Chris Hedges's Blog, page 585

Bill Gates Has Given $44 Million to Shape Education

SEATTLE—Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates saw an opportunity with a new federal education law that has widespread repercussions for American classrooms.

His nonprofit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given about $44 million to outside groups over the past two years to help shape new state education plans required under the 2015 law, according to an Associated Press analysis of its grants. The spending paid for research aligned with Gates’ interests, led to friendly media coverage and had a role in helping write one state’s new education system framework.

The grants illustrate how strategic and immersive the Microsoft founder can be in pursuit of his education reform agenda, quietly wielding national influence over how schools operate. Gates’ carefully curated web of influence is often invisible but allows his foundation to drive the conversation in support of its vision on how to reshape America’s struggling school systems.

Critics call it meddling by a foundation with vast wealth and resources. The Gates Foundation says it’s simply helping states navigate a “tectonic” shift in responsibility for education — from the federal government to more local control.

“For 50 states with varying sets of capacities and capabilities and readiness, it was both an opportunity and also a concern that states and partners in those states needed support,” said Allan Golston, president of the Gates Foundation’s U.S. work.

The Gates Foundation spent about $44 million focused on the 2015 federal education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act. The law gives states flexibility to create their own education system framework defining what a “good school” is — and in turn states get federal dollars for complying with their own rules.

The law requires academic standards, which means that the backbone for most state education systems is Common Core — a symbol for many critics during the Obama years of federal overreach in schools. Gates was influential in supporting the Common Core academic standards, and now is doing the same as states sort out the best ways to implement their education policies under the 2015 law.

And that is how the world’s largest philanthropy works: funding everything from policy work on the ground to broader research and analysis, as well as national advocacy groups, community leaders and media coverage both mainstream and niche.

In Tennessee, a Gates-funded advocacy group had a say in the state’s new education plan, with its leader sitting on an important advising committee. A media outlet given money by Gates to cover the new law then published a story about research funded by Gates. And many Gates-funded groups have become the de facto experts who lead the conversation in local communities. Gates also dedicated millions of dollars to protect Common Core as the new law unfolded.

Some Common Core and Gates critics said they weren’t aware of the foundation’s interest in the education law or the millions of dollars it has continued to pour into supporting the standards. “They’re doing it in a quiet way because they don’t want the general public to know they’re still meddling in education policy,” said Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education.

And long before thousands of fed-up teachers walked off the job in four unprecedented statewide strikes this year over pay and school conditions, education union officials had sounded alarm about Gates’ influence. The American Federation of Teachers in 2014 broke ties with Gates over Common Core after initially supporting the standards.

To be sure, the Seattle-based foundation’s education spending is just a small fraction of its philanthropy, which is primarily focused on global health and development. Still, in terms of dollars, it is the top funder of school reform in the United States. The foundation since 2001 has contributed more than $6 billion toward reshaping American schools, including nearly $300 million on Common Core by some estimates.

The groups receiving the recent education grants said the money from Gates and other like-minded philanthropies — such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York and William and Flora Hewlett foundations — was used to develop expertise in the education law so that they could be a resource to states. Most of those same groups have been funded by Gates in other initiatives, including prominent Washington-based policy players who developed Common Core in 2009.

Achieve, Inc., collaborated with local leaders to compile information about new state education plans. Mike Cohen, Achieve’s president who helped write Common Core, also had more notable roles in states such as Tennessee and New York.

“Our focus has always been about standards, about helping states set the right expectations for students in terms of what they need to know so that they’re prepared for success after high school,” said Cohen, who was a member of a local stakeholders group in Tennessee focused on standards and assessments. He also gave a presentation to New York’s Board of Regents urging the state to adopt high standards as part of its new education plan.

Tennessee said Cohen had a seat at the table because it sought national experts in addition to state officials, community advocacy groups and traditional and charter schools. Eve Carney, who led the plan’s development for the Tennessee Department of Education, said it was impossible to quantify the specific impact of each of the 67 stakeholders across six working groups.

“It’s important to have diversity in voice and different points of view, however, the influence of one over the other is not there,” Carney said.

Another example of Gates’ reach can be found in The 74 Media, Inc., which last year published an exclusive story featuring the analysis of state plans done by the Collaborative for Student Success and quoting an expert voice from the Council of Chief State School Officers. Gates gave all three groups money to work on Every Student Succeeds Act.

The publication said Gates doesn’t influence the direction of its coverage and that the money funded its broader operation. After the AP’s inquiry, the education news outlet acknowledged an oversight by updating the nearly year-old story to add a Gates funding disclosure.

Golston said it’s necessary to take a multidimensional approach to play at the system-wide level.

“We’re thoughtful about the programmatic dimensions and advocacy and communications dimensions. That’s just the nature of being in education and we’ve learned over time that you have to be thoughtful,” Golston said.

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Associated Press journalist Larry Fenn contributed from New York.

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International Criticism of Israel Mounts as Gaza Death Toll Rises

JERUSALEM—Israel’s high-tech military is coming under scathing international criticism for its use of live fire that killed scores of Palestinian protesters across a border — even if the protesting Gazans were burning tires, launching fiery kites into Israeli farms and in some cases trying to rip apart a border fence.

The Israeli army has staunchly defended its actions. It points to the violent history of Gaza’s Hamas rulers, says there have been bombing and shooting attacks against its forces and fears a mass border breach. It also says that in the open terrain of the Gaza border, with troops easily exposed, its military options are limited.

But with the death toll rising, and hundreds of unarmed people among the casualties, the criticism is mounting.

Here is a closer look at the debate over Israel’s use of live fire:

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WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

The border protests are aimed largely at breaking a decade-old blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt against Hamas. The blockade, which Israel says is needed to keep Hamas from arming, has decimated Gaza’s economy.

Since the Hamas-led protests began on March 30, more than 110 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,500 wounded by live fire, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

On Monday alone, 59 people were killed and over 1,200 wounded — making it by far the bloodiest day of cross-border violence since a 2014 war between Hamas and Israel.

The vast majority of the casualties have been unarmed protesters, according to Palestinian officials.

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ANGRY REACTIONS

Monday’s bloodshed triggered widespread criticism from around the world, with many countries, including European allies like Germany and Belgium, accusing Israel of using disproportionate force and calling for independent investigations.

The U.N. Security Council held a special session that began with a moment of silence for the Palestinians who were killed. In Geneva, the U.N. human rights office said Israel has repeatedly violated international norms by using deadly live fire to repel protesters.

Office spokesman Rupert Colville said rules under international law “have been ignored again and again” and that lethal force should only be a “last resort.”

“It seems anyone is liable to be shot dead or injured: women, children, press personnel, first responders, bystanders,” he said.

In Israel, six human rights groups have asked the Supreme Court to declare as unlawful any regulations that allow soldiers to open fire at unarmed civilians.

Hassan Jabareen, general director of Adalah, one of those groups, said soldiers are supposed to use lethal force only if their lives are in immediate danger. He said the large number of people shot far from the border or struck in their upper bodies has raised additional questions about military policies.

“They are shooting in an arbitrary way for two reasons, to punish and to deter,” he said.

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ISRAEL’S RESPONSE

Israel says it uses live fire only as a last resort. It says it begins with verbal warnings and leaflets dropped from the sky that urge people to stay away from the border, and then resorts to “non-lethal” tactics such as tear gas to disperse the crowds.

The military says snipers are permitted to open fire only when all other means have failed. Snipers are supposed to aim at protesters’ legs and can shoot only with approval from a commander.

Military officials say that tear gas is often ineffective in the windy conditions. It says it needs to keep its soldiers far from the crowds, and that other non-lethal means, such as rubber-coated bullets, are ineffective from a long distance.

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THE HAMAS FACTOR

The Israeli military says the protests are taking place in the context of a long-running armed conflict with Hamas, an Islamic militant group that has fought three wars with Israel over the past decade and killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks.

It says open-fire regulations are subject to the rules of armed conflict, which provide greater leeway for the use of lethal force.

Israel says the protests are not peaceful, and that Hamas militants are using the crowds as cover to carry out attacks.

Protesters have stormed the border fence, set it on fire with burning tires and ripped apart pieces of the structure with wire cutters. They have hurled firebombs and stones toward soldiers and sent flaming kites over the border to set Israeli agricultural fields on fire. One Israeli soldier has been wounded.

The army on Tuesday released a video that appeared to show protesters detonating several explosions near the border. It also said its forces had killed a squad of Hamas gunmen who opened fire at troops.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, said 14 of those killed Monday were actively involved in carrying out attacks.

Israel’s greatest fear is that Hamas will stage a mass breach of the fence and enter nearby Israeli communities to kidnap or kill Israelis.

Such concerns are not unfounded. In 2006, Hamas-linked militants tunneled into Israel and captured a soldier, holding him for five years until he was freed in a prisoner swap.

Hamas also infiltrated into Israel through tunnels during the 2014 war, killing at least six Israeli soldiers, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Since the war, Israel has uncovered and destroyed several additional tunnels.

Hamas leader Yehiyeh Sinwar, who was released in the 2011 prisoner swap, has hinted that a border breach is possible.

“We have no choice,” Conricus said. “There’s no way we have the leniency or the flexibility to allow rioters to tear down the fence, for terrorists to come through following those rioters and get into Israel and terrorize Israeli civilians.”

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Nation’s Most Restrictive Abortion Law Challenged in Iowa

DES MOINES, Iowa — A lawsuit challenging the nation’s most restrictive abortion law was filed Tuesday in Iowa, a state that for years was largely left out of Republican efforts to overturn abortion protections and where the Democratic attorney general has refused to defend the law.

If allowed to take effect on July 1 as planned, the law would ban most abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, around the sixth week of pregnancy. Abortion-rights groups say that’s a time when many women do not know they are pregnant.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America announced the filing of the complaint in Polk County District Court in Des Moines. The lawsuit argues that the law violates the Iowa Constitution by banning nearly all abortions and putting women’s health at risk. It seeks an injunction to halt the law’s implementation. Litigation could take years.

Until the 2016 election, Iowa had little to no role in the broad GOP effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy until a fetus is viable.

“We haven’t heard much out of Iowa until the past couple of years,” said state policy analyst Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a national research group that supports abortion rights and tracks abortion legislation. “It has been a very striking shift in the state Legislature, and it really shows how important state legislatures are to abortion access.”

The election flipped control of the Iowa Senate, putting Republicans in charge of the Legislature and the governor’s office for the first time in two decades. Up to that point, Democrats had maintained enough political power to curtail most Republican anti-abortion attempts.

Chuck Hurley is chief counsel for the Family Leader, a faith-based group in Iowa that opposes abortion. He recalled being at an election night party alongside several state lawmakers. When it became clear Republicans would win Statehouse control, Hurley said he immediately worked the room to talk about abortion legislation.

“It is very interesting that a purple state is this out front on life,” Hurley said, adding, “There’s a pent up pro-life effort here in Iowa.”

Lawmakers adopted several abortion restrictions in 2017, including a 20-week abortion ban and a requirement that women wait three days before ending a pregnancy. The waiting provision, one of the longest in the country, is on hold because of a different lawsuit.

Separately, a new Iowa-based coalition of anti-abortion organizations was formed last year to renew efforts toward an abortion ban. The Coalition of Pro-Life Leaders, which includes Family Leader, put aside years of disagreement among the groups to help win passage of the 20-week ban and the six-week ban.

“The pro-life movement in Iowa is unified for the first time in many years,” said Maggie DeWitte, executive director of Iowans for Life, one of the coalition’s groups.

Iowa Republicans last year also gave up millions in federal dollars to create a state-funded family planning program that prohibits participation from abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the affiliate’s medical director and the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City.

Shortly after the announcement of the lawsuit, Iowa’s longtime attorney general said he would not defend the law. Democrat Tom Miller said the decision to remove his office from the case was based on a belief that the measure “would undermine rights and protections for women.”

Miller said the Thomas More Society, a conservative Chicago-based law firm, has agreed to defend the law for free. The firm had no immediate comment.

Suzanna de Baca, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, said Iowa’s abortion law is tied to a small group of “very extreme politicians” in the state Legislature.

“The perception of Iowa is that we have been a rational, relatively progressive state that has always valued the health of our citizens,” she said. “It seems very uncharacteristic and extreme for an abortion ban of this magnitude to happen here.”

The lawsuit names Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Board of Medicine as defendants. Reynolds, who signed Iowa’s ban earlier this month, said at a public event in Davenport that she felt “very confident” about defending the lawsuit.

“It’s about protecting life. That’s the first and foremost priority,” she said.

Associated Press Writer Ryan J. Foley in Davenport contributed to this report.

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Judge Tosses California Law Allowing Life-Ending Drugs

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A California judge on Tuesday threw out a 2016 state law allowing the terminally ill to end their lives, ruling it was unconstitutionally approved by the Legislature.

Riverside County Superior Court Judge Daniel Ottolia did not rule on the legality of allowing physician-assisted death, but he issued an oral ruling saying lawmakers acted illegally in passing the law during a special session devoted to other topics, said lawyers for supporters and opponents.

Ottolia kept the law in place and gave the state attorney general five days to appeal. Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office did not immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

The Life Legal Defense Foundation, American Academy of Medical Ethics and several physicians challenged the law, which allows terminally ill adults to obtain a prescription for life-ending drugs if a doctor has determined they have six months or less to live. The plaintiffs say the law lacks safeguards to protect against abuse.

California is one of five states in which terminally ill people can end their lives. Oregon was the first to provide the option in 1997.

Since California approved the legislation, hundreds of terminally ill people have requested life-ending drugs, according to state figures and local advocates who track the prescriptions.

California health officials reported that 111 terminally ill people took drugs to end their lives in the first six months after the law went into effect June 9, 2016, and made the option legal in the nation’s most populous state. The next report on how many people took the drugs is due in July.

“Our supporters, they’ve frankly expressed shock at this outcome. They’re disappointed that this end of life option could be taken away,” said John Kappos, an attorney representing Compassion & Choices, a national organization that advocated for the Legislature to pass the law.

Advocates argued if the law is suspended, people who qualified for the prescriptions will lose the option and be forced to suffer prolonged, painful deaths.

“The court went down a technical path saying we’re not going to reach the merits…but the way it was enacted through a special session the court said was improper and therefore declared it unconstitutional,” Kappos said.

The Democratic lawmakers who carried the original bill, Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman of Stockton and Sen. Bill Monning of Carmel, could not immediately say if they would try to pass the bill again.

Alexandra Snyder, an attorney and executive director of Life Legal Defense Foundation, said the judge ruled that lawmakers effectively “hijacked” a special legislative session that was called to address access to medical care and used it to pass their bill.

“It was a violation of the Constitution to basically slip in this suicide bill,” she said, saying it set a dangerous precedent that undermines the legislative process. “Access to health care has no relationship to assisted suicide.”

The state’s attorney general’s office, in responding to the suit, noted that medical professionals have the right to refuse to prescribe and dispense the drugs. Under the law, the terminally ill person must be able to self-administer the drugs.

The attorney general’s office said in court documents that the act “provides comfort, support and an option to accommodate the very unique needs of terminally ill patients.” It said the plaintiffs are wrong to second guess the Legislature’s policy decisions.

In lobbying against the law before state legislators, opponents argued that hastening death was morally wrong, that it puts terminally ill patients at risk for coerced death by loved ones and could become a way out for people who are uninsured or fearful of high medical bills.

Associated Press writer Julie Watson contributed to this story from San Diego.

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North Korea Threatens to Cancel U.S. Summit

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Wednesday canceled a high-level meeting with South Korea and threatened to scrap a historic summit next month between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over military exercises between Seoul and Washington that Pyongyang has long claimed are invasion rehearsals.

The surprise declaration, which came in a pre-dawn dispatch in North Korea’s state media, appears to cool what had been an unusual flurry of outreach from a country that last year conducted a provocative series of weapons tests that had many fearing the region was on the edge of war. It’s still unclear, however, whether the North intends to scuttle all diplomacy or merely wants to gain leverage ahead of the planned June 12 talks between Kim and Trump.

The statement was released hours before the two Koreas were to meet at a border village to discuss setting up talks aimed at reducing military tension along the world’s most heavily armed border and restarting reunions between families separated by the Korean War.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency called the two-week-long Max Thunder drills, which began Monday and reportedly include about 100 aircraft, an “intended military provocation” and an “apparent challenge” to an April summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, when the rival leaders met on their border and agreed to reduce animosity and set up more high-level exchanges.

“The United States must carefully contemplate the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit amid the provocative military ruckus that it’s causing with South Korean authorities,” the North said Wednesday. “We’ll keenly monitor how the United States and South Korean authorities will react.”

Annual military drills between Washington and Seoul have long been a major source of contention between the Koreas, and analysts have wondered whether their continuation would hurt the detente that, since an outreach by Kim in January, has replaced the insults and threats of war. Earlier — and much larger — springtime drills, which Washington and Seoul toned down, went off without the North’s typically fiery condemnation or accompanying weapons tests.

In Washington, the U.S. State Department emphasized that Kim had previously indicated he understood the need and purpose of the U.S. continuing its long-planned joint exercises with South Korea. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. had not heard anything directly from Pyongyang or Seoul that would change that.

“We will continue to go ahead and plan the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un,” Nauert said.

Army Col. Rob Manning said this current exercise is part of the U.S. and South Korea’s “routine, annual training program to maintain a foundation of military readiness.” Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, said the purpose of Max Thunder and exercise Foal Eagle — another training event — is to enhance the two nations’ abilities to operate together to defend South Korea.

“The defensive nature of these combined exercises has been clear for many decades and has not changed,” said Manning.

Washington and Seoul delayed an earlier round of drills in the spring because of the North-South diplomacy surrounding February’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in the South, which saw Kim send his sister to the opening ceremonies.

Kim told visiting South Korean officials in March that he “understands” the drills would take place and expressed hope that they’ll be modified once the situation on the peninsula stabilizes, according to the South Korean government.

South Korea didn’t immediately make any official response to the North’s announcement.

The North’s statement Wednesday comes amid a flurry surprising moves from the North in recent weeks.

On Tuesday, South Korea’s military said North Korea was moving ahead with plans to close its nuclear test site next week, an assessment backed by U.S. researchers who say satellite images show the North has begun dismantling facilities at the site.

The site’s closure was set to come before the Kim-Trump summit, which had been shaping up as a crucial moment in the decades-long push to resolve the nuclear standoff with the North, which is closing in on the ability to viably target the mainland United States with its long-range nuclear-armed missiles.

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AP writers Lolita Baldor and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.

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Shift in U.S. Policies Triggers Concern in Mideast

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s prospects for brokering the Mideast peace “deal of the century” plunged ever deeper as the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem opened amid bloodshed in Gaza. The day fueled global concern that U.S. policies are tipping the broader Middle East into deeper, intractable conflict.

At the same time, Trump is winning international support for his efforts to strike a deal with nuclear-armed North Korea. But his contentious decisions in the Middle East are roiling a region where U.S. administrations have traditionally sought perhaps their biggest diplomatic prize: an elusive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The embassy move, which Trump hailed a “great day” for Israel even as dozens of Palestinians were killed in Gaza, damaged Washington’s stature as a mediator between those parties. And it’s but the latest in a series of U.S. decisions that may have set off a domino effect of unpredictable consequences.

“Traditionally we’ve tried to play a role of fireman in the Middle East. Now we’re playing the role of arsonist,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department and Pentagon official who runs the Mideast program at the Center for a New American Security.

Trump’s withdrawal last week from the Iran nuclear deal, against the protestations of European allies, appears to have emboldened both Israel and Iran to move more forcefully toward full-on confrontation. In Syria, Trump’s eagerness to pull out U.S. troops as soon as the Islamic State group is defeated has forced a reckoning by Iran’s enemies about the possibility that Tehran will fill the void.

Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said Washington is not responsible for the fact that Iran acts as “the major source of tension and instability in the region.” But he said the question is whether Trump’s administration, having pulled out of the nuclear deal, has a strategy to deal with Iran in its absence.

Shapiro, who is now at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, said that while some U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia have celebrated the pullout, the reaction “will soon be followed by some degree of concern about whether the administration is sufficiently focused, prepared, staffed and able to devote the necessary attention when it’s also managing another major foreign policy challenge in North Korea at the same time.”

U.S. officials insist the administration remains committed to restarting the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In a speech at the embassy opening, Trump’s son-in-law, senior adviser Jared Kushner, said the U.S. “is prepared to support a peace agreement in every way we can.”

Left unsaid was the fact that Kushner’s team has had to shelve Trump’s long-awaited peace plan indefinitely amid the Palestinian uproar over the embassy move, several U.S. officials have said. Since Trump in December recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced the embassy would move, the Palestinians have effectively cut off all ties with the White House, a diplomatic chill that augurs poorly for the possibility that Trump can now introduce a plan the Palestinians would accept or deem fair.

“We’re going through a rough-patch,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said Monday on Fox News. “It’ll last as long as it lasts. I can’t predict, but we will be back in a position I’m confident where we’ll be discussing peace.”

White House spokesman Raj Shah said the peace plan will be released “at the appropriate time.”

Israelis on Monday hold American and Israeli flags with the new U.S. embassy in the background in Jerusalem. Seventy years after Israel’s founding, images of victory and violence showcased the contradictions that bedevil the Jewish state. Deadly protests flared along the Gaza border, where troops killed dozens of Palestinians even as politicians feted the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem as a symbol of the ironclad alliance with Washington. (Sebastian Scheiner / AP)

That time, by all accounts, is not now. Responding to the embassy opening, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat dismissed Washington as “no longer a partner and a broker.”

“We will not sit with them,” Erekat said. “They have become part of the problem not part of the solution, a big part of the problem. Trump’s administration is the biggest problem.”

The White House response to the deaths of dozens of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli troops on Monday during mass protests on the Israel-Gaza border won’t help. The administration called the deaths “tragic” but said they were the fault of Hamas, which controls Gaza and has fomented the protests. It voiced strong support for Israel’s right to self-defense.

The renewed Gaza violence has created the unsettling but real possibility that Israel — far from enjoying a new era of peace with its neighbors — could soon find itself fighting wars on two fronts: with the Hamas militants who run the coastal Gaza Strip, and with Iranian troops and Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Syria.

Already, fallout from the embassy opening has spread far beyond Jerusalem, illustrating how in the delicate Mideast, one point of conflict often begets another.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II took to Twitter to say the embassy move would have “dangerous implications” for security and “provoke Muslims and Christians.” Thousands gathered in Turkey to protest the move. Several nations said they were pulling their ambassadors from Israel to protest the deaths in Gaza. And Erekat announced Monday that Palestinian leadership in the West Bank had decided to file a war crimes complaint against Israel with the International Criminal Court.

“The U.S. has selected one of the most sensitive, one of the most difficult issues, to step in and put forward a position that it knows will be significantly damaging to its efforts,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. He said Trump proceeded anyway “because of internal pressures and right-wing tendencies and evangelicals and others.”

“I cannot see the U.S. being an honest broker, whatsoever, as far as the Palestinian public is concerned,” he added.

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Associated Press writer Karin Laub in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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U.S. Turns Screws on Top Iranian Bankers

WASHINGTON—The United States designated the head of Iran’s central bank as a terrorist on Tuesday and barred anyone around the world from doing business with him, escalating financial pressure on Iran in the wake of President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal.

Valiollah Seif, the governor of the Iranian central bank, was named a “specially designated global terrorist” along with another senior official, Ali Tarzali, who works in the central bank’s international division. The Treasury Department accused the men of secretly funneling millions of dollars through an Iraqi bank to help Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant network that the U.S. considers a terrorist group.

The moves come as Trump’s administration, after deeming the 2015 nuclear deal insufficiently tough on Iran, seeks to construct a global coalition to place enough pressure on Tehran that it comes back to the negotiating table to strike a “better deal.” The sanctions targeting Iran’s central bank executives are some of the first actions by Trump’s administration since pulling out of the deal to start ramping up that economic pressure.

“The United States will not permit Iran’s increasingly brazen abuse of the international financial system,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said. “The global community must remain vigilant against Iran’s deceptive efforts to provide financial support to its terrorist proxies.”

The exact ramifications of the sanctions for Iran’s economy were not immediately clear. The U.S. said that the sanctions did not extend to Iran’s central bank itself. Still, the U.S. said it was imposing so-called secondary sanctions on the Iranian bank officials, which could significantly increase Iran’s isolation from the global financial system.

Typically, when the U.S. punished individuals with sanctions, it prohibits Americans or U.S. companies from doing business with them. Secondary sanctions also apply to non-Americans and non-U.S. companies. That means that anyone, in any country, who does business with Seif or Tarzali could themselves be punished with sanctions, cutting them off from the U.S. financial system.

There was no immediate comment Tuesday night from Iranian officials. Iranian media initially reported the decision based on reports in the foreign media.

The U.S. actions send an ominous warning to European capitals, still reeling from Trump’s withdrawal from the deal the U.S., Iran and world powers struck in 2015.

The European members of the deal — France, the U.K. and Germany — are trying to keep it alive without the U.S. Yet it’s unclear that will be workable, because Trump has vowed to punish European companies that continue doing business with Iran despite re-imposed U.S. sanctions. On Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was meeting in Brussels with the top French, British and German diplomats as the Europeans seek to keep Iran from bailing on the deal.

Seif, as the central bank’s governor, has helped guide Iran’s economy through the web of sanctions in place on that country. In the aftermath of the 2015 deal, in which nuclear sanctions on Iran were lifted, Seid was a prominent voice complaining that Iran was still being kept out of the global financial system and not receiving the economic benefits it was promised in exchange for curtailing its nuclear program.

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The Treasury said that Seif undermined the central bank’s credibility by routing millions of dollars from the Quds Force, the expeditionary unit of Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guards, to al-Bilad Islamic Bank, which is based in Iraq. Those funds were then used to “enrich and support the violent and radical agenda of Hezbollah,” Treasury said.

Al-Bilad Islamic Bank and its CEO and chairman, Aras Habib, were also hit with U.S. sanctions, as was Muhammad Qasir, who the Treasury said is a Hezbollah official who has been a “critical conduit” for transferring funds to Hezbollah from the Revolutionary Guards.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite guerrilla force that is also a prominent political player in Lebanon, has long helped carry out Iran’s foreign policy objectives in the Arabic-speaking world. Most recently, the U.S. has been concerned about the role that Hezbollah fighters are playing in Syria to help prop up President Bashar Assad. Hezbollah fought a war with Israel in 2006, and Israeli officials have been deeply concerned about the prospect of another confrontation.

Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

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Sports-Bet Ruling May Help Sanctuary Cities

WASHINGTON—In President Donald Trump’s former life as a casino owner, he might have cheered Monday’s ruling from the Supreme Court that struck down a federal law that barred every state but Nevada from allowing betting on most sporting events.

But the Trump administration opposed the outcome reached by the high court at least in part because it could signal trouble in its legal fight against so-called sanctuary states and cities. Seven of the nine justices — five conservatives and two liberals — backed a robust reading of the Constitution’s 10th Amendment and a limit on the federal government’s power to force the states go along with Washington’s wishes.

The federal anti-gambling law is unconstitutional because “it unequivocally dictates what a state legislature may and may not do,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion. “It’s as if federal officers were installed in state legislative chambers and were armed with the authority to stop legislators from voting on any offending proposals.”

There is a direct link between the court’s decision in the sports betting case and the administration’s effort to punish local governments that resist Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, several legal commentators said.

“The court ruled definitively that the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law. In the immigration context, this means it can’t require state or local officials to cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project, said the ruling reinforced decisions from the 1990s, including one that struck down part of a federal gun control law that required local police to determine if buyers were fit to own handguns.

“It reiterates that the real thrust of the 10th Amendment and the principles of law in this area is that the fed government can’t tell the states or cities how to legislate,” Jadwat said. The amendment says that powers not specifically given to the federal government belong to the states.

The gun law decision split the court’s conservatives and liberals in 1997, in keeping with conservatives’ complaints about the federal government’s overreach and the importance of states’ rights. But on Monday, Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined their more conservative colleagues.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the decision, but it had called on the court to uphold the federal law at issue — the department’s usual practice when federal laws are challenged — by arguing that there was no constitutional violation.

In the most recent ruling about sanctuary cities, the federal appeals court in Chicago held last month that the federal government cannot withhold public safety grants from cities that won’t go along with Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.

In lawsuits challenging the administration, cities argue that turning local police authorities into immigration officers erodes trust with minority communities and discourages residents from reporting crime. The administration says sanctuary jurisdictions allow dangerous criminals back on the street.

The administration’s efforts to crack down on places that don’t comply with immigration authorities have taken several forms. Trump issued an executive order aimed at withholding federal money from recalcitrant jurisdictions. The administration also has sued California over three laws aimed at protecting immigrants in the country illegally.

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Journalist and Novelist Tom Wolfe Dies

NEW YORK—Tom Wolfe, the white-suited wizard of “New Journalism” who exuberantly chronicled American culture from the Merry Pranksters through the space race before turning his satiric wit to such novels as “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full,” has died. He was 88.

Wolfe’s literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, told The Associated Press that he died of an infection Monday in a New York City hospital. Further details were not immediately available.

An acolyte of French novelist Emile Zola and other authors of “realistic” fiction, the stylishly-attired Wolfe was an American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it. Along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, he helped demonstrate that journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.

His hyperbolic, stylized writing work was a gleeful fusillade of exclamation points, italics and improbable words. An ingenious phrase maker, he helped brand such expressions as “radical chic” for rich liberals’ fascination with revolutionaries; and the “Me” generation, defining the self-absorbed baby boomers of the 1970s.

Wolfe was both a literary upstart, sneering at the perceived stuffiness of the publishing establishment, and an old-school gentleman who went to the best schools and encouraged Michael Lewis and other younger writers. When attending promotional luncheons with fellow authors, he would make a point of reading their latest work.

“What I hope people know about him is that he was a sweet and generous man,” Lewis, known for such books as “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” told the AP in an email Tuesday. “Not just a great writer but a great soul. He didn’t just help me to become a writer. He did it with pleasure.”

Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. “So the doors close and the walls go up!” he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

His work broke countless rules but was grounded in old-school journalism, in an obsessive attention to detail that began with his first reporting job and endured for decades.

“Nothing fuels the imagination more than real facts do,” Wolfe told the AP in 1999. “As the saying goes, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.'”

Wolfe’s interests were vast, but his narratives had a common theme. Whether sending up the New York art world or hanging out with acid heads, Wolfe inevitably presented man as a status-seeking animal, concerned above all about the opinion of one’s peers. Wolfe himself dressed for company — his trademark a pale three-piece suit, impossibly high shirt collar, two-tone shoes and a silk tie. And he acknowledged that he cared — very much — about his reputation.

“My contention is that status is on everybody’s mind all of the time, whether they’re conscious of it or not,” Wolfe, who lived in a 12-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told the AP in 2012.

In 1978, Wolfe married Sheila Berger, art director of Harper’s magazine. They had two children, Alexandra and Tommy.

He enjoyed the highest commercial and critical rewards. His literary honors included the American Book Award (now called the National Book Award) for “The Right Stuff” and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle prize for “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” one of the top 10 selling books of the 1980s. Its 1998 follow-up, “A Man in Full,” was another best-seller and a National Book Award nominee. Wolfe satirized college misbehavior in “I Am Charlotte Simmons” and was still at it in his 80s with “Back to Blood,” a sprawling, multicultural story of sex and honor set in Miami.

A panel of judges organized in 1999 by the Modern Library, a Random House imprint, picked “The Right Stuff” as No. 52 on its list of the century’s 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. Another panel of experts, listing the best journalism of the century, cited Wolfe three times on its list of 100, for “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” ”The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” and “The Right Stuff.”

Wolfe, the grandson of a Confederate rifleman, began his journalism career as a reporter at the Springfield (Massachusetts) Union in 1957. But it wasn’t until the mid-1960s, while a magazine writer for New York and Esquire, that his work made him a national trendsetter. As Wolfe helped define it, the “new journalism” combined the emotional impact of a novel, the analysis of the best essays, and the factual foundation of hard reporting. He mingled it all in an over-the-top style that made life itself seem like one spectacular headline.

“She is gorgeous in the most outrageous way,” he wrote in a typical piece, describing actress-socialite Baby Jane Holzer.

“Her hair rises up from her head in a huge hairy corona, a huge tan mane around a narrow face and two eyes opened — swock! — like umbrellas, with all that hair flowing down over a coat made of … zebra! Those motherless stripes!”

Wolfe traveled during the ’60s with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for his book on the psychedelic culture, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” One of his best-known magazine pieces, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” took a pointed look at fund-raising for the Black Panther Party by Leonard Bernstein and other wealthy whites. And no one more memorably captured the beauty-and-the-beast divide between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he wrote, “but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town!”

Wolfe had many detractors — including fellow writers Norman Mailer and John Updike and the critic James Wood, who panned Wolfe’s “big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability.”

But his fans included millions of book-buyers, literary critics and fellow authors.

“He knows everything,” novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote of Wolfe. “… I wish he had headed the Warren Commission. We might then have caught a glimpse of our nation.”

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. As a child, he did rewrites of the Authurian legends and penned biographies of his heroes. He became co-editor of his high school newspaper before moving on to Washington and Lee University, where he graduated with honors and was remembered by fellow student, the novelist Tom Robbins, as holding the very highest status: the big man on campus.

Wolfe had an unsuccessful pitching tryout with the New York Giants before heading to Yale University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in American studies. His career didn’t immediately take off; Wolfe once took The Associated Press writing test and “dismally failed,” he later recounted, noting that he was faulted for embellishing the test material, a primal sin at the AP.

But in 1957, he joined the Springfield paper and instantly fell in love with journalism. Two years later he jumped to The Washington Post, where he won Washington Newspaper Guild awards in 1960 for his coverage of U.S.-Cuban affairs and a satiric account of that year’s Senate civil rights filibuster.

New York was his dream and by 1962 he was working at the now defunct New York Herald-Tribune, with colleagues including Jimmy Breslin and Charles Portis, who later wrote the novel “True Grit.” The next year, Wolfe was assigned to cover a “Hot Rod & Custom Car” show. He completed a story, the kind “any of the somnambulistic totem newspapers in America would have come up with.”

But he knew there was a much richer, and longer story to tell, one about a thriving subculture that captured the post-World War II economic boom and the new freedom to “build monuments” to one’s own style. No newspaper could contain what Wolfe had in mind, so he turned to Esquire magazine, wrote up 49 pages and helped give birth to a new kind of reporter.

“For the who-what-where-when-why of traditional journalism, he has substituted what he calls ‘the wowie!'” according to a 1965 Newsweek story.

That same year, his first book appeared: “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a collection of 23 Wolfe articles that included the title piece, his seminal work on custom cars. In 1968, another collection — “The Pump-House Gang” — appeared, as did his book on the Pranksters.

It wasn’t until the early ’80s that Wolfe turned his attention to fiction. His topic: New York City in the late 20th century, a melange of sexual tension, class struggles and racial animus. “The Bonfire of the Vanities” first appeared as a serial in “Rolling Stone” magazine in 1984-85, with Wolfe writing the book one chapter at a time. When it was released as a novel in 1987, “Bonfire” became an immediate sensation even as it was criticized for its portrayal of blacks. One black character, the publicity-seeking Reverend Bacon, was based on a then-little known Al Sharpton. But a film version starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis was so disastrous that it inspired a nonfiction account of the wreckage, Julie Salomon’s “The Devil’s Candy.”

“A Man in Full” turned Wolfe’s smirk to Atlanta society. His 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” looked at life on a fictional elite college campus rife with drinking, status obsession and sex. The book received poor reviews and was a commercial disappointment, leading Wolfe to switch publishers in 2008 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux — where he had been for 40 years — to Little, Brown and Company. Other recent works, including the nonfiction “The Kingdom of Speech,” were not well received. But he was never without ideas for future projects.

“There are still so many things I don’t know about the city and I’d just like to see what’s out there,” he told the AP in 2012. “The Latin American population has increased enormously since ‘Bonfire’ and Wall Street has changed enormously. I’ll follow my usual technique of just taking in a scene and seeing what happens.”

____

Former Associated Press writer Larry McShane contributed to this report.

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Seattle to Tax Big Companies to Help the Homeless

SEATTLE—Seattle’s largest businesses such as Amazon and Starbucks will have to pay a new tax to help fund homeless services and affordable housing under a measure approved by city leaders.

The City Council unanimously passed a compromise plan Monday that taxes businesses making at least $20 million in gross revenues about $275 per full-time worker each year — lower than the $500 per worker initially proposed. The so-called “head tax” would raise roughly $48 million a year to build new affordable housing units and provide emergency homeless services.

The debate over who should pay to solve a city housing crisis exacerbated by Seattle’s rapid economic growth comes after weeks of tense exchanges, raucous meetings and a threat by Amazon, the city’s largest employer, to stop construction planning on a 17-story building near its hometown headquarters.

Amazon, Starbucks and business groups sharply criticized the council’s decision after Monday’s vote. They called it a tax on jobs and questioned whether city officials were spending current resources effectively. One state Republican lawmaker said he would seek legislation next year to make clear that a city tax on employees, wages or hours is illegal.

Seattle-based Starbucks had harsh words for its hometown leaders. It accused the city of spending without accountability while ignoring that hundreds of children sleep outside.

“If they cannot provide a warm meal and safe bed to a 5-year-old child, no one believes they will be able to make housing affordable or address opiate addiction,” said John Kelly, Starbucks’ senior vice president of global public affairs and social impact.

Worker and church groups and others praised the tax as a step toward building badly needed affordable housing in an affluent city where the income gap continues to widen and lower-income workers are being priced out.

“People are dying on the doorsteps of prosperity. This is the richest city in the state and in a state that has the most regressive tax system in the country,” said councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, who wanted a heftier tax. She called the compromise plan “a down payment” to build housing the city needs.

For Seattle’s liberal City Council, the discussion centered not so much on whether there should be a head tax but how big it should be. Four bill sponsors initially pitched a tax of $500 per full-time employee a year but a compromise proposal emerged over the weekend after they could not muster six votes needed to override a potential veto by Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Councilmember Lisa Herbold, a bill sponsor, said the revenue will not be enough to fully address the problem given the city’s needs but said it was “the strongest proposal” possible given the veto threat.

Tax proponents have said too many people are suffering on the streets and that the problem is deepening even though city-funded programs found homes for 3,400 people last year. The Seattle region had the third-highest number of homeless people in the U.S. and saw 169 homeless deaths last year. The city spent $68 million on homelessness last year and plans to spend even more this year. The tax will provide additional revenue.

“This legislation will help us address our homelessness crisis without jeopardizing critical jobs,” Durkan said in a statement.

Other cities have put in place similar taxes, but critics have said Seattle’s tax could threaten the booming local economy and drive away jobs.

Nearly 600 high-grossing employers — about 3 percent of all Seattle businesses — would pay the tax starting in 2019. Amazon, with 45,000 workers, would take the biggest hit.

The company expressed disappointment with the outcome.

While Amazon has resumed construction planning on the downtown building, company officials “remain apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here,” said Drew Herdener, Amazon’s vice president for global corporate and operations communications.

He said Seattle “does not have a revenue problem — it has a spending efficiency problem.”

Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez responded that she was “equally disappointed” with Amazon’s reaction to the council’s vote and said she thinks “their tone in this message that is clearly hostile toward the city council is not what I expect from a business who continues to tell us that they want to be a partner on these issues.”

Before the vote, Gonzalez said the city “has an obligation to take care of the people who are surviving and suffering on our city streets.”

Shannon Brown, 55, who has been living a tiny home at a south Seattle homeless encampment, said there’s simply not enough housing for the city’s poorest people.

“I live in a little shed, but it’s better than living in a tent or in a sleeping bag on the street,” she said. “There’s no away I can afford to live in Seattle. I don’t understand why businesses think it’s wrong to help.”

John Boufford with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades said he did not understand the rhetoric against Amazon, which he noted provides good jobs for thousands of people.

“They’re driving this economic engine,” he said. “I’m confused about why the city of Seattle is fostering an adversarial relationship with businesses in this city.”

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