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Major George Tillery

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. 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. 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. 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, , 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,  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. : Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major in 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 —Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom. Go to ; code:

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) As Afghanistan Frays, Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Is Everywhere

By Mujib Mashal, October 4, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/world/asia/afghanistan-erik-prince-blackwater.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

An American soldier overseeing the training of Afghan forces in Helmand Province in 2016.

KABUL, Afghanistan — A new crop of senior American officials in Afghanistan has been racing to contain a dual crisis on the battlefield and in a potentially explosive election dispute. But it is a different American figure — the mercenary executive Erik D. Prince — who has been the talk of Kabul these days.

More than a year after first laying out his plan to President Trump to privatize the American war in Afghanistan with a cadre of contractors — and a private air force — Mr. Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security firm that became infamous for killing civilians in Iraq, has seemingly been everywhere.

And as he has made his sales pitch directly to a host of influential Afghans, he has frequently been introduced as an adviser to Mr. Trump himself.

Mr. Prince is pushing his plan at a particularly vulnerable time for the country. Afghan security forces are dying at a record number of 30 to 40 a day largely in a defensive posture against a Taliban that has gained territory. The government is beset by repeated political crises as parliamentary elections, delayed for three years, are scheduled for this month. Presidential elections are set for April.

Interviews with a half-dozen political figures who have met Mr. Prince in recent months — as well as an interview with Mr. Prince by The New York Times during his trip to Kabul in September — reveal an executive determined to sell a vision of how his contractors could offer an official military withdrawal from Afghanistan to a war-weary American public and president.

Now, those officials say, he has increasingly found a receptive audience among Afghanistan's power brokers, meeting everyone from lowly militia commanders, to former cabinet officials and entrenched regional strongmen, to several potential presidential candidates.

What most of those Afghans have in common is a desire to see President Ashraf Ghani gone. And Mr. Prince's lobbying circuit, including multiple visits to Kabul, Washington and the United Arab Emirates, has made him increasingly unwelcome with Mr. Ghani, who has rejected repeated requests to meet with Mr. Prince.

Some in the government even tried to block Mr. Prince's visa, according to Afghan officials and those close to Mr. Prince.

Several officials close to Mr. Ghani say they see Mr. Prince's plan not only as unviable amid a complex conflict and peace effort with the Taliban, but also as a politicized threat to the Afghan president himself before next year's presidential election.

And they say Mr. Ghani's adamant opposition to a privatized security presence has made him an obstacle to Mr. Prince's ambitions.

In a speech on Monday, an angry Mr. Ghani aimed a barely veiled criticism at Mr. Prince and his plan.

"Foreign mercenaries will never be allowed in this country," he said.

A statement by Mr. Ghani's national security adviser on Thursday said the Afghan government would not allow fighting terrorism to become a "for-profit business."

"We will consider all legal options against those who try to privatize war on our land," the statement said.

Mr. Prince is positioning his pitch as a cheaper middle option between continuing a largely failed military strategy at an expensive annual tab of tens of billions of dollars, and a complete security withdrawal that some fear would abandon 17 years of costly Western efforts to remake Afghanistan.

He contends that his proposal can achieve what more than 140,000 American and NATO troops at the heart of the troop surge in 2009 and 2010 could not. He compares the current mission, which is reduced to about 15,000 American troops supported on their bases by more than 20,000 private contractors, to the failures of the Soviet Union. (An American service member was killed on Thursday in Afghanistan, the United States military command here said without providing any details. It was the eighth death of an American soldier in the country this year.)

In the interview, Mr. Prince laid out what he called a "rationalization" of private contracting already happening: a leaner mission of 6,000 private contractors providing "skeletal structure support" and training for Afghan forces. Small teams of Special Forces veterans embedded with Afghan battalions for about three years, he said, would ensure the continuity lacking now with American soldiers rotating out every year.

They would be supported by air through a fleet of contracted aircraft flown by joint teams of Afghans and contractors. About 2,500 American Special Operations forces would remain in the country for counterterrorism missions. All of this, Mr. Prince said, would bring down the annual cost of the war to roughly a fifth of the current amount.

He denied he was trying to influence the Afghan political process to achieve that vision. He said the only money he had spent on Afghanistan was the $1,500 production cost of a 10-minute video to explain his plan.

"The Afghan people will have an election, and they will make the choices that they are going to live with," Mr. Prince said. "But I will talk to whichever party in Afghanistan that wants to think about a different way to this that actually stops the bleeding."

Mr. Prince has also tied his proposal to an effort to exploit Afghanistan's mineral wealth, including rare earth deposits — a favorite topic of Mr. Trump, who has complained that the United States does not gain enough resources from its war efforts.

In one multimedia presentation that The Times has seen, Mr. Prince lists one of his goals as: "Develop and produce key rare earth minerals to restore U.S. high-tech manufacturing supply chain." During his visits here in Afghanistan, he has also met with Afghan mining officials, which he has described as exploratory meetings.

Mr. Prince's former company, Blackwater, won hundreds of millions of dollars in United States military contracts, mainly in Iraq, before it was essentially blacklisted after the firm's contractors massacred civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

His business has since gone through several reincarnations. His latest venture, the Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, has contracts in Africa and Asia, and is backed by Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company.

Mr. Prince's initial push last year to privatize the Afghan war was quashed by two of the most senior members of Mr. Trump's national security team: H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser at the time, and Jim Mattis, the defense secretary. They persuaded Mr. Trump to increase the number of troops and resources in Afghanistan.

Mr. Prince now gauges the winds in Washington as shifting in his favor, with Mr. McMaster gone and Mr. Mattis often at odds with Mr. Trump.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council, who was not authorized to speak publicly for attribution, said the administration was open to new approaches but was not reviewing a proposal from Mr. Prince.

During some of the meetings in Afghanistan, Mr. Prince has been introduced as someone who has Mr. Trump's ear, with his close relations to the president's inner circle listed as a selling point.

In the letter Mr. Prince sent to Mr. Ghani in spring 2017 seeking a meeting, he mentioned that his sister, Betsy Devos, was a member of Mr. Trump's cabinet, one Afghan official said.

Still, Mr. Prince's actual plan for Afghanistan has many skeptics.

"The idea that these contractor-soldiers embedded into Afghan units are only going to be 'training' is almost laughable," said Laurel Miller, a senior foreign policy expert at RAND and a former top United States diplomat on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"And the idea that privatizing the war is going to save money is certainly laughable," she continued. "If this idea didn't promise to be a significant moneymaker, then those who stand to profit from it wouldn't be pushing it so hard."

Ms. Miller said the proposal was based on an incorrect diagnosis for why the conflict is in a stalemate. Although there are problems of leadership and capability in the Afghan forces, the Taliban have proved they can sustain their insurgency against the application of much more force than Mr. Prince's proposal would bring, she said.

Changes to the tactics of training and advising would not convert the stalemate to a victory or an end to the war, she said.

"If anything, bringing in foreign mercenaries would be likely to provide terrific recruiting slogans for the insurgents," she added.

That was a reference to how the Taliban have already made a propaganda point of the American occupation, and would most likely view a wave of American-backed mercenary forces as even more contemptible.

Even many of the Afghan political leaders who see merit in elements of Mr. Prince's proposal — including having trainers of Afghan forces embedded for longer periods, and establishing better air and medevac support accessible to Afghan commanders — express concern about the possibilities of a private security presence less accountable than the United States military.

When pressed on what Mr. Prince's proposal could look like in practice, many of the political figures gave the example of the C.I.A.-run Afghan strike forces that are active in several parts of the country. But those militias, backed by intelligence contractors, have repeatedly been accused of violence against civilians.

Mr. Prince insists the greater danger is in an impatient American public forcing a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and leaving a security vacuum.

"Eventually America is going to grow tired," he said. "At that point you are one suicide vest in a chow hall away from a mass casualty incident that kills a bunch of Americans and makes people say: 'What the hell are we doing there? We have been doing this for 18, 19 years.'"

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.

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2) Afghanistan Signs Major Mining Deals Despite Legal Concerns

By Mujib Mashal, October 6, 2018

"The contracts, which had been stalled for years, were signed in Washington between the Afghan ministers of finance and mining, and executives from Centar Ltd., an investment company founded by Ian Hannam, a former J.P. Morgan banker who partnered with local Afghan firms to bid for the mines."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/world/asia/afghanistan-signs-mining-deals.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront

A gold mine in Baghlan Province, Afghanistan. The new contracts are for mineral deposits in Sar-e Pol and Badakhshan Provinces.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government on Friday signed two contracts for the exploration of copper and gold deposits in the north, in a bid to move away from the country's dependence on foreign aid by tapping its mineral wealth.

But watchdog groups say aspects of the contracts may violate the law and aggravate questionable practices that have marred the mining sector for years. Strongmen and political elites have long profited from the country's riches, and mineral wealth could turn into another source of instability in a country mired in decades of war.

The contracts, which had been stalled for years, were signed in Washington between the Afghan ministers of finance and mining, and executives from Centar Ltd., an investment company founded by Ian Hannam, a former J.P. Morgan banker who partnered with local Afghan firms to bid for the mines.

Centar's local partner is Sadat Naderi, who until June was Afghanistan's minister of urban development. The Afghan minerals law prohibits senior officials from bidding on mining contracts for five years after they leave government.

Civil society activists say government officials seemed pressured to move forward with the contracts despite unresolved legal issues.

"They signed the contracts without giving us satisfactory answers on concerns that the contracts were very clearly against the law," said Sayed Ikram Afzali, the executive director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan who met repeatedly with senior officials, including the Afghan president and vice president, to discuss concerns. "It was very clear that they were under pressure to move on with these contracts — they said they were facing international pressure to finalize these."

Bradley Barnett, the chief executive of Centar, said in a statement that the company had negotiated the deal "in strict adherence to Afghan law and international standards" and that the bidding process had been transparent.

The contracts call for developing a copper deposit in Balkhab district of Sar-e Pol Province and a gold deposit in Badakhshan Province. Although the value of the two mineral deposits is not clear, Centar said if exploration finds large-scale mining opportunities, the projects could generate $1 billion in economic impact and more than 10,000 jobs.

The Afghan government has repeatedly dangled its mineral wealth in front of President Trump, who is losing patience with the costly presence of American troops in the country. Mr. Barnett of Centar called the deal "potentially transformative" for Afghanistan in his statement.

Stephen Carter, the Afghanistan campaign leader at Global Witness, an organization focused on mining and conflict, said that was not the point.

"Regardless of whether or not this is a good deal for Afghanistan, approving a contract in apparent contravention of the minerals law would undermine the government's declarations that it is bringing the rule of law to the sector," said Mr. Carter, the Afghanistan campaign leader at Global Witness, an organization focused on mining and conflict.

The government of President Ashraf Ghani, which took office in September 2014, immediately halted major mining contracts issued by its predecessor over concerns of corruption. Mr. Naderi was a political ally of Mr. Ghani during the election campaign, and he was appointed to his cabinet.

Because the two contracts had been completed by the previous government — which had chosen the consortium as favored bidder long before Mr. Naderi became a cabinet minister, but had left the official signing to the new government — officials say the contracts do not violate the law. To avoid even "perceptions of a conflict of interest," Mr. Naderi resigned from the government in June.

Mr. Afzali, of Integrity Watch, said the contract that was agreed upon by the previous government has been considerably revised since that time.

"During the renegotiation of the contract, Mr. Naderi was still a cabinet minister," Mr. Afzali said.

The Afghan government provided contradictory information on when the renegotiation happened. Ajmal Ahmady, an adviser to Mr. Ghani, said the contract was renegotiated only after Mr. Naderi resigned in June. But the legal director of the Ministry of Mines said during a news conference the negotiations had been going on for 15 months.

Fatima Faizi contributed reporting.

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3)  Cleveland Judge Refuses to Send Low-Level Defendants to Jail After Inmate Deaths

By Karen Zraick, October 5, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/cleveland-jail-inmate-deaths.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

After a spate of deaths in local jails, Judge Michael L. Nelson Sr. of Cleveland Municipal Court said he would release people charged with low-level crimes on personal bond as they await trial.

A judge in Cleveland is refusing to send people accused of low-level crimes into the county jail system, citing safety concerns after six inmate deaths in four months.

The judge, Michael L. Nelson Sr. of Cleveland Municipal Court, said this week that he would release people charged with such crimes until their next court appearance, rather than holding them on bail, which many defendants cannot afford.

Defendants who are released must still agree to any conditions imposed, which could include electronic monitoring or regular check-ins.

"Six deaths means the jail is unsafe," Judge Nelson said in a phone interview. "You shouldn't die before we see you in court."

Five of the six inmates were being held at the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland, and one was at the Euclid City Jail, which is also run by the county, according to the county medical examiner.

The cause of death has yet to be determined in two of the cases, the most recent of which occurred on Tuesday. That prisoner, Allan Martin Gomez Roman, 44, died four days after he was arrested on a warrant stemming from a cocaine possession charge, Cleveland.com reported. Two of the other men who died were found hanging in their cells, and two had drugs in their systems at the time of their deaths, the authorities said.

In a statement, the Cuyahoga County sheriff, Clifford Pinkney, said he would ask the County Council to pay for an independent expert to assess the jail system.

He added that the jails were dealing with an influx of people struggling with addiction and psychological problems.

A report released last year by the Pretrial Justice Institute found that the Cuyahoga County Jail, with 2,100 beds, had been operating at over 100 percent capacity, on average, in four of the previous five years.

The report, which was requested by local court officials and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, included a survey of all inmates released on a single day. It found that 73 percent of them were black. In the latest census, 53 percent of Cleveland's residents were black.

Judge Nelson, a former president of the Cleveland N.A.A.C.P., said that the jails remained overcrowded and that staffing levels were not sufficient to monitor all of the inmates. He was loath to place people in those facilities because they could not afford bail, he said.

Cash bail, which requires defendants to put up money or other assets to win their freedom, has been widely criticized in recent years. Some states and municipalities have taken steps to reduce its use; California recently abolished cash bail altogether. (The change takes effect next year.)

In Ohio, Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer spent more than a year examining the bail system in a series called "Justice for All." Officials in parts of the state, including Cuyahoga County, have initiated changes to bail practices, and a statewide bill was introduced last year.

Critics of the cash bail system argue that defendants should be evaluated based on the risk they present to public safety, not on their financial situation.

Low-income defendants often turn to bail bond agents, which function as the payday lenders of the criminal justice world. Commercial bail is a $2 billion industry, and agents charge steep fees and can even arrest their clients.

Judge Nelson said the most recent death underscored the need to change bail practices and reduce overcrowding and strain on the jail system.

"If the balance of the county had implemented bail bond reform, there's a good chance that young man would not be in jail, period," he said.

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4) Convicts Seeking to Clear Their Records Find More Prosecutors Willing to Help

By Alan Blinder, October 7,  2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/us/expungement-criminal-justice.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Stephanie Truchan, a volunteer at the Expungement Help Desk in Indianapolis. At least 20 states have created or broadened expungement and sealing laws since the beginning of 2017.

INDIANAPOLIS — The convicted men and women who visit Room B2 of Indianapolis's courthouse cannot find jobs, or want better ones. Or they wish they could join their children for school field trips. Or they are simply seeking a measure of societal forgiveness.

They all arrive with the same aspiration: expungements intended to ease the burdens of old criminal records.

"I had to talk my way into a lot of places because of my background," said a woman named Fernell, who stopped by the subbasement room on a recent morning to discuss a conviction for resisting law enforcement when she was 19. "I want to put it behind me."

What she and most visitors to Room B2 are finding is that the people who helped get them convicted in the first place now want to help make the black marks less perilous. Bolstered by a renewed focus, from the Trump administration on down, on helping people with criminal histories participate in society successfully, at least 20 states have created or broadened expungement and sealing laws since the beginning of 2017, according to the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, a nonprofit group.

And although law enforcement officials have traditionally opposed such measures for an array of reasons — including accountability, a belief that records are vital to public safety, and unstinting support for crime victims — a growing number of them have begun to recognize that criminal records can be enduring obstacles to self-sufficiency and even help trap people in cycles of crime. Increasingly, they are overtly endorsing mercy through record suppression.

"It's just a matter of trying to remove obstacles that would make it more difficult for someone to become a productive member of the community," said Terry Curry, the elected prosecutor in Marion County, which includes Indianapolis and has a population approaching 1 million residents. "If an individual has stayed out of the criminal justice system, then why should they continue to have that stain forever?"

Though in most places the paperwork burden for expungements has fallen on private lawyers and nonprofit legal clinics, South Florida prosecutors now routinely hold events intended to help people wipe away records of arrests but not convictions. A district attorney in rural Louisiana leads information sessions about expungements for some felony convictions after a 10-year waiting period; a Vermont prosecutor recently held a record-clearing clinic; and the authorities near Fort Bragg, N.C., attracted about 500 people to an expungement event last year.

Last month, the Brooklyn district attorney promoted "Begin Again" events, where, one advertisement said, people were invited to "clear your record of a misdemeanor marijuana conviction or warrant."

But there is still a national patchwork of policies and terminologies, from destroying records to sealing them to simply noting that a conviction is effectively vacated. States have imposed various waiting periods, conditions and fees. Some places have made their processes deliberately simple, while others have complicated approaches that may require legal assistance or court hearings.

The proliferation of new laws, and newfound enthusiasm on the part of some prosecutors, has hardly erased all doubts about the wisdom of suppressing records. Many prosecutors, especially in rural areas, remain skeptical of any action to show mercy for a person's past, and some judges engage in measured resistance, holding hearings more to complain about an expungement law than to weigh an application's merits.

"You have prosecutors and judges who just think it's wrong: 'You've caused trouble in this county, you're a wrongdoer and you shouldn't get a blank slate,'" said Bernice Corley, the executive director of the Indiana Public Defender Council.

But Margaret Love, the executive director of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center and a former United States pardon attorney, said that clemency and expungements are part of the criminal justice process for a reason.

"It ought to be something that prosecutors welcome and use to their advantage to create criminal justice success stories, to advertise criminal justice success stories," she said.

The nuanced approach in Indiana, where officials hoped that expungements would improve people's job prospects, is increasingly seen as a model. Under its so-called Second Chance law, the state has a tiered system in which the offense, and the outcome of the case, determines the waiting period and the exact relief. Indiana does not destroy records, but can limit access to them and mark them as expunged, and crime victims are permitted to express their views before any decision is made.

"Indiana should be the worst place in America to commit a serious crime and the best place, once you've done your time, to get a second chance," Gov. Mike Pence, now the vice president, said when he signed the records measure into law in 2013.

There have been misgivings. Steven P. Sonnega, the prosecutor in a county just southwest of Indianapolis, unsuccessfully challenged Indiana's law in court. He declined to be interviewed but, in an email in September, said that "expungement is now part of the law in Indiana, and it's our legal duty to follow the law."

Other prosecutors, like Mr. Curry, proved more enthusiastic, backed by local law clinics and nonprofit organizations. Since the law went into effect in July 2013, his prosecutors have reviewed about 11,500 petitions, encompassing about 45,000 criminal cases. According to the prosecutor's office, about 60 percent have focused on convictions, not just records of arrests. Many cases concerned relatively minor offenses like prostitution and driving with a suspended license, lawyers involved in the process said.

"The key is you protect the public, and protecting the public means a whole lot of options," said Andrew J. Fogle, the deputy prosecutor Mr. Curry assigned to handle expungement petitions, including one for an arrest in the late 1950s. "To tail them, nail them, jail them is not a totally acceptable option."

And so down Market Street from the Capitol, past the nearly 285-foot-tall Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the local courthouse has become one of the state's busiest proving grounds for the law. In Room B2, an Expungement Help Desk, operated by a local nonprofit in space lent by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, offers information and assistance with paperwork but not explicit legal advice. From time to time, Mr. Fogle shows people the way to the help desk, which is on pace to work on more than 1,500 petitions this year, up from 986 in 2017.

"We try to make it a friendly place and not intimidating," said Julie Mennel, the paralegal who leads the help desk and, using brightly colored posters and paintings, has tried to set it apart from the adversarial justice system operating upstairs. "We're here to help people, not judge people. They've already had judgment passed."

On a recent Thursday, an elderly African-American couple sat at a desk, talking with a law student about an old conviction for marijuana possession. A far younger white man named Fred with a long record announced, laughing, that he would need to return the next day to finish his paperwork with Ms. Mennel.

Fernell, the woman with the conviction for resisting law enforcement, sat anxiously in a chair along a wall and waited to talk with someone. She asked that her last name not be used to avoid undoing what she hopes will come with an expungement: better employment and educational prospects. Before she became eligible for expungement, three fast-food restaurants, she said, had rejected her for jobs because of her teenage behavior.

"A new beginning for me means I can grow with my business, my own interests," said Fernell, 24. "I knew I wanted it done, but I was waiting it out for five years."

Perhaps her greatest ally had left the room only minutes before: Mr. Fogle, the deputy prosecutor who sometimes escorts people to the help desk and, speaking generally, said he was typically looking for a reason to support cleaning up a record.

"We're not just doing lip service to this," he said. "It actually makes other people look at it differently and has people thinking, 'If the prosecutor is O.K. with this, maybe there is something to it.'"

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5) De Blasio Rebuffs Question on Homelessness: 'I'm in the Middle of a Workout'

By Jeffery C. Mays, October 6, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/nyregion/de-blasio-homeless-gym.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Nathylin Flowers Adesegun was recorded as she confronted Mr. de Blasio about his plan to create and preserve affordable housing.

Nathylin Flowers Adesegun has for the past year worked with Vocal-NY, a nonprofit that helps low-income people, to encourage Mayor Bill de Blasio to designate more apartments specifically for homeless people as part of his plan to create and preserve 300,000 units of affordable housing over a decade.

Mr. de Blasio's plan calls for 5 percent of those units, or 15,000 apartments, to be set aside for homeless people. Vocal-NY wants him to double that.

Members of the group have called in during the mayor's appearances on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on the radio station WNYC, attended his town hall meetings and met with the agency commissioner who handles homelessness, but many still felt they weren't being heard.

On Friday, they did what other groups have done when they wanted to grab the mayor's attention: They sought out Mr. de Blasio at the Prospect Park Y.M.C.A. in Brooklyn, where he exercises most mornings.

"He's famous for having his breakfast in Park Slope and going to the gym," Ms. Adesegun, who has lived in women's homeless shelters since she lost her apartment in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2015, said on Saturday. "We needed to get his attention or he was just going to keep blowing us off."

The 35-second encounter was captured on video by another Vocal-NY activist and posted to YouTube. In the video, Ms. Adesegun, 72, a retired office manager, walks to where Mr. de Blasio is seated in a butterfly stretch and says hello. She shakes hands with the mayor and squats down before making her appeal.

"Out of 300,000 units in your affordable housing program, only 5 percent will go to the homeless: Can you look me in the eye and tell me why?" Ms. Adesegun asks as Mr. de Blasio tries to cut her off.

"I'm in the middle of doing my workout: Sorry, I can't do this now," Mr. de Blasio says. As a member of his security detail steps in, Mr. de Blasio gets up to leave. "I'm not doing this here," the mayor says as he walks out with his phone in hand. "I'm in the middle of a workout."

He then heads down a stairwell.

Ms. Adesegun said on Saturday that she believed the mayor cared more about his workout than listening to her. Eric Phillips, Mr. de Blasio's press secretary, defended the mayor's decision to leave.

"People working out at the gym shouldn't be worried they will be recorded in highly publicized, videotaped political confrontations every morning," Mr. Phillips said. "It's not the right venue for these discussions and the mayor won't have them there."

Homelessness has been one of the most vexing issues facing Mr. de Blasio. The Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group, says New York is in the midst of the worst homeless crisis since the Great Depression. The city's shelter system houses just under 61,000 people, including more than 22,000 children. In seeking to open 90 new homeless shelters, Mr. de Blasio has struggled to find locations and to overcome resistance from existing residents opposed to new shelters in their neighborhoods. Mr. Phillips says 16 shelters have been opened so far. The city also recently moved to consolidate its confusing system of rental subsidies.

Giselle Routhier, policy director of the coalition, said the group began calling for Mr. de Blasio to increase the number of units in his housing plan about a year ago.

"We still have near-record homelessness and it's not going down as much as it should be at all," Ms. Routhier said. "You can't address record homeless without dedicating a meaningful portion of your housing plan to homelessness."

Over the course of his almost five years in office, Mr. de Blasio has been confronted at the Y.M.C.A. by the union representing uniformed police officers as well as by a large group calling for traffic-calming measures after the deaths of a 4-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy who were struckby a driver a block from the gym.

On average, the mayor encounters at least one protest per month at the gym, and, as he did with the group calling for traffic changes, Mr. de Blasio sometimes stops to talk. Mr. Phillips said the mayor cared deeply about homelessness and had made strides in tackling a difficult issue.

Activists from Vocal-NY have been invited to City Hall for a meeting.

"I did my deep breaths and did my prayers and asked the Lord to show me the way and he did," Ms. Adesegun said. "We are having a tremendous result."

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6) 17 Years to the Day the U.S. Invaded, 54 Are Killed Across Afghanistan

By Fahim Abed, Fatima Faizi and Mujob Mashal, October 7, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/asia/afghanistan-casualties-anniversary.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

An Afghan police headquarters damaged by a Taliban attack in the Sayed Abad District in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, on Sunday.

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 54 people have been killed across Afghanistan in the past 24 hours, according to a tally based on interviews with officials on Sunday — 17 years to the day American forces invaded the country to topple the Taliban regime.

The violence was a reminder that the war has only raged deadlier with time, taking a toll on both the Afghan security forces and the civilians caught in the crossfire. On average, the conflict has taken the lives of 30 to 40 Afghan forces and at least 13 civilians a day. There are no tangible signs of momentum for peace talks with the Taliban.

Among the killed were at least 35 members of Afghan security forces and 19 civilians. While most of the fatalities of the security forces came from Taliban attacks, residents and local officials said a majority of the civilian casualties in the past 24 hours had resulted from two episodes of firing by government forces in central Afghanistan and an airstrike in the country's east that they said was carried out by the United States. American forces denied they had carried out a strike in the area.

A large number of Taliban fighters were also killed in attacks that Afghan officials said they had carried out in 14 of the country's 34 provinces. But the toll was difficult to verify; analysts estimate Taliban casualties usually number about the same as Afghan forces, if not more because of the airpower used against them.

[Read our weekly tally of the long-running conflict in the Afghan War Casualty Report.]

The deadliest of the attacks was an early morning raid by the Taliban on the Sayed Abad District of Wardak Province, which falls on the main highway about 60 miles outside Kabul, the capital. The highway remained blocked for hours — the Taliban had blown up a bridge — before it was reopened by the security forces.

Nasrat Rahimi, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, said 14 police officers, including Col. Sayed Nezrab Shah, the district police chief who had lost his leg in a battle three years ago, were killed.

"His leg was bothering him — it was cut off at the knee, and it would still bleed," said Naqibullah Amini, a friend of Colonel Shah's. "He was saving money, and he had prepared his passport to go abroad for better treatment. He was just waiting for the security situation to get better."

In northern Faryab Province, Taliban fighters overran two police outposts in Pashtun Kot District early on Sunday. Ten police officers and a civilian woman were killed, according to Mohammad Azam, the head of the criminal investigation department with the district police.

Most of the civilian casualties happened in Paktia Province, in eastern Afghanistan. Local residents said a convoy carrying an elite Afghan strike force, trained and run by the Central Intelligence Agency, had come under attack late Friday. Leaving behind two burned vehicles, the unit escaped the area, where a brutal wing of the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, remains influential.

When locals gathered around the vehicles early on Saturday afternoon, aircraft began bombing the area, according to Haji Gadlon Zadran, a local elder.

"Ten villagers were killed, and 21 were wounded," he said. "The ages of killed persons were 9 to 12 and all of them were innocent villagers."

Qadir Khan, the governor of the district, Gerda Serai, confirmed that 10 civilians were killed and said the strike was under investigation.

American airstrikes in support of the Afghan forces have increased in recent months, as the government's security forces have struggled to hold the line against the Taliban. Publicly available data from the United States military show that 746 bombs were dropped in July, and 522 in September. The Afghan air force has also conducted an increasing number of airstrikes.

It was unclear who carried out the strike in Paktia Province. American forces denied they were responsible for it, while a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry did not reply to questions.

"I can confirm no coalition or U.S. forces were involved in strikes at this location during the time period," said Cmdr. Grant Neeley, a spokesman for the United States force in Afghanistan.

Another episode, reflecting the blurred, dangerous state of affairs across the country, occurred in the central province of Ghor, where Afghan forces on Saturday carried out an operation to arrest a local militia commander the government has accused of abuses.

Supporters of the commander, Shamsher Alipoor, have said he was leading a local force to fill the security gap against encroaching Taliban militants.

Abdul Hai Khatibi, the spokesman for provincial governor of Ghor, said Commander Alipoor had engaged in clashes with security forces, killing four police officers and seven civilians. He fled the scene, and a government chase for him continued on Sunday, Mr. Khatibi said.

But some relatives of the victims blamed the government for the civilian deaths. One of those critics was Reza Nazari, whose sister, Amina Nazari, 48, had been killed in the violence. She lost her husband to illness seven years ago, he said, and worked as a social worker for a nongovernmental organization. She was the main breadwinner for a family of four.

Farooq Jan Mangal contributed reporting from Khost, Najim Rahim from Mazar e Sharif, and Mohammad Saber from Herat, Afghanistan.

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7) Life on the Dirtiest Block in San Francisco

By Thomas Fuller, October 8, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/san-francisco-dirtiest-street-london-breed.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

The 300 block of Hyde Street in San Francisco received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other.

SAN FRANCISCO — The heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner.

It's a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation's technology industry, where a single span of Hyde Street hosts an open-air narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.

There are many other streets like it, but by one measure it's the dirtiest block in the city.

Just a 15-minute walk away are the offices of Twitter and Uber, two companies that along with other nameplate technology giants have helped push the median price of a home in San Francisco well beyond $1 million.

This dichotomy of street crime and world-changing technology, of luxury condominiums and grinding, persistent homelessness, and the dehumanizing effects for those forced to live on the streets provoke outrage among the city's residents. For many who live here it's difficult to reconcile San Francisco's liberal politics with the misery that surrounds them.

According to city statisticians, the 300 block of Hyde Street, a span about the length of a football field in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood, received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other. It's an imperfect measurement — some blocks might be dirtier but have fewer calls — but residents on the 300 block say that they are not surprised by their ranking.

The San Francisco bureau photographer, Jim Wilson, and I set out to measure the depth of deprivation on a single block. We returned a number of times, including a 12-hour visit, from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. on a recent weekday. Walking around the neighborhood we saw the desperation of the mentally ill, the drug dependent and homeless, and heard from embittered residents who say it will take much more than a broom to clean up the city, long considered one of America's beacons of urban beauty.

Human waste has become such a widespread problem in San Francisco that the city in September established a unit dedicated to removing it from the sidewalks. Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the Public Works Department, describes the new initiative as a "proactive human waste" unit.

At 8 a.m. on a recent day, as mothers shepherded their children to school, we ran into Yolanda Warren, a receptionist who works around the corner from Hyde Street. The sidewalk in front of her office was stained with feces. The street smelled like a latrine.

"Some parts of the Tenderloin, you're walking, and you smell it and you have to hold your breath," Ms. Warren said.

At she does every morning, she hosed down the urine outside her office. The city has installed five portable bathrooms for the hundreds of unsheltered people in the Tenderloin, but that has not stopped people from urinating and defecating in the streets.

"There are way too many people out here that don't have homes," Ms. Warren said.

Over the past five years the number of homeless people in San Francisco has remained relatively steady — around 4,400 — and the sidewalks of the Tenderloin have come to resemble a refugee camp.

The city has replaced more than 300 lampposts corroded by dog and human urine over the past three years, according to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Replacing the poles became more urgent after a lamppost collapsed in 2015, crushing a car.

A more common danger are the thousands of heroin needles discarded by users.

The Public Works Department and a nonprofit organization in the Tenderloin picked up 100,000 needles from the streets over the past year. The Public Health Department, which has its own needle recovery program, has a more alarming figure: It retrieved 164,264 needles in August alone, both through a disposal program and through street cleanups.

Larry Gothberg, a building manager who has lived on Hyde Street since 1982, keeps a photographic record of the heroin users he sees shooting up on the streets. He swiped through a number of pictures on his phone showing users in a motionless stupor.

"We call it the heroin freeze," Mr. Gothberg said. "They can stay that way for hours."

Hyde Street is in the heart of the Tenderloin, a neighborhood of aging, subsidized single-occupancy apartment buildings, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants, coin laundromats and organizations dedicated to helping the indigent. Studio apartments on Hyde Street go for around $1,500, according to Mr. Gothberg, cheap in a city where the median rent for apartments is $4,500.

A number of people we met on Hyde Street distinguished between the residents of the Tenderloin, many of them immigrant families, and those they called "street people" — the unsheltered drug users who congregate and camp along the sidewalks and the dealers who peddle crack cocaine, heroin and a variety of amphetamines.

Disputes among the street population are common and sometimes result in violence. At night bodies line the sidewalks.

"It's like the land of the living dead," said Adam Leising, a resident of Hyde Street.

We met Mr. Leising late one evening after he had finished a shift as a server at a restaurant. As we toured the neighborhood, past a man crumpled on the ground next to empty beer bottles and trash, Mr. Leising told us that the daily glimpses of desperation brought him to the brink of depression.

"We are the most advanced country in the world," Mr. Leising said. "And that's what people are having to live with here."

Mr. Leising, who is the founder of the Lower Hyde Street Association, a nonprofit that holds cleanup activities on the street, feels that the city is not cracking down on the drug trade on the block because they don't want it to spread elsewhere.

"It's obvious that it's a containment zone," Mr. Leising said. "These behaviors are not allowed in other neighborhoods."

The Tenderloin police station posted on their Twitter feed that drug dealing "is the most significant issue impacting the quality of life." So far this year officers from the Tenderloin station house have made more than 3,000 arrests, including 424 for dealing drugs. "This is one of our priority areas," said Grace Gatpandan, a police spokeswoman said of the Tenderloin. But many feel they do not do enough.

Gavin Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco and the leading candidate for governor in next month's election, told The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board last week that the city had reached the point of "enough is enough."

"You can be too permissive, and I happen to think we have crossed that threshold in this state — and not just in this city," Mr. Newsom said. "You see it. It's just disgraceful."

Mayor London Breed, who was elected in June, campaigned to clean up squalor.

Ms. Breed has announced plans to provide an additional 1,000 beds for the homeless over the next two years but she is also targeting a relatively small group of people living on the streets whom she says are beyond the point of assisting themselves. The concept of this involuntary removal is known as conservatorship. A law recently passed in Sacramento strengthens the city's powers of conservatorship with a judge's permission.

"There are about 100 to 150 people who are clearly mentally ill and who are cycling through the system and who need to be forced into conservatorship," Ms. Breed said in an interview. "We know all of them."

According to Ms. Breed's office 12 percent of people who use the services of the San Francisco Department of Public Health account for 73 percent of the costs. The majority of these heavy users have medical, psychiatric and substance use issues, according to the department.

Ms. Breed has made unannounced inspections of neighborhoods, sometimes carrying a broom.

On a Saturday morning in September she walked past a woman on Hyde Street slouched on the pavement and preparing to plunge a syringe into her hand. "Put that away," said a police officer accompanying the mayor.

On a recent afternoon we dropped by a barbershop on Hyde Street.

Glenn Gustafik opened Mister Hyde two years ago to escape the high rents of downtown San Francisco, where he was quoted a $10,000 monthly rent for a similarly small space. Since opening on Hyde Street he has been engaged in a battle with drug users in the neighborhood who break the branches off a London plane tree in front of his shop and use the sticks to clean their crack pipes. This harvesting of twigs has killed the previous four trees, Mr. Gustafik said. At Mr. Gustafik's request the city protected the fifth tree with wire mesh, the kind used in suburban areas to discourage hungry deer.

Toward dusk and into the night the 300 block of Hyde becomes an impromptu food and flea market. A woman offered a bicycle for $15 one evening and bric-a-brac was laid out on the sidewalks. Many items for sale were incongruous: A man hawked six shrink-wrapped packets of raw steaks that he cradled precariously as he called out for buyers. No one asked where he got them.

At dawn crews from the city and private organizations arrive to pick up needles and trash. The city spends $70 million annually on street cleaning, well more than any other American cities that were studied in a recent report.

But the sidewalks soon become crowded again and the litter accumulates.

Mario Montoya Jr. has spent the past three decades cleaning the streets as an employee of the city's Public Works Department. Standing on a street corner as another city employee power-washed the sidewalk, Mr. Montoya described a Sisyphean cycle of cleanup and filth.

"By noon everybody is up and out," Mr. Montoya said. "And here we go again."

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8) Justice Delayed, With a Life on the Line

By Nicholes Kristof, October 6, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-jerry-brown-dna.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Kevin Cooper, center, after he was arrested in 1983.

Imagine being framed for a horrific crime: the fatal stabbing of a married couple and two children. You then spend 35 years in prison awaiting execution for that quadruple murder. 

Imagine that you're a black man and that the trial was tainted by the ugliest racism. Meanwhile, federal judges and F.B.I. investigators cite evidence that the real killer is a white convicted murderer who came home late on the night of the murders in bloody coveralls, but when his girlfriend reported him to the authorities, the police took the bloody coveralls and threw them away.

Imagine that evidence sits in government storage that could show who actually committed the murders, yet year after year a governor refuses to allow advanced DNA testing.

That is, I've argued, what happened to Kevin Cooper, now on death row at San Quentin prison. For 11 years, as attorney general and governor, Jerry Brown has refused to allow advanced DNA testing that could free Cooper or confirm his guilt.

Now I have a new argument that perhaps can move Brown. The white convicted murderer who is the other suspect in the case has voluntarily provided samples of his DNA and told me that he too wants advanced DNA testing of evidence from the murder scene.

"I had nothing to do with this crime," the man, Lee, told me. "I want it all retested, yes. To clear my name."

I've used just Lee's first name, because he asked me not to use his full name and because enough damage has been done in this murder case by people jumping to conclusions without clear proof. Lee said that his former girlfriend had fingered him to the police because she was jealous of his new flame, and that the bloody coveralls were not his.

"I have no idea who did it," said Lee, now 68. "The police need to do their job properly and find out who did it."

So both suspects in the case are now pleading with Governor Brown to permit advanced DNA testing of evidence from the murder scene. A towel used by the killers has never been tested at all, and a T-shirt used by a murderer hasn't been tested for "touch DNA" to determine who wore it. Some hairs found clutched in the victims' hands, possibly ripped from the killer's head, are not from an African-American like Cooper and have also never been tested at all.

Will Governor Brown listen?

I asked Brown what he is waiting for, and he emphasized that he is reviewing the case with input from both sides. "I'll act on it," he said. He also protested that my reporting on the case, which led to widespread calls for DNA testing, was one-sided and had "left out a number of elements."

While Brown denied that he was running out the clock, he refused to commit to resolving the issue before leaving office in January. Referring to the likelihood that Gavin Newsom will be elected governor next month, he said: "You're going to get a guy more liberal than me coming around the corner. Don't worry."

I suggested that for an innocent man on death row, every extra day is no minor thing. Brown shrugged and observed that California has 130,000 prisoners.

There has been another important development in the Cooper case. A witness has provided a sworn declaration describing a confession by Lee to the killings, committed with two other named individuals, according to Cooper's defense counsel, Norman C. Hile. The name of the witness is being kept confidential for now for the protection of the witness, Hile said in a letter to the governor.

The 1983 killings — of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and an 11-year-old neighbor, Chris Hughes — were as barbaric a crime as one can imagine. Yet the horror of this crime will have been compounded if an innocent man has been framed for it.

Granted, maybe I'm wrong about this. So, governor, prove me wrong. Test the evidence. Settle the doubts.

To study criminal justice is to see how flawed our system is. Researchers have repeatedly found that black defendants are more likely to be convicted, more likely to receive long sentences, more likely to be sentenced to death — especially, as in this case, where the victims are white. One study found that judges are less likely to grant parole when they are hungry, before lunch. Another study found that judges issue longer sentences the week after their college alma mater football team unexpectedly loses a game. Given this arbitrariness in the system, it is unconscionable to let a man languish on death row without even testing all the evidence. At stake is the life of one man, but also the legitimacy of our criminal justice system.

This case is illustrative of the problem with the death penalty, and 163 people on death row have been exonerated since 1973. This is not a problem of one man, but of a flawed system of justice.

I generally admire Brown and agree with him on most issues. But I'm mystified, as are many of his friends, by his recalcitrance in the Kevin Cooper case. I'm glad that my May column finally got him to review options for DNA testing, but almost five months have elapsed and Cooper is still waiting.

Brown told me he wished that "people would take more of an interest" in criminal justice issues. Governor, here's one such issue: Please show more interest yourself.

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9)  Babysitting While Black: Georgia Man Was Stalked by Woman as He Cared for 2 White Children
By Melissa Gomez, October 9, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/us/black-man-babysitting.html

Corey Lewis, a babysitter from Marietta, Ga., was watching two children at a Walmart when a woman called the police on him. Mr. Lewis recorded the encounter on Facebook.

Corey Lewis first noticed the woman as he crossed the Walmart parking lot in Marietta, Ga., on Sunday afternoon. She was sitting in a Kia sedan, he said, as he led the two children he was babysitting back to his car.

By the time he had them buckled up and ready to go, he had his phone out and was live-streaming on Facebook as he narrated a story about how the strange woman had begun stalking them after he refused to let her talk to the children, Mr. Lewis, 27, said in an interview.

She followed him out of the parking lot, to the gas station across the street, and to his home, where Mr. Lewis, who is black, was questioned by a Cobb County police officer about why he had with him two young children, who are white.

"I didn't know what was going on, what she wanted to do," Mr. Lewis said on Tuesday, believing that the woman had called the police because he was a black man walking around with two white children. "I felt like my character was being criminalized."

Sgt. Wayne Delk confirmed the incident, saying that an officer had responded to a call from a woman on Sunday afternoon. The police did not say whether they knew her identity.

In a series of live videos on Facebook, Mr. Lewis recorded the incident, which began in a Walmart parking lot and ended as the latest instance of a black person being reported to the police while doing a lawful activity, like golfing, napping, shopping or even canvassing.

[For more coverage of race, sign up here to have our Race/Related newsletter delivered weekly to your inbox.]

For Mr. Lewis, the episode was particularly troubling because it happened while he was working. Mr. Lewis owns his own business, Inspired By Lewis, in which he takes care of children five days a week as part of the youth mentoring program he created three years ago. His clientele is mainly white, he said, but up until Sunday, it had never occurred to him that that would give someone a reason to call the police on him.

He said he had spent that afternoon watching 6-year-old Nicholas and 10-year-old Addison while their parents were out. After taking them to an indoor play area, he took them to Walmart to eat at the Subway, he said.

After leaving the store, he and the children were hanging out by his car when the woman pulled up and asked if the children were all right. Confused, Mr. Lewis replied, "Why wouldn't they be O.K.?" She shrugged before driving off, he said, only to return to ask to speak to Addison. Mr. Lewis said he told her no, and she insisted on getting his license plate number before driving away, only to stop within sight.

Mr. Lewis said he drove to a nearby gas station, where she followed him. Instead of taking the children home, he drove them to his house, where he knew people would be outside.

Mr. Lewis continued to record as a police car pulled up, and the officer asked him what was going on. "I'm being followed and harassed," he says, to which the officer replied, "I've heard."

The confrontation ended without issue, with the officer seemingly convinced that the children — who offered similar explanations for what occurred — were fine, but he asked if he could check in with their parents, Mr. Lewis said.

"It just knocked us out of our chair," David Parker, their father, said on Tuesday. "We felt horrible for Corey."

Mr. Parker and his wife, Dana Mango, were at dinner when they received the call, and his wife had to be convinced that it was not a prank, he said.

Mr. Lewis is a family friend and well known in the community for working with children, Mr. Parker said, describing him as an "All-American guy."

Mr. Parker said that he wanted to give the woman the benefit of doubt, but that his children were having a good time with Mr. Lewis, and they were not in any apparent danger. Mr. Lewis was also wearing his signature shirt — a bright green T-shirt bearing his company's logo.

"I don't think you have to watch too many 'Law & Order' episodes to realize kidnappers don't usually wear fluorescent green shirts," he said, adding that he felt Mr. Lewis had handled the situation well.

Mr. Parker said he had a proud moment when, during an interview with a reporter, his daughter was asked if she had anything she wanted to say to the woman. "She said that, 'I would just ask her to next time, try to see us as three people rather than three skin colors because we might've been Mr. Lewis's adopted children,'" he recalled.

On Tuesday, Mr. Lewis was back working with children, saying he wasn't going to let the episode keep him from doing his job.

"You see these things, but they're like from a distance," he said. "But then for it to actually happen to you, it's unbelievable."

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10) What's Not in the Latest Terrifying IPCC Report? The "Much, Much, Much More Terrifying" New Research on Climate Tipping Points
By Jon Queally, Common Dreams, October 9, 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/09/whats-not-latest-terrifying-ipcc-report-much-much-much-more-terrifying-new-research?cd-

A burned truck and structures are seen at the Butte Fire on September 13, 2015 near San Andreas, California. California governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in Amador and Calaveras counties where the 100-square-mile wildfire has burned scores of structures so far and is threatening 6,400 in the historic Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada foothills. 

If the latest warnings contained in Monday's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—which included pronouncements that the world has less than twelve years to drastically alter course to avoid the worst impacts of human-caused global warming and that nothing less than keeping all fossil fuels in the ground is the solution to avoid future calamities—have you at all frightened or despondent, experts responding to the report have a potentially unwelcome message for your already over-burdened heart and mind: It's very likely even worse than you're being told.

After the report's publication there were headlines like: "We have 12 years to act on climate change before the world as we know it is lost. How much more urgent can it get?" and "Science pronounces its verdict: World to be doomed at 2°C, less dangerous at 1.5°C" and "A major new climate report slams the door on wishful thinking."

But as Jamie Henn, co-founder and the program director for the international climate group 350.org, stated in a tweet on Tuesday, the "scariest thing about the IPCC Report" is the fact that "it's the watered down, consensus version. The latest science is much, much, much more terrifying."

Henn was actually responding to Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann who was pushing back against those criticizing the IPCC report as too "alarmist" in its declarations and warnings. "If anything," Professor Mann declared, "it is the opposite. Once again, with their latest report, they have been overly conservative (ie. erring on the side of understating/underestimating the problem.)"

This is very possibly true and there is much scientific data and argument backing this up. As Henn and Mann both indicate, the IPCC report is based on the consensus view of the hundreds of scientists who make up the IPCC – and its been consistently true that some of the most recent (and increasingly worrying) scientific findings have not yet found enough support to make it into these major reports which rely on near-unanimous agreement.

According to Durwood Zaelke, founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, speaking to The Guardian in the wake of the latest IPCC report,  it "fails to focus on the weakest link in the climate chain: the self-reinforcing feedbacks which, if allowed to continue, will accelerate warming and risk cascading climate tipping points and runaway warming."

In August, as Common Dreams reported, research published by Johan Rockström and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden found that it is precisely these feedback loops and tipping points that should most frighten and concern humanity. While nascent and not conclusive in its findings—two of the reasons you won't find it referenced in the IPCC report—the study warned that humanity may be just 1°C away from creating a series of dynamic feedback loops that could push the world into a climate scenario not seen since the dawn of the Helocene Period, nearly 12,000 years ago.

Quoted in Tuesday's Guardian article about the dangers of ignoring potential tipping points, Nobel prize laureate Mario Molina, who shared the award for chemistry in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, said: "The IPCC report demonstrates that it is still possible to keep the climate relatively safe, provided we muster an unprecedented level of cooperation, extraordinary speed and heroic scale of action. But even with its description of the increasing impacts that lie ahead, the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution."

The purpose of recognizing the terrifying predictions is not to instill fear, however, climate campaigners and advocates for bold solutions say.

In a paper authored last year—titled Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement—Margaret Klein Salamon writes that while a World War II-style mobilization is necessary to achieve the kind emission cuts and energy transformation that science now mandates, understanding the stakes does not necessarily mean being debilitated by that knowledge. In an op-ed for Common Dreams, she argued "that intense, but not paralyzing, fear combined with maximum hope can actually lead people and groups into a state of peak performance. We can rise to the challenge of our time and dedicate ourselves to become heroic messengers and change-makers."

And as Rajiv Sicora, senior manager of research for The Leap, wrote to his group's supporters in an email on Tuesday: "This is not the time to turn away, whether in fear or in active denial of the facts. This is a time to use our fear as fuel: because the report also makes clear that the worst effects of global warming can still be prevented, and the urgency of transformative change should excite and empower all of us who are fighting for justice anyway."

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11) Millions of Unnecessary Opioid Pills Prescribed by 5 Doctors, Prosecutors Say
By Benjamin Weiser, October 11, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/nyregion/doctors-charged-opioid-prescriptions.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Five doctors in New York City have been charged with taking more than $5 million in return for prescribing millions of oxycodone pills to purported patients who had no legitimate medical need for them, according to indictments unsealed in federal court Thursday.

The series of indictments described noisy crowds of people standing in long lines at all hours, some with visible signs of drug addiction, at the Staten Island office of Dr. Carl Anderson, prompting neighbors to call the police.

Occasionally, ambulances were sent to treat the pill-seeking patients, the charges say.

Another of the doctors, Dante A. Cubangbang, of Manhattan, and his nurse practitioner prescribed 3.3 million pills that were paid for by Medicare and Medicaid over a three-year period — more than twice as many pills as the next highest prescriber in the state, one indictment shows.

The charges were to be announced at a news conference on Thursday by Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York; James J. Hunt, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's New York office; and James P. O'Neill, the commissioner of the New York Police Department.

The case — another in a line of prosecutions being brought nationallyagainst doctors, drug company executives and drug dealers — is likely to highlight the ways opioids have been aggressively marketed and have contributed to a national epidemic that killed about 72,000 Americans last year.

In March, five Manhattan doctors were indicted on charges they took bribes and kickbacks from Insys, the manufacturer of Subsys, a spray form of the highly addictive painkiller fentanyl.

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12)  Credit Unions, Long a Haven, May Add to Workers' Financial Woes
By Noam Scheiber, October 11, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/business/marriott-credit-union-employee-strike.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Jose Ramirez Paredes makes just over $13 an hour as a cleaner at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. His August statement from the Marriott Employees' Federal Credit Union shows more than $800 in overdraft fees for the year.

Working as a dishwasher at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Amos Troyah made about $30,000 in a recent 12-month period. Roughly $2,000 of it was spent on an especially frequent expense: fees on his checking and savings accounts at the Marriott Employees' Federal Credit Union.

The fees came in increments like $6 and $10 — minimum-balance fees, excess-transaction fees, automatic money-transfer fees. On occasion, they were joined by that pooh-bah of personal finance charges, the overdraft fee, at a hefty $35.

Thousands of Marriott workers around the country are on strike, complaining that stagnant wages and unsteady hours have made it difficult to stay afloat. At a time when they are under particular pressure, the credit union may be adding to their struggles. Other employees said Mr. Troyah's experience with fees was common.

For more affluent Marriott employees, on the other hand, credit union membership can be a very good deal. Typical interest rates on car loans and mortgages obtained through the credit union are below the national average, according to financial filings. And better-paid employees less frequently need services that incur high fees, like overdraft protection.

What's more, while the credit union is officially independent from Marriott, the board that oversees it consists primarily of Marriott managers who may not always be sensitive to the inequities these policies impose.

The Marriott workers' experience is a stark example of trends that are increasingly bearing down on the nearly 100 million people nationwide who have credit union accounts.

Credit unions — not-for-profit institutions that are owned by their depositors and receive a federal tax subsidy — were long considered a way to democratize banking. They were meant to serve workers who lacked access to the same financial services as middle managers or executives. Many early credit unions were managed by workers from small offices off factory floors. With the money made on loans, often to better-paid workers, they could offer checking and savings accounts at little or no cost.

This philosophy largely persisted into the 1990s, even as credit unions grew larger and hired professional managers. "You had this relationship with people you were serving that you never lost track of," said Randy Chambers, the president of Self-Help Credit Union in North Carolina, which has merged with a handful of smaller credit unions across the state.

Some credit unions still see their mission in such terms. But in recent decades, many have subtly shifted their approach. As falling interest rates made loans less lucrative, credit unions largely turned to fees to help replace the lost income. Over the past quarter-century, the average value of the fees collected for every dollar of interest income has risen to nearly 17 cents, from just under 7 cents.

For credit unions harder pressed to fund their operations, that figure can get much higher. The GE Credit Union of Connecticut makes 34 cents in fees for every dollar of interest on loans, according to last year's regulatory filings. The Montgomery County Employees Federal Credit Union in Maryland makes 44 cents.

But even against this backdrop, Marriott is an outlier. It takes in 52 cents in fees for every dollar of interest income.

Striking Marriott employees outside a San Francisco hotel. The workers complain that stagnant wages and unsteady hours have made it difficult to stay afloat.

As a result, some Marriott workers find themselves in a kind of financial double jeopardy: Low pay from Marriott keeps their account balances minimal, and those modest balances lead to more fees, crimping their assets further.

"The money gets into my account, and they take it out when I overdraft," Mr. Troyah said. "They are robbing me."

'You Ought to Pay'

On its own, raising more income through fees is defensible. For example, in a given month, only a minority of accounts typically go into the red. Not charging overdraft fees or minimum-balance fees is, in effect, a decision to ask other members to subsidize that minority.

"People came around to the idea of it not being all that fair to do it that way," said Mike Schenk, chief economist at the Credit Union National Association, an industry trade group. "That you ought to pay for the services you use."

But the effect in many cases is that the people least able to bear the costs of operating a credit union are gradually paying more of them.

Overdraft fees in particular have provoked controversy within the credit union world. "We have a hard time taking seriously any depository institution claim to trying to serve the underserved, making credit available to financially distressed people and charging those same people $30 to $35 for overdraft," said Rebecca Borné, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, which is affiliated with the Self-Help Credit Union.

The Marriott credit union, whose membership of about 32,000 includes housekeepers, dishwashers and cooks, would seem to fill that bill. While fees can be an issue for any credit union with financially strapped members, Marriott's are unusually high: more than 1.7 percent of the credit union's assets. That is three times the percentage generated by fees at credit unions serving workers at Safeway, Publix and Nordstrom — broadly similar service-sector employers.

Glenn Newton, the credit union's chief executive, said that looking at such measures can be misleading because the modest wealth of his members leads to low average deposits. That leaves the credit union with less money for generating income. In effect, he said, the credit union must pay the same costs per member as other credit unions, but has fewer ways to offset those costs.

He urged adjusting the analysis to account for the small deposits — say, by considering how much greater its assets would be if its average deposit was more typical of the industry. That would bring the fee ratio in line with other service-sector credit unions.

As a practical matter, however, the fees that an average Marriott credit union member pays across all services — $94 last year — are far higher than at these other institutions, and higher than at credit unions of a similar size.

Fewer Hours, More Temps

Jose Ramirez Paredes makes just over $13 an hour cleaning banquet rooms and other public areas at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. Mr. Ramirez Paredes said through an interpreter that he helped support his stepson, as well as a daughter and two grandchildren living nearby. He sells Amway products on the side to cover his expenses, which include a mortgage and a car payment that together cost him about $1,000 per month.

But even so, he often falls short. The August statement for Mr. Ramirez Paredes's credit union account shows more than $800 in overdraft fees so far this year. Mr. Newton said that overdraft fees had declined by nearly 10 percent between 2013 and last year, and that he believed such cases were unusual.

Workers like Mr. Ramirez Paredes and Mr. Troyah say their financial problems are heightened by Marriott's decision to rely more on temps and less on full-time employees, who have seen their hours cut back and their annual earnings fall. According to Rachel Gumpert, a spokeswoman for Unite Here, the union that represents the company's striking workers, a central issue in the dispute is that workers are having to hold down multiple jobs to support themselves because they aren't receiving enough hours at the hotel chain.

Mr. Ramirez Paredes says that even though he is considered a full-time employee, he is frequently assigned to work only three or four days per week, sometimes as little as one day. (If his hours in a six-month period fall too much, he will lose his full-time status.) Mr. Troyah's W-2 forms show that his income declined from about $34,000 in 2016 to about $28,000 in 2017 because, he says, Marriott cut his hours.

Both men said that they had asked their managers why they didn't receive more hours, and that the managers had told them business was slow. But that claim was at odds with the presence of workers dispatched from staffing firms. Marriott declined to comment.

The Math of the Mini-Loan

Lekesha Wheelings, who has worked as a line cook at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown for the past 12 years, says that she makes just over $19 an hour, but that she, too, is sometimes sent home early and ends up with fewer than 40 hours per week.

Ms. Wheelings, who lives with her eldest daughter and supports twin 17-year-old children, said she made nearly $45,000 in 2016, but only about $39,500 last year because she worked less.

To cope with the strain in her personal finances, Ms. Wheelings has at times resorted to what is known as a mini-loan from the credit union, a six-month loan of up to $500 with an 18 percent interest rate — generally the legal limit for federal credit unions — and a $35 application fee. Including the fee, the effective annual interest rate on such a loan is about 40 to 50 percent.

Some consumer-finance experts say banks and credit unions should be allowed to expand higher-interest lending so they will have an incentive to serve members who are high credit risks. "On a $500 six-month loan, even if underwriting and origination are very, very simple, that's not profitable," said Alex Horowitz of the Pew Charitable Trusts, of the 40 to 50 percent annualized rate. The alternative for many borrowers would be payday loans, which commonly charge annualized rates over 300 percent.

But even more reasonably priced short-term loans can hurt those with the most precarious finances, making them more likely to run up fees on the checking side. "If someone can't afford more debt, the expectation is that it would increase their overall financial burden and lead to more overdraft fees," Ms. Borné said of the mini-loans.

During the months in which she was repaying a mini-loan beginning in late 2014, the Marriott credit union deducted at least $450 in overdraft fees from Ms. Wheelings's checking account, according to her statements. The loan repayment left less money for such expenses as an $8.47 Netflix subscription and a $17 membership in a legal assistance service, but the overdraft protection allowed them to glide through each month, at a steep markup.

Ms. Wheelings says she plans to keep using the credit union but would like to pay fewer fees. Mr. Ramirez Paredes, alarmed by the fees, says he plans to close his account.

Big Mortgages for Some

By contrast, more affluent workers, including some executives at Marriott, appear to benefit at little cost from the credit union, securing favorable interest rates on car loans and mortgages while largely avoiding heavy fees.

Public records show that several current and former executives have obtained large mortgages from the credit union. They include Don Cleary, the Canada president for Marriott International, who received a $1 million mortgage in December 2016; William McGowan, a longtime design and project manager ($875,000 in December 2014); Michael Rhoads, senior director of international accounting ($825,000 in November 2016); and Norman Jenkins, a former senior vice president ($765,000 in February 2017).

The most common rate that the Marriott credit union reported for mortgages in the fourth quarter of last year was 3.38 percent, below the market average at the time, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Rank-and-file workers often can't obtain loans with such low rates, however, widening the disparities. In contrast to the car loans below 2.5 percent that the Marriott credit union currently advertises for those with sterling credit, workers with only fair credit — a FICO score in the low 600s — can pay more than 8 percent. Those with poor credit can pay more than 12 percent if they can get a loan at all. And the credit union approves few mortgages, period.

"The proper comparison isn't whether or not an hourly associate has access to the same loans or interest rates as a company executive," said Mr. Newton, the chief executive. "Rather, it's whether the credit union offers value to the members, based on their individual credit profile, versus what they could have received at other financial institutions."

Mr. Newton said the loans the credit union does offer to low-paid workers, like the mini-loan, are a more affordable option than products they could obtain elsewhere, such as payday loans.

Close Connections

Credit unions are legally separate from the companies whose employees they serve. But there is often significant overlap between managers of the two organizations.

At the Marriott credit union, five board members are Marriott employees with "vice president" in their title; three are employees with "director" in their title. The only "on property" employee on the board is the general manager of the Bethesda Suites Marriott in Maryland.

While any member can run for a seat on a credit union's board, many boards are stacked with company executives and those with financial expertise to oversee their increasingly sophisticated operations.

Some credit unions take steps to make sure they remain sensitive to the needs of members. The State Employees' Credit Union in North Carolina maintains a local advisory council composed of workers at each of its more than 250 branches, in addition to its board. The local bodies meet with managers four times a year and are apt to give them an earful if they encounter fees or lending policies that workers regard as unfair. That approach is relatively uncommon in the industry, though Mr. Newton said the Marriott credit union had periodically sought feedback from members in surveys.

"Members should elect the board to look after their own interests, and one of those should be balancing who pays for what," said Jim Blaine, who ran the State Employees' Credit Union for decades before retiring in 2016. But in practice, he added, "you can have a board of senior managers who truly don't understand that 75 percent of people live paycheck to paycheck."

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13) White Americans Gain the Most From Trump's Tax Cuts, Report Finds
By Jin Tankersley, October 11, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/business/trump-tax-cuts-white-americans.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

The tax cuts that President Trump signed into law last year are disproportionately helping white Americans over African-Americans and Latinos, a disparity that reflects longstanding racial economic inequality in the United States and the choices that Republicans made in crafting the law.

The finding comes from a new analysis of the $1.5 trillion tax cut using an economic model built by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank, and released in a joint report with Prosperity Now, a nonprofit focused on helping low-income Americans attain wealth and financial stability. It is the first detailed analysis of the law to break down its effects by race.

White Americans earn about 77 percent of total income in the United States, but they are getting nearly 80 percent of the benefits of the individual and business tax cuts generated by the new law, the analysis found. African-Americans received about 5 percent of the benefits, despite earning 6 percent of the nation's income. Latinos got about 7 percent, although their share of all income is 8 percent.

In total, the analysis estimates, whites will get about $218 billion in tax cuts this year as a result of the law. Black and Latino Americans will get about $32 billion combined.

The analysis starts with a simulation of the law's effects on Americans by income group, using historical tax data. On that front, its conclusions closely track those of distributional analyses by the Tax Policy Center and the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress' scorekeeper on the effects of the cuts. Both found that the vast majority of the law's benefits would flow to the top 20 percent of American income earners.

The economic policy institute's model extends those analyses by combining tax data with race and ethnicity data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. It took months to build. 

The racial divide highlighted by the analysis is largely a product of the financial advantages that white people have long held. They earn more on average than black or Latino Americans, and are far more likely to be among the top income earners in the country. That means they were better positioned to gain from a law that delivered higher benefits to top earners, in total dollars and in percentage terms, than low- and middle-income Americans. 

"The average income for white taxpayers is significantly higher than for black or Latino taxpayers," said Meg Wiehe, the economic policy's institute's deputy director. "That's a huge driver."

As a result, the average tax cut going to a white American household is more than double one going to a black or Latino one. The study found that the group getting the highest average cut was Asian-Americans, who have the highest average income of any of the groups.

It appears, though, that even among top earners, whites have fared better than other Americans under the law — probably because the tax cuts affect individual taxpayers differently depending on how they make their money.

High-earning white taxpayers, for example, are more likely to own so-called pass-through companies like limited liability corporations, and pay taxes on their profits through the individual income tax code. The new law includes a special 20 percent deduction for pass-through income, subject to some limitations. The pass-through break does not apply to high earners like professional athletes who get most of their money from salaries. 

The average tax cut, as a share of pretax income, for a white or Asian-American household in the top 1 percent of income earners was nearly 3 percent, the analysis found. For Latinos, it was 1.7 percent. For blacks, it was 1.2 percent.

"Even if you're a successful black or Latino household in the top 1 percent, you've achieved the American dream, you've hit it out of the park," said David Newville, director of federal policy at Prosperity Now, he said, "you're still not getting the same returns from this bill as a white household."

The report's authors note that Congress could have structured the cuts differently in ways that targeted lower- and middle-income taxpayers more directly. They also stress that by steering more money to whites, the law could exacerbate an already stark racial wealth divide in the United States.

The Census Bureau reported last month that the median income for white/non-Hispanic households in 2017 was $68,145. For black households, it was $40,258. For Hispanic households of any race it was $50,486. 

White/non-Hispanic households make up about two-thirds of all households in the country, the census figures show. Blacks and Hispanicseach comprise about 13 percent of households. 

A poll conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey finds that white Americans are far more likely to approve of the new tax law than those aren't white. The poll found that 55 percent of whites approved of the law, compared with 40 percent of Hispanics and 33 percent of blacks.

"Congress missed a tremendous opportunity" with the tax law, the report's authors write, "to help low- and moderate-income families — particularly those of color — build the wealth needed to secure their share of the American Dream." 

The analysis found that one way in which the cuts were relatively colorblind: Those geared toward middle-class families were, as a share of income, roughly the same across races. 

But because so many more white taxpayers are in the middle quintile of income earners compared with blacks and Latinos, the white middle class reaped much larger benefits: just over $15 billion total, compared with just over $3 billion for middle-income Latinos and just over $2 billion for middle-income blacks.

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14) E.P.A. to Disband a Key Scientific Review Panel on Air Pollution

By Lisa Friedman, October 11, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/climate/epa-disbands-pollution-science-panel.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

Traffic in Los Angeles. One critic said the E.P.A. was trying to “cut science out” of policy decisions.

WASHINGTON — An Environmental Protection Agency panel that advises the agency’s leadership on the latest scientific information about soot in the atmosphere is not listed as continuing its work next year, an E.P.A. official said.

The 20-person Particulate Matter Review Panel, made up of experts in microscopic airborne pollutants known to cause respiratory disease, is responsible for helping the agency decide what levels of pollutants are safe to breathe. Agency officials declined to say why the E.P.A. intends to stop convening the panel next year, particularly as the agency considers whether to revise air quality standards. 

Environmental activists criticized the move as a way for the Trump administration to avoid what they described as the panel’s lengthy but critical assessment of how much exposure to particulate matter is acceptable in the atmosphere.

“To me this is part of a pattern,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science-oriented environmental nonprofit. “We’re seeing E.P.A. trying to cut science out of the process.”

She and others noted that the move follows other decisions at the E.P.A. they find worrisome, including eliminating a senior science advisory position and pressing for new rules that would restrict the number and type of studies the E.P.A. could consider when writing new regulations.

Dr. Goldman, an environmental engineer, wrote on Twitter that the E.P.A. quietly telegraphed its latest move in a personnel announcement Wednesday. In that announcement, the E.P.A. said that a smaller, seven-person umbrella advisory board would from now on be conducting reviews of federal air standards and that the administration hoped to complete any revisions by late 2020.

When asked about the future of the larger, 20-person scientific board, the E.P.A. spokesman confirmed that the board was not “listed” in agency documents as continuing its work past 2018. The body is slated to meet in December.

The EPA is responsible for updating six air standards every five years under the Clean Air Act: carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, lead, and ozone.

The smaller, seven-member group, known as the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or C.A.S.A.C., is legally obligated to provide advice to the administrator about those air quality standards. But the work of its sub-panels, such as the one on particulate matter, is not required by law. 

Those panels are typically made up of researchers, doctors and others with specific expertise in the individual pollutants. Their reviews can take as long as 18 months, Dr. Goldman said.

At the same time, the C.A.S.A.C. also is going through a shake-up. Andrew Wheeler, the acting administrator of the E.P.A., announced Wednesday he was installing new members to that panel. They include a biochemist from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; an air pollution control engineer with the Jefferson County, Ala., Department of Health; a toxicologist with the Utah Department of Environmental Quality; and a pulmonary doctor and professor emeritus from the University of Rochester Medical Center. 

Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington who until Wednesday served as a member of the C.A.S.A.C. and also is on the particulate-matter review board, expressed concern that the resulting panel may be too small and inexperienced in some of the specific issues to handle the new volume of work.

“They’re being asked to implement a new process, which will significantly increase their workload,” Dr. Sheppard said. “All of this will result in poorer-quality scientific oversight.” 

Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank that supports fossil fuels, dismissed concerns about the changes. “Apparently it seems the enviros still don’t understand that elections have consequences,” he said.

Last year Scott Pruitt, Mr. Wheeler’s predecessor, barred advisory committee members from also receiving E.P.A. grants, a change he said was designed to limit conflicts of interest. It also had the effect of making it harder for academic researchers to participate on agency boards. With Mr. Wheeler’s additions to the panel, the C.A.S.A.C. board now has only one researcher.

Mr. Wheeler, in a statement, praised the group as being highly qualified with a diverse set of backgrounds needed to take on new responsibilities. 

“These experts will provide critical scientific advice to E.P.A. as it evaluates where to set national standards for key pollutants like ozone and particulate matter,” he said, adding the group would “work hard over the next two years to advise E.P.A. in a manner consistent with the Clean Air Act and the protection of public health.”

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15)  Afghan War Casualty Report: Oct. 5-11
Reporting was contributed by the following New York Times reporters: Rod Nordland, Mujib Mashal, Fahim Abed and Fatima Faizi from Kabul; Najim Rahim from Pul-i-Kumri; Taimoor Shah from Kandahar; Farooq Jan Mangal from Khost; Mohammad Saber from Herat; Zabihullah Ghazi from Jalalabad; and an employee of The New York Times from Ghazni. October 12, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/magazine/afghan-war-casualty-report.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=8&pgtype=sectionfront

One attack by the Taliban, on an Afghan police headquarters in Wardak Province killed 14 officers on Oct. 7.

The Times bureau in Kabul mobilized all of its stringers and Afghan reporters to record every attack on the Afghan security forces and civilians that they could find, as a weekly chronicle of the war. 

The number of casualties across Afghanistan increased compared to the previous week, occurring in 13 provinces, even as the weather has turned cold in many parts of the country. The week saw fewer attacks by Taliban fighters compared to last week, but more deaths among security forces. The Times confirmed reports of 96 security force members and 31 civilians killed in the past week.

[Read the Afghan War casualty report for Sept. 28-Oct. 4]

Oct. 11 Jowzjan Province: six security forces killed

Three soldiers, two police officers and one member of the National Directorate of Security were killed in Taliban attacks on Qarqin District. The Taliban suffered an unknown number of casualties.

Oct. 11 Kunduz Province: 15 border police killed

The Taliban attacked six security outposts in Qala-i-Zal District, killing 15 border police and wounding 18 others. One of the security outposts was overtaken by the Taliban. The attack was carried out by a Taliban Red Unit. Seven Taliban militants were killed in the fighting.

Oct. 10 Paktia Province: two border police killed

The Taliban attacked border police outposts in Patan District. Two border police officers were killed and two pro-government militias were wounded. More than a dozen Taliban were also killed and wounded.

Oct. 10 Jowzjan Province: one police killed 

One police officer was killed in a Taliban attack on security outposts in Burka District.

Oct. 10 Sar-e-Pul Province: six police officers and pro-government militia killed

Six police officers and pro-government militia members were killed and eight others were wounded in clashes between government forces and local militia groups in Balkhab District.

[Get a weekly roundup of Times’ coverage of war delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.]

Oct. 10 Ghazni Province: three public order police and three national police killed

The Taliban attacked Waghaz District, killing six police officers — three Afghan National Civil Order Police and three national police officers — and wounding two more.

Two police officers were wounded in a Taliban attack in Deh Yak District.

Oct. 09 Jowzjan Province: one soldier killed

One soldier was killed in a Taliban attack on security outposts in Burka District.

Oct. 09 Sar-e-Pul Province: one pro-government militia killed and four wounded

The Taliban attacked Sancharak District, killing one pro-government militia member and wounding four others.

Oct. 09 Helmand Province: eight civilians killed and 12 wounded

An explosion at a rally in Lashkar Gah for Haji Salih Mohammad, a parliamentary candidate in the coming election, left eight civilians dead and wounded 12 others.

Oct. 09 Ghazni Province: one soldier killed

The Taliban attacked an army base in Andar District, killing one soldier and wounding four others. Meanwhile, NATO forces launched operations in multiple districts of Ghazni against the Taliban, which suffered heavy casualties in these operations.

Oct. 08 Zabul Province: one police officer killed

The Taliban attacked security outposts in Mizan District. A police officer and three members of the Taliban, including a group commander, were killed in the clashes.

Oct. 08 Faryab Province: two soldiers killed

The Taliban attacked the center of Almar District, where the fighting continued until the next day. Two soldiers were killed.

Oct. 08 Jowzjan Province: 15 members of security forces killed 

Thirteen soldiers and two members of the National Directorate of Security were killed, and 20 soldiers and four police officers were wounded in Taliban attacks on military bases in Qush Tepa District. The fighting continued for 11 hours. Two military bases were overtaken by the Taliban.

Oct. 07 Kabul Province: one civilian killed

An I.E.D. explosion in Kabul city killed one civilian and wounded one civilian and one police officer.

Oct. 07 Kandahar Province: five police officers killed

The Taliban attacked police outposts in Jahangir village of Arghistan District. Five police officers were killed and seven others were wounded in the clashes. Thirteen Taliban fighters were also killed and 17 others were wounded. None of the security outposts fell to the Taliban; reinforcements from the district center forced the Taliban to flee.

Oct. 07 Wardak Province: 14 police officers killed

The police chief of Sayed Abad District and 13 other police officers were killed in attacks on the district center. A number of security outposts were captured by the Taliban, but then taken back by Afghan security forces, who arrived to support the police forces.

Oct. 07 Faryab Province: 10 members of security forces and a woman were killed

The Taliban attacked and destroyed an Afghan National Police outpost and an Afghan Local Police outpost in Pashtoon Kot District. Ten police officers and a female civilian were killed and five police officers were wounded in the clashes between the Taliban and security forces. Reinforcements that tried to reach the area were also ambushed by the Taliban.

[Read 17 Years to the Day the U.S. Invaded, 54 Are Killed Across Afghanistan]

Oct. 06 Paktia Province: 10 civilians killed

Ten civilians were killed and at least 20 were wounded in airstrikes in Gerda Serai District that were carried out after an attack on campaign provincial forces, a group of Afghan forces supported by Americans in Paktia.

Oct. 06 Ghazni Province: one soldier killed

The Taliban attacked a military outpost in Qazi village of Khogyani District of Ghazni. One soldier was killed and two others were wounded. The Taliban also suffered an unknown number of casualties.

Oct. 06 Ghor Province: seven civilians and four police killed

Clashes between Afghan forces and a local militia left seven civilians and four police dead.

Oct. 06 Kabul Province: one police and one civilian killed 

Two roadside mines exploded in Kabul, killing one police officer and one civilian and wounding nine civilians.

Oct. 06 Kunduz Province: four police killed and one wounded

The Taliban attacked a police checkpoint in Qala-e-Zal District, killing four police officers and wounding one other.

Oct. 05 Khost Province: two civilians killed 

Two civilians were killed when an I.E.D. exploded in their home in Ismail Khail Aw Mondozai District. Three children were wounded in the explosion.

Oct. 05 Khost Province: A bodyguard of parliament candidate killed 

An I.E.D. attached to a vehicle exploded in Khost city, killing the bodyguard of a parliament candidate and wounding four others.

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16) Every Older Patient Has a Story. Medical Students Need to Hear It.
At more than 20 medical schools in the United States, students are getting an earful — about life, about perspective — from healthy seniors.
By Paula Span, October 12. 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/health/elderly-patients-medical-training.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront

Elizabeth Shepherd, left, and Dr. Ronald Adelman, a geriatrician at Weill Cornell Medical School, with second-year medical students.

Whatever the cluster of second-year students at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York expected to hear from an 82-year-old woman — this probably wasn’t it.

At first, Elizabeth Shepherd, one of several seniors invited to meet with future doctors in an anti-ageism program called “Introduction to the Geriatric Patient,” largely followed the script.

As student Zachary Myslinski, 24, read off questions from a standard assessment tool, she responded in matter-of-fact tones.

Health conditions? 

Macular degeneration, replied Ms. Shepherd, a working actor who also teaches Shakespeare at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. But she was getting treatment.

Recent falls? 

Just one, when she missed a bottom step. “In the subway! In public! That was no fun.”

Weight loss? 

“Unfortunately not.”

Ms. Shepherd, elegant in an animal-print tunic and dangly earrings, easily tucked her hands behind her head, displaying good range of motion. She remembered three words — “pineapple, blue, honesty” — when asked to recall them several minutes later in a cognitive test.

But after telling her rapt audience that she’d raised a son born “out of wedlock” in 1964 and had divorced twice, she added, “I emigrated to Lesbianland for a little while in my 50s.”

Eventually returning to heterosexual relationships, she continued, she met a 90-year-old online and had “the most wonderful summer with this man.” She’s now involved with a 55-year-old, she added. But “he’s in Afghanistan at the moment, so my sex life is not as active as I’d like.”

Dr. Ronnie LoFaso, the faculty geriatrician guiding the session, said, “This is taking an interesting turn.”

But that was the point, really. 

“It’s important that they don’t think life stops as you get older,” Ms. Shepherd told me afterward. “So I decided I would be frank with them.”

Dr. Ronald Adelman, co-chief of geriatrics at Weill Cornell, developed this annual program — which includes a theater piece and is required for all second-year students — after he realized that medical students were getting a distorted view of older adults.

“Unfortunately, most education takes place within the hospital,” he told me. “If you’re only seeing the hospitalized elderly, you’re seeing the debilitated, the physically deteriorating, the demented. It’s easy to pick up ageist stereotypes.”

These misperceptions can influence people’s care. In another classroom down the hall, 88-year-old Marcia Levine, a retired family therapist, was telling students about a gastroenterologist who once dismissed her complaints of fatigue by saying, “At your age, you can’t expect to have much energy.” 

Then, in her 70s, she switched doctors and learned she had a low-grade infection.

At least 20 medical schools in the United States have undertaken similar efforts to introduce students to healthy, active elders, said Dr. Amit Shah, a geriatrician who helps direct the Senior Sages program at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine.

The programs take many forms, from Weill Cornell’s two-hour introduction to a semester-long curriculum at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Some schools, like the Medical University of South Carolina and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, match students with older patients they follow throughout their four-year educations, making home visits, accompanying their “senior mentors” to doctors’ appointments, and visiting them if they’re hospitalized.

Though the efforts can be voluntary or mandatory, can emphasize clinical skills or encourage new perspectives, they reflect broad agreement on the problems that ageism brings.

In health care, “you hear a lot of infantilizing language: ‘sweetie,’ ‘cutie,’ ‘honey,’” said Tracey Gendron, the gerontologist who started the senior mentoring program at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. “You hear that people are not worth treating because of their age.”

Interruptions are “ubiquitous in medical encounters,” said Dr. Adelman, but older patients contend with them more often.

Dr. Adelman has recorded and analyzed doctors visits in which a spouse or adult child accompanies a patient and begins asking and answering the questions. “The older person, who is cognitively fine, is just excluded, referred to as ‘he’ or ‘she,’” Dr. Adelman said. “It can undermine the relationship between the older patient and the doctor.”

More broadly, medical research often continues to exclude older people, forcing their doctors to make educated guesses about drugs and procedures, and how much they will help or hurt. 

Yet most doctors, if they’re not pediatricians, will spend much of their careers working with older people, becoming — to borrow a phrase from Dr. Donovan Maust, a geriatric psychiatrist at the University of Michigan — de facto geriatricians.

If medical students specialize in pulmonology, they’ll find that about 35 percent of their patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are over age 65, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported. 

Endocrinologists treating diabetics will learn that almost 40 percent will be 65-plus. In oncology, more than half of the survivors of all types of cancer are over age 65.

We’ll never have enough geriatricians to care for this growing older population, in part because it’s hard for doctors to pay off student loans and make a living when virtually all their patients are on Medicare.

Last year, there were just 7,279 certified geriatricians in the United States, only about half practicing full time. The supply is rising only modestly, while the demand will increase a projected 45 percent by 2025, according to the American Geriatrics Society.

Accordingly, many anti-ageism programs mandate participation by all incoming medical students. “The elderly are who they will be caring for,” Dr. Adelman said.

The efforts appear effective. Administrators point out that in longer programs, students and seniors often form friendships, sharing pizza or movies outside of required interviews.

An evaluation reviewing 10 senior mentoring programs, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, reported that “the universal goal of positively influencing student attitudes toward older adults was resoundingly achieved.”

The students meeting with Ms. Shepherd gave the hourlong session high marks. “Helpful and eye-opening,” said Sarita Ballakur, a 23-year-old from Andover, Mass.

“Her candor and openness were incredible,” said Jason Harris, 25. “An organ is an organ. A patient is who we’ll be dealing with in real life.”

“It made me more interested in working with an older patient population,” said Mr. Myslinski.

Why, then, aren’t there more such initiatives in the nation’s 151 M.D.-granting medical schools? They’re not particularly expensive, the evaluation found, and older people clamor to take part.

They do involve a fair amount of administrative time. And they require awareness of the particular challenges of this phase of life.

Ms. Shepherd was frank about that, too. 

When she turned 80, she told the students, “I began to realize, this really is different. To know that there are not so many years ahead. To think about how I want to spend the rest of my days. There was a new vulnerability.”

She appreciated that they had listened, she said afterward, calling the session “a gift to us, as well as to them. It’s an acknowledgment that we are important and of interest.”

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7) Citing Arbitrary Use and Racial Bias, Washington Supreme Court Abolishes State's Death Penalty
By Jon Queally, October 11. 2018
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/10/11/citing-arbitrary-use-and-racial-bias-washington-supreme-court-abolishes-states-death?cd-
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Scott Langley of Boston, Massachusetts, holds a banner during a vigil against the death penalty in front of the U.S. Supreme Court July 1, 2008 in Washington, DC. The Abolitionist Action Committee and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty held the vigil to abolish the death penalty to mark the 1972 and 1976 Supreme Court rulings suspending the death penalty and later allowing executions to resume. 

Citing racial bias and arbitrary application, the Supreme Court of Washington on Thursday ruled that the use of capital punishment violates the state's Constitution, a decision that will ban the use of the death penalty going forward and immediately commuted the sentences of death-row inmates to life terms.

"Today's decision by the state Supreme Court thankfully ends the death penalty in Washington," declared Washington's Democratic Governor Jay Inslee in response to the ruling.

"The court makes it perfectly clear that capital punishment in our state has been imposed in an 'arbitrary and racially biased manner,' is 'unequally applied' and serves no criminal justice goal," Inslee added. "This is a hugely important moment in our pursuit for equal and fair application of justice."

The ACLU noted the ruling makes Washington the 20th state in the U.S. to ban the death penalty, but the group said it "won't stop fighting until it's struck down everywhere in America."

As Slate reports:

the court held Thursday that capital punishment is imposed in "an arbitrary and racially biased manner" and "fails to serve any legitimate penological goals." The problems go beyond race: Most prosecutors in the state have stopped seeking the death penalty, so all current capital sentences arise from just six of Washington’s 39 counties. The location of your crime may therefore determine whether you live or die. This "random" and "capricious" application of the ultimate punishment, the court ruled, fatally undermines any state interest "retribution and deterrence of capital crimes by prospective offenders."

There are currently eight inmates on Washington's death row. The court converted their sentences to life imprisonment and forbade the state from conducting any further executions. Because its ruling is based entirely in the state constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court cannot overturn it. And the court left no room for future reconsideration of its unanimous decision. Capital punishment is over in Washington State.

Jeff Robinson, deputy legal director and director of the ACLU's Trone Center for Justice at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the court recognized clearly that racial bias remains at the heart of "who should and who should die" in the America's skewed justice system.

"There is nothing unique about the role racism played in Washington's death penalty," said Robinson. "What is rare is the Supreme Court’s willingness to call out the truth that has always been there."

Noting that both conscious and unconscious racial bias "plays a role in the death penalty decisions across America, influencing who faces this ultimate punishment, who sits on the jury, what kind of victim impact and mitigation evidence is used, and who is given life or death," Robinson said that this kind of "disparity can be described by many words — but justice is not one of them."

Human rights groups and other death penalty opponents said they hope that others states, and ultimately the U.S. federal government, will now follow the other twenty states and ban the death penalty nationwide:

"Washington's Supreme Court showed courage in refusing to allow racism to infect life and death decisions," said the ACLU's Robinson.  "Let's hope that courage is contagious."

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