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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:  Call/Write: Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009,  Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009,

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)  E.P.A. Places the Head of Its Office of Children's Health on Leave
By Coral Davenport and Roni Caryn Rabin, September 26, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/climate/epa-etzel-children-health-program.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

The Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters in Washington in July. On Tuesday, the E.P.A. placed Dr. Ruth Etzel, the head of its Office of Children's Health Protection, on administrative leave.

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday placed the head of its Office of Children's Health Protection on administrative leave, in an unusual move that several observers said appeared to reflect an effort to minimize the role of the office.

Dr. Ruth Etzel, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who has been a leader in children's environmental health for 30 years, joined the E.P.A. in 2015, after having served as a senior officer for environmental health research at the World Health Organization. She was placed on administrative leave late Tuesday and asked to hand over her badge, keys and cellphone, according to an E.P.A. official familiar with the decision who was not authorized to discuss the move and asked not to be identified.

An E.P.A. spokesman, John Konkus, declined to give a reason for the administrative leave.

The E.P.A.'s Office of Children's Health Protection, created by President Bill Clinton in 1997, is tasked with seeing that agency regulations and programs take into account the particular vulnerabilities of children, babies and fetuses. Children are more vulnerable than adults to pollution and other potential exposure because their bodies are still developing and because they eat, drink and breathe more in proportion to their size. In addition, some of their behaviors, such as crawling or putting things in their mouths, potentially expose them to chemicals or toxins.

Several people within the E.P.A. or who work closely with the agency said that Dr. Etzel's dismissal is one of several recent developments that have slowed the work of the children's health office. One person cited a proposal outlining a strategy for reducing childhood lead exposure, which had been in development for over a year with the involvement of 17 federal agencies, and which has been stalled since early July.

The Office of Children's Health Protection is technically housed in the office of the E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, who has served as the agency's acting administrator since July.

Under Mr. Wheeler and his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, who left the position earlier this year amid investigations into his oversight of the agency, the E.P.A. has aggressively pursued an agenda of rolling back environmental restrictions on numerous pollutants, arguing that the regulations are overly strict or that they burden industry. 

"This seems like a sneaky way for the E.P.A. to get rid of this program and not be upfront about it," said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the director of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center, a teaching hospital affiliated with Michigan State University, whose analysis of blood tests in Flint, Mich. — a community that became caught up in a lead crisis affecting its drinking water — played a key role in showing that residents were being poisoned by the lead. Dr. Hanna-Atisha called Dr. Etzel "an international leader in children's health."

The decision to put the department head on administrative leave "is highly unusual," said Joseph Goffman, a former senior counsel for the E.P.A. during the Obama administration. 

The office Dr. Etzel oversees is small, with a budget of about $2 million and 15 full-time employees in Washington and 10 regional children's health coordinators, some of whom have other responsibilities in addition to children's health.

Mr. Konkus, the E.P.A. spokesman, said the Trump administration had no intention to diminish or eliminate an office designed to protect children's health. "Children's health is and has always been a top priority for the Trump administration and the E.P.A. in particular is focused on reducing lead exposure in schools, providing funds for a cleaner school bus fleet and cleaning up toxic sites so that children have safe environments to learn and play," he said in an emailed statement.

Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on climate change, from the Washington bureau. She joined The Times in 2013 and previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, Politico and National Journal.

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2)  Hundreds of Migrant Children Quietly Moved to a Tent Camp on the Texas Border
By Caitlin Dickerson, September 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html

Migrant children at a detention facility in Tornillo, Tex.

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in South Texas.

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.

But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.

The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their care.

To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered near 90 percent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing. Hundreds of children are being shipped from shelters to South Texas each week, totaling more than 1,600 so far.

The camp in Tornillo operates like a small, pop-up city, about 35 miles southeast of El Paso on the Mexico border, complete with portable toilets. Air-conditioned tents that vary in size are used for housing, recreation and medical care. Originally opened in June for 30 days with a capacity of 400, it expanded in September to be able to house 3,800, and is now expected to remain open at least through the end of the year.

"It is common to use influx shelters as done on military bases in the past, and the intent is to use these temporary facilities only as long as needed," said Evelyn Stauffer, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department.

Ms. Stauffer said the need for the tent city reflected serious problems in the immigration system.

"The number of families and unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system," Ms Stauffer said. "Their ages and the hazardous journey they take make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse. That is why H.H.S. joins the president in calling on Congress to reform this broken system."

But the mass transfers are raising alarm among immigrant advocates, who were already concerned about the lengthy periods of time migrant children are spending in federal custody.

The roughly 100 shelters that have, until now, been the main location for housing detained migrant children are licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities, who impose requirements on safety and education as well as staff hiring and training.

The tent city in Tornillo, on the other hand, is unregulated, except for guidelines created by the Department of Health and Human Services. For example, schooling is not required there, as it is in regular migrant children shelters.

Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children under President Barack Obama, helped to craft the emergency shelter guidelines. He said the agency tried "to the greatest extent possible" to ensure that conditions in facilities like the one at Tornillo would mirror those in regular shelters, "but there are some ways in which that's difficult or impossible to do."

Several shelter workers, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, described what they said has become standard practice for moving the children: In order to avoid escape attempts, the moves are carried out late at night because children will be less likely to try to run away. For the same reason, children are generally given little advance warning that they will be moved.

At one shelter in the Midwest whose occupants were among those recently transferred to Tornillo, about two dozen children were given just a few hours' notice last week before they were loaded onto buses — any longer than that, according to one of the shelter workers, and the children may have panicked or tried to flee.

The children wore belts etched in pen with phone numbers for their emergency contacts. One young boy asked the shelter worker if he would be taken care of in Texas. The shelter worked replied that he would, and told him that by moving, he was making space for other children like him who were stuck at the border and needed a place to live.

Some staff members cried when they learned of the move, the shelter worker said, fearing what was in store for the children who had been in their care. Others tried to protest. But managers explained that tough choices had to be made to deal with the overflowing population.

The system for sheltering migrant children came under strain this summer, when the already large numbers were boosted by more than 2,500 young border crossers who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy. But those children were only a fraction of the total number who are currently detained.

Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeking asylum.

Children who are deemed "unaccompanied minors," either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.

The move to Texas is meant to be temporary. Rather than send new arrivals there, the government is sending children who are likely to be released sooner, and will spend less time there—mainly older children, ages 13 to 17, who are considered close to being placed with sponsors. Still, because sponsorship placements are often protracted, immigrant advocates said there was a possibility that many of the children could be living in the tent city for months.

"Obviously we have concerns about kids falling through the cracks, not getting sufficient attention if they need attention, not getting the emotional or mental health care that they need," said Leah Chavla, a lawyer with the Women's Refugee Commission, an advocacy group.

"This cannot be the right solution," Ms. Chavla said. "We need to focus on making sure that kids can get placed with sponsors and get out of custody."

The number of detained migrant children has spiked even though monthly border crossings have remained relatively unchanged, in part because harsh rhetoric and policies introduced by the Trump administration have made it harder to place children with sponsors.

Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented immigrants themselves, and have feared jeopardizing their own ability to remain in the country by stepping forward to claim a child. The risk increased in June, when federal authorities announced that potential sponsors and other adult members of their households would have to submit fingerprints, and that the data would be shared with immigration authorities.

Last week, Matthew Albence, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified before Congress that the agency had arrested dozens of people who applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. The agency later confirmed that 70 percent of those arrested did not have prior criminal records.

"Close to 80 percent of the individuals that are either sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large chunk of those are criminal aliens. So we are continuing to pursue those individuals," Mr. Albence said.

Seeking to process the children more quickly, officials introduced new rules that will require some of them to appear in court within a month of being detained, rather than after 60 days, which was the previous standard, according to shelter workers. Many will appear via video conference call, rather than in person, to plead their case for legal status to an immigration judge. Those who are deemed ineligible for relief will be swiftly deported.

The longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts or escape attempts, according to shelter workers and reports that have emerged from the system in recent months.

Advocates said those concerns are heightened at a larger facility like Tornillo, where signs that a child is struggling are more likely to be overlooked, because of its size. They added that moving children to the tent city without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.

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3)  Kavanaugh and the Blackout Theory
By Sarah Hepola, September 29, 2018
"When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/brett-kavanaugh-drinking-blackouts.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

College students drinking at a tailgate party before a Indiana University football game.

One of the trickiest things about blackouts is that you don't necessarily know you're having one. I wrote a memoir, so centered around the slips of memory caused by heavy drinking that it is actually called "Blackout," and in the years since its 2015 release, I've heard from thousands of people who experienced them. No small number of those notes contain some version of this: "For years, I was having blackouts without knowing what they were." Blackouts are like a philosophical riddle inside a legal conundrum: If you can't remember a thing, how do you know it happened?

In the days leading up to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a theory arose that he might have drunk so much as a teenager that he did not remember his alleged misdeeds. The blackout theory was a way to reconcile two competing narratives. It meant that Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth but so was Brett Kavanaugh. He simply did not remember what happened that night and therefore believed himself falsely accused. Several questions at the hearing were designed to get at this theory, but it gained little ground.

I want to be clear, up front, that I cannot know whether Judge Kavanaugh experienced a blackout. But what I do know is that blackouts are both common and tragically misunderstood.

Before the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was mysteriously dispatched, she was aiming toward the above line of inquiry.

"Have you ever passed out from drinking?" she asked.

Kavanaugh's answer was dismissive but slightly confusing: "I've gone to sleep, but I've never blacked out. That's the allegation? That's wrong."

A few clarifications. First, I dare you to find the heavy drinker who hasn't passed out from too much booze. To say you were just sleeping is like my dad saying he's resting his eyes when he's napping. It's a semantic dodge.

Second, and more crucially, this answer tips toward a common conflation of the act of passing out — sliding into unconsciousness, eyes closed, being what drinkers often call "dead to the world" — and the act of blacking out, a temporary, alcohol-induced state in which you can remain functional and conversational, but later you will have no memory of what you did, almost as though your brain failed to hit the "record" button. This phenomenon remains unknown to many, even experts who ought to know better — doctors, journalists, judges.

Blackouts are caused by a spike in the blood-alcohol level. Crucial is not only how much you drink or what you drink but also how fast. People who don't eat before drinking are at higher risk for blackout. Shot contests, beer-chugging competitions, keg stands — the macho pre-gaming world of intercollegiate boozing is a perfect setup for blackouts, part of why they're so rampant at universities — a 2002 survey conducted by researchers at Duke University found that approximately 50 percent of college drinkers reported having at least one blackout — though adults are no less prone.

There are two kinds of blackouts. The more common is fragmentary, where slivers of the night are missing. The more extreme version is "en bloc," where several hours can be wiped from the memory drive. Fragmentary blackouts start at a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.2, though they've been found at lower levels; everyone's brain is different. En bloc blackouts happen closer to 0.3, and it's worth noting that at 0.35, it is estimated that about half of drinkers will die, so blackout drinkers are getting up there.

A common bonding experience in drinking circles is "piecing the night together"— friends sitting around the next day, laughing as they scroll through text messages and camera rolls, trying to fill in the gaps in one another's memories. Some of the missing dots are easy to connect: Oh, that's right, we went to the bar! Others might be confounding: Wait, we went to a BAR? 

"Piecing things together" is a phrase that jumped out at me when I read Judge Kavanaugh's 2014 speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society,in which he describes drunken heroics as a routine part of campus life; Senator Richard Blumenthal also leapt on this at the hearing, although Judge Kavanaugh deflected the inquiry, as he did every question about any possible dark side to his consumption.

One particularly dastardly aspect of blackouts is that other people don't necessarily know you're having one. Some people in a blackout stagger around in a zombie state; others quote Shakespeare. I had friends who told me I got this zombie look in my eyes, like a person who was unplugged, but others friends told me, on different occasions, that I'd seemed fine.

It wasn't until this century that scientists really understood blackouts. For generations, experts thought they were the exclusive realm of alcoholics, a sign of troubled late-stage drinking. But non-problem drinkers black out all the time. In fact, that kind of drinker would be a good candidate for someone who might remain ignorant of their blackouts. You see this in sexual assault cases: A woman believes she passed out the night before, but she actually blacked out, leaving untold minutes or hours unaccounted for in her memory bank. This is hellishly confusing — because to the person who wakes up not remembering what happened, it feels like you must have been asleep. Disrupting that assumption requires some contrary piece of evidence: Cuts and bruises, strange clothes you don't recall putting on, a friend's testimony, surveillance footage. Today's young people are more aware of their own blackouts — in part because scientists have gained insight about them, allowing media stories to spread, but also because those kids carry around phones that record everything they do, making them much more likely to have that jarring moment of cognitive disconnect. Wait, when did I type THAT? Wait, when was THAT picture taken? Previous generations simply did not carry such handy data collection services in their pockets.

I suspect Mark Judge — if he were ever able to speak from the heart and not through sworn statements vetted by his lawyer and dispatched from aBethany Beach house — would be able to speak powerfully on this topic. As a recovering alcoholic, Mr. Judge has gotten real about his drinking, something that can be tough for the people around you, who are not nearly so invested in staring down their high school keggers. I believe Mr. Judge when he swears he doesn't remember the incident that Christine Blasey Ford described. I also think that absence of information might have been why, assuming Dr. Blasey's recollection is correct, he had such a queasy reaction when he ran into her at a grocery store. I used to get a hideous gnawing sensation when I stumbled across people I'd blacked out around, because I did not know. What had I said? What had I done? The sheer unknowing rattled me.

Mr. Judge describes this terror in his memoir "Wasted," where he tells the story of a wedding rehearsal dinner where he got so blasted he doesn't remember the evening's end. A friend informs him the next day that he tried to take off his clothes and "make it" with a bridesmaid. Mr. Judge's response cuts me. "Please tell me I didn't hurt her," he said.

Inside those haunted words I see a life and a trail of damage that could have been my own. I consider it nothing but a gift of biology, or temperament, or sexual dynamics that I never had to worry I had physically or sexually assaulted anyone in a blackout. I worried I was rude. I worried I was weird, dumb, deathly unsexy. As I grew older, and more risk-taking, I worried I'd had sex with someone I didn't know, a not-uncommon experience in my own daily calendar. But I have known men who drank too much, and I have loved them, and this is a fear that beats in their private hearts. I hope I didn't hurt her. I interviewed a blackout expert for my book, and he told me something I've never forgotten: "When men are in a blackout, they do things to the world. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them."

One of the most unforgettable moments in an unforgettable hearing came when Senator Patrick Leahy asked Dr. Blasey about her strongest memory of that night. "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter," she said. The word Dr. Blasey used, hippocampus, is significant. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that plays a central role in memory formation. And damned if it isn't a part of the brain disrupted by a blackout. The hippocampus stops placing information in long-term storage, which means what happened, what you did, what you said, what hurt you might have caused another human — all of it turns to a stream of unremembered words and images that pour forever into the dark night. 

So while Dr. Blasey's brain was pumping the epinephrine and norepinephrine that would etch the moment on her brain, it is quite possible that one if not both of those men were experiencing something like the opposite: A mechanical failure of the brain to record anything. Such a dynamic is breathtaking in its cruelty, which makes it no less common.

I suspect we'll never know whether Brett Kavanaugh experienced blackouts as a young drinker. I suspect he'll never know, because what I took from the man at his hearing was that he was not interested in going there. Those days are gone; he has closed the door on that era. But as a wise man once said, just because we are done with the past doesn't mean the past is done with us. You can ask Christine Blasey Ford about that. You can ask Mark Judge. I bet both of them would have a few things to say about the way memories splinter and implant in the body. How the past lives inside us, guides us, owns us. I have often wondered what the body remembers even as the mind forgets. And then there are other things. The ones that will and never can be forgotten.

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4) Seven Palestinians Killed in Gaza Border Clash
By Reuters, September 28, 2018
"Gaza health officials said 505 people were wounded. They identified the dead as males, two of them ages 12 and 14."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/middleeast/gaza-palestinians-border.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

Palestinian protesters reacting to tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers during a protest at Gaza's border with Israel.

GAZA — Israeli soldiers fatally shot seven Palestinians, including two boys, who were among thousands of people who thronged to the fortified Gaza border on Friday as part of weekly protests begun six months ago, Gaza health officials said.

Israel's military said its troops resorted to live fire and an airstrike in response to explosive devices and rocks launched at them and to prevent breaches of the border fence from Gaza, a Hamas-controlled enclave.

Gaza health officials said 505 people were wounded. They identified the dead as males, two of them ages 12 and 14.

About 200 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza protests began on March 30 to demand the right of return to lands that Palestinian families fled or were driven from on Israel's founding in 1948, and the easing of an Israeli-Egyptian economic blockade.

Hamas said Friday's protest also marked the 18th anniversary of the last Palestinian revolt against Israel.

A Gaza sniper killed an Israeli soldier in an earlier protest, and Palestinians have used kites and helium balloons to fly incendiary devices over the border fence, destroying tracts of forest and farmland in Israel.

Israel accuses Hamas, against which it has fought three wars in the last decade, of having deliberately provoked violence in the protests, a charge Hamas denies.

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5) The Most Important Least-Noticed Economic Event of the Decade
A localized recession in manufacturing-heavy areas can explain a lot of things.
By Neil Irwin, September 29, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/upshot/mini-recession-2016-little-known-big-impact.html?rref=collection%2Fissuecollection%2Ftodays-new-york-times

Sometimes the most important economic events announce themselves with huge front-page headlines, stock market collapses and frantic intervention by government officials.

Other times, a hard-to-explain confluence of forces has enormous economic implications, yet comes and goes without most people even being aware of it.

In 2015 and 2016, the United States experienced the second type of event.

There was a sharp slowdown in business investment, caused by an interrelated weakening in emerging markets, a drop in the price of oil and other commodities, and a run-up in the value of the dollar.

The pain was confined mostly to the energy and agricultural sectors and to the portions of the manufacturing economy that supply them with equipment. Overall economic growth slowed but remained in positive territory. The national unemployment rate kept falling. Anyone who didn't work in energy, agriculture or manufacturing could be forgiven for not noticing it at all.

Yet understanding this slump — think of it as a mini-recession — is important in many ways. 

It helps explains the economic growth spurt of the last two years. The end of the mini-recession in the spring of 2016 created a capital spending rebound that began in mid-2016, and it has contributed to speedier growth since. Oil prices have reached four-year highs, a major factor in a surge in business investment this year.

It helps explain some of the economic discontent evident in manufacturing-heavy areas during the 2016 elections. It offers warnings for where the next downturn might come from, and shows how important it is for policymakers to remain watchful and flexible about unpredictable shifts in the global economy.

Most important, the mini-recession of 2015-16 offers a cautionary tale for any policymaker who might want to think of the United States as an economic island.

The episode is stark evidence of the risk the Trump administration faces in threatening economic damage to negotiate leverage with other nations on trade and security. What happens overseas can return to American shores faster and more powerfully than once seemed possible.

How it happened

The mini-recession defies neatness. It's a story of spillovers and feedback loops and unintended consequences. But here's a summary:

In 2015, Chinese leaders were concerned that their economy was experiencing a credit bubble, and they began imposing policies to restrain growth. These worked too well and caused a steep slowdown. That in turn caused troubles in other emerging nations for whom China was a major customer.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, finally growing confident that the United States economy was returning to health, made plans to end its era of ultra-easy monetary policy.

As the Fed moved toward tighter money, its counterparts at the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan were going in the opposite direction. The prospect of higher interest rates in the United States and lower rates in the eurozone and Japan fueled a steep rise in the value of the dollar on global currency markets.

That in turn made China's problems worse. China had long pegged the value of its currency to the dollar, so a stronger dollar was also making Chinese companies less competitive globally. When China attempted to reduce this burden by loosening the peg in August 2015, it faced capital outflows, making the economic situation worse.

Moreover, across major emerging markets, many companies and banks had borrowed money in dollars, so a stronger dollar made their debt burdens more onerous.

Put it all together, and when the Fed moved toward raising interest rates — as it eventually did in December 2015 — it was essentially making financial conditions tighter and therefore slowing growth across big swaths of the world.

The slowdown across emerging markets, in turn, meant less demand for oil and many other commodities. That helped cause their prices to fall. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil fell to under $30 in February 2016 from around $106 in June 2014. The drops in the prices of metals like copper and aluminum, and agricultural products like corn and soybeans, were also steep.

That only heightened the economic pain for the many emerging economies that are major commodity producers, such as Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia.

Given falling prices and high debt loads among energy producers in the United States, the markets for stocks and riskier corporate bonds came under stress, especially in early 2016. That generated losses for investors and fears about the overall stability of the financial system.

Each of these forces has connections to the others. It wasn't one problem, but an intersection of a bunch of them. That made it devilishly hard to diagnose, let alone to fix, even for the people whose job was to do just that.

The view from Washington

When Federal Reserve officials meet eight times a year to set interest rate policy, their job, assigned by Congress, is to figure out what is best for the United States economy. Their job isn't to set a policy that will be best for China or Brazil or Indonesia.

Entering 2015, things were looking pretty good for the United States.

Inflation was below the 2 percent level the Fed aims for, but the traditional economic models on which the central bankers had long relied predicted that it would start to rise thanks to a rapidly falling unemployment rate.

Even when prices for oil and other commodities started falling in the middle of the year, the Fed's models viewed it as a positive for the overall economy. Sure, some oil drillers and farmers might experience lower incomes, but consumers everywhere would enjoy cheaper gasoline and grocery bills.

Although officials spent a lot of time monitoring the global economy, the fact remained that the United States wasn't as dependent on exports as many smaller countries. The 2008 financial crisis had shown how the American and European banking systems were deeply intertwined, but the same couldn't be said of the ties with Chinese banks.

In other words, through the summer of 2015 it sure looked to many Fed officials as if the sound move was to start raising interest rates.

At the Treasury Department, which is responsible for the United States' currency policies, it seemed well into 2015 that the strengthening dollar was mostly benign.

"There was a sense that the U.S. was doing well and the rest of the world was not doing very well," said Nathan Sheets, a Treasury under secretary at the time and now chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income. "It was driven by strong U.S. fundamentals."

But in late summer 2015, financial markets started to react more violently to the feedback loop of global currencies and commodities. It started to seem as if some of the old rules of thumb — about how a rising dollar or falling oil prices might affect the economy — might not apply.

Perhaps the economics models used by forecasters had become outdated, failing to fully account for the ways surging energy production had become more intertwined with the manufacturing sector and the financial markets.

"These things were all interconnected in different ways, and they all cycled back on the same industries and parts of the economy," said Jay Shambaugh, a member of the Obama White House Council of Economic Advisers at the time. Still, distilling that complex story into crisp memos for senior officials was no easy task.

"You have to make memos short and to the point in the White House, and it was hard to say what exactly we thought was happening," he said.

Behind closed doors at the Fed, officials started debating whether this outburst of volatility in markets really posed a risk to the overall economy. Should they stick to their plans to raise interest rates steadily, or slow down?

Over two days in October, the debate played out publicly.

Stan Fischer, the vice chairman of the Fed, was reluctant to adjust the planned rate increases, not wishing to let swings in financial markets dictate policy.

"We do not currently anticipate that the effects of these recent developments on the U.S. economy will prove to be large enough to have a significant effect on the path for policy," he said in a speech in Lima, Peru, on Oct. 11, 2015.

Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor who had worked on international issues at the Treasury, was quite a bit more worried.

"There is a risk that the intensification of international cross currents could weigh more heavily on U.S. demand directly, or that the anticipation of a sharper divergence in U.S. policy could impose restraint through additional tightening of financial conditions," she said on Oct. 12 in Washington.

Ms. Brainard was right.

How the damage played out

The vicious circle of a stronger dollar, weaker emerging market growth and lower commodity prices caused spending on certain types of capital goods to plummet starting in mid-2015.

Spending on agricultural machinery in 2016 fell 38 percent from 2014 levels; for petroleum and natural gas structures — think oil drilling rigs — the number was down a whopping 60 percent.

The oil and gas exploration boom tied to fracking technology came to a halt with energy prices at rock-bottom levels, and with it sales of equipment tied to that boom. 

With the fall in domestic capital investment in those industries and with weakness overseas, companies in related industries took it on the chin. Caterpillar, the maker of heavy equipment, had 30 percent lower revenue in 2016 than 2014.

In large segments of the economy, by contrast, it was business as usual. Business spending on investments like computers and office buildings kept rising, as did consumer spending.

Still, the industrial sector downturn was powerful enough to turn a strong expansion into a weak one. Overall growth fell to 1.3 percent in the four quarters ended in mid-2016, from 3.4 percent in the preceding year.

The national economy kept adding jobs. But Harris County, Tex., which encompasses energy-centric Houston and its near suburbs, shed 0.8 percent of its jobs in that span. In Peoria, Ill., hometown of Caterpillar, employment fell 3.2 percent.

In effect, this was a localized recession — severe in certain places, but concentrated enough that it did not throw the overall United States economy into contraction.

In Williston, N.D., where the economy had been booming for years because of a surge in oil and natural gas drilling on the Bakken oil patch, businesses of all types closed or slashed wages.

"It varies week to week, but every week keeps getting worse," Marcus Jundt, owner of a restaurant, the Williston Brewing Company, told CNBC in March 2016. "We don't know where the bottom is, but we're not there yet."

But it could have been worse.

How it ended

When Janet Yellen assumed leadership of the Federal Reserve in early 2014, she inherited an economy that had been expanding steadily for years, with a great deal of help from the Fed's interest rate policies.

Deciding how and when to pull that support — when to raise interest rates, which had been near zero for more than six years — was set to be the defining choice of her tenure.

In 2015, with signs that the United States economy was returning to health, she and her colleagues believed it was time to begin raising interest rates. She is a leading labor market scholar who spent a career studying, among other things, how a tight labor market can eventually feed through to inflation.

In July of that year, with stirrings of the emerging markets disruption, the unemployment rate was 5.2 percent, not much above the level Fed officials believed was consistent with a fully healthy labor market. Then the turmoil of August began.

Ms. Yellen elected not to raise rates in September, waiting for more evidence that the economy was truly on track and that the emerging market troubles wouldn't do too much damage to the domestic economy. But by December she judged that the situation had stabilized enough to raise rates.

At the same time, the Fed revealed forecasts indicating that its senior officials expected to raise interest rates four more times in 2016. Within weeks, global markets were sending a message: Not so fast.

The dollar kept strengthening, the price of commodities kept falling, and the Standard & Poor's 500 dropped about 9 percent over three weeks in late January and early February. Bond yields plummeted, suggesting that the United States was at risk of recession.

In mid-February 2016, the financial leaders of the world's most powerful nations were set to convene in a Shanghai for the periodic G20 summit. With global markets in turmoil, the great question was: Can the officials rein in these forces?

The official statement released by the participants in the summit contained multiple nods to the turbulence, acknowledging risks from "volatile capital flows" and falling commodity prices. But more important than any words was what followed in the following weeks.

Two days after the summit, China lowered its reserve requirement on banks, essentially opening the spigot for more lending. In the months that followed, it would put in tighter controls on the movement of capital outside the country, and seek to tie the value of the yuan less closely to the dollar.

Three weeks after the summit, the Fed had another policy meeting. Rather than raise interest rates further as had been envisioned in December, Fed officials declined to raise rates — and steeply reduced their expectations of how much further they would raise rates over the remainder of 2016.

Together, these steps were enough to end the vicious cycle. The dollar stopped appreciating and started dropping. Oil prices bottomed out and began a recovery. In the United States, capital spending was growing again by the summer of 2016.

What really happened in Shanghai?

Some analysts of financial markets have put a conspiratorial bent on the concerted action from the two sides of the Pacific, speculating that leaders had made a secret deal at the G20 meeting in February 2016. They call it the "Shanghai Accord"— essentially, that the Fed would hold off on rate increases if the Chinese also took actions of their own.

Ms. Yellen said it's not so. She said in an interview that there was an extensive exchange of views and information with the Chinese delegation in Shanghai, but that there were no promises or explicit agreements.

"I realize it looked to much of the world like some kind of secret handshake deal," she said. "This wasn't a deal. This was the global economy and capital markets affecting the U.S. outlook, and the Fed being sensitive to that, taking that into account and its influencing policy appropriately."

The Fed, she said, did what it thought was best for the United States economy without knowing exactly what the Chinese would do.

Mr. Sheets, the former Treasury official, also dismissed the idea of some secret agreement.

"It's just not how it works," he said. "There were a lot of meetings. A lot of bilaterals and quadrilaterals. You meet with your counterparts and talk about the global economy and think about the challenges and what might be done. But there was nothing agreed behind closed doors that was not part of the formal statement."

Even if there was no formal secret agreement, the result — leaders of the world's two biggest economies squarely focused on the risks that the situation presented — turned out to be enough.

The lessons

The impact of the global commodity-currency spiral of 2015-16 is evident from a glance at the economic statistics. It is less so in the economic debates of 2018.

First, while the Trump administration has claimed full credit for a surge in business investment, the bounce-back from the mini-recession is a major factor.

White House economists have presented charts showing a surge starting in the fourth quarter of 2016, when the election took place. But that turnaround began in mid-2016 by most measures, not late 2016 as suggested by the White House's "six quarter compound annual growth rate" measure.

Second, the mini-recession might well have affected some political attitudes during the 2016 election. While the economy was in pretty good shape for people in large cities on the coasts, 2016 was rough for a lot of people in local economies heavily reliant on drilling, mining, farming or making the machines that support those industries.

A poll in October 2016 by an agriculture trade publication, Agri-Pulse, found that 86 percent of farmers were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the United States. 

Third, economic policymakers need to display the flexibility to respond to incoming information, even when it doesn't fit their own forecasts or preconceptions.

If Ms. Yellen had been more stubborn about sticking to the plan to keep raising rates through 2016 because of her training as a labor market economist, the result might well have been an actual recession. "She's always learning," said Julia Coronado, president of MacroPolicy Perspectives, "and not so egotistical that she's wedded to one view of the world."

Finally, it shows the global economy is so interconnected that events in Shanghai or São Paulo can cause unpredictable effects in faraway places.

In the last year, the Trump administration has been lobbing tariffs at China and other major economic partners to extract more advantageous terms for trade. But the mini-recession warns of the risk of ricochet.

Like it or not, the complexity of our global connections means that policy can't just focus on the home front. In 2016, we learned that lesson the hard way, even if not everybody was paying attention.

Neil Irwin is a senior economics correspondent for The Upshot. He previously wrote for The Washington Post and is the author of "The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire."

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6) Under the Fog of Kavanaugh, House Passes $3.8 Trillion More in Tax Cuts
By Glen Fleishman, September 28, 2018
http://fortune.com/2018/09/28/house-3-8-trillion-tax-cut-passes/

With attention fixed on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a new $3.1 trillion tax cut on Friday. The vote was 220 to 191, including three Democrats.

The down-to-the-wire 2017 tax act passed in late December contained a mix of permanent and temporary changes that had to result in a net increased cost that fell within a structural limit of $1.5 trillion that allowed the Senate to approve the bill with a simple majority.

The House's new bill takes effect starting in 2025, and would add $600 billion to the national debt within the next decade, and then $3.2 trillion in the 10 years after that, according to Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center.

Despite the House vote, it is unlikely the Senate will take up the legislation. The first round of tax cuts landed with a thud, with even a leaked Republican National Committee poll—reported on by Bloomberg News—showing American voters thought it benefited "large corporations and rich Americans" by an overall 2-to-1 margin and the same margin among independent voters.

Without special rules in place, the Senate would vote under normal procedures, which can require 60 senators' votes to pass a bill that is heavily opposed.

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7) Hundreds of Children Rot in the Desert. End Trump's Draconian Policies.
By The Editorial Board, October 1, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/opinion/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Shoes and toys left at the Tornillo Port of Entry in Tornillo, Tex., where minors crossing the border without proper papers have been housed after being separated from adults.

It doesn't take a psychologist to understand that ripping children from their beds in the middle of the night, tearing them away from anyone they've forged a connection with and thrusting them into more uncertainty could damage them. 

Yet the crisis that has led federal immigration authorities to pull nearly 2,000 unaccompanied children (so far) out of shelters around the country in the dead of night and bus them to a "tent city" in the desert town of Tornillo, Tex., is almost entirely of the American government's own making.

The Trump administration has struggled for solutions as the 100-or-so shelters that normally house unaccompanied minors who've crossed the United States border have filled to capacity in recent months. More and more children stuck in immigration limbo for longer periods of time have strained the entire system that manages such kids. (As The Times reported, officials feared the children being taken to Texas — they are among 13,000 being detained nationwide — would run off if they were told ahead of time, or moved them during waking hours.)

How to best handle the cases of unaccompanied minors has perplexed immigration authorities since the Obama administration. But the current crowding is not the result of some dramatic increase in the number of children stealing across the southern border. In fact the influx is no greater now than it has been for the past two years.

Instead, the Trump administration's own draconian policies are to blame. Around the same time that it began separating immigrant children from their parents as they crossed into the United States, the Department of Homeland Security also established strict new requirements for the relatives and friends who might care for these children while their cases are sorted out. Prospective sponsors are now required to submit fingerprints, and to share their information with federal immigration officers. Because most of them are undocumented immigrants themselves, they have been scared off by these new requirements. And with good cause: So far, dozens of applicants who took the chance of applying to be sponsors have been arrested on immigration charges. 

As would-be sponsors shrink away, more of unaccompanied children are left stranded in federal custody.

Images of young children who were torn from their parents this summer triggered a massive public outcry, leading the Trump White House and immigration officials to reverse course on family separations. The long-lasting trauma of extended detention, however, is harder to capture on film, and the public has yet to voice its concern over the tighter sponsorship requirements. 

And yet we must. Proponents of the current system insist that the restrictions on sponsors were put into place for the children's protection. But it's hard to see how any of the new policies could possibly do more good than harm.

Staff members at shelters cried as the children were taken away, they told The Times, out of dread for what the children would now face. The tent city in Texas is not being held to any of the same rules that group homes or foster care facilities are subject to. And those existing safeguards had already proved inadequate protection against physical abuse, sexual assault and emotional torment. The Department of Health and Human Services has instead offered a thin set of guidelines, but while the tents are air-conditioned, children will not have regular access to schooling or legal services.

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8) For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business
A surging inmate population in the 1980s led to a boom in for-profit prisons. Today, privately run prisons have become the government’s default detention centers for undocumented migrants.
By Clyde Haberman, October 1, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/us/prisons-immigration-detention.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

Thomas W. Beasley had something for sale, and figured he could market it the same as any other merchandise. “You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers,” he told an interviewer.

That was three decades ago. Only Mr. Beasley wasn’t hawking new wheels, beachfront property or beef patties. His stock in trade was prison bars. As a co-founder of Corrections Corporation of America in 1983, and with a get-tough-on-crime spirit ascendant in the country, he sold lockup space to federal and state governments that were jailing people faster than they could find room in their own institutions.

[In a new book, an investigative journalist goes undercover as a guard to get behind the scenes of the private prison industry. Read our review.] 

Mr. Beasley’s company, renamed CoreCivic two years ago, became a leader in what is now a roughly $4-billion-a-year American industry: for-profit prisons, privately owned and operated. Some bad-to-the-bone criminals are among the people guarded by private prisons. But a key function these days is watching over undocumented immigrants. Their detention centers, located mainly in the South and the West, are where the government sends most people caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

How ably these companies discharge their duty — or not — shapes this Retro Report video, the latest in a documentary series examining major news stories of the past and their continuing impact. The treatment of migrants has new urgency in the Trump era, given this administration’s efforts at strict border control, which include detaining large numbers of children. Data obtained by The New York Times showed that in mid-September, 12,800 migrant children were held in federally contracted shelters, five times the number in custody a little over a year earlier.

One picture of private prisons captured in the video includes barely edible food, indifferent health care, guard brutality and assorted corner-cutting measures. It is framed by the experience of Josue Vladimir Cortez Diaz, a gay man from El Salvador who fled through Mexico to the United States after enduring what he described as persecution and death threats in his homeland. Captured at the California border, he was sent to a private detention center run by GEO Group, formerly the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. This was in Adelanto, Calif., about 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Mr. Cortez Diaz, 26, was freed after a judge granted him asylum last November, but not before he and other detainees staged a hunger strike to protest their treatment at Adelanto. Prison guards beat and pepper-sprayed them, they say, and they are now suing GEO and federal and local authorities for what they say were rights violations.

“The conditions in the detention center, they’re bad, right down to the food,” Mr. Cortez Diaz told Retro Report. He added, “They don’t care if someone is sick, if the food goes bad. That’s how we came to say we have to protest.”

A spokesman for GEO, Pablo E. Paez, dismissed those assertions as “completely baseless” and said that the federal authorities reviewed that situation and “found that the officers acted in accordance with established protocol.”

Complaints about private prisons are not new. They go back almost to the advent of the prisons themselves in the 1980s. Those were the Reagan years, when government sought to shift some of its functions to private hands. At the same time, voters wanted harsher measures taken against criminals. Thus, cellblock populations rapidly grew, and prisons became alarmingly overcrowded.

But the appetite for locking people up was not matched by a willingness to spend taxpayer money on new government-run cells and support services. Enter for-profit prisons. They were ready to bear some of the burden — for a fee, of course. At federal and state levels, they now operate in more than two dozen states, often in relatively remote regions where jobs can be scarce. It is not unusual in some states for big city crime to become a rural area’s economic development.

The private companies, with CoreCivic and GEO Group dominant, tout their virtues by saying they build and operate prisons more cheaply than governments can, what with the public sector’s many mandates. Their day-to-day operations are similarly more efficient and less costly, they assert, and they do it all without compromising public safety. The bottom line, they say, is that they allow governments to free up public funds for pursuits that mean more to most taxpayers than how felons are jailed.

“Privately operated facilities are better equipped to handle changes in the flow of illegal immigration because they can open or close new facilities as needed,” said Rodney E. King, CoreCivic’s public affairs manager.

Critics tell a different story. They cite moments like a 2015 riot to protest poor conditions at a prison in Arizona run by another major private player, Management & Training Corporation. Earlier at that same institution, three inmates had escaped and murdered two people.

Stories abound of scrimping by prison operators, with bad food and shabby health care for inmates, low pay and inadequate training for guards and hiring shortages. At immigrant detention centers, operators see little need to offer extensive educational programs or job training, since people held there are mostly destined for deportation.

“To maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures,” Rachel Steinback, a lawyer for Mr. Cortez Diaz and other Adelanto hunger strikers, told Retro Report.

Beyond pragmatic considerations, philosophical questions have dogged private prisons from the start. They boil down to this: If someone violates society’s code of behavior, is it not up to government to punish the offender as society’s representative, and not some profit-seeking entity? As far back as 1985, M. Wayne Huggins, then the sheriff of Fairfax County, Va., asked, “What next will we be privatizing? Will we have private police forces? Will we have private fire departments? Will we have private armies?” Those questions have not disappeared.

Private companies house about 9 percent of the nation’s total prison population. But they take care of a much higher share of immigrant detainees — 73 percent by some accounts. Alonzo Peña, a former deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, acknowledges that the companies have all too often fallen short. “It wasn’t their priority to ensure that the highest standards were being met,” Mr. Peña said.

ICE, he said, deserves some blame. “We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical,” he said. “But unfortunately, it was in the execution and the monitoring and the auditing we fell behind, we fell short.”

Studies suggest that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits. And in 2016, under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department concluded that private prisons were in general more violent than government-operated institutions, and ordered a phaseout of their use at the federal level. Reversing that order was one of the first things that President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did on taking office.

The Trump administration leaves no doubt that it will detain as many undocumented immigrants as it can and send them to for-profit centers. And to help make sure that happens, the companies spend millions on campaigns and lobbying efforts (not unlike businesses that sell cars, real estate or hamburgers).

They have thus far figured out how to prevail, a point noted by Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. Ms. Eisen explored this in a recent book, “Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Her conclusion: “There is no reason to think the private prison industry will go away anytime soon.”

How The New York Times Covered the Story

The sharp rise in the detention of migrant children has been the focus of recent Times coverage. A federal review from 2016 found private prisons are more dangerous than government-run prisons for both guards and inmates; the Trump administration indicated earlier this year that it will expand their use. This is a reversal of an Obama administration decision to phase out the use of private for-profit prisons to house federal inmates because the number of such inmates has been dropping since 2013. That order was canceled in February in an announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

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9)  Suicides Get Taxi Drivers Talking: ‘I’m Going to Be One of Them’
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/nyregion/suicides-taxi-drivers-nyc.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Three taxi drivers, from left, Lal Singh, Nicolae Hent and Lakhbir Rangar, spoke after a New York City Council meeting to consider bills that would help drivers facing financial hardships as a result of the rise of Uber and other ride-hail apps.

Both men were longtime taxi drivers from Romania. Both were worried about paying their bills as Uber decimated their industry. They were best friends. And both had struggled with depression.

Nicanor Ochisor’s wife dragged him to a doctor in March to get help. Two days later, he hanged himself in his garage.

“I didn’t know he was so depressed,” his friend, Nicolae Hent, said.

Mr. Hent had taken antidepressants. He wished he could have told Mr. Ochisor that it would get better.

“I didn’t know. I still feel bad even now — why I didn’t know that,” Mr. Hent said recently as he drove his taxi through Queens.

Mr. Ochisor was one of six professional drivers to commit suicide in New York in the last year — a crisis that has prompted a flurry of legislation to address the despair plaguing the industry. Most were men in their 50s and 60s anguished about their finances and feeling hopeless about being able to retire.

Many taxi drivers are under incredible stress, but Mr. Ochisor’s story shows how difficult it can be to convince those with severe depression to talk about it. Life behind the wheel of a taxi can be solitary and the job tends to attract independent-minded people who might not feel comfortable talking about emotions that can carry a stigma.

But city officials are urging drivers to seek help. In August, the City Council approved a cap on Uber and other ride-hail vehicles — the first major American city to rein in the booming apps. Now the Council is considering a separate set of bills that would establish a health fund for drivers and create “driver assistance centers” for mental health counseling and financial advice.

One bill aims to help taxi medallion owners saddled with massive debt. Corey Johnson, the Council speaker, said the city was considering several measures to do that, including a partial bailout or a hardship fund for medallion owners who drive their taxis — not for large-scale owners like Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer who with his wife owned more than 30 medallions.

“For the smaller individual medallion owners, what can we do to help them get out from under this crushing debt?” Mr. Johnson said in an interview, adding that the Council should vote on the bills by the end of the year. “We’re trying to figure out a way to do that.”

The recent string of suicides and the intense publicity they have received are now prodding drivers to speak more openly about their mental health — with each other and with their families. As their industry collapses, the conversations among drivers are different, from sharing photos of their grandchildren or talking about hobbies like winemaking, to discussing how they are going to survive.

Lal Singh, a taxi driver for three decades, said he had thought about suicide as he endured long hours driving his taxi and worried about paying off the loan he had taken out to buy it.

“When I hear that somebody did suicide, I was thinking about me,” Mr. Singh said as he waited at the taxi parking lot at Kennedy International Airport on a recent afternoon. “I’m going to be one of them one day.”

Mr. Singh, who is 62, owes about $6,200 a month on the taxi medallion he bought in 2000. He often drives a long stretch of Manhattan, from Harlem to Wall Street, looking in vain for passengers.

“When you have nothing to do, we are suffering,” Mr. Singh said. “What are you living for?”

At the airport taxi lot on a recent afternoon, taxi driver after driver complained of mounting debt and of feeling abandoned by the city, which has made millions of dollars selling medallions. A taxi medallion, the aluminum plate required to drive a cab in New York, once sold for more than $1 million but is now worth less than $200,000. Many drivers still owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans.

One taxi driver, Muhammad Anil, said his children had seen the headlines about the suicides and asked him if he was O.K. Mr. Anil, 57, told them he was fine, though he is concerned about the more than $500,000 he owes on his medallion.

“I don’t want them to worry about me too much,” he said.

Middle-age drivers may be particularly vulnerable. The suicide rate for people between the ages of 45 and 64 has jumped in recent years, more than for other age groups, said Barbara Stanley, a psychology professor at Columbia University. Suicide is a deeply personal decision and it is difficult to know for certain the factors that drive a person to make that choice.

The drivers, Dr. Stanley said, “might have been depressed in the past or had a vulnerability to depression and you combine it with these terrible environmental stressors and that’s a recipe for disaster.”

Still, many drivers are resistant to the idea of therapy.

“They’ve driven their whole lives,” said Meera Joshi, the city’s taxi commissioner. “There’s a tremendous amount of pride involved, rightfully so. Part of our messaging is that there’s no shame to needing mental health help.”

At 70, Harbans Singh still works 12-hour shifts in his taxi to pay off his medallion debt. Mr. Singh said he was not interested in counseling, adding that he relied on his Sikh faith.

“We don’t need counseling from the T.L.C.,” he said in reference to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, which oversees the industry. “I don’t trust the T.L.C.”

Many drivers have said the best way to help is to offer them financial assistance. But the city is in a difficult position. Any bailout of medallion owners could cost billions of dollars, and officials have said they cannot offer residents a payout unless they are indigent or legally broke. Lyft, another popular app, had discussed the idea of a $100 million “hardship fund” for drivers, paid for by the tech companies, but only if the city dropped the proposal for a cap.

Marlow Pierre, a taxi driver who leases his medallion, said the best solution would be to further restrict Uber.

“Let us get back to business,” Mr. Pierre said. “All these guys want to do is work.”

Two days before his death, Mr. Ochisor saw a doctor and started taking an antidepressant. But it was too late. “He was worrying too much,” Mr. Hent said. “He told me many, many times, we have to work until we die.”

Gabriel Ochisor has taken over managing his father’s taxi, which his mother Helen and another driver still operate. The taxi failed a recent inspection because of a ripped seat.

“I can see why you would get stressed and pull your hair out,” Gabriel Ochisor said.

Mr. Hent sought help from a doctor around 2005 after a crippling anxiety attack, due in part to the stresses of his job. He started taking two antidepressants and learned coping strategies. He took up tennis.

“I saw how many people are sick in America” with depression, Mr. Hent said. “I said, ‘Oh I can take care of this.’”

Now Mr. Hent, who is 62 and owes about $130,000 on his medallion, is pushing the city to assist taxi drivers. He spoke at a recent Council hearing, waiting three hours for his turn — time spent away from making money in his taxi.

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Mr. Hent said. “I won’t kill nobody. But I’ll fight until I die.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resourcesfor a list of additional resources. Here’s what you can do when a loved one is severely depressed.

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10) Amazon to Raise Minimum Hourly Wage to $15 for All U.S. Workers
By Karen Weise, October 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/business/amazon-minimum-wage.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

A worker at an Amazon warehouse in Aurora, Colo.

SEATTLE — Even Amazon can get squeezed by political pressure and a tight labor market. The online giant on Tuesday said it would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its United States workers.

It said the pay increase would include part-time workers and those hired through temporary agencies. The company said it would also lobby Washington to raise the federal minimum wage.

Amazon said the new wages would apply to more than 250,000 Amazon employees, including those at the grocery chain Whole Foods, as well as the more than 100,000 seasonal employees it will hire for the holiday season. It goes into effect on Nov. 1.

The company had previously said the average hourly wage, including stock and incentive bonuses, for full-time workers at the fulfillment centers was more than $15 an hour, but it had not disclosed pay for part-time and contract workers.

Amazon has come under increased scrutiny for the wages and conditions of its work force, particularly at the fulfillment centers where it packages and sorts orders, and with the contract drivers who make last-mile deliveries. Some workers at the grocery chain Whole Foods, which Amazon bought last year, have recently made a push to organize a union.

The wage increase comes as Amazon’s fortunes, as well as those of its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, have ballooned. Amazon’s market capitalization passed $1 trillion last month, though it has since fallen slightly. And last year Mr. Bezos became the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $165 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The company also plans to announce the location of its second headquarters before the end of this year, and the new site, which Amazon says will eventually employ 50,000 highly-paid workers, is widely expected to get what could be billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives from state and local governments. The size of the potential taxpayer payout, and the secrecy around the bidding process, have frustrated even some lawmakers in cities hoping to land the headquarters.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the liberal independent from Vermont, has taken on Amazon directly, pointing to new financial disclosures from the company showing that its median pay is $28,446, meaning half of its employees make less. Amazon, which is typically reserved when responding to criticism, publicly pushed back, saying Mr. Sanders’s statements were “misleading” and that median pay for its full-time employees in the United States was $34,123.

“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” Mr. Bezos said in a statement. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.”

Employment has become Amazon’s most potent political vulnerability as well as its most important political message. The shift to online shopping has led many retailers like Toys “R” Us and Sears to shut down and lay off staff in cities and towns across the country, while jobs at the warehouses and sorting centers that move Amazon’s goods have boomed. It employs about 575,000 worldwide, up more than 50 percent in the past year alone, and its growth has followed the divergent paths of the economy, with highly-skillled tech workers in Seattle making well over $100,000 and warehouse employees earning lower wages.

Even as Amazon pushes toward using more robots at its warehouses and expanding experiments like Amazon Go, its cashierless convenience stores, it still has a huge need for workers, particularly as the holiday season approaches. With the United States unemployment rate below 4 percent, the tight labor market has made it harder to attract the workers it and other retailers need.

The smaller supply of prospective workers has slowly been pushing wages higher. The average wage for retail sales people across the United States is $13.20 an hour, according to federal data. For all retail workers, including sales people, cashiers and supervisors, the average wage is $18.85.

Last year Target announced it would raise minimum pay to $15 an hour by 2020, and Costco has raised its starting pay to at least $14 per hour. In January, Walmart said it was raising starting wages for employees to $11 after the new tax law passed, though critics noted that it was laying offworkers as it tried to quietly close 63 Sam’s Club stores.

“At the moment in the United States unemployment is pretty low, and Amazon may be struggling to recruit and retain employees,” said Alan Manning, an economics professor at London School of Economics who has studied minimum wage policies. “It’s also a bit of good publicity.”

Indeed, less than an hour after the announcement on Tuesday, Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president in charge of operations, posted a video on Twitter of employees at a fulfillment center in Southern California cheering as he broke the news to them.

The federal minimum wage has been set at $7.25 for almost a decade, though more than 20 states and cities have higher wage floors. In 2014, Amazon’s hometown Seattle was one of the first major cities to pass a law that would raise wages to $15.

“Once you’re paying a higher wage you tend to want your competitors to also pay a higher wage,” said Professor Manning. “If your costs are going up, you’d also quite like your rivals’ costs to go up as well.”

Amazon also announced minimum pay increases to £10.50 in London and £9.50 elsewhere in Britain. It said the minimum pay would benefit 17,000 Amazon employees and more than 20,000 seasonal workers.

Adam Satariano contributed reporting from London.

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11) Billionaire’s Fight to Close Path to a California Beach Comes to a Dead End
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose belief in property rights outweighed his affinity for a state access law.
By Nellie Bowles, October 1, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/technology/california-beach-access-khosla.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

“If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I’d be depressed about it,” Vinod Khosla has said.

SAN FRANCISCO — It was a happy day for the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla: He lost his battle.

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Khosla’s appeal to overturn a ruling that the beach access path cutting through a coastal village he owns near Half Moon Bay, Calif., must stay open. 

Now Mr. Khosla, a billionaire who founded Sun Microsystems and helped lay the foundations of the consumer internet, has to apply for a permit to close the narrow road down to a popular surfing spot known as Martin’s Beach. That’s it. 

But over nearly a decade in the courts, the battle became deeply symbolic to Mr. Khosla, who has said he was fighting on principle to stop a violation of property rights. So why was he likely to be happy he lost? He has said he never wanted to win.

As the case wound its way up to the Supreme Court, it threatened to gut California’s Coastal Act of 1976, which enshrines public access to beaches as a right.

“If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I’d be depressed about it,” he told The New York Times this year. “I support the Coastal Act; I don’t want to weaken it by winning. But property rights are even more important.”

The situation began shortly after 2008 when Mr. Khosla bought a 53-acre hillside on the Northern California coast. It had about 47 cottages on it and was known as Martin’s Beach. While the previous owners had largely left the gate to the beach open and charged for parking, Mr. Khosla decided not to do the same. He tried to close the road, immediately sparking a controversy.

Over the years, the battle grew increasingly contentious. At one point, Mr. Khosla, who owns the land through a holding company, hired guards to stand at the top of the road. In 2012, five surfers were arrested and became known as the Martin’s Five. 

The Surfrider Foundation, which led the fight to keep the road open, hailed the Supreme Court’s decision as one that saves the coast from being slowly privatized by wealthy landowners.

“Whether you have to drive an hour to the coast and picnic or whether you can spend $32 million and buy property adjacent to the coast, the beach belongs to everybody,” said Eric Buescher, an attorney working on the case for the Surfrider Foundation. “The Coastal Act survives the whims of a billionaire and continues to protect the people of California.”

If the Supreme Court had heard the case and ultimately ruled in favor of Mr. Khosla, the ruling could have not only reshaped the laws that govern 1,100 miles of California shoreline but also affected public access to beaches, lakes and waterways in 22 states, according to the Surfrider Foundation. 

“This case reaffirms that you cannot make a unilateral decision to shut down a beach that has provided generations of families with memories,” Lisa Haage, chief of enforcement at the California Coastal Commission, said in a statement.

For Mr. Khosla, this means the state is forcing him to keep open a money-losing business. The beach, he had argued, is not as popular as it used to be, and charging for parking no longer covers the cost of an attendant and maintenance of public facilities. 

“No owner of private business should be forced to obtain a permit from the government before deciding who it wants to invite onto its property,” Mr. Khosla’s lawyer Dori Yob Kilmer said in a statement. “No business owner should be forced to obtain a permit from the government to shut down a private business, to change prices from those that existed in 1972 (as the state has demanded) or to change hours of operation.”

The Supreme Court’s action on Monday ends this peculiar saga, which has captivated Silicon Valley. 

Well, it may end it. Mr. Khosla, who referred questions to Ms. Kilmer, must now apply for that permit to close the road to Martin’s Beach. 

“If denied,” Ms. Kilmer said, “we will start this process over again.”

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