.
Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying."  For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners.
Major Tillery Needs Your Help:
Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence.
Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment.
Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed.

Major Tillery and family

HOW YOU CAN HELP
    Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.
    Go to JPay.com;
    code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

    Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:
    The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.
    Call: 215-686-8000 or

    Write to:
    Major Tillery AM 9786
    SCI Frackville
    1111 Altamont Blvd.
    Frackville, PA 17931
    For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org
    Call/Write:
    Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com
    Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com


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    Free Leonard Peltier!

    On my 43rd year in prison I yearn to hug my grandchildren.

    By Leonard Peltier


    Art by Leonard Peltier

    Write to:
    Leonard Peltier 89637-132 
    USP Coleman I 
    P.O. Box 1033 
    Coleman, FL 33521
    Donations can be made on Leonard's behalf to the ILPD national office, 116 W. Osborne Ave, Tampa, FL 33603

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    Reality's trial
    is postponed 
    until October 15th.


    That's 500 Days in Jail,
    Without Bail!

       

    Whistleblower Reality Winner's trial has (again) been postponed.
    Her new trial date is October 15, 2018, based on the new official proceedings schedule (fifth version). She will have spent 500 days jailed without bail by then. Today is day #301.
    And her trial may likely be pushed back even further into the Spring of 2019.

    We urge you to remain informed and engaged with our campaign until she is free! 




    One supporter's excellent report
    on the details of Winner's imprisonment

    ~Check out these highlights & then go read the full article here~
    "*Guilty Until Proven Innocent*

    Winner is also not allowed to change from her orange jumpsuit for her court dates, even though she is "innocent until proven guilty."  Not only that, but during any court proceedings, only her wrists are unshackled, her ankles stay.  And a US Marshal sits in front of her, face to face, during the proceedings.  Winner is not allowed to turn around and look into the courtroom at all . . .
    Upon checking the inmate registry, it starts to become clear how hush hush the government wants this case against Winner to be.  Whether pre-whistleblowing, or in her orange jumpsuit, photos of Winner have surfaced on the web.  That's why it was so interesting that there's no photo of her next to her name on the inmate registry . . .
    For the past hundred years, the Espionage Act has been debated and amended, and used to charge whistleblowers that are seeking to help the country they love, not harm it.  Sometimes we have to learn when past amendments no longer do anything to justify the treatment of an American truth teller as a political prisoner. The act is outdated and amending it needs to be seriously looked at, or else we need to develop laws that protect our whistleblowers.
    The Espionage Act is widely agreed by many experts to be unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the First Amendment of Free Speech.  Even though a Supreme Court had ruled that the Espionage Act does not infringe upon the 1st Amendment back in 1919, it's constitutionality has been back and forth in court ever sense.

    Because of being charged under the Espionage Act, Winner's defense's hands are tied.  No one is allowed to mention the classified document, even though the public already knows that the information in it is true, that Russia hacked into our election support companies." 
     Want to take action in support of Reality?

    Step up to defend our whistleblower of conscience ► DONATE NOW


    FRIENDS OF REALITY WINNER ~ PATRIOT & ALLEGED WHISTLEBLOWER
    c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610 ~ 510-488-3559

    Standwithreality.org

    @standbyreality (Twitter)

     Friends of Reality Winner (Facebook)



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    Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations! 
    Charity for the Wealthy!

    GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

    By Jake Johnson, December 18, 2017

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    1) Why Are Parents Bringing Their Children on Treacherous Treks to the U.S. Border?
    President Trump hopes to deter the flow of migrants into the United States, but near the busy border crossing in Arizona, some said that the threat of separation from their children would not deter them.
    By Julie Turkewitz and Jose A. Del Real, June 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/immigration-border-children.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

    A child from Guatemala at Casa Alitas in Tucson.


    TUCSON, Ariz. — When Luis Cruz left behind his wife, four of their children and the house he'd built himself, he'd heard that American officials might split him from his son, the one child he took with him. But earlier this month, the two of them set out from Guatemala anyway.
    The truth, he said this week, moments after they arrived at a cream-colored migrant shelter in Tucson, was that he would rather be apart from his child than face what they had left behind. "If they separate us, they separate us," said Mr. Cruz, 41. "But return to Guatemala? This is something my son cannot do."
    For years, children and parents caught crossing the nation's southern border have been released into the United States while their immigration cases were processed, the result of a hard-fought legal settlement designed to keep children from spending long months in federal detention. In the eyes of the Trump administration, this practice has served as an open invitation for people like Luis Cruz, and has played a major role in driving thousands of families across the border with Mexico.
    Mr. Trump's newest immigration policies — first an effort to separate families crossing the border, and now an effort to change the legal settlement on migrant family detention — represent an aggressive effort to rescind that invitation, one that has plunged the nation into a debate about the limits of its generosity.

    But interviews at shelters and passage points along both sides of the border this week, as well as an examination of recent immigration numbers, suggest that even with tightened restrictions on families, it's going to be difficult for the president to stanch the flow.

    Though it's impossible to know yet whether the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" crackdown on illegal border crossers will have a significant deterrent effect, one thing was clear this week at the Arizona-Mexico border: Many families — especially those from countries in Central America plagued by gang violence and ruined economies — are making the calculation that even separation or detention in the United States is better than the situation at home.
    "Why would you undertake such a dangerous journey?" said Magdalena Escobedo, 32, who works at the migrant shelter here in Tucson, called Casa Alitas. "When you've got a gun to your head, people threatening to rape your daughter, extort your business, force your son to work for the cartels. What would you do?"

    Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April announced a policy of prosecuting all illegal border crossers, yet federal agents caught nearly 52,000 people at the border in May, marking a steady rise in illegal entries after a sharp decline during the first year of Mr. Trump's administration. More than 250,000 migrants had been arrested this year as of late May, according to data by United States Customs and Border Protection; that number is close to the total number arrested in all of 2017, about 311,000.
    Casa Alitas, a low-slung building down a dusty street in Tucson, takes in families who've presented themselves to border officials to ask for asylum. Once they're processed at immigration facilities, authorities drop them off here for a meal and a shower before they head off to stay with friends or relatives and wait for their day in court.
    On Thursday, men like René Pérez, 40, who made it into the United States with his son this week, said he was well aware that they might have been separated or placed in custody. "If it happens, it happens," said Mr. Pérez.
    Across the border in the Mexican town of Nogales, many parents preparing to cross the border said temporary separation from their children in the United States would be better than facing the violence back home.

    "I'd rather accept that, to know that my son is safe," said Lisbeth de la Rosa, 24, who was waiting in line to enter the United States with her 4-year-old son.

    "It's worth it," said Lidia Rodríguez-Barrientos, 36, standing with her 9-year-old daughter. "Why? Because we're afraid to go back."
    What has guided much of border detention policy in recent years is a 1997 agreement in the case Flores v. Reno, in which the federal government was barred from detaining migrant children, save for a short period and under certain conditions. The agreement was interpreted later to include children traveling with their families.
    Unwilling to separate young migrants from the parents traveling with them, both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations arrived at the policy of releasing families while they awaited immigration proceedings—though Obama administration officials did so only after having been successfully sued over their policy of holding families together in detention.
    Critics, including Mr. Trump, have long said that allowing migrants to go free while their immigration cases are pending encourages parents to enter the United States with children, and some conversations bear that out.
    "This is the reason I brought a minor with me," said Guillermo T., 57, a construction worker who recently arrived in Arizona. Facing unemployment at home in Guatemala, he decided to head north; he had been told that bringing his 16-year-old daughter would assure passage. He asked that only his first named be used to avoid consequences with his immigration case.
    "She was my passport," he said of his daughter.
    The Trump administration is asking for changes to the Flores settlementthat would allow officials to detain children with their families for longer than the short period allowed under the agreement. Lawyers for the Obama administration already asked for changes to that settlement and were denied. In any case, it's unclear if that will stop people from coming.

    Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a global fellow at the Wilson Center who has interviewed hundreds of Central American migrants in the field, said that they are primarily motivated to leave their countries by violence and lack of economic opportunities, phenomena which she described as closely connected.

    She said these migrant families choose the United States because they often have networks in the country already and know that there are many job opportunities. "There are push and pull factors. The push factors are the lack of economic opportunities and the security problems in their countries. It's a mix of these conditions. The pull factors are of course the jobs and the families."
    Even with steep drops in the number of recorded murders in the past year, El Salvador and Honduras, the home countries of many migrants, are still among the most dangerous countries in the world. Poverty is hammering away at livelihoods in much of Central America, and for some, the decision to leave is a gamble on a better life.
    For others, it's a matter of saving the one they have.
    On Thursday, federal officials dropped Mr. Cruz and his 16-year-old son, also named Luis, at Casa Alitas. Both wore black, despite the southwestern heat, and inside, they sat at a table covered with a cloth of bright sunflowers.
    They eagerly consumed big bowls of soup before explaining why they had come.
    The elder Mr. Cruz, a lemon and orange grove worker, had hoped to live his life in his home state of Suchitepéquez. Then in late May, his son was approached twice by a gang who demanded he join them, flashing a gun and urging him to commit his first extortion. "They kill you if you don't obey," said Mr. Cruz.
    On June 3, the pair left for the United States, and then presented themselves at the border to ask for asylum. After lunch at the shelter, the younger Mr. Cruz pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolding it to reveal a letter his school director had written before he left — a note they hoped would be the evidence they needed to win asylum in the United States.
    "The student had to withdraw himself from school due to violence and gang persecution," she wrote. "He decided to move to save his life."
    Julie Turkewitz reported from Tucson and Jose A. Del Real reported from Nogales, Mexico. Miriam Jordan contributed reporting from Los Angeles and Frances Robles from Miami.

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    2) 75 Percent of Americans Say Immigration Is Good for Country, Poll Finds
    By Niraj Chokshi, June 23, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-donald-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

    A newspaper salesman in front of the entry to the United States from Nogales, Mexico. Many Americans view immigration as a top concern ahead of this fall's midterm elections.CreditRyan Christopher Jones for The New York Times


    Most Americans oppose the separation of immigrant families at the border, and a larger share of people than at any point since 2001 say immigration is good for the nation.
    Those were just some of the findings of polls published in the past week that shed new light on attitudes toward immigration, a subject that many Americans view as a top concern ahead of this fall's midterm elections.
    While most oppose President Trump's policy of separating children from their parents at the border, fellow Republicans were more likely to support it than not, the polls found. Since the polls were conducted, however, the president caved to public pressure and agreed to stop the separation policyby detaining families at the border together for an indefinite period.

    And despite the president's anti-immigration message, three in four Americans say immigration is generally good for the nation, according to Gallup, the polling organization.

    "Americans' strong belief that immigration is a good thing for the country and that immigration levels shouldn't be decreased present the president and Congress with some tough decisions as the midterm elections loom," Gallup said in a news release Thursday.
    Here's what the recent polls show
    Despite the contentious political climate, 75 percent of Americans think immigration, in general, is good for the nation, according to Gallup, which surveyed more than 1,500 adults during the first two weeks of June.
    Among Democrats and those who lean toward the party, 85 percent viewed immigration positively, compared with 65 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican.
    When asked their thoughts about "legal immigration" specifically, even more Americans, about 84 percent, said it was good for the country.

    Support for reining in immigration is at its lowest level in more than half a century: Just 29 percent of Americans believe it should be decreased, the smallest share recorded by Gallup since at least 1965.

    Strong opposition to separating familiesSeveral recent polls found that most Americans disagreed with President Trump taking a hard-line approach to immigration enforcement by separating families at the border.

    "When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can't ignore?" Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement this week, announcing the results of a recent survey of more than 900 voters conducted last week and weekend. "Two-thirds of American voters oppose the family separation policy at our borders."
    Two similar polls of adults — one conducted by Ipsos and another conducted by YouGov with The Economist — found comparable results, albeit with smaller majorities opposing the policy.
    In all three polls, those surveyed were about twice as likely to oppose separating families as to support it. But there was a large partisan divide: Republicans were more likely to support family separation than oppose it, while Democrats overwhelmingly disliked it. Independents strongly opposed the policy, just not to the same degree as Democrats.
    "Neither quotes from the Bible nor get-tough talk can soften the images of crying children nor reverse the pain so many Americans feel," Mr. Malloy said in the statement. The administration was heavily criticized after Attorney General Jeff Sessions used a Bible passage to justify the separation policy and images of weeping children began to circulate widely.

    The nation's top problem?

    Immigration has also emerged as a top policy concern among Americans: Those who were asked this month to name the most important problem facing the nation were more likely to bring up the issue than any other, according to a Pew Research Center survey of about 2,000 adults.
    When Pew asked that same question in January 2017, immigration was cited less often than health care, the economy, unemployment, race relations and Donald J. Trump, then the president-elect.
    Gallup found similar results: The share of Americans who said immigration was the top problem facing the country rose to 14 percent in June, from 10 percent the month before.
    Both polls found that Republicans cited immigration far more often than Democrats. Still, Pew found that about one in five Democrats and Republicans alike wanted local candidates to discuss the issue this fall.

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    3) 16 and Alone, Inside a Center for Separated Children in New York
    By Jesse McKinley, Liz Robbins and Annie Correal, June 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/nyregion/cuomo-separated-families-children.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

    Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured a campus of a childcare agency in New York on Thursday for a rare glimpse at the conditions in which children separated from their parents are being held.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times


    It was just three weeks ago that the 16-year-old was detained by immigration agents in Texas after traveling with his father to the United States. The father was deported back to Guatemala. The child was sent to New York.
    Today, he sits in a children's residence, one of an estimated 700 young people who have been placed with child care agencies in New York since President Trump announced his "zero tolerance" policy of separating children from family members when they are apprehended at the southern border.
    Amid a rising outcry over the practice, and even as the president signed an executive order ending it, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo toured one of the agency campuses with a New York Times reporter for a rare glimpse of these children's lives. Because the agency that runs the residence receives federal funding that could be imperiled by speaking to the press, it offered the tour on the condition that its name, exact location and the name of the children interviewed not be disclosed.

    Mr. Cuomo said that he wanted to visit the residence to make sure that the children there were being well cared for, and he excoriated the Trump administration for not informing him of the presence of the separated children in New York earlier. "They're placing children in state-certified facilities, state-regulated facilities, and not even communicating with us," he said.

    The separated children are only the most visible part of a migration that has been taking place quietly since 2014, when a surge in the number of "unaccompanied minors" — children arriving at the border without parents — garnered attention. Ten state welfare agencies have contracts to provide medical, educational and other support services while providing temporary housing for the children. Many unaccompanied minors have been subsequently placed with relatives or guardians already living in the United States.

    But the separated children may not have those connections, and how they will be reunited with their parents remains unclear. Many of them are under 12, known as "tender age," and they now make up about 20 percent of the 11,801 unaccompanied minors in the custody of the government, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
    In New York, there were hints of the coming crisis at the beginning of May, for those who knew where to look. At one child care agency, the number of unaccompanied minor children placed by the federal government swelled to 15 that month, from just three the month before.
    Megan Newman, who lives near a child welfare agency in East Harlem, said she has seen children coming and going from the building for months. And recently, she noticed something else.

    "More little ones," she said in a telephone interview. "The little minis. I haven't seen babies, per se. But yeah, a lot of little ones. It's a steady parade."
    About a month ago, a 9-year-old boy from Honduras landed with the same foster care agency, Cayuga Centers, after traveling by bus from Texas, where he and his mother had been apprehended. On June 8, a family friend contacted the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio, asking for legal advice.
    From that call, it would be nearly two weeks before the extent of the number of children being sent to New York became clear.

    "It's inhumane and unsustainable," Mr. Cuomo said Thursday, of taking children from their parents at the border. "This was either a deliberate strategy to create chaos or one of the greatest government blunders in history."
    Both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio expressed shock at the number of children placed in New York, and outrage at the federal government's lack of transparency. But there is no requirement that federal officials inform the city or state about how many children it is sending.
    Eric Ferrero, the deputy commissioner for the city's Administration for Children's Services, said that his office had been asking federal authorities for more than a week about children arriving from the border.

    "Do they have an obligation to tell you, 'We've got six kids coming into La Guardia tonight'? No, that's not how it typically works," he said. "But we would expect the federal government to answer our questions about how many kids they have in New York City who have been separated from their parents and are experiencing trauma. These are kids that have presumably some really complicated needs that we want to make sure we're helping to meet."
    The consulates for the children's home countries also said they weren't getting information from the government. José Vicente Chinchilla, the consul general of El Salvador, said there was no indication until this week that children separated from their families had been sent to New York, let alone how many.
    He relies on a monthly report from the federal government of the number, names and ages of unaccompanied minors in his jurisdiction — New York and Pennsylvania — and according to the May report there had been no significant increase.

    Asked how many separated Salvadoran children were in New York, he said, "To be honest, I don't have a number," noting on Thursday that neither the federal authorities nor the local welfare agencies had responded to requests for information.
    The campus Mr. Cuomo visited sits in an almost serene suburban locale and is home to about 15 of the separated children, along with other unaccompanied minors. The hallways and classrooms were clean. Dozens of children played soccer on well-used fields, while a limp American flag sat on a hillside above several of the dormitories.
    Inside a dorm set aside for teenage girls, the walls were spare, dotted with snapshots of birthday parties and painted with inspirational maxims; the doors lock from inside and out. But there were also signs of longing for home and a better life, including a series of cut-out paper butterflies glued to a wall with messages of the children's hopes. "I want to be someone in life to be able to help all the people who need it," said one, in Spanish. "I want to learn to become a teacher," said another.

    An official at the residence said many of the children had managed to speak to their parents, and several of the separated children had been placed with family. For others, the wait continues. "Because they are older than the tender-age children, they are faring much better, but still it's very traumatic, they've been traumatized by the separation," the official said. "They have trouble sleeping, sometimes they're anxious, depressed, crying, primarily."
    One of those hoping to stay in the United States was the 16-year-old from Guatemala — a diminutive, talkative teenager who said he had only finished schooling through fifth grade. He said he had not expected his father to be sent back, and suddenly found himself alone in New York. He had spoken with his father several times and said he had a cousin in Houston, where he would like to go live, though it is not clear if that will happen.
    Despite being taken away from his father, he expressed optimism. "It is a happy place here," he said, holding a soccer ball firmly in his grasp while talking to the governor. "It's not a sad place, it's a happy place."

    Zoe Greenberg, William Neuman, Sean Piccoli and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

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    4) Rare Hantavirus May Have Caused Belmont Racetrack Worker's Death
    By Sarah Maslin Nir, June 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/nyregion/hantavirus-belmont-death.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

    A worker's bedroom at Belmont Park racetrack, with blood spots on the wall from bedbugs.CreditSarah Maslin Nir/The New York Time

     

    A worker at Belmont Park racetrack has died in what health officials believe may be a rare case of hantavirus in New York State.
    The worker, whose name has not been released, was found earlier this month collapsed outside the ramshackle employee barracks, tucked between the horse barns and exercise pens where he and scores of other grooms, hot walkers and riders live, state health officials said. He was hospitalized and died on June 6 of what appears to have been hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, an advanced stage of the virus, according to the New York State Department of Health's preliminary findings.
    The illness, the pulmonary form of which has a nearly 40 percent fatality rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cannot be communicated between humans. It is typically contracted by inhaling air contaminated with rodent droppings in confined spaces, or, in rare cases, via a bite.
    In New York State, there have been five cases of hantavirus since the state began tracking it in 1993: three were in Long Island and two upstate, according to the Health Department. Nationwide, there have been 728 reports of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome between 1993 and 2017, according to the C.D.C. (The center is reviewing the case at Belmont, which will officially determine if hantavirus caused the death.)

    At Belmont, which is in Elmont, N.Y., near the Queens border, far from the sun-hatted hordes in the stands on big race days like the Belmont Stakes, dilapidated bungalows house the mostly immigrant work force responsible for cosseting and caring for the thoroughbreds that race there. According to interviews with residents, a jockey and a former trainer, the barns and living spaces are plagued with rats.
    "When you get down on your knees to do a horse up? They run up your legs," said Peter Daly, a former trainer who now owns Tack Room Products, a supply shop across the street from the park.
    Inspectors on Thursday ordered the removal of 32 workers from rooms they found had dangerous conditions. They have been relocated to other housing on-site, according to the New York Racing Association, a nonprofit corporation. Between 900 and 1,000 people live on the premises. The racing association, which is responsible for the housing, has begun patching holes, securing overflowing feed bins and containing waste to remediate the problem.
    "We are redoubling our prior efforts to address appropriate rodent control measures throughout all backstretch facilities," Patrick McKenna, a spokesman for the racing association, said in an email.
    Drawn by the feasts of horse oats and refuse, rats often pass unimpeded from the barns through holes visible in the sides of the cinder-block dorms and small clapboard shacks where the workers live, according to workers who reside there. Rooms are often shared, and many are squalid, with mattresses or pallets on the floor, some with punched-out windows covered by cardboard. The workers asked not to be named because they feared reprisal for criticizing the facility, which is state-owned and operated by the racing association.
    "It's a challenging setting because of the nature of the industry; rodents like the environment," said Brad Hutton, the New York State Department of Health's deputy commissioner for public health.
    Mr. Hutton and a team of epidemiologists and inspectors have spent the past several days at the track, assessing conditions and teaching workers how to identify early symptoms of hantavirus. The illness can start with flulike symptoms and can progress over weeks to the point where "it feels like someone is sitting on your chest," Mr. Hutton said.
    As inspectors have visited the facility this week to root out the conditions that may have caused the possible case of hantavirus, they have also found other types of infestation, Mr. Hutton said.
    One worker, who said he has lived in the barracks on the racetrack grounds for 20 years, showed a reporter the roughly 10-by-12-foot room he shares with another man: Blotches of blood from crushed bedbugs stained the walls. Next to a pillow was a can of repellent with which his roommate sleeps.
    NYRA, as the New York Racing Association is known, was returned from state to private control last year. It has made some improvements to the facility, which was first constructed at the turn of the 20th century, as part of a $30 million multiyear campaign that includes renovations to more than 50 residential cottages and nearly 30 barns. In 2016, the association completed the construction of a new residential dormitory, and is in the midst of building a second. This week, lawmakers voted to make it eligible to receive state funding for the redevelopment project.
    "While the improvements have been substantial and meaningful, there is more work to be done," said Mr. McKenna.

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    5) Large-Scale Art Protest Outside OxyContin Maker Ends in Arrest
    By Colin Moynihan, June 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/arts/design/art-protest-arrest-at-oxycontin-maker.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

    Police confiscated a large sculpture of a spoon that was placed outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Conn., as part of a protest against the opioid crisis.CreditGregg Vigliotti for The New York Times


    STAMFORD, Conn. — The sculpture, about 10 feet long and weighing some 700 pounds, is a huge depiction of the sort of spoon addicts use to cook heroin before injecting it.
    On Friday morning, the spoon, by the Boston-based sculptor Domenic Esposito, was unloaded here outside the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, the makers of the painkiller OxyContin.

    Some of Mr. Esposito's work exploring the ways that addiction affects lives will appear in a new exhibition at a gallery a few blocks away. He and the gallery owner, Fernando Luis Alvarez, said they were at Purdue to shame the company, asserting that its much-abused drug had led countless people to dependence and served as a gateway to other narcotics like heroin.

    "I think this is an important matter," Mr. Alvarez said. "People are dying."
    As the opioid epidemic rages on, Purdue Pharma has become a magnet for criticism from legislators, regulators and the relatives of the dead. On Friday it was the artists' turn, however briefly. The spoon was gone by noon, carted off on the orders of the police. And the gallery owner was arrested and led away in handcuffs after he refused to move the piece from where it had been blocking Purdue's driveway.

    A statement Friday from a Purdue spokesman, Robert Josephson, said, "We share the protesters' concern about the opioid crisis and respect their right to peacefully express themselves."
    Mr. Josephson said the company is committed to working on meaningful, collaborative solutions to help stop deaths related to opioid overdoses.
    Over the past year, increasing attention has been directed at Purdue and the members of the Sackler family who owned and ran the company while it aggressively marketed OxyContin as a painkiller that was less prone to abuse than other drugs. In 2007, the parent company of Purdue pleaded guilty to a federal felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead.
    Multiple states have since sued the company, saying it employed deceptive marketing practices, an allegation Purdue has denied. The photographer Nan Goldin, who said that a prescription for OxyContin led her to addiction, has organized protests including one inside the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which members of the family had supported with sizable donations.

    Other recent protests have taken place outside Purdue Pharma's building. Earlier this month two brothers from Pennsylvania used a projector to beam messages onto the building's facade, referring to the company as a "cartel," according to the Stamford Advocate.

    Mr. Esposito said he spent about six weeks fashioning the spoon from steel. The idea, he said, was to reflect the experience of a relative who had begun using OxyContin and Percocet experimentally before turning to heroin.
    The bent spoon became an emblem of the relative's struggles, Mr. Esposito said. The family would sometimes find similar implements around, disappointing discoveries at a time when they believed their loved one had been in recovery.
    "And then all the pain started over," he said.
    The addiction-related works in Mr. Alvarez's gallery are part of a show titled "Opioid: Express Yourself." They include an image of a giant white capsule with damaged ends depicted against a bright red background, and an abstract painting meant to project depression and anxiety. There is also a work that represents a section of bathroom wall that also includes pill bottles peeking from behind tiles affixed to the wood, and a medicine cabinet shaped like a tombstone.
    As for the spoon, Mr. Alvarez, Mr. Esposito and a few friends towed it to the Purdue building around 8 a.m. on Friday in a trailer emblazoned with an image of a skull. The police arrived before long and over the next two hours officers negotiated with Mr. Alvarez, telling him "your giant spoon" has to go. Finally a commander issued Mr. Alvarez a ticket for "obstructing free passage." When he declined after that to remove the sculpture Mr. Alvarez was placed under arrest on a charge of "interfering with police," the commander said. He was detained briefly before being released.
    Back at the building, a yellow front loader arrived. Several men wrestled the spoon into the shovel of the frontloader, and it was then hoisted up, placed onto the back of a truck and driven away.

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    6) Black Dolls Found in Nooses at San Francisco Construction Site, Workers Say
    By Mihir Zaveri, June 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/black-dolls-hanging-construction-site.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

    Craig Ogans at a news conference in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday. He is one of the three employees who said that co-workers used threats of violence and racial slurs to try to drive them off the job.CreditJana Ašenbrennerová


    Three African-American construction workers said this week that they were targeted by racial slurs and death threats, including black dolls hanging from nooses in the bathroom, while working on the site of a San Francisco high-rise.
    The workers, Craig Ogans, Douglas Russell and Don'ta Laury, filed complaints Thursday with the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment against Clark Construction, based in Maryland. The company is building the 43-story tower where the men worked. Facebook is expected to be its major tenant.
    The three men were elevator operators on the site in the city's financial district. Their complaints said they were repeatedly harassed and discriminated against by co-workers, including a threat with a knife, as part of a concerted campaign to drive them off the project.

    "It made me feel hurt, angry, scared, fearing for my safety," Mr. Ogans said in a phone interview. "It was an emotional roller coaster for me."

    In an emailed statement, Clark Construction said it "does not tolerate harassment or discriminatory behavior" and had notified law enforcement officials about the racial harassment when it received complaints.
    Grace Gatpandan, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Police Department, said that nooses found at the site in April were being investigated by the police as a possible hate crime, though no one had been arrested yet. She said that was the only time the police were called to the work site.
    The company said it held anti-harassment and discrimination training at the site after the complaints and installed security cameras to "deter individuals from acts that are not permitted by policy or law."
    The three men were employed by a subcontractor of Clark Construction, Bigge Crane and Rigging, which was not named in their complaints. A Bigge spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
    The men are being represented by John Burris, an Oakland civil rights lawyer. Mr. Ogans and Mr. Russell said they were reassigned to different work sites after they reported the incidents. Mr. Laury could not be reached for comment, but Mr. Burris said that he was still working at the high-rise site where the harassment was alleged to have occurred.

    Clark representatives said the company would install signs on the project site — reading "Give Respect. Get Respect." — as a reminder to workers that they are entitled to a "safe and peaceful work environment."
    "We are committed to addressing reported instances of harassment and discrimination," read the statement from the company, which has 4,200 employees across the United States, according to its website.
    Mr. Burris said that the complaints filed this week were a precursor to a lawsuit the men intend to file against the company. They must first receive a "right to sue" notice from the California agency, which Mr. Burris said he expects within a week.
    At a news conference on Thursday, he displayed photos that show racial slurs and death threats scrawled in dark ink, as well as dolls dangling from nooses.
    "I'm hopeful," he said, "that this case sends a message to all construction owners at various construction sites, particularly in San Francisco, showing that they have some kind of responsibility to provide a safe working environment free of hostility."
    Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit group, said that race-based discrimination and harassment have increased in recent years. Ms. Clarke said nearly identical instances of harassment, including nooses and racial slurs, have been reported recently nationwide.
    "It aligns with a significant increase in hate crimes and racially motivated hate activity across the country," she said.

    The number of complaints received by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has steadily risen to about 9,000 in 2017 from about 6,000 in 1998.
    Mr. Ogans wrote in his complaint that shortly after he started working as an elevator operator at the construction site in March, co-workers told him to enter a sixth-floor bathroom, where he saw words using a racial slur that encouraged the killing of African-Americans.
    In April, Mr. Ogans said he found two black dolls hanging by nooses in a bathroom with references to killing him and Mr. Russell.
    "I saw this horrific sight," Mr. Ogans said. "I would like some major reforms put in place to ensure this stuff never happens ever again."
    Mr. Russell said in his complaint that after he started working on the site in February, he saw a Clark Construction employee carrying a noose.
    Mr. Laury's complaint said that between August 2017 and February 2018, he was the only African-American elevator operator on site. Co-workers repeatedly asked him, "Why are you here?" and "How did you get a job here?" and said African-American workers don't "belong" on the site, his complaint said.
    "Throughout my time working at this Clark Construction site," he wrote, "it felt like there was a concerted effort to drive out the black workers."

    Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

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    7)  Once Cut, Corporate Income Taxes Are Hard to Restore
    By Robert J. Shiller, June 22, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/business/big-war-to-raise-the-corporate-income-tax.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=8&pgtype=sectionfront

    Tax rates on corporate profits rose sharply during World War II. Here, in 1942, guns used by the United States military are assembled in a Firestone Tire & Rubber plant in Akron, Ohio.CreditAssociated Press


    The Trump corporate income tax cuts are the latest in a decades-long trend of tax reductions that have been substantially reversed mainly during times of war.
    The historical evidence is revealing.
    When the federal corporate income tax began in 1909, it was about as low as it could be — a rate of only 1 percent of corporate profits. Over more than 100 years, it has followed a broad hump shape, increasing for about half a century, and then decreasing for about the next 50 years.
    The corporate tax rate peaked in 1968 at 52.8 percent. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 brought the 2018 rate down to 21 percent from 35 percent last year.

    Wars provided an impetus for tax increases, with major hikes during both world wars and the Korean War. Corporate taxes remained high for more than 30 years, then dropped sharply under President Ronald Reagan and now, again, with President Trump.

    At the beginning of the modern era of income taxes in America — in 1909 for corporations and 1913 for individuals — war was not a factor. Instead, in the Progressive era, the main argument for instituting these levies was that "wealth is escaping its due share of taxation," Edwin Seligman wrote in his 1914 book, "The Income Tax: A Study of the History, Theory and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad."
    Taxes on land hit farmers unfairly, proponents of the new taxes said, while owners of corporate stocks paid no taxes. Excise and customs duties taxed consumers unfairly and benefited specific domestic industries, so the argument went. Seligman, a professor at Columbia University, said the income taxes were not an "attack on wealth as such." The aim of the new income taxes "was solely to redress the inequality of taxation."
    That was an intellectual defense of the income tax. But more emotional issues — those of unequal sacrifice in time of war — account for the high levels to which corporate tax rates rose.
    During World War I, the federal corporate income tax rose to 12 percent in 1918 from 1 percent in 1915. In addition, in 1917 a new "excess profits tax" — on profits above the payer's prewar level — was imposed, and it ranged as high as 80 percent. The increase came amid public outcry against wartime "profiteering." People were angry to see men who stayed at home becoming millionaires from war profits, while the soldiers overseas were fighting and, often, dying.
    The excess profits tax was scrapped in 1921, but the corporation income tax remained at nearly the same level.

    With World War II, rates rose further, reaching 40 percent in 1942. And once again a wartime excess profits tax was instituted, ranging up to 95 percent.
    After that war, the corporate excess profits tax was eliminated, but the corporate income tax rates were not cut back for long.
    The Korean War, which scared many people as being the possible beginning of what they called "World War III," occasioned further increases. The federal corporate income tax rate rose to 52 percent, and yet another temporary excess profits tax was instituted. And again, a familiar pattern was in place: Corporate income tax rates did not decline much after the war was over.
    These wartime tax increases left a lasting legacy of relatively high corporate income tax rates. Even with the Trump tax cuts, the United States is far above the rate that prevailed before World War I.
    According to a "cognitive theory" of taxation offered by Edward J. McCaffery, a scholar at the University of Southern California, governments use the opportunity of a war to raise tax rates when "citizens are either more patriotic and willing to share with the government, and/or are distracted by the crisis itself."
    What prompted taxes to begin a long decline, starting with the Reagan presidency in the 1980s? Here, we are in the realm of speculation. Decades after the Korean War — arguably the last American war with a high degree of public unanimity — the names and feats of war heroes began to fade in memory. People may simply have returned to more individualistic, self-centered views of society and the economy.
    In any case, under Reagan, the top corporate tax rate dropped from 46 percent to 34 percent. In 1993, during the Clinton administration, it increased slightly to 35 percent, where it held until last year.

    Similar declines occurred in other countries in recent decades. That didn't happen because governments needed less tax revenue. To the contrary, Prof. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan has shown that "across countries, there is no association of the expenditure-G.D.P. ratio with the corporate statutory rate."
    Effective tax rates — actual corporate taxes paid as a percentage of pretax profits, including the effects of all deductions and accounting tricks — can't be tracked accurately all the way back to 1909, but estimates have also shown a decline in these rates in recent decades.
    What data we do have shows an unmistakable trend. Consider, for example, the United States National Income and Product Accounts, published by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. Data from that source indicates that the fraction of profits on corporate income taken by federal, state, local and foreign taxes peaked during World War II and has shown a fairly linear, steady and steep downtrend ever since.
    This history provides an important perspective.
    While it may be tempting to view the Reagan and Trump tax policies as anomalies, they may be seen as part of a long-term trend. It is important to recognize that Reagan's tax decreases were not substantially reversed under subsequent administrations. And it is quite possible that President Trump's corporate tax cuts may remain in place, even if Trump political power ebbs.
    Given this history, I have to wonder: Will it take a major war — one that galvanizes the public, involves vast sacrifice and seems to truly threaten domestic survival — to raise the corporation income tax significantly?

    Robert J. Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale.

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    8)  Americans Love Families. American Policies Don’t.
    By Emily Badger and Claire Cain Miller, June 24, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/upshot/americans-love-families-american-policies-dont.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

    A migrant mother and her daughters on their way to the port of entry in Tijuana, Mexico, to ask for asylum.CreditMario Tama/Getty Images


    Politicians are united in their love for families. The very word — “families” — was among those said most often by Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton in campaign speeches. Democrats and Republicans have platforms for middle-class families, working families, military families. And candidates in need of character witnesses or podium backdrops routinely turn to their own. 
    But this past week was a reminder of a deep contradiction about the family in American politics: Families make powerful symbols, valuable to politicians and revered by voters. But American policies are inconsistent and weak, relative to many countries, in supporting them. 
    The focus of recent days was on the Trump administration’s separation of immigrant children from their parents at the Mexican border. The contradiction is also clear in many other realms, say critics on both the right and left: criminal justice, child welfare, family leave, child care, health care and education. 

    “There’s a basic inconsistency in saying we support families, we have family-friendly policies, when in fact we have the worst family policies of any developed high-income democracy,” said Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “We don’t have family-friendly policies at all.”

    Families are separated every day in the criminal justice and child welfare systems, often just as abruptly as at the border. Some parents struggle to support children without federal policies like paid family leave and subsidized child care that are offered in other countries. 
    In less visible ways, even policies and programs intended to support families can undermine them. Some families qualify for fewer federal benefits that help the working poor, like the earned-income tax credit and Medicaid, if the parents marry. Many states that prioritize health care for children offer no help to their parents, despite evidence that children have better outcomes when their parents are healthy, too. 
    In the child welfare system, case workers frequently neglect the role of fathers, despite mounting evidence of their importance for children’s well-being. And prison systems that hold family visitation ignore what researchers have learned about physical contact: Seeing parents through plexiglass is another form of trauma for children
    Before the 1970s, politicians seldom preached about families, according to research by the political scientists Steven Greene and Laurel Elder, who have analyzed the language used in political speeches. By 1992, conservatives were using “family values” as a motto and weapon of critique. Families became more politicized, Mr. Greene and Ms. Elder argue, as the American family itself went through major changes — with more mothers working, more single and same-sex parents, and the rise of more intensiveparenting. 
    Over this time, the family has come to sit at the center of a core philosophical divide between the left and the right, even as both claim to care about families the most. As the left sees it, government plays an essential role protecting and supporting families, through programs like Medicaid or a higher minimum wage. To the right, it seems government too often burdens families, who need lower taxes and less regulation.

    “Family and parenting is just such a potent political symbol,” said Mr. Greene, a political scientist at North Carolina State University. “Politicians have learned that whatever the policy is, wrapping it in the language of family and children — both Democrats and Republicans, regardless of policy — is really effective.”
    By this thinking, even President Trump’s family separation policy at the border could be argued as pro-family. “If the immigrants are coming to take away your job, then this policy is pro-family,” Mr. Greene said. 
    He worries that the politicization of the family is bad for policymaking. As the family becomes a culturally loaded symbol, evocative of everything and used to justify anything, it becomes harder to devise real policies that address real needs, he said.
    In this climate, families have become the focal point of partisans charging hypocrisy, on both sides. 
    Conservatives, critics say, value traditional nuclear families and yet support the separation of immigrant families. Liberals, critics charge, say children should not be separated from their parents and yet condone relatively easy divorce and single parenthood.
    “For people on the left who have condemned separating kids from parents, that logic would apply to other family issues they wouldn’t be so happy about, like divorce and single parenthood,” said Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and a researcher at right-leaning family researchgroups
    The research is clear that adverse childhood experiences like separation from parents are harmful to children. But the left and the right also disagree about which intertwined factors to emphasize in helping families: larger structural forces like the economy, or more personal choices like whether to marry.

    “By focusing only on family structures that are beneficial, it’s easy to gloss over structural barriers that make it hard,” said Michelle Janning, a sociologist at Whitman College and a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families. “Instead of saying, ‘Support all families,’ it’s saying, ‘Support certain families,’ and ignores the inequalities that exist.”
    There is a fair amount of agreement between the right and left, however, on the principles of what would benefit families — like helping parents support their children financially and keeping their children healthy. And there’s strong consensus among researchers about what families need and what happens when children don’t have that support. 
    What, then, would American policy look like if policies for families more closely resembled the political language celebrating them? 
    The child welfare system would value fathers, too, researchers say. Prison phone calls that keep families connected wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive. Government benefits wouldn’t penalize parents for marrying. The child welfare system wouldn’t mistake consequences of poverty for child neglect. Paid leave and public preschool would help parents stay in the labor force. And policies would support the family bonds that children need, no matter the type of family.

    Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot from the San Francisco bureau. She's particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they're all connected. She joined the Times in 2016 from The Washington Post. @emilymbadger
    Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @clairecm  Facebook

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    9) Is the Border in Crisis? ‘We’re Doing Fine, Quite Frankly,’ a Border City Mayor Says
    By Manny Fernandez and Linda Qiu, June 23, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/border-trump-immigration.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news 

    A Border Patrol vehicle parked near the border fence in Brownsville, Tex. While President Trump has cited an immigration “crisis,” Brownsville officials disagree.CreditTamir Kalifa for The New York Times


    BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — The mayor of this Texas border city has been dealing with a crisis.
    This week, he declared a state of emergency. Drones filled the skies and emergency vehicles raced down the streets. But none of it had anything to do with illegal immigration.
    It had to do with the weather.
    A severe thunderstorm caused widespread flooding throughout the Rio Grande Valley in recent days. That other crisis — the one President Trump says has been unfolding on the border because of illegal immigration — is largely a fiction, the mayor, Tony Martinez, and other Brownsville residents and leaders said.
    “There is not a crisis in the city of Brownsville with regards to safety and security,” said Mr. Martinez, who has lived in Brownsville since the late 1970s. “There’s no gunfire. Most of the people that are migrating are from Central America. It’s not like they’re coming over here to try to take anybody’s job. They’re trying to just save their own lives. We’re doing fine, quite frankly.”

    Mr. Martinez is a Democrat in a mainly conservative state, and many Republicans in Texas, like Mr. Trump, have raised an alarm over the numbers of migrants still flowing into Texas. But there is evidence, in federal data and on the ground in places like Brownsville that the immigration crisis Mr. Trump has cited over the past week to justify the separation of families is actually no crisis at all.

    There has been no drastic overall increase in the number of immigrants crossing the border, and while the rugged frontier along the Rio Grande Valley has long been a transit point for drugs and the trouble that goes along with them, the violence of Mexico’s drug wars seldom spills into the United States.
    In remarks and news releases this past week, Mr. Trump has repeatedly sounded alarm bells on the “crisis” and “mess” of illegal immigration at the southwestern border. At an event Friday with families whose loved ones had been killed by undocumented immigrants, Mr. Trump suggested that immigrants commit more crimes than citizens do. And at a campaign rally on Wednesday, he said that “illegal immigration costs our country hundreds of billions of dollars.”

    “We have to do something about immigration in this country,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “For 50 years, and long before that, it was a disaster. But over the last 20, 25 years, it’s gotten worse.”
    The numbers suggest that this is not true.
    Unauthorized crossings along the border with Mexico have sharply declinedover the past two decades, according to government data. From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, the government reported annually apprehending around 1 million to 1.6 million people who tried to cross the southwestern border illegally. That number has been halved in recent years. By month, border apprehensions averaged more than 81,588 under President George W. Bush, declined to more than 34,647 under President Barack Obama and now stand at 24,241 under Mr. Trump.

    The president is correct in citing a spike in illegal border crossings that occurred in March: The 37,393 individuals apprehended was a 203 percent increase over the same period in March 2017, though the number was lower than in 2013 and 2014.
    Research shows that incarceration rates of both legal and undocumented immigrants across the country are lower than those of native-born Americans, and that the net economic impact of immigration is positive. Mr. Trump’s reference to illegal immigration costing “hundreds of billions of dollars” likely came from a heavily flawed study from an anti-immigration group that pinned the cost at $116 billion annually. Adjusting for the flaws, the impact would more accurately be stated as $3.3 billion to $15.6 billion, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.
    As the numbers show, there is a stark disconnect between Mr. Trump’s border rhetoric and the reality of life in border cities like Brownsville.
    In a way, this is old news: Washington rhetoric has been colliding with realities on the ground for decades, regardless of the topic or the administration. But the president’s repeated descriptions of a chaotic, crime-ridden border have frustrated millions of Americans who live and work on the Southwest frontier.
    “There’s this misconception that we’re in this lawless land, and it’s the wild, wild frontier, and it’s not,” said the Brownsville police chief, Orlando C. Rodriguez. “We see actually a downward trend in crime in Brownsville over the past few years, and the numbers are just getting better every year.”

    There were a total of six homicides in Brownsville in 2017, up from four in 2016. Aggravated assault cases were at 259 in 2017, down from 264 in 2016 and from 292 in 2015. Robbery was at 133 in 2017, up from 130 in 2016 but down from 154 in 2015. Asked whether the city’s population of undocumented immigrants was committing widespread crime, Chief Rodriguez said they were most definitely not.

    “To say that illegals are running around in Brownsville causing problems, we just don’t see it,” the chief said.
    In Nogales, Ariz., which borders and shares its name with a Mexican city, the number of violent crimes plummeted by more than 70 percent from 1997 to 2016. Similar trends can be seen in San Luis, Somerton and Yuma. The overall crime rate in Arizona has also dropped by more than a third from 1993 to 2016. During that same time, the state’s undocumented-immigrant population more than doubled, according to the Pew Research Center.
    President Trump has often cited crimes committed by the transnational gang MS-13 in cities as far from the southern border as New York. Gang members have indeed been responsible for a wave of violence, though some of them were born in the United States, and much of their mayhem is targeted at immigrant communities.
    It is also true that Brownsville and other Southwest cities have their share of crime, poverty and social ills as a result of their proximity to the border.
    The drug trade fuels public corruption. Stash houses in residential neighborhoods hide smuggled people and drugs. Police chases of smugglers’ vehicles often end in tragedy — in deadly collisions, fatal shootings and rollovers.
    But such incidents often happen on or near “the line,” as many people refer to it — the physical border along the Rio Grande — or around the Border Patrol’s traffic checkpoints farther north. Out in the towns and neighborhoods, in the malls and the movie theaters, the border is at times a world away.

    “Everybody was, and I think probably to a large extent still is, going about their way,” said Representative Filemon B. Vela Jr., whose district includes Brownsville. “If you were in the city of Brownsville, and you wanted to witness anything related to this whole story, you’d have to break into one of the Southwest Key facilities to even know that there’s anything going on,” he added, referring to the nonprofit that runs a migrant children’s shelter at a former Walmart.

    Like other issues, the border-crisis debate is a partisan one. Mr. Vela and Mr. Martinez, the mayor, are both Democrats, as are numerous other community leaders and residents in a region that has long been a blue outer edge of a red-dominated state.
    The Republican leadership in Texas sees the situation differently, and has often highlighted evidence of killings, assaults, shootings and kidnappings on Texas soil that they say are directly related to Mexican drug cartels.
    Sergio Sanchez, a Republican activist and commentator in nearby McAllen, agrees with Mr. Trump’s portrayal of the border and his hard-line approach to illegal immigration.
    “The crisis is real,” said Mr. Sanchez, the former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party and the host of a conservative talk-radio show called The Wall. “The crisis is immediately south of the border, and it bleeds over to our side. Mexico is literally a lawless land and they need to come to grips with that. The crisis has been going on for decades. It’s been a fact that the border is porous, and has been porous through too many administrations.”
    When it comes to national immigration policy, Texas’ Republican lawmakers have been largely supportive of the president’s moves to build a border wall and prosecute illegal border crossers, and they have almost gone further than the president in calling for the removal of protections for so-called Dreamers, who entered the country illegally as children.
    Yet even state Republicans have balked at the latest turmoil created by the “zero tolerance” policy that has led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their families. Several Republican lawmakers, including the speaker of the state House and both United States senators, publicly opposed breaking up families.

    On Friday afternoon, in any case, now that the skies were dry and many of the streets were, too, Mr. Martinez’s border looked and felt far different from Mr. Trump’s.
    You could literally see it, or, more accurately, smell it — moist beef brisket, smoked for up to 16 hours, selling for $9.49 by the half-pound at 1848 BBQ, the barbecue joint Mr. Martinez owns downtown. Far from the former Walmart that has become a national symbol of the president’s now-rescinded family-separation policy, the flat-screen TVs here were carrying World Cup soccer, not Mr. Trump’s live remarks on immigration on Friday.
    Mr. Martinez greeted the congressman’s wife, Rose Vela. The chief pitmaster, Abraham Avila, had a package for her (and her two French bulldogs): rib bones.
    At one table sat Hector Rivera-Marrero, 22, who works part-time at 1848 and graduated in May from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Mr. Rivera-Marrero has lived in Brownsville since he was 10. His mother is an optometrist. His application to medical school awaits.
    “It’s very strange because people have this idea, this notion of the border,” said Mr. Rivera-Marrero, whose family is from Puerto Rico. “But in reality it’s very quaint, very relaxed.”
    Brownsville, a city of 183,000, feels more like a town of 1,830. Families have lived here not for years but for generations, and everyone knows nearly everyone else, and their mothers and fathers. Local officials have been busy with plans to build a new airport. SpaceX’s launch site has been taking shape nearby at Boca Chica Village.
    Not long after Mr. Trump spoke in Washington, Mr. Rivera-Marrero left the restaurant for a few hours on an extended lunch break. On the mean streets of the border, he had stuff to do. He picked up his sister from math boot camp. And he got his tires rotated.

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    10) Sarah Huckabee Sanders Was Asked to Leave Restaurant Over White House Work
    By Emily Cochrane, June 223, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-restaurant.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

    Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, this month at the Rose Garden. Her encounter at a Virginia restaurant is the third time this past week in which a Trump administration official was confronted over his or her political stance.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times


    WASHINGTON — Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said she was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant Friday night because of her work in the Trump administration, becoming the latest official to be singled out for her support of the president’s policies.
    In a Saturday tweet, Ms. Sanders said that the owner of the restaurant, the Red Hen in Lexington, Va., suggested she leave, and she complied.

    The woman’s actions “say far more about her than about me,” Ms. Sanders said. “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.” A person who identified as a waiter at the restaurant said in a Facebook post that Ms. Sanders had been accompanied by seven other guests.

    he restaurant did not respond to phone calls, and its website appeared to have crashed Saturday morning as reports of the episode began circulating.

    The encounter is the third time this past week in which a Trump administration official was confronted over his or her political stance.
    As tensions continued to escalate over the White House’s child-separation policy, Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, was heckled on Tuesday night while dining at a Mexican restaurant. “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace,” demonstrators shouted, according to video of the confrontation shared on social media.
    And Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president known for his hard-line stance on immigration, was described as a “fascist” by a protester on Sunday, also while at a Mexican restaurant, The New York Post reported.
    While the administration struggles to reunite the families amid outrage over images and audio recordings of sobbing children taken away from their parents, the divisive messaging on both sides of the debate has intensified.

    Within hours, the Red Hen’s review pages online painted a stark picture of the divide: Some people left glowing reviews for the farm-to-table restaurant from halfway across the country, and others denounced the political choices of the owner.
    “The best,” one reviewer wrote on Yelp, leaving five stars. “I’ve heard that they serve crow to those deserving of it.”
    “Pathetic,” the next review read. “How dare you use politics to discriminate. Seems you will be the actual loser in this case, once the reviews really sink in. Good luck, pal.”
    On Facebook, the establishment had accumulated more than 10,000 five-star reviews, and more than 18,000 one-star reviews, prompting some criticismover Ms. Sanders’s decision to use her White House social media account instead of her personal one to identify the restaurant.
    Another area restaurant with the same name — an unaffiliated Red Hen in a neighborhood of Washington — found itself in the crossfire, receiving some of the vitriol intended for the Lexington establishment.
    “@PressSec went to the unaffiliated @RedHenLex last night, not to our DC-based restaurant,” it said on Twitter

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    11)  Amazon Is Latest Tech Giant to Face Staff Backlash Over Government Work
    By Jamie Condliffe, June 22, 2018
    "We refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights. As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used."
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/business/dealbook/amazon-staff-facial-recognition-protest.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=8&pgtype=sectionfront

    Shankar Narayan, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, speaking at a news conference outside Amazon headquarters.CreditElaine Thompson/Associated Press


    From Google to Microsoft and now Amazon, the largest technology companies are increasingly seeing their workers protest their government projects.

    In recent years, tech firms have built artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems that governments find attractive. But as these companies take on lucrative contracts to furnish state and federal agencies with these technologies, they’re facing increasing pushback from their staffs.

    Amazon employees have joined civil rights groups and investors in protesting the company’s sale of facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies. Amazon began marketing a facial recognition system, called Rekognition, to law enforcement as a means of identifying people suspected of committing crimes shortly after the tool was introduced in 2016. The system — which analyzes images and videos and compares them with databases of photographs to pick out individuals — has been used by the Police Department in Orlando, Fla., and the Sheriff’s Department in Washington County, Ore.
    In a letter addressed to the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, that was published by The Hill, employees wrote:
    We refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights. As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used.
    The letter also criticized the data science company Palantir’s use of Amazon’s cloud computing systems to carry out work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
    Amazon declined to comment but pointed to a blog post published on its website this month after the American Civil Liberties Union called for Amazon to ban the sale of Rekognition to the police. Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services, wrote:
    We believe it is the wrong approach to impose a ban on promising new technologies because they might be used by bad actors for nefarious purposes in the future. The world would be a very different place if we had restricted people from buying computers because it was possible to use that computer to do harm. The same can be said of thousands of technologies upon which we all rely each day. Through responsible use, the benefits have far outweighed the risks.
    Earlier this week, 100 Microsoft employees wrote a letter to the company’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, protesting the software maker’s work with ICE. Microsoft holds a $19.4 million contract with ICE for a project relating to data processing and artificial intelligence. According to The Verge, the letter now has 300 signatories.
    With government contracts so lucrative, the question is whether the concerns of employees will push tech executives to action.
    Early signs suggest they may — at least to a degree.
    The campaigns at Amazon and Microsoft echo one by Google employees earlier this year. Workers there sought to halt an A.I. project that Google was working on with the Pentagon that used machine learning to improve the accuracy of drone missions.

    The protest was ultimately successful. Google said the contract with the Defense Department will not be renewed and created a set of principles to guide its artificial intelligence projects. The new guidelines prohibit the kinds of work that could cause injury or violate human rights. They do not rule out all forms of defense work, though.

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