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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 Email: justice@phila.gov 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

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

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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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1)  $10 Million From FEMA Diverted to Pay for Immigration Detention Centers, Document Shows
By Ron Nixon, September 12, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/us/politics/fema-ice-immigration-detention.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Homeland security personnel deliver supplies toWASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security transferred nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a budget document released by a Democratic senator late Tuesday night, diverting funds from the relief agency at the start of the hurricane season that began in June. The release of the document comes as a major storm barrels toward the East Coast.

The document, which was released by the office of Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, shows that the money would come from FEMA's operations and support budget and was transferred into accounts at ICE to pay for detention and removal operations. The document also shows that the Department of Homeland Security transferred money from accounts at Customs and Border Protection that pays for border fencing and technology.

The transfer was a part of more than $200 million the Department of Homeland Security moved from the budgets of other agencies to ICE's detention and removals.

Mr. Merkley, appearing Tuesday night on "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC, said the Trump administration was taking money from FEMA'S "response and recovery" and "working hard to find funds for additional detention camps." Mr. Merkley has been a vocal critic of the administration's immigration policies. Puerto Rico in the aftermath of a hurricane.

The Department of Homeland Security denies that any money transferred came from FEMA's disasters relief accounts, which pay for work related to hurricanes and other natural disasters.

"Under no circumstances was any disaster relief funding transferred from @fema to immigration enforcement efforts," Tyler Q. Houlton, an agency spokesman, said on Twitter. "This is a sorry attempt to push a false agenda at a time when the administration is focused on assisting millions on the East Coast facing a catastrophic disaster."

Mr. Holton added that money transferred from FEMA could not have been used to pay for hurricane relief efforts because of "appropriation limitations."

"DHS/FEMA stand fiscally and operationally ready to support current and future response and recovery needs," he said.

In an email, the agency said funds taken from FEMA's accounts amounted to less than one percent of the agency's operational accounts and was taken from money to pay for employee travel expenses, training, basic purchase cards and office supplies, among other things. FEMA's funding for disaster response is in a separate, $25 billion account, the agency said.

The agency said it is prepared for Hurricane Florence, which is expected to hit North and South Carolina, and Virginia on Thursday or Friday. FEMA officials said the hurricane could be the strongest storm to hit the Carolinas and Virginia region "in decades."

The release of the budget documents showing the money transfers between FEMA and ICE came after President Trump in an interview called last year's hurricane response efforts by FEMA in Puerto Rico an "unsung success"

"The job that FEMA and law enforcement and everybody did working along with the governor in Puerto Rico, I think was tremendous," Mr. Trump said.

In an early Wednesday morning Twitter post, Mr. Trump doubled down on the agency's performance: "We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!"

New data shows that nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the hurricane and many people continue to live without power on the island. An after-action report by FEMA released in July shows that they agency vastly underestimated how much food and fresh water it would need, and how hard it would be to get additional supplies to the island.

The report describes the initial response as chaotic and disorganized and plagued with logistical problems as the agency tried to get food and other equipment onto the island.

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2)  The Racism Inside Fire Departments
By Addington Stewart, a retired St. Louis firefighter, September 12, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/opinion/the-racism-inside-fire-departments.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

An electrician for the New York Fire Department, Gregory Seabrook, second from left, with his lawyers at a news conference in 2011. Mr. Seabrook said he found a noose outside his work locker after he complained about discrimination.

Imagine how you would feel if you showed up at work and found a noose waiting for you. It happened just last year to a young black firefighter in Miami. In our profession, that garish expression of racism was unfortunately not an anomaly. In the aftermath of California's summer wildfires and the well-deserved praise of the heroism of the people who risked their lives to extinguish them, it's also important to confront the bigotry that puts individual firefighters and the people we serve at risk.

I've served 35 years as a firefighter, and the racism today is as bad as I can remember. My organization, the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, is monitoring or pursuing legal or administrative action on a dozen major cases of discrimination.

Though the noose incident took place in Florida, this is not just a Southern problem. Complaints come from liberal bastions including New York City, where just last year seven African-American employees of the Fire Department filed a lawsuit over "a broad pattern of racial discrimination." In Ohio, a volunteer firefighter announced on Facebook that he'd rather save a dog than an African-American. Beyond the obvious implications for citizens who might need help, this statement is representative of the kind of attitude many black firefighters confront at work each day.

I believe incidents like those I've described here are underreported. In my experience, repercussions for reporting discrimination or harassment can be as career-damaging as the despicable actions that prompted an appeal for justice. Black firefighters who have taken a stand against unfair treatment report having been punished with increased harassment, social exclusion, reduced pay, transfers and demotions.

Despite a rich history of black firefighting heroes that goes back to the beginnings of a professionalized service in the early 19th century, firefighting in this country is stained by a tradition of exclusion. Post-segregation, discrimination was reinforced through deep-rooted nepotism and cronyism. For those whose great-grandfather, grandfather and father weren't firefighters — and especially for applicants with the wrong color, gender or sexuality — training and testing became an impermeable barrier. Notoriously, white male recruits received special mentoring and reduced scrutiny by those in charge of hiring. 

So-called bad apples can't be blamed for all the racial problems in fire departments today. The problems are system-deep. To begin to solve them, local fire department leaders must step up their efforts to support and enforce inclusivity. We should prioritize hiring fire chiefs who are fully committed to dismantling nepotism and tackling those professional traditions that degrade opportunity. We need an impartial, standardized and professional process for testing at entry level and on promotional exams to inoculate against the effects of bias and favoritism. Fire departments must enforce workplace rules already in place.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 8 percent of our nation's firefighters are African-Americans, and an even smaller percentage hold leadership positions. In that way, our nation's fire service is like many other industries that are still battling hate and bias, both subtle and in-your-face.

What makes firefighting unusual is that as we're rolling out of the firehouse with sirens on — whether responding to a fire, drug overdose or car crash — we know that what we encounter may be the worst moment in someone's life. Our hearts are pounding, and we're aware that any call could be a one-way trip for us. Smoke inhalation, building collapse and backdraft are known risks and we accept them.

But the hazards of bigotry within our ranks are an unacceptable burden. When we step into a life-threatening situation, we need to work as a team and know each one of us has the others' back.

Unchecked hate and discrimination obliterate that essential trust. They put us in greater danger, and they can put you in greater danger, too.

Addington Stewart is president of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters.

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3)  Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever

By Caitlin Dickerson, September 12. 2018

"Facilities like the one in Tornillo are also more expensive to operate...such facilities cost about $750 per child per day, or three times the amount of a typical shelter."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/us/migrant-children-detention.html

Even though hundreds of children separated from their families after crossing the border have been released under court order, the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded — a significant counternarrative to the Trump administration's efforts to reduce the number of undocumented families coming to the United States.

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, according to data obtained by The New York Times, reaching a total of 12,800 this month. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.

The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors, the data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests. Some of those who work in the migrant shelter network say the bottleneck is straining both the children and the system that cares for them.

Most of the children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Many are teenagers from Central America, and they are housed in a system of more than 100 shelters across the United States, with the highest concentration near the southwest border.

The new data was reported to members of Congress, who shared it with The Times. It shows that despite the Trump administration's efforts to discourage Central American migrants, roughly the same number of children are crossing the border as in years past. The big difference, said those familiar with the shelter system, is that red tape and fear brought on by stricter immigration enforcement have discouraged relatives and family friends from coming forward to sponsor children.

Shelter capacities have hovered close to 90 percent since at least May, compared to about 30 percent a year ago. Any new surge in border crossings, which could happen at any time, could quickly overwhelm the system, operators say.

"The closer they get to 100 percent, the less ability they will have to address anything unforeseen," said Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children for the Health and Human Services Department under President Barack Obama. "Even if there's not a sudden influx, they will be running out of capacity soon unless something changes."

The administration appeared to move to address that on Tuesday, when it announced that it will triple the size of a temporary "tent city" in Tornillo, Tex., to house up to 3,800 children through the end of the year. Immigrant advocates and members of Congress reacted to the news with distress, because conditions are comparatively harsh in such large overflow facilities, compared with traditional shelters.

Facilities like the one in Tornillo are also more expensive to operate, according to Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the shelter program. She said such facilities cost about $750 per child per day, or three times the amount of a typical shelter.

"You are flying in the face of child welfare, and we're doing it by design," Ms. DeLauro said. "You drive up the cost and you prolong the trauma on these children."

Federal authorities said they were dealing with high levels of illegal border crossings and requests for asylum. "The number of unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger issue of a broken immigration system," Evelyn Stauffer, press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement. "That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to address this broken system and the pull factors that have led to increasing numbers at the U.S. border."

The system for sheltering migrant children came under scrutiny this summer, when more than 2,500 children who were separated from their parents were housed in federally contracted shelters under the Trump administration's zero tolerance border enforcement policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number of children who are currently detained.

Historically, children categorized as "unaccompanied" have been placed with sponsors, such as parents already in the United States, extended family members or family friends, as soon as the sponsors can be vetted by federal authorities. But the new data shows that the placement process has slowed significantly. Monthly releases have plummeted by about two-thirds since last year.

The delays in vetting sponsors relate, in part, to changes the Trump administration has made in how the process works. In June, the authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.

Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented themselves, and therefore are wary of risking deportation by stepping forward to claim sponsorship of a child. Even those who are willing to become sponsors have had to wait months to be fingerprinted and otherwise reviewed.

Federal officials say their vetting procedures are designed to safeguard the children in their care.

"Children who enter the country illegally are at high risk for exploitation by traffickers and smugglers," Ms. Stauffer said in her statement.

But the longer children are detained, the more anxious and depressed they are likely to become, according to Mr. Greenberg, who oversaw the program under Mr. Obama. When that happens, children may try to harm themselves or escape, and can become violent with the staff and with one another, he said.

Stories of such behavior have emerged through reporting in recent months as the shelter system has faced intense criticism by members of Congress and the public.

"Being in congregate care for an extended period of time is not a good thing. It increases the likelihood of things going wrong," Mr. Greenberg said.

The administration funneled children who were separated from their parents into the shelter system this summer under the earlier policy, without any apparent collaboration with the officials who oversee the shelter program.

The separated children injected a new degree of chaos into the facilities, according to several shelter operators, who spoke anonymously because they are barred by the government from speaking to the news media. The children were younger and more traumatized than those the shelters were used to dealing with, and they arrived without a plan for when they could be released or to whom.

But the system had already been overwhelmed for months, operators said, as children continued to flow in while fewer were being discharged.

The shelter system has overflowed before. In 2014, when unaccompanied children flooded across the border in unprecedented numbers, a lack of shelter space led to a backup of children at the border in what authorities referred to at the time as a humanitarian crisis.

Since then, new facilities have been constructed or arranged by contract — and they are now nearing capacity.

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4) In German Catholic Churches, Child Sex Abuse Victims Top 3,600, Study Finds
By Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy, September 12, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/world/europe/german-church-sex-abuse-children.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

Bishops attending Ascension Day Mass in Muenster, Germany, in May.

BERLIN — More than 3,600 children, most age 13 or younger, were sexually abused by Catholic clergy members over the past seven decades, a wide-ranging report has found.

The study, which was commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church bishops' conference in Germany, found that at least 1,670 church workers had been involved in the abuse of 3,677 children. That is 4.4 percent of the clergy.

The study, conducted by researchers from three universities over more than four years, was an ambitious effort to understand the scale of the abuse — and how it could have been systematically covered up for so many decades.

"We are aware of the extent of the sexual abuse that is supported by the results of the study," said Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier. "It is depressing and shameful."

The findings have not yet been made public officially, but they were outlined in an eight-page summary obtained by The New York Times on Wednesday. They chronicle abuse cases from 1946 to 2014. Every sixth case of abuse involved rape, researchers found, and most of the victims were boys.

The German report was scheduled to be released on Sept. 25, but it leaked out and was first reported in the German newspaper Die Zeit on Wednesday.

As shocking as the findings are in a country that to date has learned mostly of individual cases of abuse, they are likely to underestimate the true extent of the problem, said Christian Pfeiffer, a criminologist.

Mr. Pfeiffer said he had initially been asked to take part in the research. In the end, he said, he refused because the church wanted to reserve its right to control the resulting research papers — and under certain circumstances even ban their publication.

"The report does not give the full picture, and is not fully independent," he said.

Researchers had no direct access to church files, relying instead on church personnel to fill in questionnaires for them, he said. And in several cases, the report found evidence that files regarding the abuse of minors had been manipulated or destroyed.

"The degree of the cover up is stunning and beyond anything I had expected," Mr. Pfeiffer said.

The report emphasized that many of the victims who contacted the researchers anonymously expressed the feeling that "while the Catholic Church regrets the sexual abuse by clergymen, they have yet to see a sign of true remorse and an authentic admission of guilt."

"This perception should be taken seriously," they warned, adding that offering easy, transparent and equitable compensation to all victims would help. So far, the church in Germany has left it up to each individual diocese to handle the issue of compensation, leaving wide gaps.

The German report comes in the wake of recent attempts to count the toll of abuse by Catholic priests elsewhere in the world, though investigators there were afforded more independence.

In Pennsylvania, a grand jury report released in August found that more than 300 priests had sexually abused 1,000 minors over 70 years. The report provoked widespread outrage not simply because of the numbers, but also because of the depravity of the abuse and what many saw as the bishops' callousness toward the victims.

The grand jury's report covered only six of the state's eight dioceses — and did not include the populous archdiocese of Philadelphia.

In 2004, bishops in the United States commissioned researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to survey the scope and nature of the abuse scandal amid a nationwide scandal that began in Boston. Their report found 4,392 priests with allegations of abuse, and 10,667 alleged victims from 1950 to 2002. The researchers based their report on files provided by the American bishops.

But many abuse victims and their advocates say they do not trust that the church is being transparent, and have called for government investigators to step in.

That is what happened in Australia, where a royal commission looked at child abuse in many religious institutions, including the Catholic Church. From 1980 to 2015, the report found, there were 1,880 church employees — mostly priests — suspected of abuse, and 4,444 alleged victims.

Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.

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5) Yemen Civilians Keep Dying, but Pompeo Says Saudis Are Doing Enough
By Ben Hubbard, September 12, 2018
"The intervention has been a dilemma to officials in both the Obama and Trump administrations, who had to choose between supporting close Gulf allies who have spent many billions of dollars on American weapons and holding them accountable for waging war in a way that rights groups and others say has caused egregious harm to civilians."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/world/middleeast/saudi-yemen-pompeo-certify.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

Houthi demonstrators denouncing an offer by the Saudi-led coalition to pay compensation for victims of an airstrike in Yemen in early September.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Despite attacks that have killed dozens of civilians at a time, the Trump administration on Wednesday certified that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are doing enough to minimize the deadly impact of their military campaign in Yemen.

The certification, announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was legally required to allow American military aircraft to continue refueling warplanes belonging to the two Gulf nations, the dominant members of an Arab coalition fighting a brutal war in Yemen that has helped create the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Mr. Pompeo's move came amid rising concern in Washington about the coalition's prosecution of the war and worries among some lawmakers that American weapons were being used to commit war crimes and that American officials could be held liable.

In its efforts to oust Yemen's Houthi rebels from the capital, Sana, the coalition has bombed weddings, funerals, factories and other civilian infrastructure, often with munitions acquired from the United States. The aerial assaults have elicited harsh criticisms from United Nations investigators and human rights groups, who have also accused the Houthis of violating the laws of war.

Last month, the coalition launched an airstrike near a bus full of students on a religious outing, killing dozens in an attack that Human Rights Watch called "an apparent war crime."

In response to similar assaults, Congress included in a defense bill signed by Mr. Trump last month a clause that required Mr. Pompeo to certify that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were doing enough to avoid harming civilians. Without that certification, they would lose the aerial refueling services provided by the United States.

In his statement on Wednesday, Mr. Pompeo said they were doing enough.

"The governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure resulting from military operations of these governments," Mr. Pompeo said.

He also said that ending the war in Yemen was "a national security priority" and that the United States would continue working with Gulf allies to pursue peace talks and ensure delivery of humanitarian aid.

The charity Oxfam, a longtime provider of assistance to Yemeni civilians, denounced the decision as having enabled the continuation of a horrific war.

"The State Department demonstrated that it is blindly supporting military operations in Yemen without any allegiance to facts, moral code or humanitarian law," Scott Paul, a policy advocate for the group, said in a statement. "This administration is doubling down on its failed policy of literally fueling the world's largest humanitarian crisis."

The war in Yemen began in 2014, when the Houthis, who are aligned with Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional rival, seized control of the country's northwest, including the capital, sending the government into exile.

In March 2015, a military coalition of Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia launched a bombing campaign aimed at ousting the Houthis and restoring the government. It has so far failed to achieve either objective, and the war has led to widespread hunger and the spread of dangerous diseases, like cholera.

The intervention has been a dilemma to officials in both the Obama and Trump administrations, who had to choose between supporting close Gulf allies who have spent many billions of dollars on American weapons and holding them accountable for waging war in a way that rights groups and others say has caused egregious harm to civilians.

The United States has offered some assistance in the campaign, sharing intelligence, helping Saudi Arabia protect its southern border and refueling coalition jets in midair, but United States officials say they play no role in target selection.

Much of the debate has revolved around the best way for the United States to influence the coalition's actions. Some have argued for punitive steps, like curtailing military aid. Others have counter-argued that American disengagement could worsen matters.

It was the counterargument that prevailed on Wednesday, at least in part because of the strong relationships between the White House and the Gulf countries.

In Washington, some Trump administration officials tracking the war in Yemen have increasingly expressed anxieties over the civilian deaths in internal conversations, said Andrew Miller, deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. Those include officials working on the issue at the State Department and Defense Department, he said.

Damage to a cholera treatment center in Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders after an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition airstrike last June.

"I do think there is growing concern, although it hasn't reached the point that has translated to a change in policy," said Mr. Miller, who worked on Middle East policy on the National Security Council in the Obama administration and was a State Department official.

Mr. Miller said there is "reticence" among some policymakers, including among political appointees, on strengthening ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates "because of the question of whether war crimes are being committed."

However, those officials have little or no direct access to the White House and Cabinet members. And Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump's son-in-law and the top White House adviser on the Middle East, is in close touch with Saudi and Emirati officials.

"Gulf relations are impaired by the sense among Saudis and Emiratis that all they need is Trump and Kushner, and they don't need anyone else," Mr. Miller said.

Saudi officials say the coalition exerts great efforts to minimize harm to civilians and has established an internal body to investigate reported violations of the laws of war. Early this month, the coalition admitted "mistakes" in the bombing of the school bus and said those responsible would be held accountable.

The certification signed by Mr. Pompeo said the Trump administration had recognized that "civilian casualties have occurred at rates that are far too high." But it said the coalition had taken steps to improve, including developing a no-strike list of sensitive targets and putting Saudi pilots through American training on avoiding civilian deaths.

Rights groups have said similar efforts have been going on for years and appeared to have had little effect. Some openly dismiss the coalition's professed interest in investigating itself.

A recent report by Human Rights Watch about the coalition's investigative body said it had failed "to provide credible, impartial and transparent investigations into alleged coalition laws-of-war violations."

Others, too, accuse the coalition of doing too little.

Larry L. Lewis, a former State Department official who visited Saudi Arabia five times in 2015 and 2016 to help the country's air force improve its targeting and investigations, said the certification showed that the administration either lacked the will to push the coalition to improve or did not know what it meant to do "everything possible" to reduce civilian casualties.

"There's more that can be done," Mr. Lewis wrote in an email. "Whether the U.S. government is willing to do more is another matter."

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington.

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6) U.S. Recovery Eludes Many Living Below Poverty Level, Census Suggests
By Glenn Thrush, September 13, 2018
"And the poor are getting poorer. The poverty threshold in 2017 was $24,858 for a family of four. The percentage of families of living on half that income, in constant dollars, has nearly doubled since 1975, to 5.7 percent from 3.5 percent, the report showed."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/us/politics/poverty-rate-census-bureau.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

A soup kitchen in Williamsport, Pa. Economists and advocates for poor people say the relatively modest gains over the last few years are fragile.

WASHINGTON — In July, President Trump's Council of Economic Advisers declared that the country's five-decade war on poverty was largely over and called it a success.

On Wednesday, the Census Bureau released its 2017 annual report on the poor that offered a stark counterpoint, suggesting that the national recovery has bypassed many of the 40 million to 45 million Americans estimated to be living below the federal poverty level.

While median household income rose 1.8 percent last year, the national poverty rate remained stubbornly high at 12.3 percent. That was just a slight decrease from the previous year's level of 12.7 percent, according to the federal government's most comprehensive annual gauge of economic hardship.

The supplemental poverty measure for 2017, widely regarded by economists as more accurate, was even higher, 13.9 percent in 2017, essentially unchanged from the year before. That is an improvement from the recent high of 16 percent recorded in 2013. But economists and advocates for poor people say the relatively modest gains over the last few years are fragile, endangered by the Trump administration's policies and vulnerable to a long-overdue economic downturn.

"If this is the best we can do, it isn't good," said Timothy Smeeding, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies poverty and economic mobility.

"Things really tapered off this year, after a serious drop in previous years," he said. "In terms of the boom, the party has lasted a long time, a lot longer than we thought, but not everybody is getting invited — people who are working several jobs, taking jobs without benefits, kids who are growing up in poverty. The fruits of the recovery are not being spread around evenly."

The report comes as the Trump administration seeks to curtail safety net programs, in part by playing down the severity of poverty in the country. The White House, bolstering its case for program cuts and new work requirements for recipients of federal aid, has gone so far as to question the validity of the government's traditional calculations for poverty.

Mr. Trump has pressed Congress and his cabinet to impose strict new work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, moves that could strip some beneficiaries of their benefits, and has supported new work rules in Republican-controlled states, like Arkansas and Kentucky.

In both of his budget blueprints, Mr. Trump has trimmed domestic spending on housing, education and food assistance. Such cuts have been restored by the Senate, but advocates say there is an overall bias in Washington against helping those in need that is hampering the recovery among low-income Americans.

"There's a precariousness to the recovery and a fragility in the lives of poor people right now," said Olivia Golden, the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy, an advocacy organization based in Washington that opposed budget cuts.

While Wednesday's report showed no statistically significant reduction in poverty during Mr. Trump's first year in office, the strengthening economy could usher in bigger improvements next year. The economy grew at an annual rate of 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, according to the Commerce Department, and average hourly wages in August increased 2.9 percent.

Unemployment, now at 3.9 percent, has decreased significantly for all age, gender, racial and ethnic groups, and 1.7 million workers saw wage increases last year, according to the Census Bureau.

But warning signs persist. Poverty rates among African-Americans and Hispanics have declined in recent years, but both remain above 20 percent, far outpacing the poverty rate of 9.8 percent for the white, non-Hispanic population.

And the poor are getting poorer. The poverty threshold in 2017 was $24,858 for a family of four. The percentage of families of living on half that income, in constant dollars, has nearly doubled since 1975, to 5.7 percent from 3.5 percent, the report showed.

"The level of poverty for people with the lowest incomes seems to be on the uptick," said Jennifer Jones Austin, the chief executive of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, an anti-poverty advocacy group that represents 170 agencies operating in New York City. "The Trump administration says the war on poverty is over. That's not reality."

The Census Bureau's official poverty measure, calculated at 12.3 percent last year, is widely viewed as an outdated formula.

Most economists consider the poverty number published concurrently in the supplemental report, which is 1.6 percentage points higher, to be a more precise measure because it factors in the cost of expenses like housing, child care and transportation, while estimating the positive effect of government benefits like Social Security, Medicaid and the earned-income tax credit.

But Mr. Trump's economic team, led by Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has questioned both of the Census Bureau's poverty calculations. The real poverty rate is much lower, the team has argued, citing a 2017 paper by two conservative economists that used a statistical analysis based on spending patterns by the poor that pegged the rate at closer to 3 percent.

"There are problems, especially in the supplemental report, where a lot of income is underreported," said Bruce D. Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago who wrote the alternative study with James X. Sullivan, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame.

"It misses a lot of income," he said, including food stamps and tax credits, "and doesn't capture things like the improvement in the quality of housing."

"We've made a lot of progress and it's not reflected in those numbers," he added.

In July, Mr. Hassett's team, using those alternative calculations, claimed that between 1960 and 2016, the real poverty rate had declined to 3 percent from 30 percent. "Based on historical standards of material well-being and the terms of engagement, our war on poverty is largely over and a success," members of the economic council wrote in a report intended to bolster the case for stiffening work requirements.

David Brady, who runs a poverty research center at the University of California, Riverside, said the report on Wednesday undermined a chief contention of conservatives: that the wide availability of work would, by itself, eradicate poverty.

Wages for low-income workers have not kept pace with the cost of living in high-expense states, including California, where rising housing costs have contributed to a 20 percent poverty rate that ranks the highest in the nation, Mr. Brody said. That has increased the need for safety net programs, especially housing assistance.

The report illustrated the role of government support in keeping the rate from rising higher, citing income data showing that 27 million people "were taken out of poverty" by Social Security benefits, with another 3.4 million Americans pushed above the threshold by federal food aid.

"The stagnation in the poverty rate is bad news," Mr. Brady said. "It means that a low unemployment rate alone hasn't solved the problem."

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7) Australian Politicians Threaten Schoolgirl Over National Anthem Protest
By Isabella Kwai, September 13, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/australia/national-anthem-protest-girl.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

Harper Nielsen, 9, was sent to detention for refusing to stand for the Australian national anthem during school. Her parents, Mark Nielsen and Yvette Miller, stood by her decision

SYDNEY, Australia — A 9-year-old Australian schoolgirl whose refusal to stand for the singing of the national anthem has stirred a nationwide debate said Thursday that she would continue to protest the song she said was racist even if it meant being kicked out of school.

The girl, Harper Nielsen, was sent to detention and threatened with suspension from her Brisbane primary school last week after sitting through a schoolwide rendition of "Advance Australia Fair," the national anthem, she said.

News of her protest quickly went viral, leading to condemnations by conservative politicians and a national conversation about race and free speech.

The girl's protest, which echoed those of American football players who have knelt at games during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner," made headlines in the same week that a national newspaper printed a cartoon depicting the tennis player Serena Williams with exaggerated lips.

That cartoon, like Harper's protest, further revealed a historic and racially tinged battle line in the country's culture wars.

"I think that everyone should be able to express their opinion," Harper said in an interview. "Even if you're small, you can do big things."

Harper said she was protesting one word in the anthem's second line: "young."

"Australians all let us rejoice," goes the song, "for we are young and free."

Many Indigenous Australians say the depiction of the country as new, or a young nation, diminishes the history of their ancestors, who inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years. Australia's Aboriginal and Straits Islander communities have routinely argued that many aspects of national civic life erase their history, including the anthem and Australia Day, which celebrates the arrival of the first British settlers.

"I thought about what it would be like to be an Aboriginal person in that situation and I guess that helped me," Harper, who is white, said of her refusal to stand. "They might feel left out. They might feel upset. Sad."

Her father, Mark Nielsen, said that a family conversation this year about the treatment of Indigenous Australians first got Harper, a fourth grader at Kenmore South State School in Brisbane, thinking about the anthem.

"Anyone who knows Harper know she's not a kid who can be brainwashed. She's a very strong-minded and strong-willed young person," said Mr. Nielsen, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Queensland.

Some conservative politicians condemned Harper's parents; others threatened the child with physical violence or resorted to calling her names.

"What the hell is going on? I'm angry about this," Pauline Hanson, the founder of a right-wing political party, said in a video posted to Twitter. "Here we have a kid is being brainwashed. And I tell you what, I'd give her a kick up the backside."

Jarrod Bleijie, a state politician from the Liberal National Party, said on Twitter that Harper's parents were using their child as a political pawn.

"Refusing to stand disrespects our country and our veterans," he wrote. "Suspension should follow if she continues to act like a brat."

Members of the Indigenous community, however, applauded the girl and praised her parents.

"Her parents should be congratulated for raising a brilliant, thinking young student who won't be forced to do something that is against her deeply held beliefs," Sam Watson, an Aboriginal elder, told The Courier Mail.

The Queensland Department of Education rebutted Harper's claim that she had been threatened with suspension and said the school allowed for peaceful demonstrations.

"The school has been respectful of the student's wishes and has provided other alternatives, including remaining outside the hall or not singing during the national anthem," the department said in a statement. "At no time did the school suggest that the student would be suspended or excluded for refusing to take part in the national anthem."

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8) Massachusetts Gas Explosions: Dozens of Homes Burn in Andover and Lawrence
By Kathrine Q. Seelye, farah Stockman, Jacey Fortin and Monica Davey, September 13, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/us/lawrence-massachusetts-explosion-gas-fire.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Flames consuming the roof of a home in Lawrence, Mass., a suburb of Boston. One person was killed and more than 20 were injured after explosions at dozens of homes in Lawrence, Andover and North Andover.

LAWRENCE, Mass. — Violent explosions and billowing fires tore through three towns north of Boston late Thursday afternoon, damaging dozens of houses, forcing thousands of stunned residents to evacuate and plunging much of the region into an eerie darkness.

One person was killed and more than 20 were injured in the sudden string of explosions caused by gas leaks in Lawrence, Andover and North Andover as blackish-gray clouds of smoke rolled across rooftops and flames shot into the sky.

Leonel Rondon, 18, was killed while he sat in a car in the driveway of a home in Lawrence, the authorities said. A chimney fell onto the car, they said, when the home, on Chickering Road, exploded.

Across the region, residents returned from work to find their homes burning and neighbors standing outside with no clear sense of what to do. Firefighters and other emergency workers raced from block to block, urging residents to evacuate to shelters that were hastily being opened. Along some blocks, the smell of gas hung in the air, and cellphones buzzed with evacuation warnings.

"It looked like Armageddon, it really did," Michael Mansfield, the fire chief of Andover, who has worked as a firefighter for almost four decades, told a CBS station in Boston. "There were billows of smoke coming from Lawrence behind me. I could see plumes of smoke in front of me from the town of Andover. It looked like an absolute war zone."

The string of explosions, fires and reports of gas odor — at least 70 of them, although officials were still trying to account for all of the damage late Thursday — came suddenly, beginning shortly before 5 p.m., without warning and without an immediate explanation from officials. But natural gas, and the possibility that gas had become overpressurized in a main, was the focus of many local authorities.

Earlier in the day, a local gas company, Columbia Gas of Massachusetts, had announced that it was "upgrading natural gas lines in neighborhoods across the state." On Friday morning, the company said in a statement that workers would need to visit each of the 8,600 affected customers to inspect the gas meter.

"We expect this will be an extended restoration effort," the statement said.

With three communities that are home to more than 100,000 people involved, the aftermath was chaotic, confusing and shifting by the minute. In some neighborhoods, firefighters found themselves putting out one fire, only to find another breaking out next door or down the block. Images from Lawrence showed several housing complexes bursting with flames and thick smoke billowing as firefighters rushed to the scenes.

Annie Wilson, 73, was home alone in her third-floor apartment in south Lawrence when she smelled smoke. She opened her back door and smoke poured into the house. She ran out the front, and her parakeets flew away as she tried to rescue them.

Fire quickly consumed the building. Ms. Wilson said she lost everything, including her husband's ashes, which were in an urn, all her family photographs and all her clothes.

"It was just crazy," said Jessica Wilson, 43, Ms. Wilson's daughter-in-law. "People were walking in the street with bags, kids were crying, there were sirens all over the place."

In the long hours after the fires, sections of the communities turned dark and silent, with power turned off and people told to leave. More than 18,000 customers were without electricity at one point on Thursday night. Long lines of traffic jammed the roads out of some towns. Traffic was crammed, too, near roads to shelters that were opened to those left homeless. Some exits off the major interstate highways were closed, and officials said the area's schools would be shuttered on Friday.

Thousands of people were left to sort out what to do. Some people said they were told to leave only if they smelled gas; others said they were told to leave regardless. Residents said they were uncertain whether to stay or go, and when they might return. "What we need folks to do is that if it's happening in your home, you have a funny smell, just evacuate, come out to the street," Mayor Dan Rivera of Lawrence told WBZ-TV.

The worst part, said Maria Santana, who was at home in Lawrence when she smelled gas, was that the explosions came without warning and that no one in authority seemed to have any idea of what was happening. A school not far from her home that her children and grandchildren had attended was damaged, she said.

"We didn't know anything then and we still don't know anything," she said. "We don't even know how we're standing up right now."

Maureen Taylor, 55, had been putting a roast in the oven at her Andover home when something seemed strange: The gas stove made the usual clicking noises, but it would not light.

"I wasn't getting any gas," she said. "It was very bizarre."

A minute or so later, her phone buzzed with an alarm telling her to evacuate.

"I'm very lucky that the stove didn't go off," she said.

On her way to a senior center for shelter, Ms. Taylor saw two homes in her neighborhood burning. Officers were gathered on the streets. At the senior center, Ms. Taylor said she was surrounded by dozens of other people who wondered what would come next.

"They're worried about getting home," she said. "They're worried about their animals. Because really we were just given a few minutes to evacuate, and we keep hearing new information about whether we're going to go back tonight or not."

As the night wore on, leaders of the three towns suggested that residents who had been evacuated needed to stay away — at least for now. No timeline for cleanup and safety checks was set, they said, and no one had a real sense of how much damage had been done.

Mr. Rivera said the affected properties in Lawrence were south of the Merrimack River. He warned people not to return to their homes on Thursday evening, and that it may take days to ensure that homes are safe to enter.

"If you are out of the house, stay away from your properties until we have made it safe for everyone," Mr. Rivera said. "If you have not evacuated, you have just got to go. Trust us when we tell you that if you stay in your home, you will be at risk."

Gov. Charlie Baker said public safety officers and government officials are focused on trying to make sure that people are safe and that communities make it through the night safely, despite the loss of power and lingering fears over gas. Later, he said, he will turn his attention to what caused the explosion.

"We'll get to the question about what happened," he said.

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from Lawrence, Mass.; Farah Stockman from Cambridge, Mass.; Jacey Fortin from New York; and Monica Davey from Chicago. Andrew R. Chow and Julia Jacobs contributed reporting from New York.

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9) Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules 
In a new poll, girls say they feel empowered, except when it comes to being judged on how they look. Boys still feel they have to be strong, athletic and stoic.
By Claire Cain Miller, September 14, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/upshot/gender-stereotypes-survey-girls-boys.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

"For me, it's important to be intelligent and confident. For women in society, I think people just want you to be attractive." Hiree Felema, 13

Girls have been told they can be anything they want to be, and it shows. They are seizing opportunities closed to previous generations — in science, math, sports and leadership. 

But they're also getting another message: What they look like matters more than any of that. 

Boys seem to have been largely left out of the conversation about gender equality. Even as girls' options have opened up, boys' lives are still constricted by traditional gender norms: being strong, athletic and stoic. 

These are findings from a new nationally representative poll of 1,000 children and adolescents 10 to 19, along with other research on this age group, which is not surveyed often. They show gender attitudes of a generation on the verge of adulthood.

"Nowadays, if you're a girl and you act like a boy, it's considered cool, it's normal. But if you're a guy and you act like a girl, it's different, it's not as tolerated." Muyang Yan, 12

In the survey, conducted by PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, a majority of girls said sexism was still a problem — yet in many ways, they felt empowered. Girls were slightly more likely than boys to say being a leader was a very important life goal, evidence of a significant shift in gender expectations.

"I'm all in for leadership," said Isabelle Reksopuro, 13, one of eight eighth graders at Happy Valley Middle School in Happy Valley, Ore., we interviewed this week. She is captain of the debate team and a member of the student council, and wants to become a scientist. "In this school, girls and boys have equal opportunities; it just depends on your talent."

"A lot of Asian culture is like, 'You've got to do all this stuff so you can be the perfect wife.' I'm just worried about what college I'll get into and how to go into the sciences or politics." Isabelle Reksopuro, 13

When boys and girls were asked about their goals and aspirations, the responses were similar. Three-quarters said having a successful career was very important. A third of respondents or less, of either gender, said marrying or having children was a very important goal. 

Girls were as likely as boys to say math or science was their favorite subject, and to have considered running for office. They said they were mostly treated fairly compared with boys.

Yet when it came to their bodies, girls said they did not feel equal. About three-quarters of girls 14 to 19 in the survey said they felt judged as a sexual object or unsafe as a girl. By far, they said society considered physical attractiveness to be the most important female trait — a view that adult women share, surveys have found. Girls were also more likely than boys to say they felt a lot of pressure to put others' feelings before their own. 

About half said they hear boys making sexual comments or jokes about girls daily, including a quarter of girls 10 to 13. One-third of teenage girls have heard these comments from men in their families. 

Black and Latino adolescents, the survey found, are more likely to have progressive attitudes about gender equality, but they're also more likely to hear sexual comments from peers, and to feel pressure to be attractive or strong. 

The eighth graders (who were not part of the survey) in Happy Valley, a middle-class suburb east of Portland, described equal opportunities at school for boys and girls: Girls far outnumbered boys on the student council, and a few even played on the football team.

"If you're upset, you try to get your mind off it and forget about it. I kinda wish I could express it more." Jamel Pichon, 13

The middle-school girls were unanimous in what they valued most in themselves: intelligence and confidence. But they also agreed that society placed the most value on their looks, and mentioned pressure to look attractive online and the risk of predators on social media. 

"As long as I'm confident in myself, I can put myself out there and other people can take it or leave it," said Sally Ayach, 13, a gymnast who excels at math and wants to be a lawyer.

Boys, however, don't always see it that way, she said. "If they see a girl with a nice body, they're going to go after seeing that body," she said. "It's like who can get the most girls."

"Right now, if you put your mind to it, you can do it. You want to be an astronaut? You can do it. As long as you work hard enough, no one's going to stop you." Sally Ayach, 13

In the survey, 81 percent of girls 14 to 19 said they had at least one friend who had been asked by a boy for a sexy or naked photo. "They ask all the time," Sally said. "But I'm like, no thanks, I'm not like that."

Deborah Tolman, a psychology professor at the City University of New York who researches adolescent sexuality, said: "This is the contradiction we put in front of girls: You should be confident and do well in school and do athletics, but you're supposed to also be a good sex object at the same time." 

Isabelle said romance was the exception to the equality she felt at school and in life. Recently, she rejected a boy who had been flirting with her on text and social media. 

"He got ridiculously mad; he called me names, used slurs," she said. "When we get rejected, we don't explode just because they don't like us back. Guys just feel more privileged." 

Adolescents feel these pressures worldwide, found the Global Early Adolescent Study by Johns Hopkins and the World Health Organization. "We were stunned — and I'm not easily stunned, as a clinician working 40 years with adolescents — at the hyper-sexualization of young kids," said Robert Blum, the study's principal investigator and a public health professor at Johns Hopkins.

The continuing study is of children 10 to 14 in poor urban areas in 15 countries, and gender norms were remarkably similar. "Whether you're in Hanoi or Shanghai or Baltimore, you understand the script," Mr. Blum said. "You get the messages of girl vulnerability and girl weakness and boy strength and boy independence."

"Boys typically aren't supposed to be emotional, so real men shouldn't cry." Reid Gray, 13

Traditional ideas about boys still run strong in the United States, found the new survey, which was commissioned by Plan International USA, an organization for children's rights and girls' equality. It polled teenagers and children of adults who participate in the University of Chicago's NORC AmeriSpeak panel. 

Boys said strength and toughness were the male character traits most valued by society. Three-quarters said they felt pressure to be physically strong, and a majority felt pressure to play sports. 

Asked what society expects boys to do when they feel angry, the largest shares said they were supposed to be aggressive or be quiet and suck it up. When they felt sad or scared, they felt pressure to hide those feelings or to be tough and strong instead. Girls were more able to express themselves by crying, screaming or talking about their feelings, respondents said. 

Half of boys said they'd heard men in their family make sexual jokes or comments about women; those boys were more likely to feel pressure to be tough and play along with sexism. An even bigger share, 82 percent, said they had heard someone criticize a boy for "acting like a girl."

"If you post something on social media about LGBTQ people or your sexuality, you're eventually going to be told to kill yourself." Bemmy Daniels, 13

This contributes to the feeling among girls that they're undervalued and objectified by boys, researchers said. Pressures on boys can also leave them with low self-esteem and more likely to be victims of violence or accidents. 

"It's not just girls who get hurt," said Barbara Risman, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who studies young people's gender attitudes. "I call it boys policing each other to be boyish, particularly when showing emotions or wanting to do something considered feminine, like volleyball or ballet. They have the sense that they can't stray a bit." 

In Happy Valley, boys said the qualities they valued most in themselves were ambition and intelligence — but they were deeply aware that society valued male strength. 

"There are a lot of things that 'real men' would do that I wouldn't, like anything particularly dangerous physically, and sports," said Muyang Yan, 12, who started a school coding club and wants to be a computer scientist. 

Sullivan McDaniel, 13, who's on the student council and the lacrosse and football teams, has played sports since age 3. "I don't really show a lot of emotion, but I get emotional like in sports; I get fired up," he said. "If I'm angry, I go to the gym or I go to the high school and lift."

"In school, the girls definitely seem more interested than the boys. I feel like they pay attention more than we do and I'm pretty sure they work harder than we do." Sullivan McDaniel, 13

There are some signs that recent movements to end sexual harassment might be influencing teenagers' attitudes.

In the survey, three-quarters of adolescents had heard of MeToo. A majority of girls, and one-third of boys, say it has made them feel able to tell someone if they were harassed or assaulted. 

"I have more of an ability that if that did happen to me," said Hiree Felema, 13. "There's not a chance of me being quiet about it."

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. 

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10) Kushner Says Punishing Palestinians Won't Hurt Chance for Peace Deal
By Mark Landler, September 13, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/middleeast/kushner-palestinians-israel.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

Palestinians protested the United States' decision to stop funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

WASHINGTON — Three days after the Trump administration evicted the Palestine Liberation Organization from its offices in Washington, Jared Kushner defended the latest in a string of punitive actions against the Palestinians and insisted that none of them had diminished the chances of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

Speaking on Thursday, 25 years to the day after the Oslo peace accords were signed on the White House lawn not far from his West Wing office, Mr. Kushner said President Trump had actually improved the chances for peace by stripping away the "false realities" that surround Middle East peacemaking.

"There were too many false realities that were created — that people worship — that I think needed to be changed," he said in an interview. "All we're doing is dealing with things as we see them and not being scared out of doing the right thing. I think, as a result, you have a much higher chance of actually achieving a real peace."

Mr. Kushner said he did not want to be too critical of the Oslo accords, which created the framework for peace negotiations over the last three decades. But he cast his own efforts as a radical break with the past, evincing little nostalgia for the historic images of Bill Clinton drawing together Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993.

His confidence came at a bleak moment in his own 19-month-old quest for an accord. The order to shut down the P.L.O. office followed a series of cuts in American funding to Palestinian groups, as well as the decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, all of which have profoundly alienated the Palestinians from the administration.

Mr. Kushner said the Jerusalem decision burnished Mr. Trump's credibility by delivering on a campaign promise. Palestinian leaders, he said, deserved to lose aid after vilifying the administration. And much of the money that the United States poured into the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and other Palestinian causes had been misspent anyway.

"Nobody is entitled to America's foreign aid," he said.

Aid should be used to further national interests and help those in need, he said. In the case of the Palestinians, he argued that the funding had evolved into a decades-long entitlement program with no plan to make them self-reliant.

Still, Mr. Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, also insisted that the rift between the Palestinians and Washington was not unbridgeable, despite statements by top Palestinian officials that they will never again engage with Mr. Trump.

"In every negotiation I've ever been in," he said, "before somebody gets to 'yes,' their answer is 'no.'"

Citing his experience as a dealmaker, Mr. Kushner said he was not thrown by the posturing of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, which he attributed in part to Mr. Abbas's own domestic politics. If Mr. Abbas is a serious leader, Mr. Kushner said, he will study the administration's peace plan carefully after it is released.

Mr. Kushner and his partner on the Middle East, Jason D. Greenblatt, continue to tinker with the language in the plan, which is all but finished. They have expanded the team working on the project, in part to focus on fortifying the economic component — a particular focus of Mr. Kushner's.

With the Palestinians dismissing the plan as "dead on arrival," some analysts question whether it will ever see the light of day. Mr. Kushner and Mr. Greenblatt reject that, saying they are busy consulting with officials in the region. They are not giving a timetable, though it seems unlikely they would roll it out before the midterm elections.

The White House once hoped that Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, with whom Mr. Kushner has cultivated a relationship, would be an influential advocate for the plan. But with Prince Mohammed struggling with his reform efforts at home, the administration is no longer counting on him to play that role.

For now, the administration's focus has been on punishing the Palestinians. On Monday, the State Department said it had agreed late last year to allow the P.L.O.'s representative office to stay open only if it helped advance peace negotiations.

"However, the P.L.O. has not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel," it said in a statement. "To the contrary, P.L.O. leadership has condemned a U.S. peace plan they have not yet seen and refused to engage with the U.S. government with respect to peace efforts and otherwise."

The administration also linked its decision to what it said were efforts by the Palestinians to get the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for its military operations in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the construction of Jewish settlements in Israel-occupied territory.

"While the court welcomes the membership of the so-called State of Palestine, it has threatened Israel — a liberal, democratic nation," John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump's national security adviser, said in a speech on Monday castigating the court.

Some analysts warn that stripping funds from the United Nations organization that takes care of Palestinian refugees will only contribute to the extremism of future generations of Palestinians, since it is the main supplier of secular education to children there.

Cutting $25 million in aid to six hospitals in East Jerusalem that serve Palestinians could prompt a health crisis, according to experts. The Palestinian Authority condemned the move as an "act of political blackmail." And it could boomerang on Israel, since it could be forced to step into the breach and provide more services in the West Bank.

"By punishing the Palestinians, the administration unwittingly is liberating them from former restraints under which they had operated since Oslo in order to placate U.S. and Israel," said Robert Malley, who took part in Israeli-Palestinian talks at Camp David under Mr. Clinton.

"What gradually removing those shackles from Palestinians will mean in terms of the future is unclear," Mr. Malley added. "What is clear is that future will be different."

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11)  Medicine's Financial Contamination
Disclosure rules may seem arcane, but money corrupts medical research.
By The Editorial Board, September 14, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/medicines-financial-contamination.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The fall from grace last week of Dr. José Baselga, the former chief scientific officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, illuminated a longstanding problem of modern medicine: Potentially corrupting payments by drug and medical device makers to influential people at research hospitals are far more common than either side publicly acknowledges.

Dr. Baselga, a giant in cancer research whose work led to the discovery of the lifesaving drug Herceptin, resigned on Thursday after The New York Times and ProPublica reported that he had repeatedly failed to properly disclose millions in industry payments.

Decades of research and real world examples have shown that such entanglements can distort the practice of medicine in ways big and small. Even little gifts have been found to influence doctors' prescribing habitsand their perceptions of a given company's products. Larger payments have been shown to affect the design of clinical trials and the reporting of trial results, among other things. And such financial entanglements have proved devastating to individual patients — and to society at large. The opioid epidemic, to take one recent example, was partly spread by doctors who were persuaded to ignore warning bells and prescribe these drugs liberally by companies that showered them with gifts and consulting fees.

Dr. Baselga's lapses may not have touched off a drug epidemic, but they have damaged the reputation of a leading cancer hospital in which tens of thousands of patients place their trust every year. Medical institutions should prize that trust at least as much as they prize profits. They should work aggressively to keep themselves beyond such reproach. And they should hold leaders of Dr. Baselga's rank to an especially high standard, because leaders more than rule books set the example that others will follow.

The latest scandal marks an especially sad failure to meet those ideals. In statements to industry analysts and the American Association for Cancer Research, Dr. Baselga praised two drug trials that many of his peers considered failures, without mentioning that the trials' sponsor, Roche, had paid him millions of dollars. He also withheld his financial conflicts from dozens of publications, including at least one journal that he edited.

Those conflicts touched his own institution directly, in that several of the companies he advises have business with Memorial Sloan Kettering. Both Varian Medical Systems, which sells the hospital radiation equipment, and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which sells it medications, pay him several hundred thousand dollars a year for his role on their boards of directors. Likewise, Juno Therapeutics and Paige.AI, both tapped Dr. Baselga to serve as a chief adviser after securing exclusive rights to data and technology developed by the hospital. Neither Juno nor Paige are required to disclose exactly what they've paid Dr. Baselga, because neither has brought a product to market yet. But if those payments are on par with what he's receiving from other companies, it would come out to hundreds of thousands of dollars for each. And if his compensation from these companies includes stock, he stands to profit personally, and handsomely, from intellectual property that belongs to the hospital.

Sloan Kettering's other leaders were well aware of these relationships. The hospital has said that it takes pains to wall off any employee involved with a given outside company from the hospital's dealings with that company. But it's difficult to believe that conflicts of this magnitude could have truly been worked around, given how many of them there were, and how high up on the organizational chart Dr. Baselga sat. It also strains credulity to suggest that he was the hospital's only leader with such conflicts or with such apparent difficulty disclosing them. After the initial report, but before Dr. Baselga's resignation, the hospital sent a letter to its entire 17,000-person staff acknowledging that the institution as a whole needed to do better. It remains to be seen what additional actions will be taken — and by whom — to repair the situation. 

Financial conflicts are hardly confined to Sloan Kettering. A 2015 study in The BMJ found that a "substantial number" of academic leaders hold directorships that pay as much as or more than their clinical salaries. According to other surveys, nearly 70 percent of oncologists who speak at national meetings, nearly 70 percent of psychiatrists on the task force that ultimately decides what treatments should be recommended for what mental illnesses, and a significant number of doctors on Food and Drug Administration advisory committees have financial ties to the drug and medical device industries. As bioethicists have warned and as journal publishers have long acknowledged, not all of them report those ties when and where they are supposed to.

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12) A Dallas Police Officer Shot Her Neighbor, and a City Is Full of Questions

By Manny Fernandez and Marina Trahan Martinez, September 14, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/us/botham-jean-dallas-shooting-amber-guyger.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

Lakolya London of Dallas, center, demonstrating with others on Wednesday at a weekly City Council meeting to protest the killing of Botham Shem Jean.

DALLAS — Botham Shem Jean analyzed risk for a living at a global auditing firm. For someone in his line of work, the evening was shaping up to be as risk-free as it gets: Alone, in his one-bedroom apartment one block from the Dallas Police Department headquarters.

Fresh from work, he had texted his sister his evening plans: Watching a football game on TV, the Eagles versus the Falcons. He texted a friend, apologizing for not going out with her the weekend before. Mr. Jean, 26, was from the island-nation of St. Lucia. He had a big smile, and was a big eater, winning a meat-lovers' contest at Big Chef Steak House back in the Caribbean. He still had his ticket for a free meal on his next visit, his prize after eating a two-pound steak in one sitting.

Unit 1478 on the fourth floor of the South Side Flats apartment complex was an 800-square-foot bachelor pad: dishes piled up in the sink, with pancake syrup, dish soap and other belongings adding to the clutter on the kitchen island. It was the evening of September 6. His 27th birthday was three weeks away.

In a matter of hours, Mr. Jean would be dead. A white off-duty police officer who lived in Unit 1378 — directly below Mr. Jean — claimed that she mistakenly entered the wrong apartment after returning home from her 14-hour shift and believed Mr. Jean, who is black, was an intruder. Officer Amber R. Guyger, 30, fired her service weapon twice, striking him once in the torso.

He was later pronounced dead at a hospital, his death now the center of a mystery that has angered and puzzled Dallas and beyond.

Mr. Jean speaking at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., in 2014. He was shot and killed by a white off-duty police officer in his apartment last week.

The racial profiling of black men and women by white police officers put new phrases into the American vocabulary — driving while black, walking while black, shopping while black. The shooting of Mr. Jean seemed to demand its own, even more disturbing version: being at home while black.

The fatal shooting has become the latest, and most bizarre, confrontation between an unarmed black man and a white officer, angering many who say they simply do not believe the officer's account. In a city with a decades-old history of racial divisions, the case has again heightened tensions. Protesters chanted and disrupted a City Council meeting on Wednesday, and threats against the police have poured in. Officers have said they believe Officer Guyger's version of events, while many in the black community — and many white residents as well — do not. City officials and other leaders have been caught in the middle.

"This is the worst sort of situation, because we all expect to be safe in our own homes," Michael S. Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas, said in an interview. "Everybody is heartbroken. Everybody wants the same thing — let's get the answers. This is what the mother said to me. I was sitting there talking to her Saturday morning. And she said, 'I'm not angry, but I just want to know why this lady shot my son.'"

Officer Guyger has been charged with manslaughter and released on a $300,000 bond, and numerous questions remain unanswered as the investigation continues. Mr. Jean's relatives and his lawyers said Mr. Jean and the officer did not know each other. It's not known whether there might have been a dispute between them as neighbors. Indeed much about what happened that night at the door of Mr. Jean's apartment remains either unclear or in dispute.

The officer told investigators the door was slightly ajar and then fully opened when she inserted her computerized chip key; lawyers for Mr. Jean's family said the door was closed. Officer Guyger said in court documents that when she opened the door, the apartment was dark and she saw a silhouette of someone she thought was a burglar. She said she shouted commands that were ignored. Neighbors, however, have told lawyers for Mr. Jean's relatives that they heard someone banging on the door and shouting, "Let me in!" and "Open up!" before gunshots rang out. They said they then heard a man, presumably Mr. Jean, say, "Oh my God, why did you do that?"

Accounts of banging and shouting are puzzling, because Officer Guyger is single and lived alone, and it was unknown why she would have banged on the door if she believed she was at her own apartment.

In some ways, the drama unfolding in Dallas looks and feels similar to other high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men that have gripped the country in succession in recent years. Mr. Jean's family is represented by Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who represented the relatives of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, as well as S. Lee Merritt, a lawyer for the family of Jordan Edwards, the 15-year-old freshman shot and killed by a white officer last year in a Dallas suburb. In an echo of past police killings, there has been anger over what seem to be attempts to incriminate the victim: Police released a search warrant that revealed that 10.4 grams of marijuana in multiple baggies had been found in Mr. Jean's apartment.

"First they assassinate his person, then they assassinate his character," Mr. Crump said.

Hours earlier that evening, managers at the apartment complex had received complaints from residents that there was a strong smell of marijuana in the fourth-floor hallways. Managers knocked on Mr. Jean's door and at least five other doors inquiring about the smell, the Jean family lawyers said. It was unclear who on the floor was responsible for the odor.

It was not known whether Officer Guyger's apartment was searched.

Mr. Jean's relatives, lawyers and supporters all say it would have been difficult for the officer to have mistaken Mr. Jean's door: It had a large, bright-red, semicircular doormat, lying on a bare concrete floor. Officer Guyger had none. Would she not have noticed?

"My main concern is that she is lying," said Mr. Merritt, one of the Jean family lawyers.

But Officer Guyger's supporters say she had her hands full at the time she arrived at Mr. Jean's door: Officials said she had with her a police vest, duty bag and lunchbox — items she might be expected to carry to her own front door, not someone else's.

Mr. Jean's mother, Allison Jean, with Sam Berry, left, a minister, as he spoke to reporters after her son's funeral.

While relations between the police and black residents are strained, the case is playing out in one of the most diverse law enforcement settings in the country.

Dallas appears to be the only major city and county in the country where the police chief, the sheriff and the district attorney are all black women: Chief U. Reneé Hall, Sheriff Marian Brown and District Attorney Faith Johnson. Chief Hall was applauded by many for turning the investigation over to the Texas Rangers to ensure an independent inquiry, and both Chief Hall and Ms. Johnson attended the funeral of Mr. Jean on Thursday, as did several other officials.

But the diversity in the ranks of law enforcement has not quelled the anger over the shooting and over the police department's handling of it.

Black activists, religious leaders and elected officials have all criticized the authorities for charging the officer not with murder but with the lesser charge of manslaughter. They also want to know why she was not immediately arrested at the scene, but was allowed to go free until she was officially charged three days later. They are demanding that Officer Guyger, who remains on paid administrative leave, be fired.

"The reasonableness of her explanation is what's called into question," said State Senator Royce West, a Democrat who is African-American and whose district includes the South Side Flats. "The question is whether or not she saw a black man and then decided to shoot. Regardless of whether or not he was in the right place or not, her first impulse appeared to be that she was going to fire her weapon."

Jennifer Sarduy of Fort Worth, Tex., live-streamed video as the names of victims of police shootings were read during a news conference on Wednesday at City Hall in Dallas.

Robert L. Rogers, a lawyer representing Officer Guyger and a former Dallas County prosecutor, declined to comment. Officer Guyger has been a Dallas officer for four years and four months, joining the force in 2014 in her first job as a law enforcement officer in Texas.

Some of the officer's colleagues and superiors said they believe her version of events, and called the shooting, as one put it, "a bad accident." One police official said Officer Guyger was not intoxicated at the time of the shooting, and that she had a good reputation as part of the Southeast Patrol Division's Crime Response Team, of which she was a member.

"They go out and arrest the most dangerous people in the city," said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the press about the case. "You've got to have your head on right. You've got to be brave, dedicated, hard-charging. She was all of those things."

Officer Guyger was involved in another shooting last year. A man grabbed her Taser during a confrontation, and she shot him in the stomach. The man survived, and a grand jury later declined to indict her.

The official said Officer Guyger did not have any complaints filed against her accusing her of violating a person's civil rights. The official said the length of her shift that day was a key factor in the shooting. The police officers' union has publicly urged city officials to address the long shifts that have resulted from budget cuts, which have led to low morale and a mass exodus of officers.

Mourners left flowers and programs on a table after Mr. Jean's funeral on Thursday at Greenville Avenue Church of Christ in Richardson, Tex.

"You cannot have people working that hard and not have a mistake, and it can be life-threatening mistakes," the official said.

Officers said the shooting reminded them of a similar case in 2016. In that case, an N.B.A. player was fatally shot in Dallas after he broke into what he thought was his girlfriend's apartment. Bryce Dejean-Jones, 23, a player for the New Orleans Pelicans, kicked open the door to an apartment in the middle of the night, startling the man who lived there, the authorities said. As Mr. Dejean-Jones kicked the bedroom door, the man shot him, the police said.

Mr. Dejean-Jones had been trying to get into his girlfriend's apartment, which was directly above the unit he broke into, his agent said at the time.

The floors of the South Side Flats, a modern luxury apartment building with 288 units built in 2015 at the edge of downtown Dallas, have a similar design and layout: well-lighted, with whirring ceiling fans and bare concrete floors. Residents said it was easy to get confused in the halls, and some said they had gone to the wrong apartment occasionally. The light panels near Mr. Jean's door and Officer Guyger's door are the same color.

Her mistake appeared to begin when she parked on the fourth floor, not the third floor where she lived, for reasons that remain unclear. She had lived in the complex for a short time, fewer than 60 days, officials said.

On Thursday, minutes after Mr. Jean's funeral at Greenville Avenue Church of Christ in nearby Richardson, his father, Bertrum Jean, 54, stood in an upstairs dining hall and gym, leaning against a set of retractable bleachers.

He hugged those who approached him, and laughed at times. "He just wanted to be with me everywhere I go," the elder Mr. Jean said, recalling when his son was 5. "I think I spoiled him."

The elder Mr. Jean, who preaches at a Church of Christ congregation and works as a water and sewage inventory supervisor on St. Lucia, said he understands racial tensions exist in Dallas and in the United States, but what role that played in his son's death, he said he was not certain.

"I believe it may have been an isolated incident," he said. "I don't know what to make of it, but I'm still not fearful. If my other son has to come up here to school, I will send him."

Matthew Haag and Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.

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13)  U.S. Is Ending Final Source of Aid for Palestinian Civilians
By Edward Wong, September 14, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/world/middleeast/us-aid-palestinian-civilians.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Palestinian girls play soccer in Ramallah. The United States is blocking funding to cross-border programs between Israelis and Palestinians, including soccer games for children.

WASHINGTON — As part of its policy to end all aid for Palestinian civilians, the United States is blocking millions of dollars to programs that build relationships between Israelis and Palestinians, according to current and former American officials briefed on the change.

The move to prevent Palestinians — including, in many cases, children — from benefiting from the funds squeezes shut the last remaining channel of American aid to Palestinian civilians.

The money had already been budgeted by Congress for allocation in fiscal year 2017, which ends this month. In the past, these designated funds went mostly to programs that organized people-to-people exchanges between Palestinians and Israelis, often for youth. Some went to programs for Israeli Jews and Arabs.

Advocates had hoped this last $10 million pot of money would remain available to projects with Palestinians, even as the Trump administration cut all other aid.

But last week, officials from the United States Agency for International Development told congressional aides that programs that benefit Palestinians alongside Israelis would not receive any new money, said Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont. Mr. Leahy established the broader program managed by U.S.A.I.D.

The agency's officials did not want to cut programs with Palestinians, but had to accommodate a White House that does not want to send American funds to Palestinians, Mr. Rieser said.

As a result, only programs with Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs will get funding, contrary to the tradition of the funds and intent of Congress.

"Essentially, U.S.A.I.D. was faced with the choice of shutting down the program and losing the funds, or keeping something going," Mr. Rieser said. "They decided to support programs that involve Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs."

Programs currently on multiyear grants will still get all their funds, Mr. Rieser said.

In a statement on Friday, U.S.A.I.D. said it is "currently unable to engage Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the administration's recent decision on Palestinian assistance." The agency said it was "continuing its support for civil society working on these issues within Israel."

The broad push to cut all funding to Palestinian civilians is promoted by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump and the top White House adviser on the Middle East. Mr. Kushner has been working on a peace proposal for the Israelis and Palestinians, and is seeking maximum negotiating leverage over the Palestinians.

He also has criticized the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas for refusing to negotiate after Mr. Trump declared in December that the United States was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

"Nobody is entitled to America's foreign aid," Mr. Kushner told The New York Times on Thursday.

In late August, the Trump administration announced it was redirecting $200 million that was set aside last year for bilateral aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Soon afterward, American officials said they were ending funding to a United Nations aid agency for Palestinians and redirecting $25 million intended for hospitals in East Jerusalem, which has a mostly Palestinian population.

Until those moves, the United States was one of the largest national donors of aid to Palestinians.

Before last week, advocates of aid to Palestinians had said they hoped American officials would not bar Palestinians from access to the $10 million in funds from what is known as the Conflict Management and Mitigation Program. The program receives a total of $26 million annually from Congress and was established in 2004 by Mr. Leahy. (The other $16 million is spent elsewhere in the world.)

The change means members of Congress will revisit the annual practice of setting aside $10 million, mostly for Israeli-Palestinian exchange programs, Mr. Rieser said.

"Senator Leahy regards the decision to cut off funding for the West Bank and Gaza as a sign that this White House has failed at diplomacy," he said. "This is not a partisan view. It's the view of those who recognize that you don't advance the cause of peace by cutting off programs that are designed to promote tolerance, understanding and address shared problems."

The money from the United States is almost a quarter of the annual global funding for peace and reconciliation activities between Israelis and Palestinians, said Joel Braunold, executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations that seeks United States support for such activities. The grants are bid out for as much as $1.2 million over three years, and are by far the largest of their kind, he said.

Cutting off programs that benefit Palestinians "would deeply damage the integrity of the program," Mr. Braunold said. "If they don't change their track, I can't perceive a situation where Congress would support this."

Mr. Braunold stressed that any groups that receive grants this year for Israeli programs were still doing worthwhile work.

The change also means Palestinian nongovernmental groups would not be given funds, he said, adding that some such groups had won bids before.

The American aid agency previously said the funds' aims are "to support Israelis and Palestinians working on issues of common concern." Last year, the funding proposals sought to support "cross-border projects that bring together Israelis and Palestinians and activities that bring together Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians are strongly encouraged."

The aid mission and embassy have given out 126 grants since 2004.

The program activities vary widely, such as bringing Israeli and Palestinian almond farmers together and organizing soccer games for Palestinian and Israeli girls.

One group, Kids4Peace, won a $800,000 grant for a project that "connects more than 1,000 youth and parents from East and West Jerusalem and neighboring West Bank communities in cross-border programs," according to an aid agency fact sheet. Those include workshops, home visits, community service projects and religious holiday events.

"We're concerned that changes in aid would hurt the people most essential to any peace agreement by jeopardizing the momentum of organizations like ours," said Father Josh Thomas, the group's executive director. The group sees "huge demand from Palestinian and Israeli families."

The project's grant runs out in 2019, and under the current decision the group would need to cut Palestinians from activities to be eligible for future grants.

"The bottom line is if you're a Palestinian, you don't have access to any of this," said David Harden, a former American aid agency official who managed projects for 11 years in the West Bank and Gaza and who had been briefed on the decision. He called the decision vindictive. "Once you cut out East Jerusalem hospitals and cut out girls playing soccer with each other, it's the end of hope."

"Reconciliation activities should be beyond politics," he added, saying that the programs had been very effective.

R. Nicholas Burns, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and former senior American diplomat who worked on Palestinian issues, said that "cutting off all American economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people is meanspirited and beneath a great nations like ours."

"Republican and Democratic presidents have tried for decades to position the U.S. as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians," he said. "President Trump has abdicated that critical role and squandered our influence and credibility with the Arab world on this critical issue. This is diplomatic malpractice of the highest order."

David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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14)  Even in Better Times, Some Americans Seem Farther Behind. Here's Why.
By Patricia Cohen, September 14, 2018
"Among college graduates, white families, for instance, had six times the median wealth of black and Hispanic families, extending a stubborn racial gap. ...Researchers have found that socioeconomic status and health shadow each other, climbing or falling in tandem."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/business/economy/income-inequality.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

A man uses a cell phone while crossing a street in midtown Manhattan, Thursday, July 19, 2018, in New York.

Americans' household earnings are finally stretching back to their pre-recession heights. But feeling secure and comfortable isn't only a measure of how much money you have. It's also a measure of how much you have compared with others.

For many, that is one reason that recent financial progress may seem overshadowed by the gains they've missed out on and a needling sense that they've lost ground.

As new research illustrates, two groups in particular have stalled: whites without a college degree, and blacks and Hispanics with one. Both are being far outpaced by college-educated whites.

"America has been a story of getting ahead, of progress," said Morris P. Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford University. "There's been no story of progress — for them."

The findings, part of a study on the demographics of wealth between 1989 and 2016 from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, show significant advances in education and earnings among white, black and Hispanic Americans over that period. A Census Bureau report this week also showed continued income gains last year. But the study highlights the growing importance of relative shifts in position up or down the income ladder at a time when the economy's riches are flowing increasingly to the wealthiest sliver.

The economic swoops and comebacks of the last three decades have chipped away at many measures of well-being. An advanced global economy has radically revalued the contributions of blue-collar labor and technological skills.

The lingering economic insecurity has fired resentments, sharpened identity politics and fueled populism on the right and left that is upending hierarchies in the Democratic and Republican Parties.

But parallels between whites who did not finish college and blacks and Hispanics who did show that "this is not clearly a race story and not clearly an education story," said William R. Emmons, an economist at the St. Louis Fed and a co-author of its report.

To Mr. Emmons, the most striking result was the steep declines among white families headed by someone without a college degree. Members of this group — labeled the white working class — not only were left behind financially, but also lagged in other measures of well-being, like self-reported health, homeownership, and marriage or cohabitation rates.

In absolute terms, they are still doing better than their black and Hispanic counterparts, with nine times the wealth and a higher median income. But as Theodore Roosevelt observed, "Comparison is the thief of joy."

The white working class, which once dominated the American work force and reaped a hefty chunk of its rewards, has seen its incomes trail far behind those of college graduates. In less than three decades, its share of total income sank to 27 percent from 45 percent. For these workers, the education gap is starker than ever.

At the same time, working-class blacks and Hispanics began to catch up. These groups' median incomes grew at an accelerated pace over the same period that the median income of working-class whites declined.

"Their relative position has fallen dramatically," said Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, "at a time when the desirable standard of living has risen a lot."

To Mr. Inglehart, expanding inequality is the primary culprit, decreasing satisfaction while fanning ethnic and racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiment around the world. "Rewards are being sucked up at the top to a degree that is stunning," he said.

In the United States, polls have shown that a majority of whites feel whites are discriminated against. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes it as a powerful feeling that the government is helping others to cut ahead of them in line as they fall further back. This has helped turn them more aggressively, she argues, against affirmative action and policies that assist displaced migrants. But as the Fed data suggests, waning privilege is a more likely reason.

The most plausible explanation, the report concluded, is the "diminishing set of advantages relative to nonwhite working-class families in terms of high school graduation rates, access to relatively high-paying jobs, and freedom from explicit workplace discrimination."

What may be surprising is that the group with the most similar experience in some respects is black and Hispanic college graduates. Additional education has clearly paid off in terms of greater wealth and income. Yet they are lagging well behind their white counterparts. Among college graduates, white families, for instance, had six times the median wealth of black and Hispanic families, extending a stubborn racial gap.

In Granite City, Ill., workers returned to a U.S. Steel plant in May that had been idle for more than two years. In a technologically advanced global economy, there has been a recalibration of the value of blue-collar labor and digital skills.

Without a cushion of family assets, the housing bubble and recession cut deep among minorities, gnawing away the assets even of college graduates. White households with similar education levels also lost wealth, but their relative position was enhanced. In the 1990s, their real median net worth was 256 percent of the general population's. That figure jumped to 416 percent by 2016.

"Racial privilege is alive and well among college-educated elites," said Joan C. Williams, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and the author of "White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America."

Black college graduates were also the only other group besides the white working class that experienced declines in all three nonfinancial measures tracked — health, homeownership, and marriage or cohabitation rates.

Researchers have found that socioeconomic status and health shadow each other, climbing or falling in tandem.

For upwardly mobile African-Americans, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, achieving the American dream has had a peculiar side effect. They tend to encounter more discrimination because they live and work in predominantly white environments, said Cynthia Colen, an associate professor at Ohio State University's College of Public Health.

"They're playing the game, and yet they're still facing discrimination in workplaces and neighborhoods," she said. "It absolutely harms their mental health and their physical health."

These shifting economic and social fortunes have been shaping voters' attitudes and candidates' pitches as the midterm elections approach.

White working-class men in particular have responded to President Trump's frequent expressions of concern about their lost ground, his skepticism of affirmative action and his promises that reduced immigration and trade wars will restore them to their former status. His administration is also dialing back its enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and regulations.

Within the Democratic Party, attacks on widening inequality and enduring racial privilege coupled with support for free college education have resonated with voters and delivered surprising victories to several left-leaning political challengers.

The feeling of decline among the groups lagging behind is well founded, Ms. Williams said. "What's at issue here is whether they're going to interpret that decline through the lens of race or through the lens of class," she said. "There's a war over interpretation."

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15) We’re Measuring the Economy All Wrong

The official statistics say that the financial crisis is behind us. It's not.

By David Leonhardt, September 14, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/columnists/great-recession-economy-gdp.html

Protestors hold signs behind Richard S. Fuld Jr., then chief executive of Lehman Brothers, in October 2008. Ten years later, you can see the lingering effects of the financial crisis just about everywhere.

Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the official economic statistics — the ones that fill news stories, television shows and presidential tweets — say that the American economy is fully recovered.

The unemployment rate is lower than it was before the financial crisis began. The stock market has soared. The total combined output of the American economy, also known as gross domestic product, has risen 20 percent since Lehman collapsed. The crisis is over.

But, of course, it isn’t over. The financial crisis remains the most influential event of the 21st century. It left millions of people — many of whom were already anxious about the economy — feeling much more anxious, if not downright angry. Their frustration has helped create a threat to Western liberal democracy that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Far-right political parties are on the rise across Europe, and Britain is leaving the European Union. The United States elected a racist reality-television star who has thrown the presidency into chaos.

Look around, and you can see the lingering effects of the financial crisis just about everywhere — everywhere, that is, except in the most commonly cited economic statistics. So who are you going to believe: those statistics, or your own eyes?

Over the course of history, financial crises — and the long downturns that follow — have reordered American society in all sorts of ways. One of those ways happens to involve the statistics that the government collects. Crises have often highlighted the need for new measures of human well-being.

The unemployment rate was invented in the 1870s in response to concerns about mass joblessness after the Panic of 1873. The government’s measure of national output, now called G.D.P., began during the Great Depression. Senator Robert La Follette, the progressive hero from Wisconsin, introduced the resolution that later led to the measurement of G.D.P., and the great economist Simon Kuznets, later a Nobel laureate, oversaw the first version.

Almost a century later, it is time for a new set of statistics. It’s time for measures that do a better job of capturing the realities of modern American life.

As a technical matter, the current batch of official numbers are perfectly accurate. They also describe some real and important aspects of the American economy. The trouble is that a handful of statistics dominate the public conversation about the economy despite the fact that they provide a misleading portrait of people’s lives. Even worse, the statistics have become more misleading over time.

The main reason is inequality. A small, affluent segment of the population receives a large and growing share of the economy’s bounty. It was true before Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, and it has become even more so since. As a result, statistics that sound as if they describe the broad American economy — like G.D.P. and the Dow Jones industrial average — end up mostly describing the experiences of the affluent.

The stock market, for example, has completely recovered from the financial crisis, and then some. Stocks are now worth almost 60 percent more than when the crisis began in 2007, according to a inflation-adjusted measure from Moody’s Analytics. But wealthy households own the bulk of stocks. Most Americans are much more dependent on their houses. That’s why the net worth of the median household is still about 20 percent lower than it was in early 2007. When television commentators drone on about the Dow, they’re not talking about a good measure of most people’s wealth.

The unemployment rate has also become less meaningful than it once was. In recent decades, the number of idle working-age adults has surged. They are not working, not looking for work, not going to school and not taking care of children. Many of them would like to work, but they can’t find a decent-paying job and have given up looking. They are not counted in the official unemployment rate.

All the while, the federal government and much of the news media continue to act as if the same economic measures that made sense decades ago still make sense today. Habit comes before accuracy.

Fortunately, there is a nascent movement to change that. A team of academic economists — Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (the best-selling author on inequality) — has begun publishing a version of G.D.P. that separates out the share of national income flowing to rich, middle class and poor. For now, its data is published with a lag; the most recent available year is 2014. But the work is starting to receive attention from other academics and policy experts.

In the Senate, two Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, the party leader, have introduced a bill that would direct the federal government to publish a version of the same data series. Heather Boushey, who runs the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told me that it could be the most important change in economic data collection in decades.

And there is no reason that data reform needs to be limited to G.D.P. The Labor Department could change the monthly jobs report to give more attention to other unemployment numbers. It could also provide more data on wages, rather than only broad averages. The Federal Reserve, for its part, could publish quarterly estimates of household wealth by economic class.

These changes may sound technocratic. They are technocratic. But they can still be important. Over time, they can subtly shift the way that the country talks about the economy.

“As someone who advises policymakers, I can tell you there is often this shock: ‘The economy is growing. Why aren’t people feeling it,’” Boushey says. “The answer is: Because they literally aren’t feeling it.” She argues — rightly, I think — that the government should not focus on creating wholly new statistics. It should instead change and expand the ones that are already followed closely. Doing so could force the media and policymakers to talk about economic well-being at the same time that they are talking about economic indicators.

It’s worth remembering that the current indicators are not a naturally occurring phenomenon. They are political creations, with the flaws, limitations and choices that politics usually involves.

Take the unemployment rate. It dates to 1878, when a former Civil War officer and Massachusetts politician named Carroll D. Wright was running the state’s Bureau of the Statistics of Labor. Wright thought that the public had an exaggerated sense of the extent of unemployment after the Panic of 1873. He called it “industrial hypochondria.”

So Wright asked town assessors and police officers to count the number of people in their area who were out of work. But he added a caveat that he knew would hold down the number, as Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian, has written. Wright wanted the count to include only adult men who “really want employment.” He specifically called for the exclusion of the many men who had effectively given up searching for work because they didn’t think that they could find a job that paid as much as their previous job. Not surprisingly, Wright’s count produced a modest number that, he happily announced, had proved the “croakers” wrong.

Several years later, he received a promotion. He was named the first head of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, a job he would hold for 20 years. His original methods from Massachusetts influenced the way that the federal government began calculating unemployment data, and still do to this day. The fact that the official rate ignores millions of discouraged workers is — although Wright wouldn’t have used this phrase — a feature not a bug.

There is no mystery about what a better set of indicators would look like. For the most part, the indicators already exist. They tend to be obscure, however. Some are calculated only once a year or less frequently. Others appear monthly or quarterly, but the media and politicians tend to ignore them. These numbers include: the overall share of working-age adults who are actually working; pay at different points on the income distribution; and the same sort of distribution for net worth (which includes stock holdings, home values and other assets and debts).

The whole point of statistics is to describe reality. When a statistic no longer does so, it’s time to find a new one — not to come up with a convoluted rationale that tries to twist reality to fit the statistic.

The notion that our most prominent economic indicators are problematic has been around for a long time. Kuznets himself, the economist who invented G.D.P. as we know it, cautioned people not to confuse it with “economic welfare.” Most famously, Robert F. Kennedy liked to say during his 1968 presidential campaign that G.D.P. measured everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.”

After all these years, though, we haven’t solved the problem. Maybe it takes a financial crisis to do so.

David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. 

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16) Border Patrol Agent Arrested in Connection With Murders of 4 Women
By Simon Romero and Manny Fernandez, September 15, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/us/laredo-border-patrol-agent-arrested.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

Law enforcement officers near the scene where a woman’s body was found north of Laredo, Tex. A Border Patrol agent was arrested on Saturday in connection with that killing and others.

ALBUQUERQUE — A United States Border Patrol agent was arrested in South Texas on Saturday in connection to a calculated killing spree that left four people dead in recent weeks around the city of Laredo, the authorities said.

Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said police officers arrested the agent, Juan David Ortiz, early on Saturday morning after a woman who claimed she had been abducted by Mr. Ortiz escaped half-clothed and sought help at a gas station in Laredo.

“We consider this man to be a serial killer who was preying on one victim after another,” Sheriff Cuellar said. “Fortunately, he’s now been apprehended.”

The case is the latest in a series of recent gruesome episodes involving Border Patrol agents, and comes at a time when protesters and some Democratic lawmakers are seeking to curb the actions of immigration officials. Some are calling for an end to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was created in 2003. Customs and Border Protection, another agency in the Department of Homeland Security, has also come under fierce criticism.

Mr. Ortiz, 35, was found hiding in a truck in the parking lot of a hotel in Laredo, a city of about 250,000 people on the southwest border with Mexico and about 145 miles from San Antonio. He was arrested on suspicion of evading arrest. District Attorney Isidro Alaniz of Webb County said the authorities were prepared to also charge Mr. Ortiz with four counts of murder and one count of aggravated kidnapping.

Mr. Alaniz said Mr. Ortiz is suspected of shooting the four victims, two of whom were identified on Saturday as Melissa Ramirez, 29, and Claudine Luera, 42. Ms. Luera was found still alive but in critical condition on Thursday near a stretch of Texas Highway 255, but later died at a nearby hospital.

Another female victim remained unidentified and was referred to as Jane Doe, Mr. Alaniz said. The fourth appeared to be a transgender woman, but authorities referred to her as John Doe. Mr. Alaniz said he believed that all of the victims worked as prostitutes in the Laredo area.

“At this time we believe the suspect was acting alone,” Mr. Alaniz said, describing Mr. Ortiz as a supervisory agent who had worked as a Border Patrol agent for a decade.

Mr. Alaniz said authorities tracked down Mr. Ortiz after a woman, also described as working as a prostitute, escaped after having been abducted. She claimed that the agent, a married father of two young children, had torn off her blouse before she could run away from his vehicle. She ran until she found a police officer at a nearby gas station.

She then described the suspect to the officer and provided details about his vehicle and his home, Mr. Alaniz said. He said the woman told authorities that she grew suspicious of the agent after asking him about the spate of killings.

Andrew Meehan, the assistant commissioner for public affairs at the Border Patrol, said the agency was fully cooperating with investigators in the case. He said it was the agency’s policy to not comment on details of a current investigation, but added, “criminal action by our employees is not, and will not be tolerated.”

Mr. Ortiz’s arrest came on the heels of a case in April in which authorities in Laredo arrested Ronald Anthony Burgos Aviles, also a supervisor for the Border Patrol, and charged him with killing a woman with whom he was romantically involved and her 1-year-old son.

Two years ago, a senior Border Patrol agent stationed farther north up the border in Del Rio, Tex., was taken into custody and charged with distributing child pornography and attempting to entice a minor to engage in sexual activity. Federal prosecutors said the agent, Salvador Contreras, 50, sent child-porn images to an undercover agent whom Mr. Contreras believed was the mother of 8-year-old and 14-year-old girls. He had expressed, prosecutors alleged, a desire to engage in sexual conduct with both girls and had made arrangements to do so. Mr. Contreras, who was later sentenced to serve 11 years in a federal prison, had called himself a sex addict who was just “looking for his next high,” according to prosecutors.

In another case, from 2014, a Border Patrol agent in Texas kidnapped, attacked and sexually assaulted three undocumented immigrants: a woman and two teenage girls from Honduras. The agent, Esteban Manzanares, killed himself as officers closed in on his South Texas home.

Customs and Border Protection must annually report to Congress all cases of reported sexual abuse by its employees, a requirement prompted by media reports of sexual assault allegations within the agency.

In its most recent report in 2016, the agency showed that from October 2014 to September 2015 there were 52 allegations of sexual abuse and sexual assault by Customs and Border Protection employees, including Border Patrol agents. Many of the allegations stemmed from on-duty cases involving people the employees had apprehended.

The majority of those 52 allegations were found to be either unsubstantiated, not sustained, unfounded or exonerated. But 10 of the 52 allegations were found to have merit and were substantiated or sustained. The report said the employees in the substantiated cases either resigned, had been charged, disciplined or were pending disciplinary action.

State Representative Richard Peña Raymond, a Democrat who represents Laredo, said on Saturday that he knows many Border Patrol agents in the region. He was quick to assert that the allegations against Mr. Ortiz were not reflective of the Border Patrol as a whole.

“That could have been a sheriff’s deputy,” Mr. Raymond said. “It could have been a P.D. It could have been a state trooper. It wasn’t. It’s a Border Patrol agent, and I don’t think that one thing had anything to do with the other. If this is true, do you really think that there’s something they could have done to have prevented this guy from having the mind-set to kill four people? Usually, these guys have some issues that no amount of training would have addressed.”

He added, “Whenever you hear about any law enforcement officer doing something wrong — I don’t care what the agency is — then it’s wrong. But you can’t paint with a broad brush and say, ‘Well, they must all be guys that are willing to go kill four people.’”

The National Border Patrol Council, a union for border patrol agents, did not respond on Saturday evening to a request for comment.

Simon Romero reported from Albuquerque and Manny Fernandez from Houston. Julia Jacobs contributed reporting from New York and Ron Nixon from Washington.

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