Chris Hedges's Blog, page 501

The Life-Destroying Danger of Prosecutorial Misconduct

For most prison inmates, news that charges against them have been dismissed is cause for celebration.

Not so for Bobby Joe Maxwell.

Last week, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles dismissed Maxwell’s case. The trouble is, after spending nearly 40 years in custody for two counts of first-degree murder, Maxwell can’t appreciate his good fortune. In December, he suffered a massive heart attack and has been in a coma ever since. He is not expected to recover.

Maxwell’s prosecution is a story of justice delayed and justice denied, compounded by egregious official misconduct.

Now 68 years old, he was arrested in 1979 and charged with stabbing 10 homeless men to death in downtown Los Angeles. The local media at the time hyped him as a satanic serial killer, the “Skid Row Stabber.”

In all likelihood, he was neither, as I explained in a 2011 Truthdig column that profiled Maxwell and his appellate attorney, Verna Wefald of Pasadena. (Disclosure: Wefald is a friend and a former colleague from the California state public defender’s office, where we worked together in the early 1990s.)

Maxwell’s trial was delayed until 1984 by legal motions, including an unusual dispute over the publicity rights to his life story that his lawyers had acquired as part of their retainer agreement. The dispute made it all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ultimately validated the agreement.

When the trial finally commenced, it lasted nine months and quickly became the stuff of L.A. noir, with daily news coverage of its every grisly twist and turn.

Back then, Los Angeles was a metropolis in fear, gripped by an unprecedented surge in the rate of violent crime. Centered in the poorest neighborhoods, the surge was fueled by an epidemic of crack cocaine use and trafficking, decades of neglect of the area’s slums and the rise of such criminal gangs as the Bloods, the Crips and the Mexican mafia, among others. Even outside the inner-city war zones, people were on edge and looking to law enforcement for relief.

The Los Angeles Police Department originally arrested two other suspects for the 10 stabbings, but it eventually targeted Maxwell, who had moved to the city in 1977 from Tennessee with hopes of becoming a karate instructor. The martial arts career of the functionally illiterate Maxwell never got off the ground and, like the 10 victims, he fell into homelessness himself. For the prosecution and the public at large, he was an easy villain, straight out of Hollywood central casting.

Just a year before Maxwell went on trial, the district attorney had secured a high-profile conviction in the Hillside Strangler case. The DA, on a roll, was determined to take another courtroom scalp.

In the end, the jury returned guilty verdicts on two of the 10 counts (it acquitted on five, and deadlocked on the other three). The jury subsequently voted to spare Maxwell the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

From the outset, however, the case against Maxwell was extraordinarily weak. As the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted in a 2010 ruling that ordered Maxwell to be released or retried, the prosecution’s evidence was “nearly all circumstantial.”

Prosecutors claimed that a knife Maxwell possessed was “consistent” with the instrument used to stab one victim. They also introduced as evidence a palm print Maxwell left on a bench near the scene of another stabbing. The wife of one of the victims testified that a disposable lighter found in Maxwell’s pocket at the time of his arrest was similar to one owned by her spouse, but she was unable to pick out the lighter from an array shown to her before the trial. Still another witness testified in court that he recognized Maxwell’s voice from one crime scene, but he was unable to pick Maxwell out of a pretrial lineup in which Maxwell spoke.

Lacking proof of guilt, the prosecution resorted to one of the dirtiest tricks in the trade, turning to a notorious jailhouse informant named Sidney Storch to salvage its case.

A transplanted New Yorker, Storch was a heroin addict with a long and public history of dishonesty, starting with his discharge from the Army in 1964 for being a habitual liar. According to the 9th Circuit, he was also “a criminal recidivist, with four felonies and approximately 13 arrests under his belt.”

Storch’s crime of choice was forgery. In 1981 and 1982, he had supplied information to the LAPD about forgery rings in exchange for leniency in his own cases. By the time he took the witness stand in Maxwell’s trial, he had perfected the snitching technique of “booking” other defendants by gaining proximity to them in jail, getting information about them from newspaper articles and then falsely claiming that they had confessed their guilt to him.

That’s exactly what he did in Maxwell’s case.

In 1983, Storch was arrested by the LAPD for, among other crimes, impersonating a Central Intelligence Agency officer. He was also in possession of a false California driver’s license, forged checks and stolen credit cards.

After his apprehension, Storch was placed in a cell with Maxwell at the Los Angeles County jail. Exactly how long Storch and Maxwell were housed together was never exactly clear—the prosecution claimed the two shared a cell for three weeks, while the defense insisted they were together for a mere four hours. Whatever the length of time, Storch testified that Maxwell had admitted responsibility for the murders.

Unbeknownst to the defense at the time, however, the DA had worked out a secret deal with Storch. In return for his testimony, the prosecution agreed to shorten Storch’s potential prison sentence to 16 months, a fraction of the total time he faced behind bars. The prosecution also withheld from the defense Storch’s extensive record as a government informant.

The wheels of justice grind slowly, assuming they grind at all.

In 1992, Storch died of AIDS in a New York City jail, forever precluding the possibility that he might recant his testimony. Nonetheless, Wefald, who continued to represent Maxwell as a sole practitioner after leaving the public defender’s office, plugged away, filing habeas corpus petitions in state and federal courts, maintaining to all who would listen that her client wasn’t the Skid Row Stabber.

“I remember when my supervisor at the state public defender’s office first gave me this case and said [Maxwell is] supposed to be innocent,” Wefald recounted in an email exchange. I replied, “You mean they got the wrong man? A case like this comes across your desk only once in a lifetime, but never did I imagine that it would be 30 years of fighting.”

Although it took decades for Maxwell’s appeals to reach the 9th Circuit, when it finally did, a panel of three judges unanimously agreed with Wefald that “Storch’s testimony was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case.” The panel concluded that not only had Storch testified falsely, but that the DA had violated Maxwell’s due process rights by concealing the details of Storch’s plea agreement and history as an informant. The prosecution was directed to release Maxwell or retry him.

Astonishingly, it chose the latter course. After unsuccessfully petitioning the United States Supreme Court to overturn the circuit’s ruling, the prosecution refiled five murder charges against Maxwell in 2013 for the two counts on which he was originally convicted and the three on which the original jury had deadlocked.

Until Maxwell’s heart attack, the DA was set to put on another marathon dog and pony show, even without its deceased star witness. Rather than concede that the case against Maxwell was a miscarriage of justice from its inception, the deputy DA assigned to retry Maxwell told The Washington Post that the judge’s decision to drop the charges was a “compassionate release,” and that his office stood ready to reinstate the charges if Maxwell ever recovered his health.

“I learned a lot from all the investigation I did,” Wefald told me. “No one believed me when I said Maxwell was innocent, and now there are innocence projects all over the country.”

According to the National Registry of Exonerations—a nonprofit research project based at the University of California, Irvine and the law schools at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University—2,257 criminal defendants convicted of crimes ranging from felony drug offenses to murder have been exonerated in the United States since 1989.

Even if the DA won’t admit it, Bobby Joe Maxwell should raise the total to 2,258. It’s a shame—and yet another indictment of our deeply flawed legal system—that he’ll never get to savor the taste of vindication.

It’s a shame—and yet another indictment of our deeply flawed legal system—that he’ll never get to savor the taste of vindication.

Recent Supreme Court Ruling Gums Up Immigration Courts

LOS ANGELES—Immigration courts from Boston to Los Angeles have been experiencing fallout from a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that has caused some deportation orders to be tossed and cases thrown out, bringing more chaos to a system that was already besieged by ballooning dockets and lengthy backlogs.

The little-known ruling addressed what might seem like a narrow procedural issue over how to properly provide notices to immigrants to appear in court for deportation proceedings. But it is having broader implications in immigration courts that are in charge of deciding whether hundreds of thousands of people should be allowed to stay in the United States.

Since the decision was issued in June, immigration attorneys have been asking judges to throw out their clients’ cases. Some immigration judges have refused to issue deportation orders for immigrants. And in a recent case in Washington state, a Mexican farmworker had an indictment for illegally re-entering the country tossed out.

It isn’t clear how many people’s immigration cases could be affected. Some immigration judges have denied attorneys’ requests, but others in states including Tennessee, New Jersey and California have granted them.

“The potential consequences of the decision are massive,” said Jeremy McKinney, an immigration attorney in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision focused on the case of a Brazilian handyman seeking to apply for a special green card given to immigrants who have been in the country at least 10 years, have good moral character and whose American relatives would suffer if they were deported.

Wescley Pereira came to the United States on a tourist visa from Brazil in 2000 and settled in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he has two American-born children. In 2006, Pereira was arrested for operating a vehicle under the influence and given a notice to appear in immigration court, but it didn’t include specifics about his hearing. More than a year later, a mailer with that information was sent to him but got returned as undeliverable, and an immigration judge ordered him deported when he didn’t show up.

Pereira was pulled over in 2013 for driving without headlights on, and with the deportation order on his record, immigration authorities detained him.

By then, he had lived in the country long enough to seek a green card. But the U.S. government said Pereira could only count the time before he received the notice toward his green card aspirations.

The Supreme Court disagreed, saying a notice that doesn’t list the time and place of a hearing isn’t a notice under the law, and that Pereira was building up time in the country toward his application all the while. Without listing time and place, “the Government cannot reasonably expect the noncitizen to appear for his removal proceedings,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority decision.

Justice Samuel Alito issued a lone dissent, saying that the U.S. government can’t put an accurate date on notices since one agency issues them and another sets the hearings. Simply adding an arbitrary date, he said, will likely “mislead many recipients and to prejudice those who make preparations on the assumption that the initial date is firm.”

Since the ruling, immigration lawyers have been arguing that the undated notices their clients received in recent years aren’t valid. In some cases, they’re asking for deportation cases to be thrown out entirely, and in others, for a deportation order to be wiped from immigrants’ records so they can get another chance to argue they should be allowed to remain in the country.

“You can’t really order someone deported for not showing up when you didn’t tell them when to show up,” McKinney said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which seeks to carry out deportations for the government, has been pushing back. The agency that forms part of the Department of Homeland Security, has been litigating the issue and appealing judges’ decisions to throw out deportation cases, according to ICE.

A spokesman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is part of the Department of Justice, said a mechanism is being worked out so Homeland Security officials can issue notices with a specific date, time and place, but those without can still be accepted by the immigration courts.

Immigration judges have taken diverse approaches to these requests, with some approving and others denying them.

But there are many to be dealt with in an already backlogged immigration court system with more than 700,000 pending cases.

In a Los Angeles courtroom, immigration judge Lori Bass received so many requests she scheduled up a special hearing to handle them. In Arlington, Virginia, an immigration judge held an impromptu group hearing to address 20 such requests, which accounted for about half that session’s docket, said immigration attorney Parastoo Zahedi.

Judge Dana Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said a significant number of cases are affected and with judges taking different views the issue will likely wind back up in the courts. In the last month, she said she’s seen about 50 such motions in her immigration court in San Francisco.

“It is a very thorny legal issue,” Marks said. “It highlights again how unbelievably complicated immigration law is.”

The ruling’s impact has also stretched beyond the immigration courts. A federal judge in Spokane, Washington dismissed an indictment against 30-year-old farmworker Jose Virgen-Ponce for illegally re-entering the United States after finding he was improperly deported to Mexico two years ago on an incomplete notice.

Virgen-Ponce, who came to the country in 2006 and has several drug- and driving-related convictions, is being held in an immigration detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, while U.S. authorities again seek to deport him.

Israel Detaining Jewish Activists for Supporting Palestinian Rights

Facing backlash against its controversial “nation-state bill,” passed last month, Israel has detained Jewish writers and activists who oppose the law’s definition of Israel as an entirely Jewish state, with no mention of the value of democracy or equal rights for Palestinians.

On Sunday, writer, professor and political commentator Peter Beinart was on vacation, traveling from Greece to attend a family bat mitzvah in Israel when he was detained by the Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, at Ben Gurion Airport in Jerusalem, he reported Monday in an article for The Forward.

Beinart’s was one of three such detentions at airports and border crossings in recent weeks.

Israel-born poet Moriel Rothman-Zecher arrived at Ben Gurion with his wife and infant daughter on July 29. Agents allowed his family through customs but detained him for approximately three hours, claiming his involvement in nonviolent protests was a “slippery slope” to violence against the state, and asking him for the names of pro-Palestinian and peace organizations and of fellow activists and friends.

Rothman-Zechner called the experience “jarring and unpleasant” but acknowledged how common and more abusive the situation is for countless Palestinians, and anyone else without his Israeli citizenship and white privilege.

He wondered how he would explain the incident to his daughter when she is older. “It’s painful to think about telling her one day, ‘Hey kid, on our first visit to Israel, your aba [father] was detained at the border because he thinks Palestinians are human beings deserving of equality,’ ” he said.

A week after Rothman-Zecher’s detention, Simone Zimmerman, a founder of IfNotNow, an organization of young American Jews fighting Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, was detained with a friend, Abigail Kirschenbaum, at the Taba Border Crossing between Israel and Egypt.

According to New York magazine, the two “were held for roughly three and a half hours, had their phones inspected, and were asked a litany of queries about their opinions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, their involvement with human-rights groups, and their interactions with Palestinians, among other topics.”

The incident involving Beinart occurred a week after the detention of Zimmerman and Kirschenbaum. While long an advocate for a two-state solution and Palestinian rights, in the past Beinart has been more cautious about separating his advocacy for the Palestinian people from his Zionism and defense of a Jewish state. Those nuances, however, may be lost on Israeli security forces.

“I was detained and interrogated about my political activities,” Beinart writes, describing how agents first detained him with his family, asking innocuous questions about where they were from and why they were in Israel before escorting Beinart separately to another room, where the questions turned accusatory and aggressive:

Was I involved in any organization that could provoke violence in Israel? I said no. Was I involved in any organization that threatens Israel democracy? I said no—that I support Israeli organizations that employ non-violence to defend Israeli democracy.

The agent then confronted Beinart about his participation in a protest on his last trip to Israel, one that Beinart explained was due to “the fact that Palestinians in Hebron and across the West Bank lack basic rights.” He described his involvement in The Center for Jewish Nonviolence.

The conversation took a strange turn after that, with the interrogator comparing the center with North Korea. As Beinart recalls:

He asked if the Center had incited violence, and I replied that, as its name suggests, it practices non-violence. My interrogator then replied that names could be misleading. The government of North Korea, he observed, calls itself a democracy but is not. I told him I didn’t think the Center for Jewish Nonviolence and the North Korean government have much in common.

Beinart recognizes that he had immense privilege due to being white and Jewish and armed with the phone number of a lawyer, whom he called and who helped set him free. He also was the only one of the three recent detainees to receive an apology from Shin Bet and a rare admission of wrongdoing from Prime Minister Netanyahu.

“We are sorry for the distress caused to Mr. Beinart,” a Shin Bet spokesperson said in a statement, The Times of Israel reports. Netanyahu called the incident “an administrative mistake” and “immediately spoke with Israel’s security forces to inquire how this happened.”

For Beinart, Netanyahu’s statement didn’t go far enough. On Monday he tweeted, “Benjamin Netanyahu has half-apologized for my detention yesterday at Ben Gurion airport. I’ll accept when he apologizes to all the Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans who every day endure far worse.”

 

 

White House Aide Stephen Miller Denounced by Uncle in Withering Essay

Trump administration officials have faced no shortage of critics in the mainstream media, but seldom have its criticisms come from members of their own families. (Strategist Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George, has repeatedly inveighed against the president but has, to date, spared his wife in his diatribes.) However, such is the fate of White House aide Stephen Miller, whose uncle has penned a withering indictment of his nephew and his sadistic immigration policy.

“Let me tell a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration,” begins David Glosser in Politico. “It begins at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus.”

Glosser then proceeds to trace his family’s history, from its persecution in Eastern Europe to its ascension in the United States—first selling goods from a horse and wagon in the coal town of Johnstown, Pa., and generations later as the owners of a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores. The Glossers’ is a distinctly American story, replete with hardship and discrimination, but one that would have probably been impossible under the kinds of restrictions imposed by the Trump administration.

“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” he writes. “I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants—been in effect when [my great-grandfather] Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”

In one of the essay’s more annihilating passages, Glosser all but renounces his sister’s son, questioning how he could align himself with a far right that sought his family’s destruction less than a century ago.

“The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the ‘America First’ nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees,” he continues. “Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.”

Glosser is also careful to note the president’s own descendants fled torment in Europe for a better life in the United States. (Donald Trump’s grandfather reportedly evaded conscription in the German army, while his mother’s family sought to escape the destitution of rural Scotland.) Melania Trump’s parents were naturalized just last week, beneficiaries of an immigration mechanism the president aims to deny to thousands upon thousands of would-be Americans.

“No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us,” Glosser concludes. “As free Americans, and the descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.”

Read the essay in its entirety at Politico.

FBI Fires Peter Strzok in Wake of Anti-Trump Text Messages

WASHINGTON—The FBI has fired a longtime agent who once worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation over text messages criticizing President Donald Trump.

Former agent Peter Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team a year ago after the text messages were first discovered, and the FBI had been reviewing his employment. Strzok’s lawyer said he was fired late Friday by FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich.

The lawyer, Aitan Goelman, criticized the firing in a statement Monday, saying he was removed because of political pressure and “to punish Special Agent Strzok for political speech protected by the First Amendment.” He said the firing “should be deeply troubling to all Americans.”

Goelman said that the FBI had overruled the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which he said had determined that a 60-day suspension and demotion from supervisory duties was “the appropriate punishment.”

The FBI did not have immediate comment.

Strzok vigorously defended himself at a combative House hearing in July, speaking publicly for the first time since the texts were revealed. He insisted that the texts — including ones in which he called Trump a “disaster” and said “We’ll stop” a Trump candidacy — did not reflect political bias and had not affected his investigations.

Strzok was also a lead investigator on the probe into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016.

Republicans were livid at the hearing, which several times devolved into a partisan shouting match. Democrats accused Republicans of trying to divert attention from Mueller’s investigation and Trump’s ties to Russia by excessively focusing on Strzok.

Trump has repeatedly taken aim at Strzok on Twitter, saying his critical text messages showed that Mueller’s investigation is a hoax.

House Republicans cheered Strzok’s firing, with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying on Twitter that it was “long overdue.”

Google Is Tracking Your Movements, Like It or Not

SAN FRANCISCO—Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.

An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.

Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request.

For the most part, Google is upfront about asking permission to use your location information. An app like Google Maps will remind you to allow access to location if you use it for navigating. If you agree to let it record your location over time, Google Maps will display that history for you in a “timeline” that maps out your daily movements.

Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company will let you “pause” a setting called Location History.

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are. And some searches that have nothing to do with location, like “chocolate chip cookies,” or “kids science kits,” pinpoint your precise latitude and longitude — accurate to the square foot — and save it to your Google account.

The privacy issue affects some two billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.

Storing location data in violation of a user’s preferences is wrong, said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau. A researcher from Mayer’s lab confirmed the AP’s findings on multiple Android devices; the AP conducted its own tests on several iPhones that found the same behavior.

“If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” Mayer said. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”

Google says it is being perfectly clear.

“There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. “We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time.”

To stop Google from saving these location markers, the company says, users can turn off another setting, one that does not specifically reference location information. Called “Web and App Activity” and enabled by default, that setting stores a variety of information from Google apps and websites to your Google account.

When paused, it will prevent activity on any device from being saved to your account. But leaving “Web & App Activity” on and turning “Location History” off only prevents Google from adding your movements to the “timeline,” its visualization of your daily travels. It does not stop Google’s collection of other location markers.

You can delete these location markers by hand, but it’s a painstaking process since you have to select them individually, unless you want to delete all of your stored activity.

You can see the stored location markers on a page in your Google account at myactivity.google.com, although they’re typically scattered under several different headers, many of which are unrelated to location.

To demonstrate how powerful these other markers can be, the AP created a visual map of the movements of Princeton postdoctoral researcher Gunes Acar, who carried an Android phone with Location history off, and shared a record of his Google account.

The map includes Acar’s train commute on two trips to New York and visits to The High Line park, Chelsea Market, Hell’s Kitchen, Central Park and Harlem. To protect his privacy, The AP didn’t plot the most telling and frequent marker — his home address.

Huge tech companies are under increasing scrutiny over their data practices, following a series of privacy scandals at Facebook and new data-privacy rules recently adopted by the European Union. Last year, the business news site Quartz found that Google was tracking Android users by collecting the addresses of nearby cellphone towers even if all location services were off. Google changed the practice and insisted it never recorded the data anyway.

Critics say Google’s insistence on tracking its users’ locations stems from its drive to boost advertising revenue.

“They build advertising information out of data,” said Peter Lenz, the senior geospatial analyst at Dstillery, a rival advertising technology company. “More data for them presumably means more profit.”

The AP learned of the issue from K. Shankari, a graduate researcher at UC Berkeley who studies the commuting patterns of volunteers in order to help urban planners. She noticed that her Android phone prompted her to rate a shopping trip to Kohl’s, even though she had turned Location History off.

“So how did Google Maps know where I was?” she asked in a blog post.

The AP wasn’t able to recreate Shankari’s experience exactly. But its attempts to do so revealed Google’s tracking. The findings disturbed her.

“I am not opposed to background location tracking in principle,” she said. “It just really bothers me that it is not explicitly stated.”

Google offers a more accurate description of how Location History actually works in a place you’d only see if you turn it off — a popup that appears when you “pause” Location History on your Google account webpage. There the company notes that “some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other Google services, like Search and Maps.”

Google offers additional information in a popup that appears if you re-activate the “Web & App Activity” setting — an uncommon action for many users, since this setting is on by default. That popup states that, when active, the setting “saves the things you do on Google sites, apps, and services … and associated information, like location.”

Warnings when you’re about to turn Location History off via Android and iPhone device settings are more difficult to interpret. On Android, the popup explains that “places you go with your devices will stop being added to your Location History map.” On the iPhone, it simply reads, “None of your Google apps will be able to store location data in Location History.”

The iPhone text is technically true if potentially misleading. With Location History off, Google Maps and other apps store your whereabouts in a section of your account called “My Activity,” not “Location History.”

Since 2014, Google has let advertisers track the effectiveness of online ads at driving foot traffic, a feature that Google has said relies on user location histories.

The company is pushing further into such location-aware tracking to drive ad revenue, which rose 20 percent last year to $95.4 billion. At a Google Marketing Live summit in July, Google executives unveiled a new tool called “local campaigns” that dynamically uses ads to boost in-person store visits. It says it can measure how well a campaign drove foot traffic with data pulled from Google users’ location histories.

Google also says location records stored in My Activity are used to target ads. Ad buyers can target ads to specific locations — say, a mile radius around a particular landmark — and typically have to pay more to reach this narrower audience.

While disabling “Web & App Activity” will stop Google from storing location markers, it also prevents Google from storing information generated by searches and other activity. That can limit the effectiveness of the Google Assistant, the company’s digital concierge.

Sean O’Brien, a Yale Privacy Lab researcher with whom the AP shared its findings, said it is “disingenuous” for Google to continuously record these locations even when users disable Location History. “To me, it’s something people should know,” he said.

Video Captures Yemeni Schoolchildren Moments Before U.S.-Backed Bombing

As funeral ceremonies for the 51 Yemenis—including 40 young children—massacred by the latest U.S.-backed Saudi bombing took place in the war-torn district of Saada on Monday, cellphone footage captured by one of the children just moments before the coalition’s airstrike shows the dozens of kids excitedly gathered on a bus for a long-awaited field trip celebrating their graduation from summer school.

“By backing the Saudi coalition’s war in Yemen with weapons, aerial refueling, and targeting assistance, the United States is complicit in the atrocities taking place there.” —Sen. Bernie Sanders

According to CNN—which obtained and published the footage Monday—most of the children on the bus were killed by the Saudi airstrike less than an hour after the video was captured.

This is just the latest horrific attack on civilians by the Saudi-led coalition, which has received explicit military and political backing from the United States. Images sent to Al-Jazeera by Yemen’s Houthi rebels suggest that a Mark-82 bomb—which is manufactured by the massive American military contractor Raytheon—was used in the strike, though the photos have yet to be independently verified.

Watch the footage (warning, the video is graphic):

According to the Houthi Health Ministry, 79 people in total and 56 children were wounded in the attack, which quickly drew condemnation and demands for an independent investigation from international humanitarian groups, the United Nations and a small number of American lawmakers.

“By backing the Saudi coalition’s war in Yemen with weapons, aerial refueling, and targeting assistance, the United States is complicit in the atrocities taking place there,” Sanders, I-Vt., wrote on Facebook. “We must end our support for this war and focus our efforts on a U.N.-brokered cease-fire and a diplomatic resolution.”

As Al-Jazeera notes, the U.S. “has been the biggest supplier of military equipment to Riyadh, with more than $90 billion of sales recorded between 2010 and 2015.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has enthusiastically continued the long-standing U.S. policy of backing the Saudi regime no matter how many innocent people it slaughters in Yemen, openly applauding the kingdom for buying so much American weaponry.

Ahead of Monday’s funerals, images on social media showed Yemenis digging graves.

Digging graves for 40 children killed in Saudi-led coalition’s airstrike in Dahian, Saada last Thursday. #Yemen. pic.twitter.com/Y0nqA1vXZU

— Nadwa Dawsari (@Ndawsari) August 11, 2018

“I didn’t find any of his remains, not his finger, not his bone, not his skull, nothing”: Families still searching for loved ones as funerals are held for 29 children killed in Yemen bus attack https://t.co/uBgDFpMXU8 pic.twitter.com/SOfShnxOus

— Al Jazeera News (@AJENews) August 12, 2018

As Will Bunch of Philly.com (The Philadelphia Inquirer) noted in a column Sunday, the Saudi-led coalition’s school bus bombing forced the corporate media—which have almost completely ignored the humanitarian crisis in Yemen—“to pay at least a little bit of attention.”

“It shouldn’t have taken so long,” Bunch wrote. “This blood is on America’s hands, as long as we keep sending the bombs that kill so many Yemenis, and as long as we give the Saudis our unqualified diplomatic support in a messy regional conflict. And yet there’s been no public debate about the murky U.S. role out of this, and no clarification from the White House or the Pentagon over what we hope to accomplish by our support of the mayhem.”

“If the American people can take back control of what is being done in our name,” Bunch concluded, “maybe we can finally begin washing away this spreading moral stain.”

10 Ways We Can Bridge the Great American Political Divide

Trump has intentionally cleaved America into two warring camps: pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Most Americans aren’t passionate conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. But they have become impassioned for or against Trump.

As a result, people with different political views have stopped talking with each other. This is a huge problem because democracy depends on our capacity to deliberate together.

So what can we do—all of us—to begin talking across the great divide? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. Don’t avoid political conversations with people who are likely to disagree with you, even in your own family. To the contrary, seek them out and have those discussions.

2. Don’t start by talking about Trump. Start instead with “kitchen table” issues like stagnant wages, shrinking benefits, the escalating costs of health care, college, pharmaceuticals and housing.

3. Make it personal. Ask them about their own experiences and stories. Share yours. Try to find common ground.

4. Ask them why they think all this has happened. Listen carefully and let them know you’ve heard them.

5. If they start blaming immigrants or African-Americans, or elites, or Democrats, or even Obama—stay cool. Don’t tune out. Ask them about why they think these people are responsible.

6. Gradually turn the conversation into one about power—who has it, who doesn’t. Ask about their own experiences at work, what’s happened to their jobs, how others among their families and friends are treated.

7. Ask them about the roles of big corporations and Wall Street. For example:

—Why is it that when corporations and Wall Street firms violate the law, no executive goes to jail?

—Why did Wall Street get bailed out during the financial crisis but homeowners caught in the downdraft didn’t get help?

—Why do big oil, big agriculture, big Pharma, and Wall Street hedge-fund managers get special subsidies and tax loopholes?

8. Get a discussion going about how the system is organized, for whom, and how it’s been changing. For example:

—Why is it that only four major airlines fly today when a few years ago there were 12? Why are there only four Internet service providers?

—How is this increasing concentration of economic power across the entire economy driving up prices?

—Why are pharmaceutical companies and health insurers able to charge more and more?

—Why can corporations and their top executives declare bankruptcy and have their debts forgiven, when bankruptcy isn’t available to people laden with student debt or to homeowners who can’t meet their payments?

—Why are the biggest benefits from the tax cut going to billionaires?

9. Then get to the core issue: Do they think any of this has to do with big money in politics?

—Is the system rigged? And if so, who’s doing the rigging, and why?

—How can average people be heard when there’s so much big money in politics? Should we try to get big money out of politics?

—And if so, how do we do it?

Notice, you’re not using labels. You’re not talking about Democrats or Republicans, left or right, capitalism or socialism, government or free market. You’re not even talking about Trump.

You’re starting with the everyday experiences of most people—with their wages and living expenses and experiences on the job—and from there moving to economic and political power.

10. Oh, and don’t forget to use humor. Humor is the great disinfectant. For example, the Supreme Court says corporations are people. Well, you’ll believe they’re people when Texas executes a corporation.

Remember, the point isn’t to convince them you’re right and they’re wrong. It’s to get us thinking about what’s really happening to America. It’s exposing the abuses of power all around us.

If we can join together around these fundamental issues, we will all win.

Omarosa Releases Another Recording, This One Featuring Trump Himself

WASHINGTON—Former presidential adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman released another audio recording Monday that she says features President Donald Trump, as she threatened to “blow the whistle” on White House corruption.

The recording, released on NBC’s “Today” show, is purportedly a phone conversation between Trump and Manigault Newman after she was fired from the White House. It appears to show Trump expressing surprise, saying “nobody even told me about it.”

Manigault Newman is drawing fire from Trump’s allies and national security experts for secret recordings she made at the White House, including her firing by chief of staff John Kelly in the high-security Situation Room.

While the latest recording appears to show Trump was unaware of the firing, Manigault Newman said on “Today” that Trump may have instructed Kelly to do it, but she offered no evidence. The White House, which offered stinging criticism over the weekend, did not immediately respond to questions on the new recording.

Manigault Newman, whose book “Unhinged” is out this week, suggested there was more to come, saying: “There’s a lot of very corrupt things happening in the White House and I am going to blow the whistle on a lot of them.”

Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said on “Fox and Friends” Monday that Manigault Newman may have broken the law by recording private conversations at the White House.

When asked if she broke the law, Giuliani said: “She’s certainly violating national security regulations, which I think have the force of law.”

On Sunday, Manigault Newman told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she surreptitiously recorded a number of conversations in the White House for her own protection. Parts of her conversation with Kelly were played on the air. Critics denounced the recordings as a serious breach of ethics and security.

“Who in their right mind thinks it’s appropriate to secretly record the White House chief of staff in the Situation Room?” tweeted Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

In the recording, which Manigault Newman quotes extensively in her new book, “Unhinged,” Kelly can be heard saying that he wants to talk with Manigault Newman about leaving the White House. The Associated Press independently listened to the recording of the conversation.

“It’s come to my attention over the last few months that there’s been some pretty, in my opinion, significant integrity issues related to you,” Kelly is heard saying, citing her use of government vehicles and “money issues and other things” that he compares to offenses that could lead to a court martial in the military.

“If we make this a friendly departure … you can look at your time here in the White House as a year of service to the nation and then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation,” he tells Manigault Newman, adding: “There are some serious legal issues that have been violated and you’re open to some legal action that we hope, we think, we can control.”

Manigault Newman said she viewed the conversation as a “threat” and defended her decision to covertly record it and other White House conversations.

“If I didn’t have these recordings, no one in America would believe me,” she said.

The response from the White House was stinging. “The very idea a staff member would sneak a recording device into the White House Situation Room, shows a blatant disregard for our national security – and then to brag about it on national television further proves the lack of character and integrity of this disgruntled former White House employee,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

The Situation Room is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, where the nation’s most consequential foreign policy decisions are made, and staff are not permitted to bring in cellphones or other recording devices.

“I’ve never heard of a more serious breach of protocol,” said Ned Price, who served as spokesman of the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “Not only is it not typical, something like this is unprecedented.”

Price said there is no one checking staffers for devices at the door, but there is a sign outside the room making clear that electronic devices are prohibited.

“The Situation Room is the inner-most sanctum of a secure campus,” he said, describing the breach as part of a culture of disregarding security protocols in the Trump White House. He also questioned why Kelly would ever choose to have such a meeting there.

In the book, which will be released Tuesday, Manigault Newman paints a damning picture of Trump, including claiming without evidence that tapes exist of him using the N-word as he filmed his “The Apprentice” reality series, on which she co-starred.

Manigault Newman wrote in the book that she had not personally heard the recording. But she told Chuck Todd on Sunday that she later was able to hear a recording of Trump during a trip to Los Angeles.

“I heard his voice as clear as you and I are sitting here,” she said on the show.

The White House had previously tried to discredit the book, with Sanders calling it “riddled with lies and false accusations.” Trump on Saturday labeled Manigault Newman a “lowlife.”

Katrina Pierson, an adviser to Trump’s re-election campaign who served as a spokeswoman for his 2016 campaign, said she had never heard Trump use the kind of derogatory language Manigault Newman describes. She said in a statement that she feels “pity for Omarosa as she embarrasses herself by creating salacious lies and distortions just to try to be relevant and enrich herself by selling books at the expense of the truth. ‘Unhinged,’ indeed.”

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also questioned Manigault Newman’s credibility in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The first time I ever heard Omarosa suggest those awful things about this president are in this book,” she said, noting Manigault Newman “is somebody who gave a glowing appraisal of Donald Trump the businessman, the star of the ‘The Apprentice,’ the candidate and, indeed, the president of the United States.”

Manigault Newman had indeed been a staunch defender of the president for years, including pushing back, as the highest-profile African-American in the White House, on accusations that he was racist.

But Manigault Newman now says she was “used” by Trump, calling him a “con” who “has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities” and is “truly a racist.”

“I was complicit with this White House deceiving this nation,” she said. “I had a blind spot where it came to Donald Trump.”

Charlottesville Anniversary: Peaceful Protests, Few Arrests

WASHINGTON — Thousands of people wanting to send a message that racism is unwelcome in the United States gathered in a park outside the White House to protest a white nationalist rally on the anniversary of the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In the end, fewer than two dozen white nationalists showed up.

The events held in both Charlottesville and Washington, largely peaceful though tense at times, were part of a day of speeches, vigils and marches marking a year since one of the largest gatherings of white nationalists and other far-right extremists in a decade. One person was arrested in Washington on Sunday, and four others were arrested in Charlottesville.

In Charlottesville, the mother of the woman killed at last summer’s rally visited the site of the attack, saying the country’s racial wounds still have not healed. In Washington, a phalanx of police and a maze of metal barriers separated the small group of white nationalists from shouting counterprotesters within view of the White House.

Jason Kessler, the principal organizer of last year’s “Unite the Right” event, led the Sunday gathering he called a white civil rights rally in Lafayette Square. Kessler said in a permit application that he expected 100 to 400 people to participate, but the actual number was far lower: only around 20.

Kessler’s group was dogged by jeering crowds from the moment they emerged from the Foggy Bottom Metro station; they marched about a mile to the White House surrounded by uniformed officers and police vehicles. Behind the barricades, in the northern half of Lafayette Park, thousands of counterprotesters struggled to even catch a clear glimpse of the white nationalist rally.

The counterprotesters had gathered hours earlier in Lafayette Park and nearby Freedom Plaza. Makia Green, who represents the Washington branch of Black Lives Matter, told Sunday’s crowd in Freedom Plaza: “We know from experience that ignoring white nationalism doesn’t work.”

After about 90 minutes, the white nationalists were packed into a pair of vans and driven to safety.

President Donald Trump, who further enflamed tensions last year by blaming “both sides” for the violence, wasn’t at home this year — he has been at his golf club in New Jersey for more than a week on a working vacation.

Washington Police Chief Peter Newsham credited his forces for successfully avoiding violence and keeping the two sides separated. Newsham called it, “a well-executed plan to safeguard people and property while allowing citizens to express their First Amendment rights.”

Earlier in the day in Charlottesville, the mother of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old killed during last year’s rally, said there’s still much healing to be done.

Susan Bro laid flowers at a makeshift memorial at the site of the attack in downtown Charlottesville. With a crowd gathered around her, she thanked them for coming to remember her daughter but also acknowledged the dozens of others injured and the two state troopers killed when a helicopter crashed that day.

“There’s so much healing to do,” Bro said. “We have a huge racial problem in our city and in our country. We have got to fix this, or we’ll be right back here in no time.”

Hundreds of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members and other white nationalists descended on Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, in part to protest over the city’s decision to remove a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a park.

Violent fighting broke out between attendees and counterprotesters. Authorities eventually forced the crowd to disperse, but chaos erupted again when the car barreled into the crowd.

James Fields Jr., of Maumee, Ohio, is charged in state court with murder in Heyer’s killing and faces separate hate crime charges in federal court. He pleaded not guilty last month to the federal charges.

The day’s death toll rose to three when a state police helicopter crashed, killing Lt. Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke Bates.

Among the other anniversary events was a Sunday morning community gathering at a park that drew more than 200 people. The group sang and listened to speakers, among them Courtney Commander, a friend of Heyer’s who was with her when she was killed.

“She is with me today, too,” Commander said.

Law enforcement officials faced blistering criticism after last year’s rally for what was perceived as a passive response to the violence that unfolded. A review by a former U.S. attorney found a lack of coordination between state and city police and an operational plan that elevated officer safety over public safety.

The anniversary weekend was marked by a much heavier police presence, which also drew criticism from some activists.

Demonstrators on Sunday marched through Charlottesville chanting, “Cops and Klan go hand in hand,” and “Will you protect us?”

After the white nationalists departed, police had a tense standoff with about 150 masked anti-fascist, or antifa, protesters who marched through downtown Washington blocking traffic after the white nationalists left. Police shoved back advancing members of the far-left-leaning militant group, and an officer used pepper spray, but no tear gas was deployed.

The city of Charlottesville said four people were arrested in the downtown area. Two arrests stemmed from a confrontation near the Lee statue where a Spotsylvania, Virginia, man stopped to salute, a Charlottesville woman confronted him and a physical altercation took place, officials said.

Police were also investigating the assault of a Charlottesville police officer who was knocked down during a demonstration related to the rally. The officer was knocked to the ground and swarmed after approaching a man whose face was covered, according to police. The officer wasn’t hurt, but the investigation is ongoing.

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Kunzelman reported from Charlottesville and Rankin reported from Richmond, Virginia.