*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Major George Tillery

MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION SEX FOR LIES AND MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY

April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony. These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors. Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters. Homicide detectives and prosecutors threatened Claitt with a false unrelated murder charge, and induced him to lie with promises of little or no jail time on over twenty pending felonies, and being released from jail despite a parole violation. In addition, homicide detectives arranged for Claitt, while in custody, to have private sexual liaisons with his girlfriends in police interview rooms. In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org. Without the coerced and false testimony of Claitt there was no evidence against Major Tillery. There were no ballistics or any other physical evidence linking him to the shootings. The surviving victim's statement naming others as the shooters was not allowed into evidence. The trial took place in May 1985 during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE family Osage Avenue home in Philadelphia that killed 13 Black people, including 5 children. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings. This was a frame-up conviction from top to bottom. Claitt was the sole or primary witness in five other murder cases in the early 1980s. Coercing and inducing jailhouse informants to falsely testify is a standard routine in criminal prosecutions. It goes hand in hand with prosecutors suppressing favorable evidence from the defense. Major Tillery has filed a petition based on his actual innocence to the Philadelphia District Attorney's Larry Krasner's Conviction Review Unit. A full review and investigation should lead to reversal of Major Tillery's conviction. He also asks that the DA's office to release the full police and prosecution files on his case under the new  "open files" policy. In the meantime, Major Tillery continues his own investigation. He needs your support. Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years The Pennsylvania courts have rejected three rounds of appeals challenging Major Tillery's conviction based on his innocence, the prosecution's intentional presentation of false evidence against him and his trial attorney's conflict of interest. On June 15, 2016 Major Tillery filed a new post-conviction petition based on the same evidence now in the petition to the District Attorney's Conviction Review Unit. Despite the written and video-taped statements from Emanuel Claitt that that his testimony against Major Tillery was a lie and the result of police and prosecutorial misconduct, Judge Leon Tucker dismissed Major Tillery's petition as "untimely" without even holding a hearing. Major Tillery appealed that dismissal and the appeal is pending in the Superior Court. During the decades of imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. In 1990, he won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA Department of Corrections (DOC) to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh, which later resulted in the closing and then "renovation" of that prison. Three years ago Major Tillery stood up for political prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because "Mumia is dying."  For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia was also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and a disciplinary penalty of months in solitary confinement. See, Messing with Major by Mumia Abu-Jamal. Major Tillery's federal lawsuit against the DOC for that retaliation is being litigated. Major Tillery continues as an advocate for all prisoners. He is fighting to get the DOC to establish a program for elderly prisoners. Major Tillery Needs Your Help: Well-known criminal defense attorney Stephen Patrizio represents Major pro bonoin challenging his conviction. More investigation is underway. We can't count on the district attorney's office to make the findings of misconduct against the police detectives and prosecutors who framed Major without continuing to dig up the evidence. Major Tillery is now 67 years old. He's done hard time, imprisoned for almost 35 years, some 20 years in solitary confinement in max prisons for a crime he did not commit. He recently won hepatitis C treatment, denied to him for a decade by the DOC. He has severe liver problems as well as arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, and a continuing itchy skin rash. Within the past couple of weeks he was diagnosed with an extremely high heartbeat and is getting treatment. Major Tillery does not want to die in prison. He and his family, daughters, sons and grandchildren are fighting to get him home. The newly filed petition for Conviction Review to the Philadelphia District Attorney's office lays out the evidence Major Tillery has uncovered, evidence suppressed by the prosecution through all these years he has been imprisoned and brought legal challenges into court. It is time for the District Attorney's to act on the fact that Major Tillery is innocent and was framed by police detectives and prosecutors who manufactured the evidence to convict him. Major Tillery's conviction should be vacated and he should be freed. Major Tillery and family HOW YOU CAN HELP Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom. Go to JPay.com; code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner: The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false. Call: 215-686-8000 or Email: justice@phila.gov Write to: Major Tillery AM 9786 SCI Frackville 1111 Altamont Blvd. Frackville, PA 17931 For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org Call/Write: Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com

Obtain Updates: www.justice4majortillery.info

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) Top Cancer Researcher Fails to Disclose Corporate Financial Ties in Major Research Journals

By Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas, September 8, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/health/jose-baselga-cancer-memorial-sloan-kettering.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

Dr. José Baselga, the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in 2015.

This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

One of the world's top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.

The researcher, Dr. José Baselga, a towering figure in the cancer world, is the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has held board memberships or advisory roles with Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb, among other corporations, has had a stake in start-ups testing cancer therapies, and played a key role in the development of breakthrough drugs that have revolutionized treatments for breast cancer.

According to an analysis by The New York Times and ProPublica, Dr. Baselga did not follow financial disclosure rules set by the American Association for Cancer Research when he was president of the group. He also left out payments he received from companies connected to cancer research in his articles published in the group's journal, Cancer Discovery. At the same time, he has been one of the journal's two editors in chief.

At a conference this year and before analysts in 2017, he put a positive spin on the results of two Roche-sponsored clinical trials that many others considered disappointments, without disclosing his relationship to the company. Since 2014, he has received more than $3 million from Roche in consulting fees and for his stake in a company it acquired.

Dr. Baselga did not dispute his relationships with at least a dozen companies. In an interview, he said the disclosure lapses were unintentional.

He stressed that much of his industry work was publicly known although he declined to provide payment figures from his involvement with some biotech startups. "I acknowledge that there have been inconsistencies, but that's what it is," he said. "It's not that I do not appreciate the importance."

Dr. Baselga's extensive corporate relationships — and his frequent failure to disclose them — illustrate how permeable the boundaries remain between academic research and industry, and how weakly reporting requirements are enforced by the medical journals and professional societies charged with policing them.

A decade ago, a series of scandals involving the secret influence of the pharmaceutical industry on drug research prompted the medical community to beef up its conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements. Ethicists worry that outside entanglements can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Disclosing those connections allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts.

"If leaders don't follow the rules, then we don't really have rules," said Dr. Walid Gellad, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh. "It says that the rules don't matter."

The penalties for such ethical lapses are not severe. The cancer research group, the A.A.C.R., warns authors who fill out disclosure forms for its journals that they face a three-year ban on publishing if they are found to have financial relationships that they did not disclose. But the ban is not included in the conflict-of-interest policy posted on its website, and the group said no author had ever been barred.

Many journals and professional societies do not check conflicts and simply require authors to correct the record.

Officials at the A.A.C.R., the American Society of Clinical Oncology and The New England Journal of Medicine said they were looking into Dr. Baselga's omissions after inquiries from The New York Times and ProPublica. The Lancet declined to say whether it would look into the matter.

Christine Hickey, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan Kettering, said that Dr. Baselga had properly informed the hospital of his outside industry work and that it was Dr. Baselga's responsibility to disclose such relationships to entities like medical journals. The cancer center, she said, "has a rigorous and comprehensive compliance program in place to promote honesty and objectivity in scientific research."

Asked if he planned to correct his disclosures, Dr. Baselga asked reporters what they would recommend. In a statement several days later, he said he would correct his conflict-of-interest reporting for 17 articles, including in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and the publication he edits, Cancer Discovery. He said that he did not believe disclosure was required for dozens of other articles detailing early stages of research.

"I have spent my career caring for cancer patients and bringing new therapies to the clinic with the goal of extending and saving lives," Dr. Baselga said in the statement. "While I have been inconsistent with disclosures and acknowledge that fact, that is a far cry from compromising my responsibilities as a physician, as a scientist and as a clinical leader."

The corporate imprint on cancer research

Dr. Baselga, 59, supervises clinical operations at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation's top cancer centers, and wields influence over the lives of patients and companies wishing to conduct trials there. He was paid more than $1.5 million in compensation by the cancer center in 2016, according to the hospital's latest available tax disclosures, but that does not include his consulting or board fees from outside companies.

Many top medical researchers have ties to the for-profit health care industry, and some overlap is seen as a good thing — after all, these are the companies charged with developing the drugs, medical devices and diagnostic tests of the future.

Dr. Baselga's relationship to industry is extensive. In addition to sitting on the board of Bristol-Myers Squibb, he is a director of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation equipment and for whom Memorial Sloan Kettering is a client.

In all, Dr. Baselga has served on the boards of at least six companies since 2013, positions that have required him to assume a fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of those companies, even as he oversees the cancer center's medical operations.

The hospital and Dr. Baselga said steps had been taken to prevent him from having a say in any business between the cancer center and the companies on whose boards he sits.

The chief executive of Memorial Sloan Kettering, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, settled lawsuits several years ago that were filed by the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliated research center. They contended that he hid research conducted while he was at Penn to start a new company, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and did not share the earnings. Dr. Thompson disputed the allegations. He now sits on the board of Merck, which manufactures Keytruda, a blockbuster cancer therapy.

Ms. Hickey said the cancer center cannot fulfill its charitable mission without working with industry. "We encourage collaboration and are proud that our work has led to the approval of novel, lifesaving cancer treatments for patients around the world," she said.

Some disclosures are required; others aren't

After the scandals a decade ago over lack of disclosure, the federal government began requiring drug and device manufacturers to publicly disclose payments to doctors in 2013.

From August 2013 through 2017, Dr. Baselga received nearly $3.5 million from nine companies, according to the federal Open Payments database, which compiles disclosures filed by drug and device companies.

Dr. Baselga has disclosed in other forums investments and advisory roles in biotech start-ups, but he declined to provide a tally of financial interests in those firms. Companies that have not received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for their products — projects still in the testing phases — do not have to report payments they make to doctors.

Serving on boards can be lucrative. In 2017, he received $260,000 in cash and stock awards to sit on Varian's board of directors, according to the company's corporate filings.

ProPublica and The Times analyzed Dr. Baselga's publications in medical journals since 2013, the year he joined Memorial Sloan Kettering. He failed to disclose any industry relationships in more than 100, or about 60 percent of the time, a figure that has increased with each passing year. Last year, he did not list any potential conflicts in 87 percent of the articles that he wrote or co-wrote.

Dr. Baselga compiled a color-coded list of his articles and offered a different interpretation. Sixty-two of the papers for which he did not disclose any potential conflict represented "conceptual, basic laboratory or translational work," and did not require one, he said. Questions could be raised about others, he said, but he added that most "had no clinical nor financial implications." That left the 17 papers he plans to correct.

Early-stage research often carries financial weight because it helps companies decide whether to move ahead with a product. In about two-thirds of Dr. Balsega's articles that lacked details of his industry ties, one or more of his co-authors listed theirs.

In 2015, Dr. Baselga published an article in the New England Journal about a Roche-sponsored trial of one of the company's drugs, Zelboraf. Despite his financial ties to Roche, he declared that he had "nothing to disclose." Fourteen of his co-authors reported ties to Roche.

Dr. Baselga defended the articles, saying that "these are high-quality manuscripts reporting on important clinical trials that led to a better understanding of cancer treatments."

The guidelines enacted by most major medical journals and professional societies ask authors and presenters to list recent financial relationships that could pose a conflict.

But much of this reporting still relies on the honor system. A study in August in the journal JAMA Oncology found that one-third of authors in a sample of cancer trials did not report all payments from the studies' sponsors.

"We don't routinely check because we don't have those kind of resources," said Dr. Rita F. Redberg, the editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, who has been critical of the influence of industry on medical practice. "We rely on trust and integrity. It's kind of an assumed part of the professional relationship."

Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for The New England Journal of Medicine, said in an email that it had now asked Dr. Baselga to amend his disclosures. She said the journal planned to overhaul its tracking of industry relationships.

The American Association for Cancer Research said it had begun an "extensive review" of the disclosure forms submitted by Dr. Baselga.

It said that it had never barred an author from publishing, and that "such an action would be necessary only in cases of egregious, consistent violations of the rules."

Among the most prominent relationships that Dr. Baselga has often failed to disclose is with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche and its United States subsidiary Genentech.

In June 2017, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, Dr. Baselga spoke at a Roche-sponsored investor event about study results that the company had been counting on to persuade oncologists to move patients from Herceptin — which was facing competition from cheaper alternatives — to a combination treatment involving Herceptin and a newer, more expensive drug, Perjeta.

The results were so underwhelming that Roche's stock fell 5 percent on the news. One analyst described the results as a "lead balloon," and an editorial in The New England Journal called it a "disappointment."

Dr. Baselga, however, told analysts that critiques were "weird" and "strange."

This June, at the same cancer conference, Dr. Baselga struck an upbeat note about the results of a Roche trial of the drug taselisib, saying in a blog post published on the cancer center website that the results were "incredibly exciting" while conceding the side effects from the drug were high.

That same day, Roche announced it was scrapping plans to develop the drug. The news was another disappointment involving the class of drugs called PI3K inhibitors, which is a major focus of Dr. Baselga's current research.

In neither case did Dr. Baselga reveal that his ties to Roche and Genentech went beyond serving as a trial investigator. In 2014, Roche acquired Seragon, a cancer research company in which Dr. Baselga had an ownership stake, for $725 million. Dr. Baselga received more than $3 million in 2014 and 2015 for his stake in the company, according to the federal Open Payments database.

From 2013 to 2017, Roche also paid Dr. Baselga more than $50,000 in consulting fees, according to the database.

These details were not included in the conflict-of-interest statements that are required of all presenters at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, although he did disclose ownership interests and consulting relationships with several other companies in the prior two years.

ASCO said it would conduct an internal review of Dr. Baselga's disclosures and would refer the findings to a panel.

Dr. Baselga said that he played no role in the Seragon acquisition, and that he had cut ties with Roche since joining the board of a competitor, Bristol-Myers, in March. As for his presentations at the ASCO meetings in the last two years, he said he had also noted shortcomings in the studies.

The combination of Perjeta with Herceptin was later approved by the F.D.A. for certain high-risk patients. As for taselisib, Dr. Baselga stands by his belief that the PI3K class of drugs will be an important target for fighting cancer.

Charles Ornstein is a senior editor at ProPublica.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

2) Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced

By Dave Zirin, September 7, 2018

https://www.thenation.com/article/colin-kaepernick-will-not-be-silenced/

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick on January 1, 2017.

With a new ad by Nike, and new recriminations from the amoral White House, Colin Kaepernick has been the leading topic of conversation as the NFL season gets underway. But lost in the debates about his Nike campaign—and people setting fire to their own sneakers—is what is new about his collusion case against the NFL.

On Thursday of last week, NFL franchise owners were dealt a serious blow when their efforts to dismiss Kaepernick's collusion case were denied by independent arbitrator Stephen Burbank. In his statement, released by Kaepernick's attorney Mark Geragos, Burbank wrote, "On August 28, 2018, the System Arbitrator denied the NFL's request that he dismiss Colin Kaepernick's complaint alleging that his inability to secure a player contract since becoming a free agent in March 2017 has been due to an agreement among team owners and the NFL that violates Article 17, Section 1 of the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFLPA [union]."

The significance of the ruling is not only that the NFL's efforts were stymied. The collective-bargaining agreement is central to the labor question in the arbitrator's ruling. As NFL veteran Russell Okung tweeted, "What started as a protest to highlight systemic injustice, continues to evolve & now encompass a legit labor dispute. Encouraged by the System Arbitrator's level headed interpretation of the CBA & decision to deny the NFL's request to dismiss @Kaepernick7's case. Huge! #ImWithKap"

If NFL owners were savvy, rather than mostly legacy billionaires who live in fear of Donald Trump's tweets, they would make every effort at this point to settle with Kaepernick. Geragos and his investigators have now been sanctioned to dig even deeper, to depose owners and executives and excavate the shadowy corners of the league that NFL owners seem to think is their birthright to keep hidden— that means e-mails, phone records, text messages. In addition, if found guilty of collusion—if Geragos can summon smoking-gun evidence, a whistle-blower or some tangible proof—the verdict could invalidate the league's collective-bargaining agreement with the players' union two and a half years before it is due to expire in 2021. With the season about to get underway, the NFL Players Association would have the ownership over the proverbial barrel.

But NFL owners' settling this case would be more surprising than a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl run. This is a predominantly conservative ownership fraternity that has a reservoir of cultural capital invested in making an example out of Colin Kaepernick. They need him to be a ghost story, a cautionary tale that can be used against any player who even dreams of using the NFL as a political platform to speak out against racism.

Already, this strategy has proven to be disastrous. Kaepernick has instead become first a martyr, someone whose memory inspired players to keep protesting last season, and then an icon of resistance, the kind of person who gets standing ovations at the US Open.

Even if NFL owners come to their senses and offer a settlement, Colin Kaepernick is not going to settle. He clearly believes that this is about more than money. It is about police violence and being vocal for those who don't have a voice. It is about standing up to this idea that billionaires seem to have that they can silence whomever they want without repercussions. This is so much bigger than the NFL. We are about to witness a case that will determine whether the powerful can treat free speech as a privilege. Colin Kaepernick is determined to define it as a right.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

3)  Don't Let Migrant Kids Rot

By The Editorial Board, September 9, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/opinion/editorials/dont-let-migrant-kids-rot.html

Undocumented immigrants at a bus station in McAllen, Tex.

For all the human brain's mysteries, its development is quite well understood. Early childhood and adolescence are crucial times of unparalleled neural growth. Just as trust and stability can enhance that growth, fear and trauma can impede it. Institutionalization, in particular, can have profound and deleterious effects, triggering a range of developmental delays and psychiatric disorders from which recovery can be difficult, if not impossible. 

In light of that knowledge, the Trump administration's latest move against immigrant children is especially troubling. On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security proposed new regulations that would allow the government to detain migrant children indefinitely. Officials are now prohibited from detaining such minors for more than 20 days by an agreement known as the Flores settlement, which has been in place since 1997. The new rules would end that settlement and would likely open the door to an expansion of detention centers across the country.

D.H.S. says that by eliminating Flores, officials will deter illegal immigration, reasoning that undocumented adults will be less likely to enter the country to begin with if they know they can't avoid long-term detention simply by having a child in tow. Immigration activists say the proposed rule's true aims are both simpler and more diabolical than that: "They want to strip away every last protection for detained immigrant children," says Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project.

Even with Flores in place, those protections have proved thin. Youth migrant shelters — there are roughly 100 such facilities housing more than 10,000 minors across the country — have been cited for a long list of abuses, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, blatant medical neglect, the forcible injection of antipsychotic medications, the unlawful restraint of children in distress and harsh rules that prohibit even siblings from hugging one another. The shelters in question, several of which are facing lawsuits, are part of a network that has received billions of federal dollars in the past four years alone. That money has continued to pour in even as abuse allegations have multiplied.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) Looking Our Racist History in the Eye

By Margaret Renkl, September 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/looking-our-racist-history-in-the-eye.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

A boy and his mother hold hands as they walk to school on the first day of desegregation in Nashville's public schools, Sept. 9, 1957. An exhibit of photographs at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville shatters the civic myth that the city peacefully accepted racial integration.

NASHVILLE — In 1960, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in this city, which was emerging as a training center for nonviolent protest. "I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration," he said, "but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community."

That movement was the work of people who later became some of the most influential figures in the national struggle for civil rights: James Lawson, John Lewis, Z. Alexander Looby, Diane Nash. When people today think of the civil rights era in the South, they think of Birmingham, Ala. They think of Little Rock, Ark. They think of Forsyth County, Ga., which warned African-Americans passing through not "to let the sun go down on your head." They don't think of Nashville.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prepares to address an audience at Fisk University in Nashville in 1960 following the bombing of the home of a prominent civil rights attorney.

But this was the first major city in the South to desegregate public facilities, lunch counters and movie theaters. It developed a calm, one-year-at-a-time approach to integrating city schools. When Ms. Nash, confronting Mayor Ben West, asked if it was wrong "to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of color," Mr. West answered, simply, "Yes."

These are the stories Nashville tells itself again and again: We aren't like the rest of the South. Dr. King said so.

The problem with civic memory is that it is both true and deeply false. Some layer of reality inevitably undergirds a public fairy tale. A myth always contains enough truth to make it seem like the final word. But there's no such thing as the final word. That's because any history is a narrative construction, one that files off the roughest edges of the story. The past itself is shaggy, troubled, unruly. It will not be contained. William Faulkner said it best: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Here's what's true: Nashville did not attack its own children with fire hoses, as Birmingham did. Tennessee did not call out the National Guard to integrate its universities, as Mississippi did. There is no "Bloody Sunday" in our history, as there is in the history of Selma, Ala. But our stories about the orderly desegregation of schools and the peaceful desegregation of lunch counters and the benign treatment of black people by the white people in power? That's all a myth.

"We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957-1968," a set of photographs assembled by the Frist Art Museum, exposes such mythmaking for what it is. The collection features work by photographers at Nashville's two daily newspapers, The Tennessean and the now-defunct Nashville Banner, taken during the African-American struggle for civil rights in the city. Very few of these images were published; only a handful were seen by people of the time.

Part of the collection is on display in the museum's ground-level public gallery, through which virtually all visitors pass. The full collection appears in a companion book just released by Vanderbilt University Press. Because of the violence depicted in them, the most troubling images appear only in the book. "As a mother of young children, I very conscientiously attempted to address the dark moments of the history, but without the images that may be viewed as most disturbing, especially for a family unprepared for what they were going to see or even participants in the movement who may still be traumatized by their experience," said exhibit curator Kathryn Delmez.

Z. Alexander Looby, a civil rights attorney and Nashville City Council member, right, survived an early dawn bombing that destroyed his home in 1960. The remains of his house, left.

One 1957 photo depicts a crowd gathered in the middle of the night outside the newly integrated Hattie Cotton School, which had been bombed shortly after midnight. A photo from 1960 shows the aftermath of a bomb set off at the home of Mr. Looby, an attorney who defended sit-in demonstrators in court. Another, from 1962, depicts the Rev. Cephus Coleman standing in front of his own house as it burns to the ground. Two 1963 photos show a girl — all of 15 — lying unconscious in the street, beaten by a police officer with a club. In another photo from 1963, an effigy of Dr. King is hung by the neck in the headquarters of the Nashville police.

The civil rights era in Nashville, in other words, was "peaceful" only in the context of the even greater brutality of our neighbors to the south.

Rev. Cephus C. Coleman (center), a minister, watches as his home burns. In a predominantly white neighborhood it was the third blaze to break out in the same night, Aug. 7, 1962.

And to the north and west, too. People in other parts of the country like to imagine that their own histories contain nothing like the dark shame of racism that haunts the South, but that belief, too, is a myth. In 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed, there were protests and violence in Chicago; St. Augustine, Fla.; Tulsa, Okla.; New York City; Rochester, N.Y.; Philadelphia and Jersey City. In Cambridge, Md., National Guard troops — bayonets drawn — surrounded black people kneeling in prayer.

For some time now, Nashville's civic institutions have been issuing correctives to the persistent myth of peaceful integration here. The astonishing Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library tells the whole story of African-Americans' struggle for full civil rights in Nashville. The nonprofit organization Historic Nashville offers a tour of civil rights landmarks in the city. Last year, The Tennessean published a series of unvarnished stories about the conflicts of that time. In 2016, when Representative Lewis returned to Nashville to accept the Nashville Public Library Literary Award for his National Book Award-winning graphic memoir, "March: Book Three," the mayor gave him prints of his first police mug shots, taken after his arrest at the lunch counter sit-ins and long believed to be lost to history. In Nashville, we no longer want our ugliest moments to be lost to history.

The photography exhibit at the Frist closes Oct. 14, but this record of Nashville's past will endure: Copies of the companion volume to the photography exhibit will be distributed to all branches of the Nashville Public Library and to every public school in the city, and all members of the Tennessee General Assembly will receive a copy to deliver to the public libraries in their own communities. Here's hoping they pause to take a look first. There's a truth in these photographs that many of them have likely never seen before.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

5) Rich Nations Vowed Billions for Climate Change. Poor Countries Are Waiting.

By Mike Ives, September 9, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/world/asia/green-climate-fund-global-warming.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

Farmers on a parched field in Bang Pla Ma district, north of Bangkok, in 2015.

HONG KONG — When industrialized nations pledged in 2009 to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help the poorest countries deal with climate change, it won over some skeptics in the developing world who had argued that rich nations should pay up for contributing so much to the problem.

But the money has been slow to materialize, with only $3.5 billion actually committed out of $10.3 billion pledged to a prominent United Nations program called the Green Climate Fund. President Trump's decision last year to cancel $2 billion in promised aid did not help.

At a climate change conference in Thailand this past week, some delegates reached by telephone said that the setting — the heart of Southeast Asia, a region where challenges relating to warming are readily apparent — was grimly fitting. They described the United Nations program's shortcomings as a symbol of a broken promise.

"The fund of hope is becoming a fund of hopelessness," said Meena Raman, legal adviser to the Third World Network, an advocacy group in Malaysia, and a former nonvoting member of the Green Climate Fund's board.

The meeting in Bangkok of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a prelude to a larger one in December in Poland, where countries will try to set rules for carrying out the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The Bangkok meeting did not specifically address financing to mitigate climate change. But it came two months after disagreements among the Green Climate Fund's board members prevented the fund from approving new projects at a routine meeting.

Activists demonstrating in front of the United Nations building on Friday in Bangkok, where a climate change conference was being held.

Some observers say the fund's funding shortfall and bureaucratic malaise have dimmed expectations for the talks in Poland, which were already bound to be difficult.

"The lack of real money coming through is really undermining trust in the negotiations" around how to put the Paris accord in place, said Brandon Wu, the director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, an advocacy group that monitored the Bangkok meeting. "That's a big part of the logjam."

The Green Climate Fund was designed to help developing countries prepare for climate disasters and develop low-fossil-fuel economies. It was part of a larger plan, led by Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state in 2009, to put together $100 billion a year for poor economies through a combination of government contributions and private investments.

Many academics see contributions to the fund by wealthy countries as a moral imperative, arguing that the developing world is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change but least responsible for causing them.

"Certainly, the richer countries should bear more of the burden in the G.C.F. because they have more means and more at stake," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, referring to the fund by its initials. "Richer countries also have benefited from wealth accumulated over decades when climate issues were not at the forefront."

The Obama administration delivered $1 billion of a $3 billion pledge to the program. But last year, Mr. Trump, while announcing plans to exit the Paris accord, said the United States would no longer pay into the Green Climate Fund. He explained his decision by saying that the contributions could eventually cost the United States "billions and billions and billions" of dollars.

Ms. Raman said that while she still hoped to see other developed nations "step up" by contributing more to the fund, they had not yet made their exact commitments clear.

An Indonesian woman and child walking through a thick haze shrouding the city of Palangkaraya, Indonesia, in 2015.

"We're very horrified by the stance taken by the United States, but it's not the only one," she said. "All the developed countries are united around the United States in not making any progress on finance."

World leaders vowed in Paris to avoid a warming of 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a threshold that they deemed unacceptably risky. Yet there are widely varying estimates of how much money is being spent on fighting climate change in poor economies. One reason for the discrepancy is that there is no consensus over which contributions should be counted in the tally.

And critics of the Green Climate Fund have questioned why much of the money it is distributing has been channeled through large development banks, or private-sector enterprises led by global investment firms. They argue that more climate aid should go directly to governments in the developing world, or the communities at risk.

"We want money, but we're hard-pressed to give our full blessing to the projects coming on board," said Lidy Nacpil, the coordinator of the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development, a regional alliance of nonprofits and community groups.

But even critics of the fund worry about the shortfall, saying it poses risks for people in poor regions where governments are either unable or unwilling to spend more on climate mitigation and adaptation.

The initial, Obama-era goal of securing $100 billion in climate finance and investment per year by 2020 "was the amount needed by the countries to implement their ambitions," said Neha Rai, an expert on climate finance at the International Institute for Environment and Development, a think tank in Britain. "But at the same time, irrespective of the amount, it gives a policy signal that climate-relevant investments are important."

Southeast Asia is a case in point.

People who live in the Asia-Pacific region are "particularly vulnerable" to the effects of a changing climate, the Asian Development Bank said last year in a report, which projected Southeast Asia to be "most affected by heat extremes" in the wider area by the end of the century.

Rowing boats through the streets of Hanoi after floods last month. Vietnam said state investments could provide only 30 percent of what it needs to adapt.

Of 74 approved Green Climate Fund projects worth $3.5 billion, three are in Southeast Asia and they have a combined value of nearly $156 million, according to data provided by the program. Nineteen others in the program's pipeline directly target the region and are worth $904 million.

Ms. Nacpil said climate finance was important in Southeast Asia partly because so many cities are in coastal areas that are vulnerable to sea-level rise and must adapt. And because the number of coal-fired power plants in the region is expected to increase, she added, governments should be encouraged to bend national policies toward investments in renewable energy.

Jenty Kirsch-Wood, a climate specialist with the United Nations Development Program, defended the Green Climate Fund by pointing to its benefits in Vietnam, where part of a $30 million grant from the program has funded the distribution of free, storm-resistant housing to people in typhoon-prone coastal areas.

"The Green Climate Fund has revitalized hope for countries like Vietnam that they can meet their Paris agreement targets — embracing the green energy revolution, but also helping their citizens to adapt to climate change," Ms. Kirsch-Wood said.

But $30 million goes only so far in a country of 93 million people with an economy worth more than $200 billion and a long, exposed coastline. And in a 2015 climate plan submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention, Vietnam said that state investments could provide only 30 percent of what it needs to adapt.

"Many developing countries have made clear that they will not be able to reach their Paris agreement targets without international climate finance," said Oyun Sanjaasuren, the Green Climate Fund's director of external affairs.

"For its part, G.C.F.'s pipeline of climate projects in developing countries shows that demand for climate finance already exceeds supply," she said.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

6) Dallas Officer Charged With Manslaughter After Killing Neighbor in His Apartment

By Sarah Mervosh and Matt Stevens, September 9, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/us/amber-guyger-dallas-police-shooting.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Officer Amber Guyger, 30, was arrested on Sunday on a charge of manslaughter.

A Dallas police officer was arrested on Sunday, three days after she shot and killed a neighbor in his apartment, claiming she mistook the unit for her own and the man for an intruder, the authorities said.

The officer, Amber R. Guyger, 30, was charged with manslaughter and booked into the Kaufman County jail. She was freed on $300,000 bail on Sunday night.

Her arrest followed days of rising tensions in the community, accusations of preferential treatment for the police and questions about what role race may have played in a deadly encounter between a white police officer in uniform and a black man startled in his own home.

Officer Guyger went home from work in her police uniform late Thursday night and tried to enter the apartment, where she encountered and shot Botham Shem Jean, the police said.

Mr. Jean, 26, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Officer Guyger was placed on administrative leave but was not immediately arrested, and the Dallas Police Department handed the investigation over to the Texas Rangers, the state's top law enforcement agency. The Texas Rangers announced the arrest on Sunday night but declined to provide details about the case.

A lawyer for Officer Guyger could not be reached for comment on Sunday. The Dallas Morning News reported that she could be heard on a 911 call crying and apologizing. "I'm so sorry," she said.

Lee Merritt, a lawyer for Mr. Jean's family, said in an interview late Sunday that Officer Guyger's arrest was a "step in the right direction." But he questioned why the authorities had waited, saying, "We don't want it lost on anyone that, had this been a regular citizen, she would have never left the crime scene."

Officials have not said how Officer Guyger may have mistaken the apartment for her own, or what interaction she had with Mr. Jean just before the shooting.

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas called the case "bizarre" and "confusing to all of us." He said that Officer Guyger apparently parked her car on the wrong floor of the building's parking lot and then walked to the apartment. "We don't know how she got into that door," he said. "We have to get to the bottom of this for everybody."

Ben Crump, another lawyer for the family, said that Mr. Jean had been unarmed when Officer Guyger arrived and shot him in the chest.

Botham Shem Jean, shown at the college he attended, was fatally shot at his Dallas apartment by a police officer who said she mistook the apartment for her own, the authorities said.

"You know, we're still dealing in an America where black people are being killed in some of the most arbitrary ways: Driving while black, walking while black — and now, we have to add living while black," he said Sunday at a news conference.

Mr. Jean, he said, "went to his grave never knowing why the police came through his door and shot him."

Office Guyger has been a member of the Dallas Police Department for four years. She was involved in a shooting last year, when she shot and injured a suspect after he grabbed a police Taser during a confrontation. She was not indicted in that episode, The Dallas Morning News reported.

On Thursday night, after working a full shift, she returned home to her apartment complex, South Side Flats, the police said. The complex is less than a quarter-mile from the Dallas Police Department headquarters.

Officer Guyger called 911 at about 10 p.m. to report the shooting.

Alyssa Kinsey, 29, who lives next door to Mr. Jean's apartment, said she was sitting with her back to the tenants' shared wall when she heard a gunshot, followed by a commotion. She said she ran to her door to listen and heard a female voice calling 911.

Staring through her peephole, Ms. Kinsey said she saw a police officer pacing and heard her "hyperventilating."

To get to Mr. Jean's apartment, Officer Guyger would have had to walk past 15 to 20 apartments — many of which have distinct wreaths, doormats and trash cans, Ms. Kinsey said. Mr. Jean, for instance, had a red doormat outside his apartment.

"It doesn't look the same," she said. "So my main question is: What was she doing?"

Mr. Merritt, the lawyer, said that that the officer and Mr. Jean did not know each other but that she lived in a unit below Mr. Jean, who had received noise complaints from a downstairs neighbor. He said the apartment complex uses electronic keys, which blink red when used incorrectly. Officer Guyger's key was found in the doorway of Mr. Jean's apartment, he said.

Mr. Jean was born in the Caribbean and later moved to the United States, where he graduated in 2016 from Harding University in Arkansas. He then moved to Dallas, where he worked for the accounting firm PwC.

He was from a prominent family in St. Lucia, his home country. Mayor Rawlings said he planned to meet with the prime minister of St. Lucia this week.

At the apartment complex, people had left flowers, a balloon and photos near Mr. Jean's door, Ms. Kinsey said. She said that the lights in his apartment were still on, his patio furniture still outside.

"This is the last person I ever thought this would happen to — and this is the last place," Ms. Kinsey said. "It's so secure here. The Police Department is a block away."

Sandra E. Garcia contributed reporting.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7)  Players and Fans See Sexism in Serena Williams's Treatment at U.S. Open

By Melissa Gomez, September 9, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/sports/serena-williams-tennis-sexism-carlos-ramos.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront

At the trophy ceremony after the United States Open final, Serena Williams, right, consoles Naomi Osaka, who defeated Williams, 6-2, 6-4.

The United States Open final between the tennis legend Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, a rising star in her own right, could have been a celebration of talent and determination, regardless of the outcome.

Instead, the match on Saturday will be remembered for what Williams charged were "sexist" code violations against her by the chair umpire, who penalized her for verbal abuse after she called him a "thief."

Osaka went on to win the game in two sets, 6-2, 6-4, but she was also upset and apologized to the crowd and Williams's fans.

Reactions on social media largely focused on the umpire, Carlos Ramos, for penalizing Williams for behavior that critics said would ordinarily result in just a warning for other players.

On Sunday, Williams was fined $17,000 for three code violations, The Associated Press reported.

Chris Evert, a former top tennis player, tweeted that Ramos should have warned Williams about the verbal abuse violation before penalizing her. During the game, Andy Roddick, who retired from the sport in 2012, wrote on Twitter, "Worst refereeing I've ever seen ...... the worst !!!"

James Blake, a retired tennis star, tweeted that he had said worse things on the court and did not get penalized.

"And I've also been given a 'soft warning' by the ump where they tell you knock it off or I will have to give you a violation," he wrote. "He should have at least given her that courtesy. Sad to mar a well played final that way."

Billie Jean King, a tennis legend and a pioneer for women in the sport, congratulated Osaka in a tweet before thanking Williams in a separate one for calling out a double standard between men and women in the sport.

(2/2) When a woman is emotional, she's "hysterical" and she's penalized for it. When a man does the same, he's "outspoken" & and there are no repercussions. Thank you, @serenawilliams, for calling out this double standard. More voices are needed to do the same.

The actress Reese Witherspoon and the TV host Ellen DeGeneres thanked Williams on Twitter for standing up for women's rights. The actress Gabrielle Union called her "the best athlete the world has ever seen" and said Osaka demonstrated "#BlackGirlMagic & fierce determination."

Sally Jenkins, in her column in The Washington Post on Sunday, wrote, "Ramos took what began as a minor infraction and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies in the history of tennis, all because he couldn't take a woman speaking sharply to him."

There were some who criticized Williams for the way she reacted, going as far as calling it a "meltdown."

At a news conference after the match, Williams was asked if there was anything she would have changed about the game. She stood by her statements to call Ramos a "thief," adding that she would continue to fight for women's equality.

She said her experience was an example for future players who want to express themselves and be strong women.

"They're going to be allowed to do that because of today," she said. "Maybe it didn't work out for me, but it's going to work out for the next person."

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

8) How Teeth Became Tusks, and Tusks Became Liabilities

By Natalle Angler, September 11, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/science/tusks-teeth-elephants-genes.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_sc_20180911&nl=science-times&nlid=26108213edit_sc_20180911&ref=headline&te=1

Elephants from one family group, some tuskless, greet a calf from another family in Gorongosa. Only three of the 19 adult females in the calf's family have tusks.

GORONGOSA NATIONAL PARK, Mozambique — We are flying in a Bat Hawk aircraft — which may be named for a raptor that preys on bats but looks more like a giant, lime-green dragonfly — and my hair, thanks to the open cockpit, has gone full Phyllis Diller.

Scudding above flood plains the color of worn pool table felt and mud flats split like jigsaw puzzles, we dip toward the treetops and see herds of waterbuck scatter with an impatient flash of their bull's-eye rumps. 

We are searching for the elusive tuskless elephants of Gorongosa, elephants that naturally lack the magnificent ivory staffs all too tragically coveted by wealthy collectors worldwide. 

Tuskless elephants can be found in small numbers throughout Africa, but Gorongosa is known to harbor a sizable population of them, the legacy of a violent 15-year civil war. Tusked elephants were slaughtered for their ivory at a harrowing rate, and the park's rare tusk-free residents thus gained a sudden Darwinian advantage.

Today, about a quarter of the park's 700 or so elephants are tuskless, all of them female, and I am determined to catch a glimpse of at least one. Yet a week of ground searches has proved fruitless, and now we are circling in a plane and still nothing and, holy mother of Horton, how can such massive creatures go missing? 

"There!" Alfredo Matavele, the pilot, cries triumphantly, pointing toward a cluster of trees. "And there!" pointing toward a watering hole. And there and there. "Do you see them?" he demands. 

Oh yes, I see them. Dozens, scores, cliques and claques of elephants, ears flapping like flags, trunks slowly swinging, and many of their faces decidedly free of ivory eruptions. I have found them at last, my sisters in dental deprivation.

Other people may admire elephants for their brains or their complex social lives; I feel a bond with this mutant crew. After all, I've learned that we share a basic developmental anomaly, which may well be traceable to the same underlying glitches in our DNA. 

Elephant tusks happen to be overgrown versions of the upper lateral incisors — the teeth right next to the front teeth, before you get to the canines. Simply put, tuskless elephants lack lateral incisors.

I, too, lack lateral incisors; moreover, the trait runs in families. Tuskless elephants often have tuskless kin. Both my daughter and my younger brother are missing their lateral incisors. No wonder we've always had trouble ripping the bark off trees.

An X-ray of human teeth with highlighted incisors.

Scientists do not yet know the precise cause of tusklessness, but they've made great progress in deciphering the genetic program behind mammalian tooth development generally. It turns out to be an old and widely shared code. 

"Tooth development has been very conserved during evolution," said Irma Thesleff, a developmental biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She has found that mutations associated with tooth abnormalities in mice also show up in genetic studies of people with missing or malformed teeth. 

"Elephants are no more different from humans than mice are," Dr. Thesleff said, "so it's quite possible that the same gene or genes are involved" in elephant tusklessness and human toothlessness. 

For example, it could be a typographical error in the genetic code for a signaling molecule called wnt10a. "This is one of the most commonly mutated genes in humans with missing teeth," Dr. Thesleff said.

And oh, we gap-mouths are everywhere. An estimated 8 percent of the population is missing one or more of the 32 teeth found in the standard adult set, and that figure rises to about 30 percent if you include a natural absence of the four extra wisdom teeth that many people get yanked out anyway.

Missing lateral incisors is thought to be the second most common form of so-called tooth agenesis. One archaeological study of a 9,000-year-old farming community in Basta, Jordan, found that 36 percent of the inhabitants lacked lateral incisors. Researchers viewed the elevated rate as evidence of inbreeding. 

The normal background rate of the condition is more like 2 percent to 4 percent, which, coincidentally or otherwise, is close to the background rate of tusklessness among African elephants. 

Even more common in humans than a lack of lateral incisors, said Ariadne Letra, an associate professor at the University of Texas School of Dentistry at Houston, is the absence of the lower second premolars, the teeth with two cusps located in the bottom jaw just before the four-cusped molars. 

(I discovered in the course of reporting this story that my husband was born without his second premolars, so I guess I'm grateful my daughter has any teeth at all.)

A rare narwhal tusk found in an English country house. Scientists are not yet certain how narwhals use their tusks.

Through animal studies, scientists have learned that teeth can grow in macabre isolation from other body systems, as though they yearned for a career as novelty dentures at a Halloween party. Isaac Salazar-Ciudad, a theoretical biologist who studies tooth development at the University of Helsinki, explained that if you remove part of the primordial mouth of a mouse embryo and culture it in a dish, it will develop an array of normal-looking mouse teeth. 

Although the basic genetic program is widely shared, tooth building is also flexible, susceptible to evolutionary influences.

Teeth develop through the interaction of two types of embryonic tissue, epithelial and mesenchymal, which early in gestation — by about Day 28 in humans — start folding up into each other origami-style to form a series of large and small buds. Those buds can then be sharpened into canines or incisors for slicing into flesh, or flattened and sculpted into molars with any number of cusps for processing high-fiber plants. 

The core of a tooth, the pulp, holds the blood vessels and nerve fibers, while the bulk consists of a bone-like material called dentin. The outer coating of calcium phosphate enamel is the hardest substance in the body, which is why animal teeth account for a disproportionate share of the fossil record. 

And when lengthened into structures that breach the boundary of the mouth and grow throughout life, teeth become tusks — for digging, fighting, hauling, piercing, threat display.

The diversity of shapes that teeth can assume, combined with their mineralized hardness, said Dr. Salazar-Ciudad, "could be why they have been repurposed as tusks and used for so many tasks."

Walruses use their tusks as grappling hooks and weapons, but not to forage.

In most cases, tusks are recast canines, curving to the side and upward in wild boars and warthogs, or drooping down in walruses like Yosemite Sam's mustache. In narwhals, the unicorns of the Arctic, the tusk is built of a single overgrown canine that penetrates through the narwhal's left upper lip in a permanent open wound, which ends up hosting tiny shrimplike creatures with an appetite for shed whale skin. 

The narwhal tusk "is the only straight tusk in nature, and the only spiral tusk, too," said Martin Thomas Nweeia, a narwhal expert who lectures at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

Tusks, as a rule, are multipurpose devices. Boars and warthogs apply theirs offensively and defensively, to battle one another during mating season and to gore predators many times their size. 

Walruses use their tusks like grappling hooks, to haul themselves out of the water and onto the ice, and as weapons against polar bears and in sexual contests — but not, as commonly believed, to forage for food or pry open oysters. 

The purpose of the narwhal's tusk remains a subject of contention. Some researchers suggest the whales use it to stun their fish prey. Dr. Nweeia and his co-workers propose that it is a kind of sensory organ, for detecting changes in water salinity and temperature. 

Elephants are the true masters of the Swiss Army tusk. They use their mighty incisors to dig for salts and minerals, to break off branches and get at the foliage, to pry into trees and peel off the bark — "They really love to to eat bark," said Joyce Poole, scientific director of Elephant Voices, a research and advocacy group working at Gorongosa — to scoop an errant calf out of a mudhole or lift a sleeping one to its feet. 

They coordinate tusks, trunks and feet to de-thorn acacia trees and soften tough grasses, and they stash leafy branches across their ivory shelves for later consumption. 

Just as people are left- or right-handed, so elephants have a favored tusk. "If they're going to break a branch over a tusk, they use the same tusk repeatedly," Dr. Poole said. A groove forms in the preferred tusk over time. 

But it can take two tusks to tangle. From my perch in the Bat Hawk, I watched a pair of large bull elephants spar by locking together their massive tusks, which can weigh well over 100 pounds each — seven times the weight of an average female tusk.

Yet the biophysical properties that make tusks such splendid tools to own have all too often proved their owners' undoing. People have long coveted ivory for its beauty, ductility and presumed magical properties. 

The first appearance of narwhal tusks in medieval Europe is thought to have given rise to the myth of the unicorn, and to a mad surge in demand for the nine-foot spiraling spears. Elizabeth I is said to have paid 10,000 pounds for a narwhal tusk, then the price of an average castle. 

The drive to harvest walrus ivory may well have contributed to the settlement of Greenland in the 10th century, and led to the near extinction of walrus populations around Norway, Iceland and other parts of the North Atlantic.

A customs officer in Hong Kong with contraband products made from endangered species, including elephant ivory.

Elephant ivory, however, is considered the finest in the world, and elephants have long been slaughtered to supply it. Despite international efforts to ban the ivory trade, demand still drives a business worth at least a billion dollars a year. 

The persistence of elephant poaching has prompted researchers to wonder whether elephants really needed their tusks, and whether they might not be better off if the tuskless trait were to spread more widely through the African population. 

Shane Campbell-Staton, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have begun systematically comparing tusked and tuskless elephants in Gorongosa, seeking not only to identify the genes involved in tusklessness but also to solve perplexing patterns of inheritance.

Why, for example, are nearly all the tuskless elephants of Africa female? Among Asian elephants, a related species, many males are tuskless, and recent studies suggest they fare surprisingly well on the sexual battlefieldwhen pitted against tusked rivals. 

Dr. Campbell-Staton is also looking at downstream effects of tusklessness. 

"We know tusks play an important role in obtaining food," he said, "so if individuals don't have that tool, are they using the environment differently, and could those changes have consequences for other animals dependent on elephants as ecosystem engineers?"

Maybe, but from the look of it, the tuskless elephants of Gorongosa are thriving. "They're in fantastic condition, this is a very good habitat for them, and there's no indication they're suffering nutritionally," Dr. Poole said. 

Lateral incisors: who needs them? Better by far to keep the poachers at bay.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9)  The Handmaid's Court

By Michelle Goldberg, September 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/columnists/kavanaugh-abortion-roe-v-wade-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

A protester dressed as a character from "The Handmaid's Tale" attended the first day of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing last week.

Shortly after his inauguration, Donald Trump, uniquely attentive to his debt to the religious right, appointed the anti-abortion activist E. Scott Lloyd to head the Office of Refugee Resettlement, despite Lloyd's lack of relevant experience. The position gave Lloyd authority over unaccompanied minors caught crossing into the United States, authority Lloyd exploited to try to stop pregnant migrants from getting abortions.

Last year, thanks to Lloyd's interference, a 17-year-old from Central America had to wage a legal battle to end her pregnancy. Known in court filings as Jane Doe, the girl learned she was pregnant while in custody in Texas, and was adamant that she wanted an abortion. In keeping with Texas's parental consent law, she obtained a judge's permission, helped by a legal organization called Jane's Due Process. Jane's Due Process raised money for the abortion, which was scheduled for the end of her first trimester.

But under Lloyd's direction, the shelter where she was being detainedrefused to cooperate. Doe went back to court, and a federal judge ruled in her favor, issuing a temporary restraining order against the government. The administration appealed, and the case, Garza v. Hargan, went to a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. One of the judges was Brett Kavanaugh.

Garza v. Hargan was the only major abortion-rights case Kavanaugh ever ruled on. His handling of it offers a clue about what's in store for American women if he's confirmed to the Supreme Court. No one knows whether Kavanaugh would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade outright or simply gut it. But even on a lower court, Kavanaugh put arbitrary obstacles in the way of someone desperate to end her pregnancy. Thanks to Trump, he may soon be in a position to do the same to millions of others.

It's fitting that last week's Kavanaugh confirmation hearings were regularly interrupted by the sound of women screaming. Again and again, protesters, most of them female, cried out for the preservation of their rights, and were arrested. Republican men were contemptuous. "What's the hysteria coming from?" asked Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

Let me answer. It is true, as Sasse said, that protesters have claimed for many years that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, women will die. It's a fair prediction; women died before Roe, and where abortion is illegal, unsafe abortion leads to maternal death. In the past, however, Roe has been saved. Should Kavanaugh be confirmed, it will either fall or be eviscerated. 

In Garza, Kavanaugh and another judge vacated the temporary restraining order that prevented the government from hindering Doe's abortion. Brigitte Amiri, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who represented the girl, was stunned, because it seemed clear that Doe, who'd already obtained the necessary judicial signoff, had the law on her side. "It wasn't what I was expecting from any judge that would have read Roe v. Wade," Amiri said of the ruling. "Conservatives, progressives, anyone."

Indeed, a few days later, the full court reversed the panel's decision. Kavanaugh, dissenting, wrote that "the government has permissible interests in favoring fetal life."

By the time Jane Doe got her abortion, she was 15 weeks pregnant and needed a more complicated second-trimester procedure. On Friday, Rochelle Garza, a lawyer who served as Doe's temporary legal guardian during the proceedings, testified at Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings.

"She was one of the most vulnerable people in our community," Garza said of the girl, adding, "She was an immigrant, she didn't speak English, she was in detention, and she was being put under extreme pressure. And I felt it was unfortunate that Judge Kavanaugh did not take that into consideration."

We shouldn't expect a Trump nominee, however personally decent his friends say he is, to care about women's wishes. Kavanaugh's defenders insist that he's the sort of judge any Republican would appoint, and they are correct. Still, it's a particularly bitter insult that women stand to lose reproductive autonomy thanks to the minority presidential victory of a louche misogynist.

Politicians sometimes say that they are personally opposed to abortion, but believe it should be legal. Trump and some of his enablers reverse that formulation.

The president, who does not, according to two of his lovers, wear condoms, has declined to say whether he's ever been involved with an abortion. According to court papers unsealed on Friday, Elliott Broidy, former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, also refused to wear condoms during sex with his mistress, Shera Bechard, then demanded she get an abortion when she became pregnant. According to the unsealed papers, Broidy admired Trump's "uncanny ability to sexually abuse woman and get away with it."

A famous pro-choice poster from the 1980s proclaimed, "Your body is a battleground." Kavanaugh is likely to join the Supreme Court because in 2016, the woman whom most women voted for was defeated. Now our bodies are subject to occupation.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women's rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

10) The Recovery Threw the Middle-Class Dream Under a Benz

By Nelson D. Schwartz, September 12, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/business/middle-class-financial-crisis.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Once a year or so, the economist Diane Swonk ventures into the basement of her 1891 Victorian house outside Chicago and opens a plastic box containing the items that mean the most to her: awards, wedding pictures, the clothes she was wearing at the World Trade Center on the day it was attacked. But what she seeks out again and again is a bound diary of the events of the financial crisis and their aftermath.

"It's useful to go back and see what a chaotic time it was and how terrifying it was," she said. "That time is seared in my mind. I looked at it again recently, and all the pain came flooding back."

A decade later, things are eerily calm. The economy, by nearly any official measure, is robust. Wall Street is flirting with new highs. And the housing market, the epicenter of the crash, has recovered in many places. But like the diary stored in Ms. Swonk's basement, the scars of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession are still with us, just below the surface.

The most profound of these is that the uneven nature of the recovery compounded a long-term imbalance in the accumulation of wealth. As a consequence, what it means to be secure has changed. Wealth, real wealth, now comes from investment portfolios, not salaries. Fortunes are made through an initial public offering, a grant of stock options, a buyout or another form of what high-net-worth individuals call a liquidity event.

Data from the Federal Reserve show that over the last decade and a half, the proportion of family income from wages has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just under 61 percent. It's an extraordinary shift, driven largely by the investment profits of the very wealthy. In short, the people who possess tradable assets, especially stocks, have enjoyed a recovery that Americans dependent on savings or income from their weekly paycheck have yet to see. Ten years after the financial crisis, getting ahead by going to work every day seems quaint, akin to using the phone book to find a number or renting a video at Blockbuster.

The financial crisis didn't just kill the dream of getting rich from your day job. It also put an end to a fundamental belief of the middle class: that owning a home was always a good idea because prices moved in only one direction — up. The bubble, while it lasted, gave millions in the middle class a sense of validation of their financial acumen, and made them feel as if they had done the Right Thing.

In theory, if you lost your job, or suffered some other kind of financial setback, you could always sell into a real estate market that was forever rising. Ever-higher home prices became a steam valve, and the "greater fool" theory substituted for any conventional measure of value.

The kindling for the fire that consumed Wall Street and nearly the entire economy was mortgages that should never have been taken out in the first place. Homeowners figured the more house the better, whether or not their income could support the monthly payment, while greedy banks and middlemen were all too happy to encourage them.

When the bubble burst, the bedrock investment for many families was wiped out by a combination of falling home values and too much debt. A decade after this debacle, the typical middle-class family's net worth is still more than $40,000 below where it was in 2007, according to the Federal Reserve. The damage done to the middle-class psyche is impossible to price, of course, but no one doubts that it was vast.

Banks were hurt, too, but aside from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the pain proved transitory. Bankers themselves were never punished for their sins. In one form or another — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, quantitative easing, the Fed's discount window — the financial sector was supported in spectacular fashion.

Like the bankers, shareholders and investors were also bailed out. By cutting interest rates to near zero and pumping trillions — yes, you read that right — into the economy, the Federal Reserve essentially put a trampoline under the stock market. The subsequent bounce produced a windfall, but only for a limited group of beneficiaries. Only about half of American households have any exposure to the stock market, including 401(k)'s and retirement plans, and ownership of the shares of individual companies is clustered among upper-income families.

For homeowners, there wasn't much of a rescue package from Washington, and eight million succumbed to foreclosure. Sometimes, eviction came in the form of marshals with court orders; in other cases, families quietly handed over the keys to the bank and just walked away. Although home prices in hot markets have fully recovered, many homeowners are still underwater in the worst-hit states like Florida, Arizona and Nevada. Meanwhile, more Americans are renting and have little prospect of ever owning a home.

Worsening the picture, the post-crisis era has been marked by an increased disparity in wealth between white, Hispanic and African-American members of the middle class. That's according to an analysis of Fed data by the Pew Research Center, which found that families in the latter two groups were more dependent on housing as their principal form of investment. Not only were both minority groups harder hit by foreclosures, but Hispanics were also twice as likely as other Americans to be living in Sun Belt states where the housing crash was most severe.

In 2016, net worth among white middle-income families was 19 percent below 2007 levels, adjusted for inflation. But among blacks, it was down 40 percent, and Hispanics saw a drop of 46 percent. For many, old-fashioned hard work has simply not been a viable path out of this hole. After unemployment peaked in the fall of 2009, it took years for joblessness to return to pre-recession levels. Slack in the labor market left the employed and unemployed alike with little leverage to demand raises, even as corporate profits surged.

Maybe it was inevitable that when half the population watches its wages stagnate while the other half gets rich in the market, the result is President Donald Trump and Brexit.

"It peeled away the facade and revealed an anger that had been building for decades," said Ms. Swonk, who is chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. "The crisis was horrific, but its legacy pushed us over the edge in terms of the discontent."

It also made inequality and the One Percent an urgent topic, and made unlikely celebrities of wonky intellectuals such as the economist Thomas Piketty. His best seller, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," published in 2013, was 816 data-laden pages that laid out a grim diagnosis. Mr. Piketty argued that the decades after World War II, when the divisions between the classes narrowed and opportunities to move up the economic ladder expanded — that is, when the middle class as we knew it was formed — may actually have been an aberration. Society, Mr. Piketty wrote, risks a return to the historical norm of a yawning gap between rich and poor.

Whether or not he is right, the concentration of wealth that is a legacy of the financial crisis will make itself felt far into the future. Younger Americans, in particular, will be marked by the experience of 2008 much as the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression haunted the generations who lived through it in the last century. Not only were they unable to accumulate assets in the lean years of the early recovery, but they also missed out on the recent stock market rally that benefited their older and richer peers.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that while all birth cohorts lost wealth during the Great Recession, Americans born in the 1980s were at the "greatest risk for becoming a lost generation for wealth accumulation."

For those fortunate enough to still possess wealth after the crisis, the future looks very different. With the security provided by assets, rather than just income, they and especially their children are on a glide path for a gilded financial future. 

"Over and over, you see that family wealth is an important determinant of opportunity for the next generation, over and above income," said Fabian T. Pfeffer, a sociologist at the University of Michigan. "Wealth serves as a private safety net that allows you to behave differently and plan differently."

A wealthy person who loses a job can afford to be more choosy and wait for an opportunity suited to his or her skills and experience. The risk of going to an expensive college and taking on debt is lower when there is parental wealth to fall back on.

Timothy Smeeding, who teaches public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, put it more bluntly. "You can see dynasties starting to form," he said.

Ten years have passed since the trauma of 2008, the nerves are still raw, and the pain still has a way of flaring up. Every time she goes down into the basement and peruses her diary, Diane Swonk feels it anew.

"It is the diary of an economist, as well as a mother and a human being," Ms. Swonk said. It includes her published writings for clients, as well as her feelings, thoughts and fears as the crisis unfolded. She also recorded her impression of key figures she met during those fateful months, including Lawrence H. Summers, a top White House economic official at the time, and Ben S. Bernanke, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

"The financial crisis became a delineator," she said. "There were those who could recoup their losses and those who could not. Some people have amnesia, but we are still living with the wounds."

Nelson D. Schwartz has covered economics since 2012. Previously, he wrote about Wall Street and banking, and also served as European economic correspondent in Paris. He joined The Times in 2007 as a feature writer for the Sunday Business section.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11)  $10 Million From FEMA Diverted to Pay for Immigration Detention Centers, Document Shows

By Ron Nixon, September 12, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/us/politics/fema-ice-immigration-detention.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

12)  The Racism Inside Fire Departments

By Addington Stewart, a retired St. Louis firefighter, September 12, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/opinion/the-racism-inside-fire-departments.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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

By Caitlin Dickerson, September 12. 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

14) In German Catholic Churches, Child Sex Abuse Victims Top 3,600, Study Finds

By Katrin Bennhold and Melissa Eddy, September 12, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/world/europe/german-church-sex-abuse-children.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

15) Yemen Civilians Keep Dying, but Pompeo Says Saudis Are Doing Enough

By Ben Hubbard, September 12, 2018

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/world/middleeast/saudi-yemen-pompeo-certify.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

16) U.S. Recovery Eludes Many Living Below Poverty Level, Census Suggests

By Glenn Thrush, September 13, 2018

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/us/politics/poverty-rate-census-bureau.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

17) Australian Politicians Threaten Schoolgirl Over National Anthem Protest

By Isabella Kwai, September 13, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/australia/national-anthem-protest-girl.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*