Chris Hedges's Blog, page 74

The United States of Impeachment

How, exactly, did I get here? My political journey has somehow taken me from canvassing for Obama north of Fort Knox, KY in 2008, to voting for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary outside of West Point, NY in 2016, to – gulp! – “defending” Trump against impeachment in 2019. What a long, strange, trip it has been, as they say. Truth is, I couldn’t sleep last night and have been watching CNN’s wall-to-wall impeachment coverage since 4AM. When the clock struck a reasonable hour on East Coast time, and once I couldn’t contain the frustration any longer, I called my father.

Now, Dad and I are political opposites. No, that’s too mild. We are toxically antithetical. A bit of back story: he and I have gone months without speaking in the past over arguments surrounding the Iraq War and other polarizing political topics. It’s gotten ugly at times. Years ago, we called an armistice and agreed, for the most part, to limit our daily conversations to grandkids and the NY Yankees. Dad voted Trump; I was a Bernie-bro who held my nose then cast for team Hillary. Yet, against all odds, we agree, mostly, that – though for perhaps different reasons – the Democrats’ impeachment crusade is equal parts distraction and farce. As we took turns venting this morning, it struck me that, in hyper-polarized – Red Team / Blue Team – America, our middle-ground discussion must be about as rare (or mythical) as a unicorn.

Look, I know I’m about to get hammered as soon as this piece hits the web. I’m not all that naive. Most left-leaning publications wouldn’t likely have touched it; the few mainstream liberal friends I have left may bolt; and online critics – whether famous or nameless – will once again slap me with the standard labels: Trump-apologist, Putin-stooge, Russian-asset, and/or blatantly un-American. So it goes. Nonetheless, no matter the cost (count me a free-speech-nostalgist), whatever principles I possess demand that I throw my two cents in.

Allow me one caveat (which my pops won’t like): personally, I think Trump is utterly unfit for office – in part, due to his temperament, but mainly because of his policies. What a novel thought, I know! So, I’ll save you the suspense – I ain’t gonna vote for the guy … ever. Furthermore, I think Trump’s committed plenty of impeachable acts, mainly in the foreign policy arena, from overseeing U.S.-abetted, unsanctioned war crimes in Yemen, to escalating America’s bombing of several nations upon whom Congress has not declared war. Problem is, as I’ve written, the same can mostly be said of Baby Bush and “Saint” Obama. And we all know the DNC-machine has zero stomach for criticizing the latter, no matter how mildly.

All that said, I truly believe that Ukraine-gate, like Russia-gate before it, was a dangerous charade – smoke and mirrors – from the start. The entire Russian collusion angle, no matter hard MSNBC liberals wished it were otherwise, never amounted to much of anything. In fact, the whole masquerade served (and serves) mainly as a cudgel for establishment Dems and their media lackeys’ attempt to delegitimize a duly elected president from the very moment he was elected. I know, I know – the Electoral College is a travesty, an undemocratic anachronism. I agree wholeheartedly. Still, according to the rules of the game, Trump won. Period.

Matters deteriorate from there, unfortunately. So polarized, so tribal, has Washington become, that the Democrats marched down this impeachment road knowing full well that they didn’t stand a chance of removing Trump. No one seriously believed the Republican-led Senate, especially with ice-cold Mitch McConnell at the helm, would convict this president. Proof positive came this morning, when first Nancy Pelosi, then Rep. James Clyburn, hinted they might even withhold the impeachment articles from the Republican Senate indefinitely, or, forever. Say again? So what was all this for, then, exactly?!? Clearly, the entire process constituted little more than political masturbation from Jump Street. Though, admittedly, it’s been – and will continue to be – a boon for the media. Like pornography, impeachment-theater makes for great (if guilt-ridden) entertainment – which is precisely the business the media is in these days.

There was hardly an ounce of statesmanlike bipartisanship in yesterday’s vote; and there won’t be any going forward, either. Not a single Republican crossed the aisle to censure the president. Only two Democrats voted against impeachment. This nearly clean party divide is as instructive as it is disturbing. Consider an historical comparison: even before Nixon’s (far more deserved) impeachment came up for a full floor vote in the House, key Republican senators told him he’d lost their confidence. He resigned almost immediately. It’s hard to imagine such a scenario on either side of the aisle in our tortured present.

Tulsi Gabbard, at least, showed some political courage – even Meghan McCain referred to Tulsi’s “balls-of-steel” – and voted “present”, rather than with her party. Rep. Gabbard wasn’t prepared to vote “Nay,” and, admittedly, that may be due to limited political expedience – a last lifeline to what remains of her Democratic connections. Seen in another light, though, hers amounts to a plea for moderation, for bipartisanship. She’d said, previously, that her decision on impeachment would depend, in part, on whether there’d be cross-aisle consensus. And of course there wasn’t. In the email I received from her campaign this morning – worth quoting at length – she explained it thus:

A house divided cannot stand. And today we are divided. Fragmentation and polarity are ripping our country apart. This breaks my heart, and breaks the hearts of all patriotic Americans, whether we are Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. So today, I come before you to make a stand for the center, to appeal to all of you to bridge our differences and stand up for the American people. My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we can heal our country.

When the smoke clears, and Election Day 2020 passes, I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised if Tulsi Gabbard leaves the Democratic Party and joins her friend Bernie Sanders as an Independent.

The enormous elephant in the proverbial impeachment room, though, is the little matter of what U.S. policy towards Ukraine and Russia should be. That ought to be at least part of the rub, no? There are, I’d submit, serious questions worth asking about Obama’s – and the entire establishment’s – preferred strategy on this front. The late-stage Obama team – and, certainly, had she been elected, Hillary’s gang – seemed intent, in the wake of Crimea and Ukraine, on drumming up a New Cold War with the world’s other major nuclear power. Is this warranted; is it smart? Count me doubtful. Furthermore, who, exactly, are, America’s “partners” in Ukraine? Well, it might be inconvenient to admit, but a solid chunk are legitimate fascists, neo-nazis, in fact.

Okay, Trump shouldn’t have used the language he did with Ukraine’s president; his transactional style strikes me as immature and unstatesmanlike. That said, is it truly in the interest of the US to arm military factions – some army, some militia – in a proxy war with Russia? It didn’t end so well last time Washington played that very game a few decades back in Afghanistan. Ukraine is as near to Russia as Mexico is to Texas. Thus, logic – or even a simple glance at a map – should put to rest the notion that the whole proxy campaign has anything to do with the well-worn fiction that the US must fight the Russians “there,” rather than “over here.” No, I’m sorry: the Democratic (and Republican-National-Security-insider) plan strikes this author as a terrifyingly dangerous form of brinksmanship.

Another potential result of the impeachment show is what it forebodes. In the future, expect both parties, whenever they are in the opposition, to treat every election loss as evidence that the new president is illegitimate. Impeachment proceedings might just become the new normal – hardly, if my memory of high school civics serves me, the intent of the Founding Fathers. Sure, maybe Mitch McConnell started down this trail with his post-Obama-election statement that “The single most important thing we [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Even if we grant them that, the Democrats have exponentially upped the ante. Mark my words, Americans will come to regret that escalation when Washington politics fracture (is it even possible?) ever further in the years to come.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the distraction aspect of the all-Trump-all-impeachment, all-the-time, phenomenon. Trump isn’t going anywhere; in fact, I predict he’ll win by an even larger margin in 2020. Nothing tangible, after all, will come of this vote. Not a thing will change. So here’s the real pity: as the show unfolds over the next several months, impeachment will suck all the air out of the actually important problems and stories of the day. Meanwhile, the forever wars will rage, and US foreign policy – along with the world, itself – will sink ever deeper towards hell in a hand basket. Impeachment will bury the true scandal of the moment – the Afghanistan Papers, remember those? Yemen will keep getting bombed; Iraq will drift towards yet another collapse; Israeli apartheid will cement ever further; and India’s Prime Minister Modi will escalate his potentially civil-war-inducing suppression of Muslims.

Through all that, count on one thing: America will remain paralyzed, distracted. Last night, all the female Democrats in the House – at Pelosi’s behest, one assumes – wore black to mark the “seriousness” of their faux somber occasion. Turns out the attire was totally appropriate, if for the wrong reasons. Black befit the moment, not because Trump behaved badly, but because the Democrats just ushered in the Age of Impeachment, of sustained partisanship, of ignoring the real scandals and existential threats before this wayward republic of ours. With that, I yield the floor.

This article originally ran on Antiwar.com.

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, TomDispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Trump Blasts Christian Magazine That Called for His Removal

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump blasted a prominent Christian magazine on Friday, a day after it published an editorial arguing that he should be removed from office because of his “blackened moral record.”

Trump tweeted that Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham, “would rather have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President.”

The magazine “has been doing poorly and hasn’t been involved with the Billy Graham family for many years,” Trump wrote. He later questioned whether the magazine would prefer a Democratic president “to guard their religion.”

Related Articles


[image error]







The Unholy Alliance Among Trump, Kavanaugh and the Evangelicals



by Sonali Kolhatkar








[image error]







Young Christians More Progressive, Diverse Than Their Parents



by Natasha Hakimi Zapata








[image error]







'Make America Christian Again'



by Mel White

Some of his strongest evangelical supporters, including Graham’s son, rallied to his side and against the publication. Their pushback underscored Trump’s hold on the evangelical voting bloc that helped propel him into office and suggested the editorial would likely do little to shake that group’s loyalty.

Rev. Franklin Graham, who now leads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and prayed at Trump’s inauguration, tweeted Friday that his father would be “disappointed” in the magazine. Graham added that he “felt it necessary” following the editorial to share that his father, who died last year after counseling several past presidents, voted for Trump. The president thanked Graham for the disclosure.

Christianity Today “represents what I would call the leftist elite within the evangelical community. They certainly don’t represent the Bible-believing segment of the evangelical community,” Graham told The Associated Press in an interview. He wrote on Facebook: “Is President Trump guilty of sin? Of course he is, as were all past presidents and as each one of us are, including myself.”

The magazine’s circulation is estimated at 130,000. In the editorial titled “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli wrote that Democrats “have had it out for” the president since he took office.

But Galli asserted that the facts “are unambiguous” when it comes to the acts that led to the president’s impeachment this week by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

Trump “attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents,” Galli wrote, referring to former Vice President Joe Biden. “That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”

The schism among Christians about Trump dates back to before his election. Prominent Southern Baptist Russell Moore warned that Trump “incites division” in a 2015 op-ed. The essay cited the Bible in asking fellow Christians to “count the cost of following” him. It later earned a tweeted lashing from then-candidate Trump.

After Trump defended the organizers of a 2017 white nationalist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville, Va., one member of his evangelical advisory board stepped down, citing “a deepening conflict in values between myself and the administration.”

But no such break has occurred between the president and the core of his evangelical base. Trump is deeply popular among white evangelical Protestants, with roughly 8 in 10 saying they approve of the way he is handling his job, according to a December poll from The AP-NORC Center.

Many prominent evangelicals have only intensified their support for Trump as Democrats moved to impeach him, circling the wagons despite Trump’s personal history, which includes multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, deeply divisive policies and profanity laced comments.

At the heart of that backing is what pro-Trump evangelicals view as the president’s significant record of achievement on their highest priorities, such as his successful installation of more than 150 conservative federal judges and his support for anti-abortion policies.

“No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close,” Trump said in his tweets. He declared that he “won’t be reading ET again!” using the wrong initials to describe the Christian publication.

Johnnie Moore, a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, tweeted that during the “hyperventilating” over the “inconsequential” editorial, he was at Vice President Mike Pence’s residence, “where dozens of evangelicals who actually lead MILLIONS were celebrating Christmas undistracted by impeachment & grateful” for the administration’s policies.

Adding that Christianity Today “only represents a certain segment of evangelicals,” Moore tweeted that “this is not a game changing moment or hardly a surprise.”

Another Trump evangelical adviser, Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, tweeted that the magazine is “dying” and “going against 99% of evangelical Republicans who oppose impeachment.”

The editorial did not take a position on whether Trump should be removed by the Senate or by popular vote in the 2020 election, calling it “a matter of prudential judgment.” But Galli wrote that the need for Trump’s removal “is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”

The editorial came one day after Trump became the third president in American history to be impeached. The House charged him with abuse of power in pressuring Ukraine to announce investigations of Biden, and with obstructing Congress in the ensuing probe.

Asked Friday in an interview with CNN about Trump’s critical tweets, Galli said the president’s characterization of the magazine as far left was “far from accurate.” But Galli, who is set to retire from his post next month, also said he is realistic about the impact of his words.

“I don’t have any imagination that my editorial is going to shift their views on this matter,” Galli said of the president’s supporters. “The fact of the matter is Christianity Today is not read by the people — Christians on the far right, by evangelicals on the far right — so they’re going to be as dismissive of the magazine as President Trump has shown to be.”

___

Schor reported from New York.

Vatican Office Reveals Vast Caseload of Abuse

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican office responsible for processing clergy sex abuse complaints has seen a record 1,000 cases reported from around the world this year, including from countries it had not heard from before — suggesting that the worst may be yet to come in a crisis that has plagued the Roman Catholic Church.

Nearly two decades after the Vatican assumed responsibility for reviewing all cases of abuse, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is today overwhelmed, struggling with a skeleton staff that hasn’t grown at pace to meet the four-fold increase in the number of cases arriving in 2019 compared to a decade ago.

“I know cloning is against Catholic teaching, but if I could actually clone my officials and have them work three shifts a day or work seven days a week,” they might make the necessary headway, said Monsignor John Kennedy, the head of the congregation’s discipline section, which processes the cases.

Related Articles


[image error]







Pope Removes Shroud of Secrecy From Clergy Sex Abuse Cases



by










Pope's 'Wrath of God' Promise on Sex Abuse Doesn't Appease Survivors



by

“We’re effectively seeing a tsunami of cases at the moment, particularly from countries where we never heard from (before),” Kennedy said, referring to allegations of abuse that occurred for the most part years or decades ago. Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Italy and Poland have joined the U.S. among the countries with the most cases arriving at the congregation, known as the CDF.

Kennedy spoke to The Associated Press and allowed an AP photographer and video journalists into the CDF’s inner chambers — the first time in the tribunal’s history that visual news media have been given access. Even the Vatican’s most secretive institution now feels the need to show some transparency as the church hierarchy seeks to rebuild trust with rank-and-file Catholics who have grown disillusioned with decades of clergy abuse and cover-up.

Pope Francis took a step towards showing greater transparency with his decision this week to abolish the so-called “pontifical secret” that governs the processing of abuse cases to increase cooperation with civil law enforcement.

But the CDF’s struggles remain, and are emblematic of the overall dysfunction of the church’s in-house legal system, which relies on bishops and religious superiors, some with no legal experience or qualified canon lawyers on staff, to investigate allegations of sexual abuse that even the most seasoned criminal prosecutors have difficulty parsing. The system itself is built on an inherent conflict of interest, with a bishop asked to weigh the claim of an unknown alleged victim against the word of a priest who he considers a spiritual son.

Despite promises of “zero tolerance” and accountability, the adoption of new laws and the creation of expert commissions, the Vatican finds itself still struggling to reckon with the problem of predator priests — a scourge that first erupted publicly in Ireland and Australia in the 1990s, the U.S. in 2002, parts of Europe beginning in 2010 and Latin America last year.

“I suppose if I weren’t a priest and if I had a child who were abused, I’d probably stop going to Mass,” said Kennedy, who saw first-hand how the church in his native Ireland lost its credibility over the abuse scandal.

“I’d probably stop having anything to do with the church because I’d say, ‘Well, if you can’t look after children, well, why should I believe you?”

But he said the Vatican was committed to fighting abuse and just needed more time to process the cases. “We’re going to look at it forensically and guarantee that the just outcome will be given,” he said in an interview.

“It’s not about winning people back, because faith is something that is very personal,” he added. “But at least we give people the opportunity to say, ‘Well, maybe give the church a second chance to hear the message.’”

___

Located in a mustard-colored palazzo just inside the Vatican gates, the CDF serves as the central processing center for abuse cases as well as an appeals court for accused priests under the church’s canon law, a parallel legal system to civil law enforcement that dispenses ecclesial justice.

In the past, when the CDF was known as the Holy Office or the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition, such church punishments involved burnings at the stake for heretics and publishing lists of banned books that the faithful were forbidden to read.

Today, CDF justice tends more toward ordering errant priests to prayer, penance and prohibition from celebrating Mass in public. In fact the worst punishment handed down by the church’s canon law, even for serial child rapists, is essentially being fired, or dismissed from the clerical state.

While priests sometimes consider defrockings to be equivalent to a death sentence, such seemingly minor sanctions for such heinous crimes have long outraged victims, whose lives are forever scarred by their abuse. But recourse to church justice is sometimes all the victims have, given the statutes of limitations for pursuing criminal charges or civil litigation have often long since passed by the time a survivor comes to terms with the trauma and decides to report the abuse to authorities — usually to prevent further harm.

‘’I wanted to make sure that this priest does not have access to any children,” said Paul Peloquin, a Catholic clinical psychologist and abuse survivor who reported his abuser to the archdiocese of Santa Fe, N.M., in 1990.

By then, church authorities had known for decades that the Rev. Earl Bierman groped young boys, and they had sent him off for therapy. But his bishops kept putting him back in ministry, where he is believed to have abused upwards of 70 children. A Kentucky jury convicted him in 1993 and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, where he died in 2005.

Peloquin, however, never received a reply to his initial complaint to his bishop.

“It just made me angry,” said Peloquin, who now counsels victims from a faith-based perspective that emphasizes forgiveness in healing. “It seemed like they would have called me up right away and said, ‘Let’s hear about what you’ve got to say.’”

Because of cases like his, where the bishop ignored the victim, protected the pedophile and placed the church’s reputation above all else, the CDF under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ‘(the future Pope Benedict XVI) in 2001 persuaded St. John Paul II to centralize the process.

The aim was to crack down on abusers and provide bishops and religious superiors with needed guidance to punish the priests rather than move them around from parish to parish, where they could abuse again. At no time has the Vatican ever mandated superiors report abusers to police, though it has insisted they cooperate with civil reporting laws.

The 2001 revision calls for bishops and religious superiors who receive an allegation to conduct a preliminary investigation, which in the U.S. is often done with the help of a lay review board.

If the bishop finds the claim has a semblance of truth, he sends the documentation to the CDF which tells the bishop how to proceed: via a full-blown canonical trial, a more expedited “administrative” procedure, or something else, including having the CDF itself take over the investigation.

Over the ensuing months and years, the bishop continues the investigation in consultation with the CDF. Eventually the bishop reaches a verdict and a sanction, up to and including dismissal from the clerical state, or laicization.

If the priest accepts the penalty, the case ends there. If he appeals, the case comes to the CDF for a final decision.

From 2004 to 2014 — roughly the years of Benedict’s papacy with a year on each bookend — some 848 priests were defrocked around the world and another 2,572 were sanctioned to lesser penalties, according to Vatican statistics.

The Vatican hasn’t published updated statistics since then, but Benedict’s get-tough defrocking approach has seemingly gone unmatched by Francis. The Jesuit pope appears more swayed by arguments that the church and society are better served if abusers remain in the priesthood, albeit out of active ministry with young people, so they are at least under surveillance by their superiors and not able to have access to children in other jobs.

The appeals are decided in an ivory damask-walled conference room on the first floor of the Palazzo Sant’Uffizio, the CDF headquarters a stone’s throw from St. Peter’s Square.

The room is dominated by a massive wooden crucifix on the wall that faces St. Peter’s Basilica, and, in each corner of the room, a closed-circuit TV camera peering down on CDF staff.

The cameras record the debates on DVDs for the CDF’s own archives and in case the pope ever wants to see what transpired.

It is wretched work, reading through case files filled with text messages of priests grooming their victims, psychological evaluations of pedophiles, and heart-numbing letters from men and women who were violated as children and are finally coming to terms with their traumas.

“There are times when I am poring over cases that I want to get up and scream, that I want to pack up my things and leave the office and not come back,” Kennedy told Catholic journalists in the U.S. earlier this year.

Nearly 20 years after the CDF assumed responsibility for the cases, it has processed 6,000 abuse cases, and at one point Francis lamented that it had a backlog of 2,000. But the CDF now must cope with the globalization of the scandal that in 2001 seemed to be largely confined to the English-speaking world.

Today, the CDF counts just 17 officials, with occasional help from other CDF staff, plus the superiors. Kennedy said he was planning to bring in a Brazilian, Polish and bilingual American canonist to help offset the expected departures of current CDF staff and to process cases from countries that are only now having a reckoning with abuse.

But there are still countries the CDF has never heard from — a scenario that suggests “either that they’re all saints or we don’t know about them yet,” Kennedy told AP.

The implication is that victims are still cowed, and bishops are still covering up cases. A new Vatican law mandates all abuse and cover-up be reported to church officials, but there is no automatic penalty if anyone fails to do so.

Not even in the U.S., which has the most stringent reporting mechanisms in place, is there any way to ensure that bishops are forwarding allegations to the CDF as required.

“There has never been independent review of diocesan compliance with that law,” said the Rev. James Connell, a canon lawyer who represents abuse survivors.

___

Walk into the Pontifical Gregorian University library, climb up the spiral staircase to the legal stacks and you’ll find volume after volume of “Decisiones Seu Sententiae” — the Latin-language legal decisions from one of the Holy See’s main tribunals, the Roman Rota.

The tomes contain hundreds of decrees of petitions to nullify Catholic marriages from around the world — the Vatican-stamped paperwork Catholics need to remarry in the church after divorcing.

But there is no such jurisprudence published for the Vatican’s other main tribunal, the CDF. None of those rulings are ever published. And that is because until this past week, abuse cases were covered by the highest form of confidentiality in the church, the so-called “pontifical secret.”

John Paul decreed that abuse cases would be kept under such tight secrecy in 2001, and defenders argued it was the best way to protect the privacy of the victim, the reputation of the accused and the integrity of the process.

Critics said the pontifical secret was used to keep the scandal hidden, prevent police from acquiring internal documentation and silence victims. The U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a scathing denunciation of the secrecy in 2014, and victims long complained how it retraumatized them:

Many were held to secrecy for decades by their abusers, only to have the church re-traumatize them by imposing secrecy on them when they finally found the courage to report the crime.

In announcing the abolition of the highest confidentiality in abuse cases, the Vatican said the reform would facilitate cooperation with civil law enforcement, since bishops would no longer be able to hide behind the pontifical secret to withhold documents.

The argument was striking, given that it amounted to an explicit admission that bishops had used the pontifical secret as an excuse to refuse cooperation when prosecutors, police or civil authorities demanded internal paperwork.

In more academic terms, the lack of published CDF jurisprudence means no bishop or religious superior has case law to refer to when he receives a new allegation that one of his priests has raped a child: He can’t read up on how the Vatican or his brother bishops have handled a similar set of facts in the past, since none of the cases are published.

No seminarian studying canon law can cite case studies in preparing his thesis about how the Catholic Church has responded to the abuse scandal. No academic, journalist, victim or ordinary Catholic has any real idea how the Catholic Church has adjudicated these cases in any systematic way.

The Rev. D.G. Astigueta, a Jesuit canonist at the Gregorian, has said such institutional secrecy surrounding abuse case harms the development and practice of the church’s own law.

“Canonical science doesn’t only grow and develop from a reflection by experts or the production of new laws, but also by jurisprudence, the way of interpreting the law by judges and lawyers,” he told a 2017 conference.

He called for greater transparency by the CDF so that today’s canon lawyers, especially those studying in Rome, could have easy access to case files and thus have “teaching based not just on theory but practice.”

He is not alone. For the past several years, Vatican-affiliated universities in Rome have hosted conferences on seeking a new equilibrium between the need to protect the integrity of the investigation while looking out in particular for the needs of the victims.

Three of the official speakers at Francis’ big sex abuse summit in February called for a reform of the pontifical secret, and the Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, was the primary driver behind the reform.

In another change to church law this year, Francis decreed that victims cannot be silenced, and have the right to learn the outcomes of their cases. But they are still largely kept out of the process, after making an initial complaint.

“They are that person who has been harmed. And it would seem to be natural justice that they should know what is being done (and) what is being said in their absence,” said Marie Collins, an Irish survivor who quit Francis’ child protection commission in frustration in part over what she said was the CDF’s intransigence and obsession with secrecy.

And the length of time the cases take benefits no one, she added.

The CDF is due to soon publish a step-by-step guidebook for bishops and religious superiors to refer to so they can process cases, and two researchers are currently hard at work in Kennedy’s office, entering case details into a database so the CDF can generate a statistical analysis of the cases it has processed over the past two decades.

Kennedy said he needs more funding to complete the project, and said more transparency could be possible down the line.

“I think eventually we will get to the point of publishing jurisprudence, like the way the Roman Rota does,” he said. The aim would be to redact names and revealing details, but show “the broad parameters of what it is that we do.”

Boeing Capsule Launches to Wrong Orbit, Skips Space Station

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Boeing’s new Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit after lifting off on its first test flight Friday, a blow to the company’s effort to launch astronauts for NASA next year.

As the company scrambled to understand what happened, NASA canceled the Starliner’s docking with the International Space Station, instead focusing on a hastier than planned return to Earth. The Starliner could parachute into its landing site in the New Mexico desert as early as Sunday.

Officials stressed the capsule was stable and safe, and that had astronauts been aboard, they would have been in no danger. A crew may have been able to take over control and salvage the mission. The problem was with the Starliner’s mission clock: It was off-kilter, which delayed timed-commands to put the capsule in the right orbit. Engineers worried the problem could resurface during descent.

Related Articles


[image error]







Long-Distance Trip: NASA Opening Space Station to Visitors



by








[image error]







Trump Declares New Space Command Key to American Defense



by








[image error]







Why Are Billionaires Like Jeff Bezos So Obsessed With Space?



by

It was a major setback for Boeing, which had been hoping to catch up with SpaceX, NASA’s other commercial crew provider that successfully completed a similar demonstration last March. SpaceX has one last hurdle — a launch abort test — before carrying two NASA astronauts in its Dragon capsule, possibly by spring.

NASA officials did not think Friday’s problem would hold up SpaceX, but said they would need to make sure nothing was in common between the two companies’ on-board mission timers. Ground controllers were puzzled over why the Starliner’s timer was not working properly when the capsule separated from the rocket and began flying freely.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said it was too soon to know whether Boeing would need to conduct another orbital test flight without a crew, before flying astronauts. The company had been shooting for its first crew launch by the middle of next year. An additional test flight would almost certainly push the first astronaut flight back.

Boeing’s Jim Chilton, a senior vice president, stopped by the Starliner’s manufacturing plant at Kennedy Space Center to address employees on his way to a somber news conference.

“These are passionate people who are committing a big chunk of their lives to put Americans back in space from our soil, so it’s disappointing for us,” Chilton told reporters.

It’s been nearly nine years since NASA astronauts have launched from the U.S. The last time was July 8, 2011, when Atlantis — now on display at Kennedy Space Center — made the final space shuttle flight.

Since then, NASA astronauts have traveled to and from the space station via Kazakhstan, courtesy of the Russian Space Agency. The Soyuz rides have cost NASA up to $86 million apiece.

The space agency handed over station deliveries to private businesses, first cargo and then crews, in order to focus on getting astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars.

Commercial cargo ships took flight in 2012. Crew capsules were more complicated to design and build, and parachute and other technical problems caused repeated delays. Target launch dates starting with 2017 came and went. Last April, a SpaceX crew capsule — the same one that flew to the space station a month earlier — exploded during a ground test.

The U.S. needs companies competing like this, Bridenstine said Thursday, to drive down launch costs, boost innovation and open space up to more people. He stressed the need for more than one company in case of problems that kept one grounded.

Friday’s blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station started flawlessly as the Atlas V rocket lifted off with the Starliner just before sunrise. But a half-hour into the flight, the trouble became apparent.

Ground controllers tried to send up commands to get the spacecraft in its proper orbit, but the signals did not get there and by then it was too late. The capsule tried to fix its position, burning too much fuel for the spacecraft to safely make it to the space station for a Saturday rendezvous.

All three astronauts assigned to the first Starliner crew were at control centers for the launch: Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann, both with NASA, and Boeing’s Chris Ferguson, who commanded the last shuttle mission. He’s now a test pilot astronaut for Boeing and one of the Starliner’s key developers.

“This is why we flight test, right? We’re trying to get all of the bugs, if you will, out of the system,” said Fincke at the briefing. “There’s always something.”

Built to accommodate seven, the white capsule with black and blue trim will typically carry four or five people. It’s 16.5 feet (5 meters) tall with its attached service module and 15 feet (4.5 meters) in diameter.

For the test flight, the Starliner carried Christmas treats and presents for the six space station residents, the original air travel ID card belonging to Boeing’s founder and a mannequin, named Rosie after the bicep-flexing riveter of World War II.

The flight was designed to test all systems, from the vibrations and stresses of liftoff to the touchdown at the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, with parachutes and air bags to soften the landing.

On the eve of the launch, Bridenstine said he’s “very comfortable” with Boeing, despite the prolonged grounding of the company’s 737 Max jets. The spacecraft and aircraft sides of the company are different, he noted. Boeing has long been involved in NASA’s human spacecraft program, from Project Mercury to the shuttle and station programs.

Boeing began preliminary work on the Starliner in 2010. Four years later, Boeing and SpaceX made the final cut. Boeing got more than $4 billion to develop and fly the Starliner, while SpaceX got $2.6 billion for a crew-version of its Dragon cargo ship.

On Thursday, Bridenstine said NASA wants to make sure every reasonable precaution is taken with the capsules, designed to be safer than NASA’s old shuttles.

“We’re talking about human spaceflight,” he cautioned. “It’s not for the faint of heart. It never has been, and it’s never going to be.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Early PG&E Blackouts Forewarned Later Problems

SAN FRANCISCO — The state senators grilling the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. were upset — like millions of other Californians, some spent days in the dark when the nation’s largest utility shut off power during windstorms this fall.

The lawmakers demanded that the executive explain why blackouts intended to prevent downed power lines from sparking deadly wildfires caused so much trouble of their own.

The explanation CEO Bill Johnson offered the Capitol hearing room: Several smaller outages that PG&E triggered in the year before its debacle began in mid-October went well, giving his company misplaced confidence.

Related Articles


[image error]







Power Cut to 1 Million in California to Try to Prevent Deadly Fires



by








[image error]







Wildfires Outside L.A. Threaten Homes, Spare Reagan Library



by








[image error]







Bankrupt PG&E Makes $13.5 Billion Deal With California Wildfire Victims



by

“I think we got a little complacent that we had figured it out,” Johnson testified last month.

PG&E had not figured it out.

An Associated Press review shows widespread problems with the four “public safety power shutoffs” the utility started rolling out in 2018, a year before massive blackouts paralyzed much of California in recent months. Interviews and documents obtained under public records requests reveal persistent failures and broken promises that in some cases compromised public safety.

Even as PG&E assured regulators it was fixing the problems, the utility kept making many of the same mistakes, further undermining trust after its outdated equipment and negligence has been blamed for fires that killed nearly 130 people during 2017 and 2018.

Communication, a foundation of emergency management, was poor. PG&E’s notifications of impending outages were haphazard at times, with some sent after the power was already out. Telecommunications companies, water providers and emergency managers did not always receive the early word they needed.

“We were surprised that PG&E provided no advanced warning to us,” an official with the city of Oroville’s drinking water provider wrote state regulators about a June outage.

PG&E made important information hard to get. It was slow to distribute electronic maps showing who would lose power, making it harder for emergency responders to know exactly where to send resources. The utility also balked at providing the addresses of medically needy customers to local officials who planned to check on them in person.

Breakdowns afflicted even basic technology. In a region that’s home to Silicon Valley and its thousands of computer programmers and engineers, PG&E had not prepared the website where it posted outage updates for a crush of customers, so it crashed. Tech experts from the state had to intervene.

The sound quality of some calls PG&E hosted during shutoffs was so poor that emergency responders and legislators had a hard time understanding updates. Even then, not everyone was invited.

“In the future, AT&T requests that it and other communications providers be included on any conference calls providing real time information,” the telecommunications giant protested to regulators after the June shutoff.

These and other early failures weren’t widely recognized as harbingers of the issues that would overwhelm PG&E come mid-October, partly because the outages affected rural areas with less political and economic clout.

While the headline-making shutoffs affected more than 2 million people across much of PG&E’s 70,000-square-mile service territory, the four initial blackouts affected tens of thousands in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills and famed wine valleys. They hit in October 2018 and then in June, September and early October of this year.

Among those who saw trouble building were regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission.

The first shutoff was chaotic and the next three were not going according to the guidelines regulators had passed. Commission staff met more frequently with PG&E starting in the spring, using advice and persuasion rather than mandating changes.

“We, as the state, never got to the point where we had complete confidence in PG&E’s ability to execute,” said Elizaveta Malashenko, the top California regulator overseeing blackouts.

Malashenko, deputy executive director of safety and enforcement policy, told the AP that the commission didn’t act more aggressively because it has to balance punitive intervention with giving utilities a chance to self-correct.

“There needs to be some basic operational assumption that you can set up a conference call,” Malashenko said.

Some critics faulted regulators for not doing enough.

The utilities commission, a sprawling bureaucracy with a complex rule-making process, was “not aggressive enough early in setting clear requirements and standards,” said Melissa Kasnitz, legal director for the Center for Accessible Technology, which advocates for people with disabilities.

PG&E promised to fix a range of problems promptly, and an executive said it worked hard to deliver.

In many ways, that didn’t happen. Not only did the problems continue throughout the smaller shutoffs, but they were replicated on a huge scale starting with the mid-October shutoffs.

The problems galled local officials, who vented deep frustration that a utility they often work closely with kept failing them.

After all, they are the ones dealing with a shutoff’s consequences. They must dispatch ambulances, run jails and water plants, direct traffic through darkened intersections, set up community shelters and much more.

“It’s almost as if it’s intentional disregard of all the warnings we gave them,” said Napa County Supervisor Diane Dillon, whose district north of San Francisco has experienced nearly every shutoff.

___

Sixteen million people — more than the population of nearly any U.S. state — depend on PG&E for power. The shutoffs were an inconvenience for some and extremely costly for others. For society’s most frail, they brought questions of life and death.

Those who rely on medical devices in their homes were particularly vulnerable.

“PG&E did nothing to help us who depend on electricity to run our life support,” recounted Grace Lin, a polio survivor who needs a ventilator to breathe and uses an electric wheelchair. “It’s not like we could simply grind our teeth and tough it out by holding our breath.”

Lin said she was confused by the notifications PG&E sent ahead of the first shutoff that affected her San Francisco Bay Area home on Oct. 9. The company website they referred to for updates was frozen. Lin considered herself lucky that she had the means to evacuate 20 miles away, to a quadriplegic friend’s house that had electricity.

PG&E could identify “medical baseline” customers such as Lin based on billing records. Local officials working to identify everyone who might need help repeatedly asked PG&E to share its list, so no one was overlooked.

Regulators said PG&E promised it would release medical baseline addresses during a shutoff. Yet when each of the first four hit, PG&E insisted that locals sign a legal agreement not to disclose the addresses, causing delay and uncertainty that regulators said could risk lives.

On the eve of the first massive power outage, Malashenko of the utilities commission was urgently emailing company officials in frustration.

“This issue has been discussed many times over the last several months” yet “has once again become an issue with PG&E,” she wrote on Oct. 8.

Malashenko said state officials also pushed PG&E to improve in other areas. Starting in April, they met at least weekly with PG&E, pointing out needed improvements and stressing that aspects of the utility’s preparation was inadequate.

PG&E argued that the commission’s own privacy rules meant it couldn’t share the addresses without a non-disclosure agreement, spokesman Jeff Smith explained. Resolving the problem took an order that the commission’s executive director sent three hours before the first massive blackouts began.

Other groups of vulnerable Californians endured shutoffs without the help they needed.

“A lot of them don’t have support, a lot of them don’t have family,” Betty Briggs, 84, said of her elderly neighbors in the well-touristed Napa Valley town of Calistoga. “It makes it very difficult, and it puts them in danger.”

Briggs can get around without help, but her husband requires 24-hour care due to dementia. He lives nearby at Cedars Care Home, where seven residents in their 80s and 90s experienced three shutoffs before mid-October.

The outages created anxiety for people reliant on routine, as well as practical problems.

Beds and wheelchair lifts require electricity. So does the heat and air conditioning. When the freezer got too warm, staff tossed 30 days of backup food.

Owner Irais Lopez still hasn’t restocked fully.

“Now, we only buy small quantities,” Lopez said, “because we don’t know what will happen.”

___

At PG&E’s high-rise headquarters in downtown San Francisco, the emergency operations center springs to life with each shutoff.

Employees in different colored vests that distinguish their expertise cluster around banks of computer monitors showing real-time updates. Maps track wind speed and direction, as well as which circuits are down. Conversation hums in the background.

This is where decisions are made and answers can be found — and local officials said they felt they had little access to either.

Fed up with communication gaps, one hard-hit county requested a presence at PG&E headquarters during the September shutoff. Regulators required that the utility hold seats in its emergency operations center for local representatives, but a lawyer for Sonoma County instead spent her day in a conference room several locked doors away.

“There was just a lack of understanding on behalf of PG&E of why local government needs timely information,” said Petra Bruggisser, a deputy county counsel.

PG&E already had a shaky reputation in its Northern and central California territory.

The company spent three years in bankruptcy starting in 2001, after California’s attempt to deregulate its power market went awry.

Maintenance failures led to a natural gas pipeline blast near San Francisco in 2010 that killed eight people. PG&E was found criminally liable and paid a $1.6 billion fine.

In late 2017, its equipment was suspected of starting the Tubbs Fire that killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,600 buildings.

The utility revealed in spring 2018 that it would start using power shutoffs when fire danger was high and extreme winds blew.

PG&E then began to explain what to expect, sending millions of emails to update its customer contact files, running advertising in multiple languages and holding hundreds of meetings with community leaders, public safety agencies and residents.

The California Public Utilities Commission started writing guidelines for how utilities should roll out “de-energization.” The guidelines were published as a 176-page document in June.

By that point, PG&E had again filed for bankruptcy protection, crushed by liabilities for fires in 2017 and 2018, including the Camp Fire that nearly wiped out the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.

The utility now has a market value of about $6 billion — a drop of $30 billion in just over two years — and is working with the state and a federal judge to emerge from bankruptcy by June 30.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he expects PG&E’s entire 14-member board of directors, including Johnson, its CEO, to step down before the state will approve the utility’s plan to regain its financial footing.

“PG&E’s recent management of the public safety power shutoffs did not restore public confidence,” the Democratic governor warned the company in a Dec. 13 letter. “Instead, PG&E caused extreme uncertainty and harm for Californians who rely on power for their health care and their livelihood.”

PG&E said Johnson was not available for an interview. The utility’s point man on the shutoffs told AP that he believes Johnson, while testifying before lawmakers last month, was referring to its ability to kill and safely restore power to an extremely complex electrical grid.

Sumeet Singh, a vice president who oversees PG&E’s community wildfire safety program, listed a litany of ways the utility is investing in fixes that he said will lessen the need for future shutoffs. Those include trimming more vegetation near power lines and burying some lines in areas most at risk of igniting.

Singh also acknowledged that the utility had some struggles during the early shutoffs but that it strove to improve and disputed any characterization that it did not succeed in some ways. He cited how quickly the utility restored power as one improvement, along with the timeliness and accuracy of customer notifications.

“Did we hit the mark on every single improvement? No. Do we have more work to do? Yes,” Singh said.

Power shutoffs are likely to be a feature of life in California for years to come. PG&E must invest billions in infrastructure upgrades, and communities are spreading into lands once populated by trees and brush.

Regulators promise to be watching closely.

“If we have an outcome that doesn’t meet the public expectation and what we need to run as a state,” said Malashenko of the utilities commission, “that means that we need to rethink our approach and try something different and drive to a better outcome.”

In November, the commission launched an investigation into whether it should sanction PG&E for violating shutoff protocols.

PG&E said it will need to improve how it reacts after it shuts off the power.

“I think we thought the big event was turning off the power,” Johnson told lawmakers. “And I think we focused on that as the main event instead of the impact of that, right, on the people it affected.”

___

Pritchard reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalists Terence Chea and Eric Risberg in Calistoga and Adam Beam in Sacramento contributed to this report.

U.K. Lawmakers OK Johnson’s Brexit Bill, Pave Way to Exit EU

LONDON — Britain took a big step towards the European Union exit door on Friday when lawmakers gave preliminary approval to Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s EU divorce bill in a decisive vote that broke years of political deadlock over Brexit.

The House of Commons, with its Conservative ranks swollen after Johnson’s election victory last week, voted 358-234 for the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, clearing the way for the U.K. to leave the European Union next month.

Friday’s vote was a moment of triumph for Johnson, who won a commanding parliamentary majority in last week’s general election on a promise to end more than three years of political gridlock and lead Britain out of the European Union on Jan. 31.

Related Articles


[image error]







Johnson's Win May Deliver Brexit but Could Risk U.K.'s Breakup



by








[image error]







Brexit and the Derivatives Time Bomb



by Ellen Brown








[image error]







Boris Johnson Will Ruin Britain or Cry Trying



by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

Jubilant Conservative lawmakers gathered around the prime minister in the House of Commons after the vote, getting him to sign their copies of the bill. Opposition lawmakers looked despondent.

“The election has produced a result: We will leave the EU at the end of January,” acknowledged pro-EU Liberal Democrat legislator Wera Hobhouse. “The battle to stop Brexit is over.”

The bill will receive more scrutiny and possible amendment next month when lawmakers return from a two-week holiday break, and it also has to be approved by Parliament’s unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords. But Johnson’s parliamentary majority means it is almost certain to become law in January. Britain would then leave the EU on Jan. 31.

Johnson said Friday that passing the bill would end the “acrimony and anguish” that has consumed the country since it voted in 2016 to leave the EU. Opponents argue that leaving will only trigger more uncertainty over Britain’s future trade relations with the bloc.

The U.K.’s departure will open a new phase of Brexit, as Britain and the EU race to strike new relationships for trade, security and a host of other areas by the end of 2020.

Johnson, however, painted Friday’s vote as a moment of closure. Opening debate on the bill, he said, optimistically, that after Jan, 31, “Brexit will be done, it will be over.”

“The sorry story of the last 3 1/2 years will be at an end and we will be able to move forward together,” he said.

“This is a time when we move on and discard the old labels of ‘leave’ and ‘remain,’” Johnson added. “Now is the time to act together as one reinvigorated nation.”

Britain voted narrowly to leave the EU in a 2016 referendum. But previous attempts by Johnson and his predecessor, Theresa May, to pass a Brexit deal through the U.K. Parliament foundered as lawmakers objected to sections of the agreement and demanded a bigger say in the process.

Johnson’s election victory finally gives him the power to get his way.

The bill commits Britain to leaving the EU on Jan. 31 and to concluding trade talks with the bloc by the end of 2020. Trade experts and EU officials say striking a free trade deal within 11 months will be a struggle, but Johnson insists he won’t agree to any more delays, The Brexit bill has been amended to bar ministers from agreeing to extend the transition period with the EU.

That has set off alarm bells among business, who fear that means the country will face a “no-deal” Brexit at the start of 2021. Economists say that would disrupt trade with the EU — Britain’s biggest trading partner — and plunge the U.K. into recession.

Johnson said Friday he was confident of striking a “deep, special and democratically accountable partnership with those nations we are proud to call our closest friends” by the Brexit deadline.

He said extending the transition period would just prolong Brexit “acrimony and anguish … a torture that came to resemble Lucy snatching away Charlie Brown’s football.”

For all Johnson’s talk of “getting Brexit done” on Jan. 31, details of Britain’s negotiating stance — and even who will lead the trade talks — remain unknown.

Armed with his 80-seat majority in the 650-seat House of Commons, Johnson has stripped out parts of the Brexit bill that gave lawmakers a role in negotiating a future trade deal with the EU and required ministers to provide regular updates to Parliament. The clauses were added earlier in the year in an attempt to win opposition lawmakers’ support for the Brexit bill — backing that Johnson no longer needs.

A promise that workers’ rights will not be eroded after Brexit has also been removed from the bill, although the Conservative government says it will enshrine employment rights in separate legislation.

Opposition Labour Party lawmaker Hilary Benn said Johnson’s bill was “a gamble with our nation’s economy.”

“If he fails, the cliff-edge of a no-deal Brexit comes in just 12 months’ time,” he said.

All but a handful of opposition lawmakers voted against the bill. But even without their support, it is expected to complete its passage through Parliament in January, in time for Britain to leave the 28-nation bloc on Jan. 31.

The divorce deal also needs to be ratified by the European Parliament. European Parliament vice president Pedro Silva Pereira said officials expect that to happen by Jan. 29.

Very little will change immediately after Brexit. Britain will remain an EU member in all but name during the 11-month transition period that ends in December 2020.

Keen supporters of Brexit, who gather regularly with placards outside Parliament, hailed Friday’s vote as historic.

“It’s the moment that we’ve longed for, it’s the moment that we’ve had to wait a very long time for,” said Patricia Sharman. “It’s the people’s victory. Democracy reigns and I’m absolutely delighted and very emotional.”

But Peter Roberts, who wants to remain in the EU, said it was “a terrible time for our country.”

“There’s banners here saying ‘the people’s will,’ ‘the people’s victory.’ ” We should have got rid of all that kind of thought in the 1930s. I’m really afraid.”

___

Associated Press writer Jo Kearney contributed to this report.

Amid Citizenship Law Outcry, Indian Authorities Ban Protests

NEW DELHI — Police banned public gatherings in parts of the Indian capital and other cities for a third day Friday and cut internet services to try to stop growing protests against a new citizenship law that have left 11 people dead and more than 4,000 others detained.

Thousands of protesters stood inside and on the steps of New Delhi’s Jama Masijd, one of India’s largest mosques, after Friday afternoon prayers, waving Indian flags and shouting slogans against the government and the citizenship law, which critics say threatens India’s secular democracy in favor of a Hindu state.

Police had banned a proposed march from the mosque to an area near India’s Parliament, and a large number of officers were waiting outside the mosque. Late Friday, police sprayed protesters with a water cannon to keep them from marching toward a monument in Central Delhi where protests have been converging, about 4 kilometers (2 1/2 miles) away.

Related Articles


[image error]







Indian Democracy Is Being Dismantled Piece by Piece



by








[image error]







Unrest Grows in India Over New Citizenship Law



by

About 10,000 people protested outside New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, which was the site of weekend clashes in which students accused police of using excessive force that sent dozens to hospitals. They collected signatures for a petition demanding the new law be scrapped.

Violence erupted in several towns in northern Uttar Pradesh state where protesters set some police posts and vehicles on fire and hurled rocks at security forces. Police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse the protesters in Muzzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Firozabad and Gorakhpur.

Police officer Dinesh Rai said two protesters were killed in Meerut, a town in Uttar Pradesh, when some people fired gunshots from a rooftop. He said police didn’t fire at the protesters and were investigating the deaths.

State police chief O.P. Singh said more than 100 people had been arrested and 3,305 had been detained since Thursday.

Eleven deaths have been reported across the country — five in Assam, four in Uttar Pradesh and two in southern Karnataka state.

Surveillance video seen by The Associated Press shows police entering Highland Hospital in Mangalore, a southern Indian city, on Thursday night and using batons to disperse protesters who had taken shelter inside.

The video shows two policemen trying to kick open a hospital ward door and some people wearing masks running in a hospital corridor. It earlier shows some protesters throwing rocks at police and then barging into the hospital.

Mohammad Abdullah, a hospital employee, said by phone that police entered the hospital and “fired tear gas shells.”

The protests have targeted the new citizenship law, which applies to Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally but can demonstrate religious persecution in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It does not apply to Muslims.

Critics say it’s a violation of the country’s secular constitution and the latest effort by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist-led government to marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims.

Modi has defended it as a humanitarian gesture.

The protests began last week in the northeastern border state of Assam, the seat of a decades-old movement against migrants, and at predominantly Muslim universities and communities in New Delhi, and now include a broad section of the Indian public nationwide.

A British colonial-era law banning the assembly of more than four people was in place in parts of the Indian capital as well as in several cities in Assam and Uttar Pradesh, where a motorized rickshaw driver was fatally shot during a protest in Lucknow.

Authorities erected roadblocks and turned areas around mosques in New Delhi, Lucknow and other Muslim-dominated areas into security fortresses to prevent widespread demonstrations after Friday prayers.

Police temporarily held 1,200 protesters in New Delhi on Thursday and hundreds of others were detained in other cities after they defied bans on assembly. Most protesters were released later in the day.

While some see the citizenship law as a slight against Muslims, others, including some Hindu conservatives in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, fear it will encourage immigration to India, where public services for its 1.3 billion people are already highly strained.

“In effect, some of the BJP’s own rank and file, the very people the party has sought to help, have come out against the law,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center.

Kugelman said that the government’s failure to respond to the protests, except to accuse political opponents of orchestrating them, is “likely to galvanize the protesters even more.”

The protests come amid an ongoing crackdown in Muslim-majority Kashmir, the restive Himalayan region stripped of its semi-autonomous status and demoted from a state into a federal territory last summer.

They also follow a contentious process in Assam meant to weed out foreigners living in the country illegally. Nearly 2 million people were excluded from an official list of citizens, about half Hindu and half Muslim, and have been asked to prove their citizenship or else be considered foreign.

India is also building a detention center for some of the tens of thousands of people the courts are expected to ultimately determine have entered illegally. Modi’s interior minister, Amit Shah, has pledged to roll out the process nationwide.

Critics say the process is a thinly veiled plot to deport millions of Muslims.

———

Associated Press writer Sheikh Saaliq contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders’ Climate Change Message Cheered in L.A. Debate

Sen. Bernie Sanders received widespread applause during Thursday night’s Democratic Party presidential debate when he challenged what he considered a flimsy question on the issue of the climate crisis and then offered a far-reaching critique about a global system in which trillions are spent on war and destruction but similar investments are not made to address the emergency of global heating.

After Tim Alberta, Politico‘s chief political correspondent and one of the debate moderators, asked candidates if they would support federal funding to relocate communities threatened by rising sea levels and flooding rivers, Sanders took issue with the premise of the question.

“With all due respect, Tim, your question misses the mark,” Sanders said.

“It is not an issue of relocating people from towns,” Sanders continued. “The issue now is whether we save the planet for our children and grandchildren. The issue, as you should know, what the scientists are telling us, is that they have underestimated the threat and severity of climate change. We’re talking about the Paris Agreement—that’s fine—it ain’t enough.”

Sanders continued by saying the nation must “declare a national emergency” and touted legislation he has proposed to do exactly that.

“The United States has got to lead the world, and maybe—just maybe—instead of spending $1.8 trillion a year, globally, on weapons of destruction,” he continued, “maybe an American president (ie. Bernie Sanders) can lead the world. Instead of spending money to kill eachother, maybe we pool our resources and fight our common enemy which is climate change.”

Watch:

Rejoining the Paris Agreement ain’t enough.

The issue now is whether we save the planet for our children and grandchildren.

We need a Green New Deal. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/UFtTkH2z2w

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 20, 2019

Climate campaigners applauded the answer as the top moment of the debate up to that point.

.@BernieSanders redirects the #DemDebate questions on the climate crisis with some perspective:

“The issue now is whether we save the planet for our children and grandchildren.”

Biggest applause so far of the night.

— Sunrise Movement

Key Takeaways From Democratic Presidential Debate in L.A.

LOS ANGELES — Democratic presidential candidates offered two very different debates during their final forum of 2019. In the first half, they spent much of their time making the case for their electability in a contest with President Donald Trump. The second half was filled with friction over money in politics, Afghanistan and experience.

MONEY TALKED

The candidates jousted cordially over the economy, climate change and foreign policy. But it was a wine cave that opened up the fault lines in the 2020 field.

That wine cave, highlighted in a recent Associated Press story, is where Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, recently held a big-dollar Napa Valley fundraiser, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who along with Sen. Bernie Sanders has eschewed fundraisers in favor of small-dollar grassroots donations — slammed him for it. “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States,” Warren said.

Buttigieg struck back, noting that he was the only person on the stage who was not a millionaire or billionaire. He said that if Warren donated to him he’d happily accept it even though she’s worth “ten times” what he is. He also added that Warren and only recently sworn off big money donations.

“These purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election,” Buttigieg snapped.

It was an unusually sharp exchange between Warren and Buttigieg. The two have been sparring as Warren’s polling rise has stalled out and Buttigieg poached some of her support among college-educated whites.

And Warren was not the only one going after Buttigieg. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota hit him on another front, namely what she said was his lack of experience compared to her Senatorial colleagues on stage.

Still, the divide is about more than Warren and Buttigieg. It’s about the direction of the party — whether it should become staunchly populist, anti-corporate and solely small-dollar funded, or rely on traditional donors, experience and ideology.

___

IMPEACHMENT AS PROXY

The first question in the debate was about impeachment. But the answer from the Democratic candidates was about electability.

Most candidates had no answer to their party’s biggest challenge — getting Trump’s voters to abandon him over his conduct.

Warren talked about one of her favorite themes, “corruption” in Washington. Sanders talked about having to convince voters Trump lied to them about helping the working class. Klobuchar, a former prosecutor, laid out the case against Trump as if she were giving the opening statement in his Senate trial.

Buttigieg said the party can’t “give into that sense of hopelessness” that the GOP-controlled Senate will simply acquit Trump because Republican voters aren’t convinced. But Buttigieg didn’t provide any other hope.

Only businessman Andrew Yang gave an explanation for why impeachment hasn’t changed minds. “We have to stop being obsessed about impeachment, which strikes many Americans like a ball game where you know what the score will be.”

Instead, Yang said, the party has to grapple with the issues that got Trump elected — the loss of good jobs.

___

BIDEN STEADY

Former Vice President Joe Biden has held steady throughout the Democratic race as one of the top two or three candidates by almost any measure. He has done that with debate performances described as flat, uneven, and uninspired.

He had a better night Thursday, even on a question about of one of his views that causes fellow Democrats to groan: that he can work with Republicans once he beats Trump in November.

“If anyone has reason to be angry with the Republicans and not want to cooperate it’s me, the way they’ve attacked me, my son, my family,” Biden said, a reference to Trump’s push to investigate his son Hunter that led to the president’s impeachment. “I have no love. But the fact is we have to be able to get things done and when we can’t convince them, we go out and beat them.”

Unlike others on the stage, he said pointedly that he doesn’t believe it’ll be impossible to ever work together with the other party.

“If that’s the case,” Biden said, “we’re dead as a country.”

He came close to trouble by initially saying he would not commit to a running for a second term, them quickly said that would be presumptuous to presume a first one.

___

AMERICAN ROLE IN THE WORLD

Is the greatest danger to America’s foreign interests and alliances coming from within the White House?

Democratic presidential candidates faulted Trump on multiple fronts for his failure to lead in key disputes and areas of international friction, including in the Middle East and China.

Buttigieg said Trump was “echoing the vocabulary” of dictators in his relentless attacks on the free press. Klobuchar said the president had “stood with dictators over innocents.” And Tom Steyer warned against isolating the U.S. from China, saying the two nations needed to work together on climate change.

On Israel, Biden argued that Trump had played to fears and prejudices and stressed that a two-state solution was needed for peace to ever be achieved.

The former vice president said Washington must rebuild alliances “which Trump has demolished.’”

With China, “We have to be firm. We don’t have to go to war,” Biden said.

“We have to be clear, “This is as far as you go, China,” he added.

___

YANG’S PRO MOVES

In June, Yang was a political punchline. During the first few Democratic debates, the entrepreneur, who has never before run for office, looked lost onstage, struggling to be heard over the din of nine other candidates.

But on Thursday night, Yang looked like a pro.

When the candidates debated complex foreign policy, Yang talked about his family in Hong Kong, the horror of China’s crackdown there and how to pressure them to respect human rights. When some candidates equivocated over whether nuclear energy should be used to combat climate change, Yang had the last word when he said: “We need to have everything on the table in a crisis situation.”

And when a moderator noted that Yang was the only candidate of color on the stage, the technology entrepreneur rattled off statistics about the lack of African-American and Latino wealth and how that hampers those groups donating to politicians.

Then, like a crack politician, he brought it back to his campaign’s theme — a guaranteed government income for all. That and Yang’s unpolished demeanor has helped him raise the money and public support to make Thursday’s stage while other more experienced politicians have fallen from competition.

___

WORD OF THE NIGHT

If there was a drinking game among debate watchers involving the word corruption, it might lead to a hazy morning.

Rivals for the 2020 nomination repeatedly framed President Donald Trump’s administration as one infected with lawlessness and ethical blindness, arguing that voters should deny him a second term.

We’ve “seen the impact of corruption,” Elizabeth Warren said early in the debate.

“We have a president who is running the most corrupt administration in the modern history of this country,” said Bernie Sanders, echoing one of his familiar lines from the campaign trail.

The descriptions of a rogue administration came in response to a question on impeachment. Candidates each offered an indictment of how Trump’s White House has crossed the nation’s legal guardrails.

Joe Biden defended the impeachment vote as a necessity and said as a candidate “my job is to make the case he doesn’t deserve to be president.”

The War on Terror Is Eating Our Young

One day in October 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, I stood at the front of a private high school classroom. As a new social studies teacher, I had been tasked with describing violence against women in that country. I showed the students an article from the front page of the New York Times featuring Afghan women casting off their burqas as they bathed in a stream near Kabul.

The implication of the piece was that the U.S. would liberate — had already, in fact, begun to liberate — such women. I soon realized, though, that my students weren’t really paying attention. They hadn’t, in fact, been fully capable of focusing for the previous three weeks, ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. They squirmed in their seats, watched the clock, or stared out the window at California’s rolling hills as if something bad was about to happen.

One student finally raised her hand and said, in evident confusion, “I don’t know why, but I’m scared.” And we had our first meaningful conversation since that fateful September day. One after another, my students confessed that they didn’t know what the response to those attacks — already dubbed by the Bush administration a “Global War on Terror” — would mean for all of us or what Washington’s goals of “liberation” in distant lands would mean for their futures, no less those of the women in the photo.  As last week’s explosive report in the Washington Post on the lies our top military and political leaders have offered us ever since about “progress” in the Afghan War made all too clear, none of us could really have had a clue, nor did we even know what questions to ask then.

Eighteen years later, the war on terror has spread to some 80 countries around the world, a nightmare far worse than anything those children or I could have imagined on that long-ago day. As a military spouse and a therapist-in-training, specializing in the effects of war on health, I’ve lived in several cities with a high concentration of veterans and military families, as well as refugee and migrant families from countries across five continents, many deeply affected by those still spreading armed conflicts (or even older ones in Central America that the U.S. had been involved in launching in the previous century).

It’s clear to me that, at least for the children of such groups, the never-ending fighting thousands of miles away can affect their concentration levels, the ways they solve problems with peers at school, and how their own parents respond to interpersonal conflict in their homes. I’ve watched more than once as such kids flinch at the everyday sound of an airplane overhead or sirens from an ambulance passing by while I’m trying to troubleshoot their concentration problems with them. At such times, they explain to me that similar trigger moments, unexpected reminders of violence in their home countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, or Central America, sometimes keep them from concentrating at school or even from effectively discussing their problems with me in therapy.

Such conversations drive home a point that merited only a few brief references in the recently published book of essays, War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,that Catherine Lutz and I — both of us from Brown University’s Costs of War Project — put together. The truth is, though, that the subject of the hidden costs of war to the young undoubtedly deserves a volume all its own, a reminder of how America’s wars and other conflicts, barely seen by most of us, are nonetheless deeply felt, even here, in all sorts of unnerving ways.

In a powerful piece on heroin use and survival among Afghan war widows, for instance, anthropologist Anila Daulatzai tells how an eight-year-old Afghan boy died in a bomb blast as he walked to school. Such senseless violence prompted his mother (and other similarly grieving wives and mothers) to start using heroin as a coping mechanism. Similarly, anthropologists Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger note how our country’s post-9/11 wars have affected the study habits of the children of military families even here on the home front. Some miss school to prepare for parental deployment or homecoming. Some struggle to keep up as they assume some of the household responsibilities of the missing parent. Others are even hospitalized in response to depression brought on by what could be thought of as deployment stress — simply knowing that a parent is gone and might be in danger.

I’ve seen the way armed violence many thousands of miles away affects the ability of kids to study and that’s obviously so much more true of the young in actual war zones (even when the option of school exists, which in the chaos of war, disruption, and displacement it often doesn’t). I’ve heard it in the voices of the children I’ve met who tell me that they remember vividly their inability to study because they were afraid that, in the very schools where their minds were to be molded, at any moment their bodies might be attacked or even destroyed.

Capturing the Indirect Costs of War

As my colleagues Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and I learned when we started the Costs of War Project in 2011, it’s pretty hard to quantify the indirect human costs of war, particularly those that manifest themselves in mental illness or chronic injuries among soldiers, civilians, and their families, in people eternally grieving or struggling to adjust to worlds that have often been turned upside down. Partly, this is because those in power who decide to go to war give little or no thought to what attacking another country, no less sending your troops in as occupying forces for years on end, will mean for everyday life in the war zones to come. In addition, once such wars have begun, they do a terrible job of keeping track of those costs.

In June 2016, for instance, I spoke with a Human Rights Watch analyst who was doing research on what the Saudi-led, American-backed counterinsurgency war in Yemen meant in terms of attacks on schools. As of then, more than three quarters of that country’s schools had already been closed due to insecurity. Most schools that had sustained direct damage in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, she told me, had not actually been directly targeted by Saudi-led forces. They had been grim collateral damage from air strikes on nearby suspected weapons caches and the like. Yet the consequences of such bombings have been immense and intense.

In Yemen in 2015, 1.85 million children could not take their final school exams. That’s a population larger than Philadelphia’s and that was just in the first year of an American-supported war that would only get worse (and worse and worse). War, in other words, is not just a conflict between states, not when the children who live through it (and the chaos that invariably follows in its wake) can’t do what anyone should be able to do to grow up in a reasonable way, no less sustain civilization — namely, learn to read, write, listen to others of varying viewpoints, and do the kinds of math and critical thinking that should help them anticipate the consequences of similar war-making decisions themselves one day.

Of course, when it comes to attacks on education, bombs dropping on schools barely scratch the surface of the damage caused by this century’s forever wars. A few years ago, I conducted research for the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA), which reported on how wars around the world affected education. In the process, to my grief, I learned about all kinds of not-so-obvious ways in which students are forced to participate in conflicts that should have nothing to do with them.

I learned, for instance, that schools can be used as barracks for troops, weapons caches, bases from which to fire on an advancing enemy, and recruiting grounds for soldiers. I learned that kids around the world were scared to walk to school because they or their parents feared kidnappings, rapes, roadside bombs, or because they would have a hard time reaching school thanks to clogged military checkpoints. In other places, school buses were also used to transport troops or people to political rallies, leaving kids without a safe way to attend school.

The May 2018 report that resulted from our joint efforts found that ever more targeted and indiscriminate attacks on schools, teachers, and students had occurred between 2013 and 2017: 12,700 attacks hurting more than 21,000 students and teachers in at least 70 countries.  Colleagues working in Ukraine, for instance, told me that schools for kids with disabilities had been occupied by parties on both sides of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict and that most of them had to be evacuated early in the war. There were few other options for such children when it came to education. Similarly, girls’ schools tended to suffer disproportionately when education was attacked, as did schools for other kinds of kids who generally get the shorter end of the stick during peacetime as well.

When it came to Afghanistan, my high school students were right to be skeptical about or pay little attention to the optimism of that New York Times article I showed them. While U.S. aid did indeed bring new educational infrastructure to some regions of that country, building new schools hardly began to make up for the damage done by that still unending war.

As nurse-midwife and anthropologist Kylea Liese has shown in an essay on maternal mortality in our new book, the growth of Islamic extremism among warring factions over the last 18 years has made it difficult for young women to leave their homes in the first place, let alone sit in a classroom all day. Many fear that they will be raped or killed on their way to or at school. What numbers we have are not encouraging: as of 2018, 8% of Afghan boys and 22% of Afghan girls at the primary level, and 2% of boys and 10% of girls at the secondary level identified insecurity as the reason they did not attend school.

Because so much of the damage to education is overlooked when states wage war, it can be hard to get the full story of just how many young people are being killed, hurt, or prevented from studying due to attacks on schools. When I worked on the GCPEA report, our research methods were limited to painstaking surveys of news reports from around the world and interviews with the few intrepid activists willing to speak out on the subject, often despite fearing for their own lives.

We struggled to cobble together as full a picture as possible of how many young people have been attacked, had died, had been injured, and how many children simply couldn’t study in the aftermath of such violence. But given the inability to discover so much, the full consequences of America’s forever wars (and other conflicts) across significant parts of the globe remain only partially known even to those, like us at the Costs of War Project, who focus on the subject much of the time.

A Culture of War and Terror in American Schools

One problem with a war on terror that can, as on 9/11, manifest itself anywhere at any time (and the promotion of the fear of terror that’s gone with it) is that there are no limits on the militarized chaos it can create in people’s lives. After all, since 9/11, it’s become part of our culture to assume that armed violence — terror of the Islamic or white nationalist variety — can touch us anywhere we are, including in the classroom.

It’s also common to think that physical violence is the right way to solve problems and that militarized language and tactics are reasonable ways to deal with and discipline children, especially in schools. Kids I work with attend one of the more highly regarded school systems in the country when it comes to both academics and security. Yet every week, I learn of school arguments, including disputes over who likes whom enough to date him or her, or who gave whom a dirty look in the hallway.

Such arguments have a way of escalating quickly into fights that end when uniformed security personnel break them up without — as kids and their parents typically tell me — anyone being asked what happened. The involved parties are simply removed from the scene, often by force. Such school fights and the way schools now tend to resolve them may have nothing at all to do with our distant armed conflicts abroad. Still, I’m aware that kids are increasingly seen as threats in the very places where they are supposed to be learning and that, for some kinds of kids, a militarized version of security, not the school equivalent of diplomacy, is considered the order of the day.

And don’t forget that violence, however you explain it, is now a remarkably regular part of school life and the school experience, or at least fears and preparation for it are. Even as the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars to fight jihadist terror targeting civilians at home and abroad, gun violence, including suicides, homicides, police violence, and “mass shootings” (especially in schools), has cost us exponentially more lives. Yet according to the Atlantic, we’ve invested only the tiniest fraction of the money we’ve spent prosecuting the War on Terror in protecting students in America’s schools (roughly $22 million annually).

Still, the effects of mass shootings and the ways we prepare for them have changed school life in grim ways, normalizing the very idea of armed violence. Recently, I shushed my two preschool-age children while I took a work call, only to hear one of them say to the other, “Let’s play lockdown! The shooters are coming!” They then crawled behind an armchair and lay flat on their stomachs like little boot camp trainees, their eyes wide as they watched me. In other words, somehow they’ve already absorbed the lockdown school mindset of the moment, those grim preparations for mass shooters, and they’ve yet to arrive in their first classroom.

As someone who came of age when the Columbine massacre took place, a time when we assumed that it was an isolated incident perpetrated by mentally disturbed young men, I regularly wonder why we aren’t doing more to address the ways in which war and other forms of mass violence continue to affect the hearts and minds of students here and around the world. Isn’t it time to work to change a culture in which the young spend too much of their school and homework time focused on violence rather than on the subjects they came to study?

And, of course, our government is not shy about directly encouraging kids to fight wars. In 2019, for example, the Army set aside some $700 million for recruiting, though it’s not clear how much of this is spent to recruit in schools. Data suggests that schools with a high percentage of lower-income students are visited far more frequently by recruiters than more affluent schools. According to the American Public Health Association, most new U.S. military recruits are in late adolescence and less able to handle high levels of stress, more likely to take uncalculated risks, and more likely to suffer long-term injury and mental health problems as a result of their military service.

I’ve argued with relatives who insist that junior ROTC and the recruiting of teenagers in school should be a source of pride and opportunity, especially for the most disadvantaged kids. Yet when the “opportunity” you’re offering includes the possibility of being maimed or killed, then wouldn’t it make sense to devote a larger slice of our country’s budgetary pie to training more numerous, better-qualified teachers and college counselors, while creating better constructed and supplied schools, so that kids of all stripes have a shot at opportunities that are less likely to kill or maim them?

At home or abroad, whether we know it or not, in the post-9/11 years, war has targeted the young. It’s not a pretty sight.