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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)  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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2) 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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3)  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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4)  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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5) 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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6) 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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7) Anita Hill: How to Get the Kavanaugh Hearings Right
The Senate Judiciary Committee has a chance to do better by the country than it did nearly three decades ago.
By Anita Hill, September 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/opinion/anita-hill-brett-kavanaugh-clarence-thomas.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Anita F. Hill, right, is sworn in to testify before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on the confirmation of Judge Clarence Thomas by Chairman Joseph Biden in October 1991.

There is no way to redo 1991, but there are ways to do better.

The facts underlying Christine Blasey Ford's claim of being sexually assaulted by a young Brett Kavanaugh will continue to be revealed as confirmation proceedings unfold. Yet it's impossible to miss the parallels between the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing of 2018 and the 1991 confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1991, the Senate Judiciary Committee had an opportunity to demonstrate its appreciation for both the seriousness of sexual harassment claims and the need for public confidence in the character of a nominee to the Supreme Court. It failed on both counts.

Ms. Hill testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in 1991.

As that same committee, on which sit some of the same members as nearly three decades ago, now moves forward with the Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings, the integrity of the court, the country's commitment to addressing sexual violence as a matter of public interest, and the lives of the two principal witnesses who will be testifying hang in the balance. Today, the public expects better from our government than we got in 1991, when our representatives performed in ways that gave employers permission to mishandle workplace harassment complaints throughout the following decades. That the Senate Judiciary Committee still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.

With the current heightened awareness of sexual violence comes heightened accountability for our representatives. To do better, the 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee must demonstrate a clear understanding that sexual violence is a social reality to which elected representatives must respond. A fair, neutral and well-thought-out course is the only way to approach Dr. Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh's upcoming testimony. The details of what that process would look like should be guided by experts who have devoted their careers to understanding sexual violence. The job of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to serve as fact-finders, to better serve the American public, and the weight of the government should not be used to destroy the lives of witnesses who are called to testify.

Here are some basic ground rules the committee should follow:

Refrain from pitting the public interest in confronting sexual harassment against the need for a fair confirmation hearing. Our interest in the integrity of the Supreme Court and in eliminating sexual misconduct, especially in our public institutions, are entirely compatible. Both are aimed at making sure that our judicial system operates with legitimacy.

Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators' conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators' fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators' report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.

Do not rush these hearings. Doing so would not only signal that sexual assault accusations are not important — hastily appraising this situation would very likely lead to facts being overlooked that are necessary for the Senate and the public to evaluate. That the committee plans to hold a hearing this coming Monday is discouraging. Simply put, a week's preparation is not enough time for meaningful inquiry into very serious charges.

Finally, refer to Christine Blasey Ford by her name. She was once anonymous, but no longer is. Dr. Blasey is not simply "Judge Kavanaugh's accuser." Dr. Blasey is a human being with a life of her own. She deserves the respect of being addressed and treated as a whole person.

Process is important, but it cannot erase the difficulty of testifying on national television about the sexual assault that Dr. Blasey says occurred when she was 15 years old. Nor will it negate the fact that as she sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dr. Blasey will be outresourced. Encouraging letters from friends and strangers may help, but she cannot match the organized support that Judge Kavanaugh has. Since Dr. Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh have the same obligation to present the truth, this imbalance may not seem fair.

But, as Judge Kavanaugh stands to gain the lifetime privilege of serving on the country's highest court, he has the burden of persuasion. And that is only fair.

In 1991, the phrase "they just don't get it" became a popular way of describing senators' reaction to sexual violence. With years of hindsight, mounds of evidence of the prevalence and harm that sexual violence causes individuals and our institutions, as well as a Senate with more women than ever, "not getting it" isn't an option for our elected representatives. In 2018, our senators must get it right.

Anita Hill is university professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

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8) U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find
By Ron Nixon, September 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/us/politics/us-migrant-children-whereabouts-.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

A recreation area outside Casa Padre, an immigrant shelter for unaccompanied children, in Brownsville, Tex., in June.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released on Tuesday.

The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.

In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.

The inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.

Since 2016, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services have called sponsors to check on children 30 days after they were placed there. But the department has also said it was not legally responsible for children after they were released from the custody of its office of refugee resettlement.

Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, offered a response to the findings on Tuesday night. "As communicated to members of Congress multiple times," she said, "these children are not 'lost.' Their sponsors — who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them — simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made."

The findings were accompanied by legislation introduced on Tuesday by Republican and Democrat senators to clarify the department's responsibility for ensuring the safety of migrant children, even when they were no longer in its custody.

The legislation would require officials at the Department of Health and Human Services to run background checks before placing children with sponsors. It also would compel the department to make sure that sponsors provide proper care for the children in their custody, including making sure they appear at their immigration court hearings.

Additionally, the legislation would require department officials to notify state governments before migrant children are placed with sponsors in those states. And it would increase the number of immigration court judges to help the Justice Department process cases more efficiently.

Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations, said the bill "will ensure that we keep track of unaccompanied minors in our country, which will both help protect them from trafficking and abuse as well as help ensure they appear for their immigration court proceedings."

Senator Richard Blumenthal Democrat of Connecticut, who also sponsored the legislation, said, "Children who risk their lives to make a dangerous journey in pursuit of asylum shouldn't then have to worry about falling victim to human trafficking or being handed over to abusive or neglectful adults in the United States."

In a report two years ago, the Senate subcommittee detailed how department officials mistakenly placed eight children with human traffickers who forced them to work on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio.

The report found that department officials had failed to establish procedures — including sufficient background checks and following up with sponsors — to protect the children who were traveling alone. As a result, the children were turned over to the traffickers who contracted them out to the egg farm.

Since October 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services has placed more than 135,000 unaccompanied immigrant children with adult sponsors in the United States as they wait for their cases to be heard by an immigration judge.

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

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9) Asbestos in a Crayon, Benzene in a Marker: A School Supply Study's Toxic Results
By Niraj Chokshi, August 8, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/education/asbestos-crayons-school-supplies.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Education

Crayola crayons tested negative for dangerous chemicals in a study by a consumer group, the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. A green Playskool crayon tested positive for trace amounts of tremolite, a form of asbestos.

A public interest group said this week that it had found toxic substances in a number of school supplies, including asbestos in a Playskool crayon and another carcinogen, benzene, in a dry-erase marker.

The findings were detailed in a report published Tuesday by the group, the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, which had an independent laboratory test 27 back-to-school products. Four tested positive for dangerous chemicals.

"It's insane for us to be finding asbestos in kids' products, whether it's technically legal or not, and parents shouldn't have to worry about this in 2018," said Dev Gowda, an author of the report who also directs the group's campaign to persuade manufacturers to drop toxic substances from personal care products.

"We wish that we didn't have to do a study like this, but the reality is that corporations — from manufacturers, distributors and retailers — aren't doing this for us," he said.

The group tested crayons, markers, binders, water bottles, lunchboxes, notebooks, rulers and glue. The products were purchased nationwide at a variety of businesses, including box stores, dollar stores, pharmacies, arts and crafts stores, and online.

The group, which has been surveying toys for more than three decades, recommended that the companies that make or offer the products stop selling them and start notifying consumers about the chemicals they appear to contain.

It also called on policymakers to continue to support the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency, and urged the commission itself to test more school supplies for dangerous chemicals.

Here's a look at what the public interest group found:

Asbestos

Of the crayons tested, one, a green Playskool crayon, tested positive for trace amounts of tremolite, a form of asbestos. The crayon was part of a set of 36 manufactured by Leap Year Publishing and purchased at a Dollar Tree store.

Julie Duffy, a spokeswoman for Hasbro, which owns the Playskool brand, said that "product and children's safety are top priorities" for the company.

"We are conducting a thorough investigation into these claims, including working with Leap Year, the licensee of the product," she said in a statement.

In an email, John Sorenson, a spokesman for Leap Year Publishing, said that all of its products, including the green crayon mentioned in the report, "are thoroughly tested by independent labs" to meet or exceed federal standards.

"We are currently re-verifying that they are safe and free of any asbestos, as well as requesting a review of P.I.R.G.'s testing methods," he said.

Tremolite is responsible for many cases of asbestos-related cancer and asbestos diseases, according to the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a statement, Dollar Tree said it was aware of the report and had "since reverified that each of the listed products successfully passed inspection and testing."

Crayons sold under five other brands — Crayola, Up & Up, Cra-Z-Art, Disney Junior Mickey and the Roadster Racers, and RoseArt — tested negative for asbestos.

Benzene and related compounds

Four markers were sent to the laboratory, and two dry-erase ones tested positive for a group of compounds often found in petroleum products and known as B.T.E.X.: benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

One of those compounds, benzene, is a known carcinogen and was found in a package of six magnetic markers purchased on Amazon and produced by The Board Dudes, a brand owned by Mattel.

In a statement, Mattel said it took such reports seriously, "aggressively" tests its products and was reviewing the claims. The markers, the statement added, "contain substance levels that fall within the permissible limits."

Benzene disrupts the normal functioning of cells, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Long-term exposure can have harmful effects on bone marrow and lead to a decrease in red blood cells.

An Expo dry-erase scented marker, also purchased on Amazon, tested positive for some of the B.T.E.X. compounds, though not benzene and none at levels considered worrying by toxicologists, according to the report.

In a statement, Expo said that it was aware of the report and that its products "meet all applicable regulatory and safety standards."

Washable markers, from Crayola and Jot, tested negative.

Phthalates

In another set of tests, the public interest organization examined three three-ring binders for phthalates, a group of chemicals added to plastics to make them flexible, some of which may affect human reproduction or development.

Only one, a Jot-brand, 1-inch blue binder from Dollar Tree, tested positive. Binders sold under the Avery and Yoobi brands did not.

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10)  Lagoons of Pig Waste Are Overflowing After Florence. Yes, That's as Nasty as It Sounds.
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, September 19, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/climate/florence-hog-farms.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

A hog farm in eastern North Carolina on Monday. The pink area is a lagoon of pig excrement.

The record-breaking rains that started with Hurricane Florence are continuing to strain North Carolina's hog lagoons.

Because of the storm, at least 77 lagoons in the state have either released pig waste into the environment or are at imminent risk of doing so, according to data issued Tuesday by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. That tally more than doubled from the day before, when the department's count was 34.

When a pig in a large-scale farm urinates or defecates, the waste falls through slatted floors into holding troughs below. Those troughs are periodically flushed into an earthen hole in the ground called a lagoon in a mixture of water, pig excrement and anaerobic bacteria. The bacteria digest the slurry and also give lagoons their bubble gum-pink coloration.

North Carolina has 9.7 million pigs that produce 10 billion gallons of manure, mostly on large-scale farms, primarily in low-lying Sampson and Duplin counties. Both counties were affected by Florence.

When storms like Florence hit, lagoons can release their waste into the environment through structural damage, for example, when rains erode the banks of a lagoon and cause breaches. They can also overflow from rainfall or be swept over by floodwaters.

Whatever the cause, the result when a lagoon leaks can be environmental trouble. If the untreated waste enters rivers, for example, algal blooms and mass fish die-offs can happen, as they did in 1999 during Hurricane Floyd. That year, many animals drowned in lagoon slurry.

Hog lagoons and the associated large-scale farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, have been a sore spot in the eastern part of the state where residents say that the operations harm their health and well-being. 

A recent Duke University study published online this week found that those complaints may have some merit.

"Life expectancy in North Carolina communities near hog CAFOs remains low, even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors that are known to affect people's health and life span," Dr. H. Kim Lyerly, a professor of cancer research at Duke, said in a statement. The Duke study stops short of drawing a causal link.

Last week, Andy Curliss, chief executive of the North Carolina Pork Council, said that the pig producers had learned a lot from Hurricane Floyd. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused 14 lagoons to flood but none breached, according to the pork council.

"A lot of the farms that were flooded were bought out and closed," he said. "That's why you didn't see the same impact in Matthew — we had maybe 15 floods, no breaches."

As of Tuesday afternoon, the North Carolina Pork Council's website listed only 26 lagoons as affected by the storm, far fewer than the number cited by the Department of Environmental Quality.

As Florence approached, farmers tried to free up more space in lagoons ahead of the storm by spraying manure onto fields, said Heather Overton, a spokeswoman for the state's Agriculture Department.

Will Hendrick, a staff attorney with the environmental nonprofit group Waterkeeper Alliance, said that manure sprayed on fields could run off into rivers, streams, and groundwater supplies if the fields flooded.

Excess nitrates in groundwater, such as those associated with pig manure, are linked with health problems such as blue baby syndrome. In some cases of the syndrome, nitrogen binds to the hemoglobin in a baby's blood and makes red blood cells unable to carry oxygen. The syndrome's name comes from the fact that the lack of oxygen causes the baby's skin to take on a bluish tint. The syndrome can also be caused by heart defects. 

Part of the problem, said Alexis Andiman, an associate attorney with the environmental nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, is that storm standards for pig lagoons currently date from the 1960s.

As part of a settlement for a lawsuit that Earthjustice levied against the state, "the storm standard will be tied to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration standard from 2006," Ms. Andiman said. "But that's still kind of old."

The Department of Environmental Quality's data is self-reported by farmers, many whom may have left their farms to avoid the storm surge and floodwaters. The number of spills reported could increase as more farmers make their way back to their farms. But luckily, in a region that has struggled with too much rain, the rest of the week's forecast is mostly sunny.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter on the climate team. Before joining The Times in 2017, she covered science and the environment for Popular Science.

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11) Brooklyn Diocese Is Part of $27.5 Million Settlement in 4 Sex Abuse Cases
By Sharon Otterman, September 18, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/nyregion/catholic-church-sex-abuse-settlement-brooklyn.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Some of the abuse committed against the four children occurred inside St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's Church in Brooklyn, as well as in an apartment in the old schoolhouse behind the church.

Four men who were repeatedly sexually abused as children by a religion teacher at a Roman Catholic church reached a $27.5 million settlement with the Diocese of Brooklyn and a local after-school program on Tuesday, in one of the largest settlements ever awarded to individual victims of abuse within the church.

The victims were repeatedly abused by Angelo Serrano, 67, who taught catechism classes and helped organize the religious education programs at St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's Church, in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The abuse occurred inside the church, in Mr. Serrano's apartment located in an old schoolhouse behind the church and at the affiliated after-school program, lawyers for the victims said.

The settlement comes amid a flurry of investigations — including a New York State civil investigation — and disclosures of sex abuse within the Catholic Church that have led to mounting pressure on Pope Francis to take action against bishops and cardinals for their role in the abuse crisis.

The sexual assaults in Brooklyn took place between 2003 and 2009, the lawyers said, when the boys were between the ages of 8 and 12.

One of the boys reported the abuse to his mother, who contacted the police. Mr. Serrano was arrested in September 2009, and pleaded guilty two years later to first-degree sexual conduct charges; he is serving a 15-year sentence at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.

Seeking punitive damages from the diocese, two of the victims filed a lawsuit in 2013, and the other two victims later brought lawsuits as well. The pastors at the church during the time the abuse occurred, the Rev. Stephen P. Lynch and the Rev. Frank Shannon, were named as co-defendants.

In fighting the idea that they should be held responsible for the abuse, the Diocese of Brooklyn argued that Mr. Serrano was a church volunteer, not a diocesan employee. The diocese also disputed that the abuse took place on church grounds, arguing that abuse in Mr. Serrano's apartment was not its legal responsibility.

But lawyers for the victims pointed out that Mr. Serrano received a stipend from the church and had a desk on church property.

A Brooklyn judge sided with the victims, finding that clear warning signs that Mr. Serrano was abusing the children were ignored by parish workers and priests and not reported.

"The record is clear that Lynch and Shannon had knowledge that for years Serrano often had several boys, including plaintiff, sleep over at his apartment," Justice Loren Baily-Schiffman of Kings County Supreme Court wrote in her 2017 order dismissing the church's motion for summary judgment of the case. "In fact, both Lynch and Shannon testified that they visited Serrano on numerous occasions when young boys were present."

In a deposition, Father Lynch testified that he saw Mr. Serrano kiss an 8- or 9-year-old boy on the mouth and inappropriately embrace the boy.

A church secretary, Beatrice Ponnelle, who shared an office with Mr. Serrano, also testified about questionable behavior. She said that although the church had a rule that children were not allowed to be left alone in the office with a staff member, boys as young as 7 or 8 would come into the office to do their homework while sitting on Mr. Serrano's lap. When she left for the day, he would be the only adult in the office with the boys, Justice Baily-Schiffman wrote.

Despite Mr. Serrano's position as a religious educator — with Mr. Serrano at the church nearly every day between 1997 and 2009, volunteering at the summer camp, and getting keys to the church and rectory — no records were kept regarding him or his employment history at the church, the judge wrote.

With the case set for trial, the Diocese of Brooklyn agreed to settle. But in a statement released on Tuesday, the diocese still seemed to minimize its role in allowing the abuse.

"The diocese and another defendant have settled these lawsuits brought by the four claimants who were sexually abused by Angelo Serrano at his private apartment many years ago," the statement said. "Mr. Serrano was a volunteer worker at a local parish; he was not clergy or an employee of the diocese or parish."

The statement added that for three of the claimants, "another defendant" would be contributing "a significant portion of the settlement." A spokeswoman for the diocese said that the Dorothy Bennett Mercy Center, a local after-school program based next to the church in Clinton Hill, had agreed to pay about one-third of the total settlement.

The spokeswoman, Adriana Rodriguez, did not address whether Father Shannon and Father Lynch were punished for failing to report signs of abuse.

In all, each of the four victims will receive $6,875,000, the lawyers said, sharing an email with the diocese's lawyer confirming the settlement amount. The note indicated that the diocese would confer with its insurers regarding how the settlement would be paid.

The largest previous individual settlement to an abuse victim in the Catholic Church is believed to be in 2007, when two victims of a lay music minister in the Rockville Centre diocese collected a total of $11,450,000, or $5.725 million each, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy sexual abuse cases. The lawyers for the Brooklyn victims said they believed this was a record settlement to individuals for sex abuse in the Catholic Church in this country.

The victims, who are now between the ages of 19 and 21, have requested that their identities be withheld.

"These were boys who were abused in second grade through sixth grade, for years for some of them," said Ben Rubinowitz, another lawyer for the victims. "The egregious nature of the conduct is the reason that the church paid what they did."

The Brooklyn diocese, which includes Queens, is already in the process of settling hundreds of older abuse cases where the victims can no longer sue because of the statute of limitations.

Like many dioceses, the Brooklyn diocese has confronted waves of parish mergers and closures as the number of parishioners has shrunk. St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's parish was itself the result of a merger of parishes in the 1970s because of dwindling attendance. In 2010, the diocese announced that the church would be shuttered in another wave of parish closings.

In a lengthy article by The New York Times about the struggling parishpublished in 2004, Mr. Serrano appears as a "raspy-voiced pastoral assistant" who took phone calls, promising one woman he would help her find her lease so she could avoid eviction. He calmly counseled another caller who was in a psychiatric ward, feeling desperate.

"Suicide is not an option," he told her, dropping his gruff demeanor. "Pray to St. Jude, the patron of the impossible."

"Mr. Serrano can identify with her," the story reported then, five years before his arrest. "He has struggled with depression. So far, he is winning. But, he admitted, this year would be hard. Very hard. He was talking about spending Christmas alone this year."

Since June 2017, 474 victims in Brooklyn have applied for settlements through the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program; 374 of those cases have so far been settled, the program said. In all, six dioceses in the state are running similar programs. The Brooklyn diocese took out a loan to pay for the millions required to cover those settlements, which generally amount to less than $500,000 each.

The settlement to the four victims comes after an extraordinary grand jury report in Pennsylvania detailing the abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests over decades.

"This is an extremely large settlement, and the size of the settlement has to be an indication of the severity of the abuse, and also of the pressure that the Catholic Church is under due to all the developments that are happening," said Terry McKiernan, co-director and president of BishopAccountability.org.

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12)  Why Sexual Assault Memories Stick
Christine Blasey Ford says she has a vivid memory of an attack that took place when she was 15. That makes sense.
"...alcohol does not create violent sexual impulses so much as it unleashes or magnifies pre-existing ones. And second, a sexual assault in which Brett Kavanaugh put his hand over a girl’s mouth to silence her would be in a far different category from a dumb but not character-revealing prank like shoplifting cigarettes."
By Richard A. Friedman, September 19, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/opinion/kavanaugh-christine-ford-sexual-assault.html

Memories formed under the influence of intense emotion are indelible in a way that routine memories are not.

As a psychiatrist I know something about how memory works. Neuroscience research tells us that memories formed under the influence of intense emotion — such as the feelings that accompany a sexual assault — are indelible in the way that memories of a routine day are not.

That’s why it’s credible that Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers, has a vivid recollection of the alleged long-ago event. 

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” she told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

Judge Kavanaugh has vigorously denied the charges, leading to a public debate about whether Dr. Blasey’s story is true. Her lawyers say she wants the F.B.I. to investigate before she agrees to testify before the Senate. If and when she does testify, you can bet that Republican senators will try to undermine her explosive claim on the basis that the memory of an event that occurred 36 years ago must be unreliable because it happened in the distant past. If she does not testify, some of her critics will undoubtedly argue that the time that’s passed is reason to doubt her recollection. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reason has to do with the way memories are encoded when a person is experiencing intense emotions. When people are assaulted, for example, they experience a surge of norepinephrine, a stress hormone that is a relative of adrenaline. 

The role of norepinephrine in the enhancement of memory was demonstrated by a 1994 study in which researchers randomly gave subjects either propranolol, a drug that blocks the effect of norepinephrine, or a placebo just before they heard either an emotionally arousing story or a neutral one. Then they tested subjects’ memories of both stories a week later and found that propranolol selectively impaired recall of the emotionally arousing story but not the neutral story. The clear implication of this study is that emotion raises norepinephrine, which then strengthens memory.

That is why you can easily forget where you put your smartphone or what you had for dinner last night or last year. But you will almost never forget who raped you, whether it happened yesterday — or 36 years ago. There’s very little chance that you are, as some senators suggest Dr. Blasey is, “mixed up” or “confused.”

It is also important to note that what Dr. Blasey is describing in her report of sexual assault by Judge Kavanaugh is not a so-called recovered memory— one that a person believes he has recalled after having suppressed it for many years. Quite the opposite: It is a traumatic memory that she’s been unable to forget. 

In the interview with The Post she said the assault “derailed me substantially for four or five years,” and had caused anxiety for years after that. Indeed, her therapist’s notes reflect that, in a 2012 session, she described an attack by students at an “elitist boys’ school” (Judge Kavanaugh attended a Georgetown prep school) who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society.”

Some commentators don’t dispute Dr. Blasey’s veracity. Instead, they deem an assault as described by Dr. Blasey as irrelevant to Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve on the Supreme Court because he would have been just 17 years old and drunk at the time. We all know that teenagers are notoriously impulsive and should be forgiven for doing things like that, right?

Wrong. Sexual assault cannot be easily dismissed as youthful indiscretion or the product of alcoholic intoxication. First, alcohol does not create violent sexual impulses so much as it unleashes or magnifies pre-existing ones. And second, a sexual assault in which Brett Kavanaugh put his hand over a girl’s mouth to silence her would be in a far different category from a dumb but not character-revealing prank like shoplifting cigarettes. Teenagers are notorious risk-takers because, in part, the reward circuit of the brain develops long before the prefrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning and control. But that doesn’t mean they have no sense of right or wrong or that they are hard-wired to violate the rights of others.

Some are saying that Dr. Blasey’s accusation, even if true, is just one ancient example of admittedly egregious behavior in an otherwise upstanding person who, as President Trump attests, “never had even a little blemish on his record.”

Since teenagers change so much, these people say, bad behavior then isn’t necessarily predictive of adult behavior. Sure, but why take the risk for someone who will have so much power? Dr. Blasey’s accusation is credible and deserves a full investigation.

Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and a contributing opinion writer. 

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13)  Inside Italy’s Shadow Economy
Within a distressed labor market, thousands of low-paid home workers create luxury garments without contracts or insurance.
By Elizabeth Paton and Milena Lazazzera, September 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/fashion/italy-luxury-shadow-economy.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

A seamstress working for luxury brands in her home kitchen in Puglia, Italy.

BARI PROVINCE, Italy — In a second-floor apartment in the southern Italian town of Santeramo in Colle, a middle-aged woman sat in a black-padded chair this summer, hard at work at her kitchen table. She stitched carefully at a sophisticated woolen coat, the sort of style that will sell for 800 to 2,000 euros ($935 to $2,340) when it arrives in stores this month as part of the fall and winter collection of MaxMara, the Italian luxury fashion brand. 

But the woman, who asked not to be named for fear that she could lose her livelihood, receives just €1 from the factory that employs her for each meter of fabric she completes.

“It takes me about one hour to sew one meter, so about four to five hours to complete an entire coat,” said the woman, who works without a contract, or insurance, and is paid in cash on a monthly basis. “I try to do two coats per day.”

The unregulated work she completes in her apartment is outsourced to her from a local factory that also manufactures outerwear for some of the best-known names in the luxury business, including Louis Vuitton and Fendi. The most she has ever earned, she said, was €24 for an entire coat.

Home work — working from home or a small workshop as opposed to in a factory — is a cornerstone of the fast-fashion supply chain. It is particularly prevalent in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, where millions of low-paid and predominantly female home workers are some of the most unprotected in the industry, because of their irregular employment status, isolation and lack of legal recourse.

That similar conditions exist in Italy, however, and facilitate the production of some of the most expensive wardrobe items money can buy, may shock those who see the “Made in Italy” label as a byword for sophisticated craftsmanship. 

Increased pressure from globalization and growing competition at all levels of the market mean that the assumption implicit in the luxury promise — that part of the value of such a good is that it is made in the best conditions, by highly skilled workers, who are paid fairly — is at times put under threat.

Though they are not exposed to what most people would consider sweatshop conditions, the homeworkers are allotted what might seem close to sweatshop wages. Italy does not have a national minimum wage, but roughly €5-7 per hour is considered an appropriate standard by many unions and consulting firms. In extremely rare cases, a highly skilled worker can earn as much as €8-10 an hour. But the homeworkers earn significantly less, regardless of whether they are involved in leatherwork, embroidery or another artisanal task.

In Ginosa, another town in Puglia, Maria Colamita, 53, said that a decade ago, when her two children were younger, she had worked from home on wedding dresses produced by local factories, embroidering gowns with pearl paillettes and appliqués for €1.50 to €2 per hour.

Each gown took 10 to 50 hours to complete, and Ms. Colamita said she worked 16 to 18 hours a day; she was paid only when a garment was complete.

“I would only take breaks to take care of my children and my family members — that was it,” she said, adding that she currently works as a cleaner and earns €7 per hour. “Now my children have grown up, I can take on a job where I can earn a real wage.”

Sewing thread used by home workers for some of the spring fashion collections.

Both women said they knew at least 15 other seamstresses in their area who produced luxury fashion garments on a piece-rate basis for local factories from their homes. All live in Puglia, the rural heel of Italy’s boot that combines whitewashed fishing villages and crystal clear waters beloved by tourists with one of the country’s biggest manufacturing hubs.

Few were willing to risk their livelihoods to tell their tales, because for them the flexibility and opportunity to care for their families while working was worth the meager pay and lack of protections.

“I know I am not paid what I deserve, but salaries are very low here in Puglia and ultimately I love what I do,” said another seamstress, from the attic workshop in her apartment. “I have done it all my life and couldn’t do anything else.”

Although she had a factory job that paid her €5 per hour, she worked an additional three hours per day off the books from home, largely on high-quality sample garments for Italian designers at roughly €50 apiece.

“We all accept that this is how it is,” the woman said from her sewing machine, surrounded by cloth rolls and tape measures.

‘Made in Italy,’ but at What Cost?

Built upon the myriad small- and medium-size export-oriented manufacturing businesses that make up the backbone of Europe’s fourth largest economy, the centuries-old foundations of the “Made in Italy” legend have shaken in recent years under the weight of bureaucracy, rising costs and soaring unemployment.

Businesses in the north, where there are generally more job opportunities and higher wages, have suffered less than those in the south, which were hit hard by the boom in cheap foreign labor that lured many companies into moving production operations abroad.

Few sectors are as reliant on the country’s manufacturing cachet as the luxury trade, long a linchpin of Italy’s economic growth. It is responsible for 5 percent of Italian gross domestic product, and an estimated 500,000 people were employed directly and indirectly by the luxury goods sector in Italy in 2017, according to data from a report from the University of Bocconi and Altagamma, an Italian luxury trade organization. 

Those numbers have been bolstered by the rosy fortunes of the global luxury market, expected by Bain & Company to grow by 6 to 8 percent, to €276 to €281 billion in 2018, driven in part by the appetite for “Made in Italy” goods from established and emerging markets.

But the alleged efforts by some luxury brands and lead suppliers to lower costs without undermining quality have taken a toll on those on those operating at the very bottom of the industry. Just how many are affected is difficult to quantify.

According to data from Istat (the Italian National Institute of Statistics), 3.7 million workers across all sectors worked without contracts in Italy in 2015. More recently, in 2017, Istat counted 7,216 home workers, 3,647 in the manufacturing sector, operating with regular contracts. 

However, there is no official data on those operating with irregular contracts, and no one has attempted to quantify the group for decades. In 1973, the economist Sebastiano Brusco estimated that Italy had one million contracted home workers in apparel production, with a roughly equal figure working without contracts. Few comprehensive efforts have been made to examine the numbers since.

This New York Times investigation collected evidence of about 60 women in the Puglia region alone working from home without a regular contract in the apparel sector. Tania Toffanin, the author of “Fabbriche Invisibili,” a book on the history of home working in Italy, estimated that currently there are 2,000 to 4,000 irregular home workers in apparel production.

“The deeper down we go in the supply chain, the greater the abuse,” said Deborah Lucchetti, of Abiti Puliti, the Italian arm of Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group. According to Ms. Lucchetti, the fragmented structure of the global manufacturing sector, made up of thousands of medium to small, often family-owned, businesses, is a key reason that practices like unregulated home working can remain prevalent even in a first world nation like Italy.

Plenty of Puglian factory managers stressed they adhered to union regulations, treated workers fairly and paid them a living wage. Many factory owners added that almost all luxury names — like Gucci, owned by Kering, for example, or Louis Vuitton, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton — regularly sent staff to check on working conditions and quality standards.

When contacted, LVMH declined to comment for this story. A spokesman for MaxMara emailed the following statement: “MaxMara considers an ethical supply chain a key component of the company’s core values reflected in our business practice.” 

He added that the company was unaware of specific allegations of its suppliers using home workers, but had started an investigation this week. 

According to Ms. Lucchetti, the fact that many Italian luxury brands outsource the bulk of manufacturing, rather than use their own factories, has created a status quo where exploitation can easily fester — especially for those out of union or brand sightlines. A large portion of brands hire a local supplier in a region, who will then negotiate contracts with factories in the area on their behalf.

“Brands commission first lead contractors at the head of the supply chain, which then commission to sub-suppliers, which in turn shift part of the production to smaller factories under the pressure of reduced lead time and squeezed prices,” Ms. Lucchetti said. “That makes it very hard for there to be sufficient transparency or accountability. We know home working exists. But it is so hidden that there will be brands that have no idea orders are being made by irregular workers outside the contracted factories.”

However, she also called these problems common knowledge, and said, “some brands must know they might be complicit.”

The ‘Salento Method’

Certainly that is the view of Eugenio Romano, a former union lawyer who has spent the last five years representing Carla Ventura, a bankrupt factory owner of Keope Srl (formerly CRI), suing the Italian shoe luxury behemoth Tod’s and Euroshoes, a company that Tod’s used as a lead supplier for its Puglian footwear production. 

Initially, in 2011, Ms. Ventura began legal proceedings against only Euroshoes, saying that consistently late payments, shrinking fee rates for orders and outstanding bills owed to her by that company were making it impossible to maintain a profitable factory and pay her workers a fair wage. A local court ruled in her favor, and ordered Euroshoes to pay the debts, which, after appealing unsuccessfully, the company did.

Orders dried up in the wake of those legal proceedings. Eventually, in 2014, Keope went bankrupt. Now, in a second trial, which has stretched on for years without a significant ruling, Ms. Ventura has brought another action against Euroshoes, and Tod’s, which she says had direct knowledge of Euroshoes’ unlawful business practices. (Tod’s has said it played no role in nor had any knowledge of Euroshoes’ contract issues with Keope. A lawyer for Euroshoes declined to comment for this article.)

“Part of the problem down here is that employees agree to forgo their rights in order to work,” Mr. Romano said from his office in the town of Casarano, ahead of the next court hearing, scheduled for Sept. 26. 

He spoke of the “Salento method,” a well-known local phrase that means, essentially: “Be flexible, use your methods, you know how to do it down here.” 

The region of Salento has a high unemployment rate, which makes its work force vulnerable. And although brands would never officially suggest taking advantage of employees, some factory owners have told Mr. Romano that there is an underlying message to use a range of means, including underpaying employees and paying them to work at home.

The area has long been a hub of third-party shoemakers for luxury brands including Gucci, Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo and Tod’s. In 2008, Ms. Ventura entered into an exclusive agreement with Euroshoes to become a sub-supplier of shoe uppers destined for Tod’s. 

According to Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit, she then became subject to consistently late payments, as well as an unexplained reduction in prices per unit from €13.48 to €10.73 per shoe upper from 2009 to 2012.

While many local factories cut corners, including having employees work from home, Ms. Ventura said she still paid full salaries and provided national insurance. Because the contract required exclusivity, other potential manufacturing deals with rival brands including Armani and Gucci, which could have balanced the books, could not be made. 

Production costs were no longer covered, and promises of an increased number of orders from Tod’s via Euroshoes never came, according to the legal papers filed in Ms. Ventura’s case.

In 2012, orders from Tod’s via Euroshoes stopped completely, one year after Ms. Ventura first took Euroshoes to court for her unpaid bills. Ms. Ventura said that eventually put Keope on the road to bankruptcy, according to legal documents. Ms. Ventura was declared insolvent in 2014.

When asked for comment, a Tod’s spokeswoman said in a statement: 

“Keope filed a lawsuit against one of our suppliers, Euroshoes, and Tod’s, to recover damages related to the alleged actions or omissions of Euroshoes. Tod’s has nothing to do with the facts alleged in the case and never had a direct commercial relationship with Keope. Keope is a subcontractor of Euroshoes, and Tod’s is completely extraneous to their relationship.”

The statement also said that Tod’s had paid Euroshoes for all the amounts billed in a timely and regular manner, and was not responsible if Euroshoes failed to pay a subcontractor. Tod’s said it insisted all suppliers perform their services in line with the law, and that the same standard be applied to subcontractors. 

“Tod’s reserves the right to defend its reputation against the libelous attempt of Keope to involve it in issues that do not concern Tod’s,” the spokeswoman said.

Indeed, a report by Abiti Puliti that included an investigation by Il Tacco D’Italia, a local newspaper, into Ms. Ventura’s case found that other companies in the region sewing uppers by hand had women do the work irregularly from their homes. That pay would be 70 to 90 euro cents a pair, meaning that in 12 hours a worker would earn 7 to 9 euros. 

‘Invisible’ Labor

Home working textile jobs that are labor intensive or require skilled handiwork are not new to Italy. But many industry observers believe that the lack of a government-set national minimum wage has made it easier for many home workers to still be paid a pittance.

Wages are generally negotiated for workers by union representatives, which vary by sector and by union. According to the Studio Rota Porta, an Italian labor consultancy, the minimum wage in the textile industry should be roughly €7.08 per hour, lower than those for other sectors including food (€8.70), construction (€8) and finance (€11.51).

But workers who aren’t members of unions operate outside the system and are vulnerable to exploitation, a source of frustration for many union representatives.

“We do know about seamstresses working without contracts from home in Puglia, especially those that specialize in sewing appliqué, but none of them want to approach us to talk about their conditions, and the subcontracting keeps them largely invisible,” said Pietro Fiorella, a representative of the CGIL, or Italian General Confederation of Labour, the country’s largest national union. 

Many of them are retired, Mr. Fiorella said, or want the flexibility of part-time work to care for family members or want to supplement their income, and are fearful of losing the additional money. While unemployment rates in Puglia recently dropped to 19.5 percent in the first quarter of 2018 from nearly 21.5 percent in the same period a year ago, jobs remain difficult to come by.

A fellow union representative, Giordano Fumarola, pointed to another reason that garment and textile wages in this stretch of southern Italy have stayed so low for so long: the offshoring of production to Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades, which intensified local competition for fewer orders and forced factory owners to drive down prices. 

In recent years, some luxury companies have started to bring production back to Puglia, Mr. Fumarola said. But he believed that power is still firmly in the hands of the brands, not suppliers already operating on wafer-thin margins. The temptation for factory owners to then use sub-suppliers or home workers, or save money by defrauding their workers or the government, was hard to resist.

Add to that a longstanding antipathy for regulation, high instances of irregular unemployment and fragmented systems of employment protection, and the fact that nonstandard employment has been significantly liberalized by successive labor market reforms since the mid-1990s, and the result is further isolation for those working on the margins.

A national election in March swept a new populist government to power in Italy, placing power in the hands of two parties — the Five Star Movement and the League — and a proposed “dignity decree” aims to limit the prevalence of short-term job contracts and of firms shifting jobs abroad while simplifying some fiscal rules. For now, however, legislation around a minimum wage does not appear to be on the agenda.

Indeed, for women like the unnamed seamstress in Santeramo in Colle, working away on yet another coat at her kitchen table, reform of any sort feels a long way off. 

Not that she really minded. She would be devastated to lose this additional income, she said, and the work allowed her to spend time with her children. 

“What do you want me to say?” she said with a sigh, closing her eyes and raising the palms of her hands. “It is what it is. This is Italy.”

Elizabeth Paton is a reporter for the Styles section, covering the fashion and luxury sectors in Europe. Before joining The Times in 2015, she was a reporter at the Financial Times both in London and New York. 

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14)  How Golf Digest and College Students Helped Free a Man Convicted of Murder
By Jacey Fortin, September 20, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/nyregion/Valentino-Dixon-golf-digest-exonerated.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

Valentino Dixon on Wednesday after Erie County Court vacated a murder conviction that had kept him in prison for more than 26 years.

There were dozens of witnesses when a gunfight broke out on a street corner in Buffalo on Aug. 10, 1991. At least three people were injured, and Torriano Jackson, 17, was killed.

Valentino Dixon, then 21, was at the scene. Hours later, he was arrested. And in 1992, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to almost 40 years to life in prison, with no chance of parole until 2030.

For years, Mr. Dixon fought that conviction from behind bars, insisting on his innocence. No physical evidence had ever connected him to the murder, and another man had confessed to it more than once.

After nearly three decades and a couple of unusual twists — including a Golf Digest profile that featured his detailed drawings of golf courses — his murder conviction was vacated on Wednesday, and Mr. Dixon, 48, walked free.

“I felt like I was in some type of dream,” he said in a phone interview from a Red Lobster restaurant, where he was surrounded by friends, relatives and lawyers, and about to eat lobster for the first time.

As he struggled to get his conviction overturned, Mr. Dixon got help from a varied cast of characters. They included journalists at Golf Digest, a new district attorney in Erie County, witnesses whose accounts were never presented at trial, a dogged team of undergraduate students at Georgetown University, and one man who had direct experience with long incarcerations: Martin Tankleff, who was imprisoned for 17 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering his parents and was released in 2007.

In the beginning, Mr. Dixon’s case was covered mostly by The Buffalo News. But it gained more widespread attention in 2012 because of Mr. Dixon’s art. In prison, for hours a day, he liked to draw detailed landscapes in colored pencil. Golf courses were a frequent subject. That caught the interest of journalists at Golf Digest, and the magazine profiled Mr. Dixon.

In 2017, a new district attorney, John Flynn, took office in Erie County and established a conviction integrity unit to investigate cases that might merit review.

Mr. Dixon, at the Attica Correctional Facility in 2013, become known for his art while he was incarcerated for a murder he said he did not commit.

And in 2018, a course called Prison Reform Project was offered for the first time at Georgetown University, led by the director of the university’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, Marc M. Howard. Dr. Howard has known Mr. Tankleff since they attended the same preschool, and they taught the course together, with Mr. Tankleff flying to Washington from his home on Long Island to serve as an adjunct professor once a week.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Tankleff said he had never heard of an undergraduate class like this one. “This is not a course about make-believe cases,” he said. “These are real people, real lives, real-world implications.”

With several cases to choose from, three students chose Mr. Dixon’s case and gathered evidence. They tracked down witnesses, pored over documents, called Mr. Dixon on the phone several times a week and visited him in prison. Eventually, they were convinced that he was telling the truth, and they made a short documentary on the subject.

Their work helped Donald M. Thompson, a lawyer for Mr. Dixon, make his case to the district attorney’s office. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Flynn, the district attorney, said the newly discovered evidence from various witnesses attesting to Mr. Dixon’s innocence was deemed credible.

That evidence included confessions from Lamarr Scott, who has said several times that he killed Torriano Jackson, although he did once recant a confession in front of a grand jury. On Wednesday, Mr. Scott, who is in prison for an unrelated shooting, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in connection with Mr. Jackson’s killing.

Mr. Dixon said he crossed paths with Mr. Scott when both were incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility. They were cordial, he said, but did not speak much.

Mr. Thompson said Mr. Scott used Mr. Dixon’s gun in the killing. A weapons charge against Mr. Dixon was not dropped.

Not everyone believes that Mr. Dixon is innocent. Aaron Jackson, who was injured in the shooting that killed his brother Torriano, has argued consistently and vehemently that he saw Mr. Dixon commit the murder. Mr. Jackson could not be reached on Wednesday night, but he told WGRZ, a local television news outlet, that he was sure Mr. Dixon was guilty.

“He’s not innocent, and he wasn’t tried and convicted in a kangaroo court,” Mr. Jackson said. “I don’t think he should ever be free.”

Mr. Dixon said he wants to cook for his family, take his children fishing and visit a golf course.

Though Mr. Flynn ultimately concluded otherwise, he said he understood Mr. Jackson’s concerns. “Valentino Dixon walked out of jail today,” he said. “The true victim here is Torriano Jackson, who, unfortunately, is not getting out of the grave.”

Dr. Howard called Mr. Dixon’s 1992 conviction “mind-boggling,” adding that during Mr. Dixon’s trial, the prosecution’s witnesses were unreliable and the defense did not present witnesses at all. “And it’s not like the students just took something that was at a dead end,” he added. “There was a lot of momentum building, and there was a tremendous amount of interest generated by the golf angle.”

On Wednesday, two of those students returned to New York to see Mr. Dixon leave the Erie County courtroom. Ellie Goonetillake flew from England, and Julie Fragonas from France. Both have finished their undergraduate work and begun postgraduate studies in law.

Ms. Goonetillake, 23, said the class was unlike anything she had taken before. “It was definitely the most immersive, the most challenging and most demanding course I’ve ever done in my life,” she said. “But it all pays off today.”

Ms. Fragonas, 21, said it was draining to watch Mr. Dixon and his family members struggle during his incarceration. “But it has also been such a rewarding experience,” she said. “When we saw him get out of the courtroom, it was really the best feeling.”

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Dixon was joined by his grandmother, several cousins, a few aunts, his mother, two of his three daughters and three of his six grandchildren. They had to book an entire room at the Red Lobster.

His daughter Valentina Dixon, 27, was only a few months old when her father went to prison. She, too, has been working for years to get him released. “He would tell me we were going to get through this, and we just had to stay strong in our fight,” she said. “His encouragement and his enthusiasm and his endurance pushed us to be where we are today.”

Now, Mr. Dixon has plans. He said he wanted to cook breakfast — and then lunch, and then dinner — for his mother and his grandmother on Thursday. He wanted to visit a golf course (he has never played the game) and take his children fishing at Sodus Point, N.Y.

And then he wants to work on criminal justice reform, with a focus on his home state of New York. “I’m going to dedicate my life to fighting mass incarceration,” he said.

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