Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 178

The Fallout From the Kunduz Airstrike

Updated on April 29 at 1:01 ET

Sixteen U.S. military personnel are being disciplined for the errors that led to the U.S. bombing of a civilian hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October, the Defense Department announced Friday.

Here’s more from the report:

The investigation concluded that the personnel involved did not know that they were striking a medical facility. The intended target was an insurgent-controlled site which was approximately 400 meters away from the MSF Trauma Center. The investigation found that an AC-130U Gunship aircrew, in support of a U.S. Special Forces element that was supporting a partnered Afghan ground force, misidentified and struck the MSF Trauma Center. The investigation determined that all members of both the ground force and the AC-130U aircrew were unaware the aircrew was firing on a medical facility throughout the engagement.

The comprehensive investigation concluded that this tragic incident was caused by a combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures. Fatigue and high operational tempo also contributed to the incident. These factors contributed to the “fog of war,” which is the uncertainty often encountered during combat operations. The investigation found that this combination of factors caused both the ground force commander and the air crew to believe mistakenly that the air crew was firing on the intended target, an insurgent-controlled site approximately 400 meters away from the MSF Trauma Center.

The Commander of USFOR-A concluded that certain personnel failed to comply with the rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict. However, the investigation did not conclude that these failures amounted to a war crime. The label “war crimes” is typically reserved for intentional acts -- intentionally targeting civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects. The investigation found that the tragic incident resulted from a combination of unintentional human errors and equipment failures, and that none of the personnel knew that they were striking a medical facility.

The Pentagon said 12 of the 16 personnel involved faced actions ranging from suspension and removal from command to letters of reprimand, formal counseling, and extensive retraining. The other five were involved were directed out of theater. None of the 16 was identified, though one was a general.

The hospital in Kunduz was run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian group. In the aftermath of the October 3 bombing that killed 42 people, MSF called for a never-before-used mechanism of the Geneva Conventions to investigate the strike, and General John Campbell, the most senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, acknowledged the “hospital was mistakenly struck.”

Among the steps outlined on Friday, the Pentagon said the Defense Department had approved $5.7 million to reconstruct the MSF hospital in Kunduz.

MSF, in an initial statement, said:

The administrative punishments announced by the U.S. today are out of proportion to the destruction of a protected medical facility, the deaths of 42 people, the wounding of dozens of others, and the total loss of vital medical services to hundreds of thousands of people. The lack of meaningful accountability sends a worrying signal to warring parties, and is unlikely to act as a deterrent against future violations of the rules of war.

At the same time, it has become clear that the victims and their families have neither the option to pursue legal action against the U.S. military, either in Afghanistan or in the U.S., nor to claim compensation for loss of life and livelihood. This has only compounded the devastation of the attack.

Full report here.

North Korea Sentences an American to 10 Years in Prison

North Korea sentenced a Seoul-born U.S. citizen to 10 years of hard labor for alleged subversion and espionage activities, Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, reported Friday.

Xinhua, one of the few foreign news organizations with a bureau in Pyongyang, reported that Kim Dong-chul of Fairfax, Virginia, “was charged with plotting to subvert the DPRK system, slandering the supreme leadership of the country and gathering state and military secrets.” It said Kim was born in Seoul in 1953 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1972, and later became a naturalized citizen.

Here’s more:

Running a trade company in Rason, a special economic zone in the DPRK, Kim started espionage in 2013 after coming into contact with several South Koreans who tasked him with collecting top party, state and military secrets of the DPRK, including its nuclear facilities, nuclear tests and photographs of warships at repairing factories, according to the prosecutor. ...

He was also accused of illegally buying a DPRK-made mobile phone in the capital city of Pyongyang via his local employee and providing the phone to South Korea.

Kim received donations from a Canadian church, gave them to kindergartens in Rason and took pictures of the local children accepting the donations, according to the prosecution.

Kim was detained last October, but his fate became public only in January when he was presented to CNN reporters as a spy. CNN added that he had lived in Yanji, China, which is on the border with North Korea. Kim is the latest U.S. citizen to be convicted in North Korea. Last month, the country’s Supreme Court convicted Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old student at the University of Virginia, of subversion and sentenced him to 15 years of prison and hard labor. He is alleged to have stolen a propaganda sign from his hotel.

Mother’s Day: A Treacly Cavalcade of Horror

It’s hard to know where to begin with Mother’s Day, a misshapen Frankenstein of a movie that feels like it escaped the Hallmark headquarters halfway through its creation and rampaged into theaters, trying to teach audiences how to love. The third in Garry Marshall’s increasingly strange “holiday anthology” series, Mother’s Day isn’t the rom-com hodge-podge that Valentine’s Day was, or the bizarre morass of his follow-up New Year’s Eve. But it does inspire the kind of holy terror that you feel all the way down to your bones, or the revolted tingling that strikes one at a karaoke performance gone tragically wrong.

While it’s aiming for frothiness and fun, Mother’s Day is a patronizing and sickly sweet endeavor that widely misses the mark for its entire 118-minute running time (it feels much longer). The audience gets the sense that there are many Big Truths to be learned: that family harmony is important, that it’s good to accept different lifestyles without judgment, that loss is a natural part of the circle of life. But its overall construction—as a work of cinema—always feels a little off. One character gets a life lesson from a clown at a children’s party, and departs with a hearty “Thanks, clown!” Extras wander in the background and deliver halting bits of expositional dialogue like malfunctioning robots. Half of the lines seem to have been recorded post-production and are practically shouted from off-screen to patch over a narrative that makes little sense. Mother’s Day is bad in the regular ways (e.g. the acting and writing), but also in that peculiar way, where it feels as though the film’s creator has never met actual humans before.

Like its predecessors, Mother’s Day boasts an all-star ensemble of characters who ping-pong around a general theme in celebration of the titular holiday, in this case motherhood. There’s Jennifer Aniston as Sandy, a divorced mom whose chiseled ex (Timothy Olyphant) has moved on to someone younger. Kate Hudson is Jesse, who committed the unforgivable sin of marrying a non-white man (Aasif Mandvi), which estranged her from her conservative Texan parents. Jason Sudeikis is Bradley, a soldier mourning the loss of his wife and whose cute daughters need him to snap out of his sad reverie. These heroes, and many more, are constantly tuned into the Home Shopping Network to watch the lifestyle-guru stylings of Miranda (Julia Roberts), a sweater-caped extra-terrestrial who hawks junky bracelets and mood pendants with all the charisma of a coma patient. Will she be important to the central plot later? Of course she will.

Mother’s Day is creepily patronizing and sickly sweet endeavor that widely misses the mark.

Mother’s Day is set in Atlanta, an astonishing choice considering the blinding whiteness of the ensemble picked to represent this majority-black city (the only African American character is played by the comedian Loni Love). Still, Marshall and the film’s four credited screenwriters take it upon themselves to have characters deliver bland lectures on racism and homophobia to the film’s one-dimensional “villains,” Jesse’s red-state parents. Their other daughter and Jesse’s sister, Gabi (Sarah Chalke), outdid her sibling’s marital transgression by marrying a woman (played by the comedian Cameron Esposito). Mother’s Day is looking for easy applause by castigating Jesse and Gabi’s parents (played by Margo Martindale and Robert Pine), who roll around in an RV and wear various themed t-shirts that could have been purchased at a Donald Trump rally. But they’re far too cartoonish to stand in for any real-life debate, and by the end, everyone discovers the virtues of tolerance anyway.

Aniston’s character, Sandy, seems to embody the unfortunate, gossip-rag view of her real life: a harried 40-something replaced by a younger model (the buxom Tina, played by Shay Mitchell). Sandy struggles to juggle the various commitments of her two sons, kvetches about her ex-husband at yoga class, and gets an instant case of word-diarrhea the minute she’s speaking to an eligible single man (in this case, Sudeikis). At one point, her kids fuss over leaving her to hang out with her father, saying, “But you’re so sad!” as if they’re suddenly the editorial board of The National Enquirer. Films like Mother’s Day seem to deploy this frumpy-mom stereotype for automatic audience relatability, but it’s yet another horrendously hackneyed trope in a film already filled with them.

The rest of the ensemble feel as though they’re sleepwalking, including younger stars like Britt Robertson, who plays a new mother searching for the woman who gave her up for adoption (Guess who?). Sudeikis, too, seems to equate “grief” with “looking tired all the time,” or perhaps it was too difficult to tap into his character’s sadness about his wife (who’s revealed as a celebrity cameo) given such a poor script. Unlike with the rom-com Valentine’s Day, there’s no clear genre angle to shoot for here to make the film feel like a cohesive whole. Each vignette stumbles toward a conclusion of sorts, with the film’s only consistency being an immense smugness: Here is a movie that has bravely dared to declare that mothers (and wives and daughters) deserve our love and attention and respect. For viewers who need tacky films to teach them basic lessons like that in totally artless fashion, well, there’s always the possibility of a Father’s Day sequel.

The Supreme Court Expands FBI Hacking Powers

The U.S. Supreme Court approved a new rule Thursday allowing federal judges to issue warrants that target computers outside their jurisdiction, setting the stage for a major expansion of surveillance and hacking powers by federal law-enforcement agencies.

Chief Justice John Roberts submitted the rule to Congress on behalf of the Court as part of the justices’ annual package of changes to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. The rules form the basis of every federal prosecution in the United States.

Under Rule 41’s current incarnation, federal magistrate judges can typically only authorize searches and seizures within their own jurisdiction. Only in a handful of circumstances can judges approve a warrant that reaches beyond their territory—if, for example, they allow federal agents to use a tracking device that could move through multiple judicial districts.

The amendments, drafted by a panel of federal judges at the Justice Department’s request, add another exception. It would allow a magistrate judge to issue a warrant to hack into and seize data stored on a computer, even if that computer’s actual location “has been concealed through technical means.”

In other words, under the new rule, a judge in California could approve a warrant allowing federal agents to lawfully hack into a computer without knowing its true location, whether it be New York, Budapest, or one of Jupiter’s moons.

Justice Department officials defended the change as a necessary update to counter changing technologies. At the same time, tech and privacy experts raised concerns about the amendments’ reach. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat and longtime critic of federal surveillance programs, also criticized the proposed changes as a “sprawling expansion of government surveillance.”

“These amendments will have significant consequences for Americans’ privacy and the scope of the government’s powers to conduct remote surveillance and searches of electronic devices,” he said in a statement. “Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime.”

Wyden also said he planned to introduce legislation to block the new rule. The Supreme Court’s changes automatically go into effect on December 1 unless Congress votes to override them. Such a feat may be difficult this year as normal legislative business slows ahead of November’s elections.

The changes come in the wake of a high-profile showdown over encryption between Apple and the Justice Department in February, which fizzled out after federal investigators told courts they bypassed the iPhone’s security features without the tech giant’s help.

The Torture Charges Against Mexican Police

Two Mexican soldiers and three federal police have been charged with torture in connection with a video posted online in early April that showed a woman being physically abused and suffocated with a plastic bag, judges ruled.

The New York Times reported Wednesay:

They are accused of torturing the woman after she was detained Feb. 4, 2015, in Ajuchitlan del Progreso, in the troubled southern state of Guerrero.

The video circulated on social and traditional media in recent days shows a female soldier interrogating the woman, pulling her hair and putting the muzzle of a rifle against her head.

The woman in the video has been widely reported by Mexican media to have had links to a local drug cartel called La Familia Michoacana. The two soldiers investigated in the videotaped incident were arrested in January, but were only charged with disobedience by military courts.

The is the latest instance in which Mexican authorities have been accused of torturing suspects for information or inculcated in a major crime. Earlier this month, Mexico’s Human Rights Commission confirmed that federal police were involved in the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, who were taken from a bus in 2014 by police, then turned over to a local drug cartel and never seen again. A group of international expert investigators also found that many of the suspects indicted in the students’ disappearance were tortured by the Mexican government during their interrogations, which could make their confessions or statements unusable in court.

Seeing Red: The Rise of Mensesplaining

In the season-three finale of Broad City, Abbi and Ilana find themselves, via participation in the “Birthmarc” program, on a plane to Israel. Early on in the episode, in mid-air, Abbi gets her period. From there, the rest of the finale’s plot revolves around the pair’s airborne quest to find Abbi a tampon. It’s an effort, Abbi and Ilana being Abbi and Ilana, that comes with many, many jokes about the circumstances they’ve found themselves in thanks to Abbi’s uterus. “Ooof, first day. That’s, like, putting your spoon into a molten lava cake,” Ilana says.

“It’s like the first bite of a jelly donut,” Abbi counters.

“It’s like a side of chutney.”

“It’s like fruit on the bottom.”

The exchange—rapid-fire, unapologetically graphic, unrelentingly hilarious—is yet more evidence that pop culture, which for so long has treated periods as the stuff of shame and taboo, is now insistently de-stigmatizing them. Periods have recently been so popular a topic of cultural exploration that 2015, NPR argued, was “the year of the period”—also known as the year, per Cosmopolitan, that “the period went public.”

But periods have not merely been the subjects of exploration. They have also been the subjects of explanation: women, newly given a voice in the culture at large, explaining to men what it’s like to have a period—jelly donuts and fruit on the bottom and all. Call it mensesplaining: the dynamics of mansplaining (men explaining things to women, usually extremely unnecessarily), reversed. Women enlightening men about something (most) guys will never experience themselves.

“It’s like we put menstruation in the witness protection program, and now it goes by the alias ‘Periods’ and lives in a small town in Oklahoma.”

Earlier this week, Michelle Wolf—for the evening filling the role of The Daily Show’s “senior period correspondent”—engaged in a long, explanatory segment about periods. The riff was loosely pegged to New York state’s repeal of its tampon tax—one of the many states that has made that move, in response to public outrage about the taxing of those basic health items as “luxury goods”—but it ended up doubling as an exegesis about the odd yet ongoing taboo associated with the thing that is experienced every month by a significant portion of the world’s population. “We’ve cloaked it in such secrecy and shame!” Wolf noted. She added: “It’s like we put menstruation in the witness protection program, and now it goes by the alias ‘periods’ and lives in a small town in Oklahoma.”

Wolf’s riff, tellingly, was aimed at men as much as it was at women. Its purpose was to amuse the ladies, certainly—Wolf got in a great line about a congresswoman’s reference to the vagina as a “very intimate area,” “like it’s a bed and breakfast in Vermont”—but the purpose was also, just as much, to mensesplain. To bring men in on the joke. Throughout the Daily Show segment, Trevor Noah played the role of the Typical Man, supportive but fundamentally mystified. “I want to talk about something that, to be honest, I don’t want to talk about: periods,” he said by way of introducing Wolf to the audience. But as the segment played out, Noah’s position evolved. “Periods are natural!” he observed at one point, triumphantly.

It was an exchange reminiscent of the Key & Peele seminar that attempted to explain periods to guys and otherwise put the “men” in “menstruation.” And of the “Menzies” episode of New Girl, which found Jess’s male roommates suffering sympathy periods and thereby, yep, putting the “men” in “menstruation.”

The jokes are treating the normalization of the period not just as a lady thing, but as a culture thing.

If the normalization of the period is a feminist issue, then the effort to normalize it for everyone, guys included, reflects a broader feminist realization: that its concerns are matters not just for women to contend with, but also society. Whether it’s wage equity or cultural representation, things will improve more quickly if women’s issues have male supporters. The Daily Show’s and Broad City’s period jokes—which are coming on the heels of similar jokes from Amy Schumer and Jenny Slate and many, many other comedians— are recognizing that. They are treating the de-stigmatization of the period not just a lady thing, but as a culture thing.

“For the first time,” Newsweek noted in a recent cover story on, yep, periods, “Americans are talking about gender equality, feminism, and social change through women’s periods, which, as [Gloria] Steinem puts it, is ‘evidence of women taking their place as half the human race.’” And that place-taking, the newest round of jokes suggest, will involve men—the guys who make laws and policies about women’s bodies; who manufacture tampons whose ingredients don’t currently need to be listed on boxes; who advertise maxi-pads using blue liquid as a sanitized stand-in for menstrual blood.

And so, onto Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate” and The Vagina Monologues and Menstruation Barbie and PJ Harvey’s song “Happy and Bleeding” and Ani DiFranco’s “Blood in the Boardroom” and all those period-related quizzes  (“How Metal Is Your Period?” “How YOLO Is Your Period?”) on Buzzfeed—cultural products aimed for the most part at normalizing periods for women—is grafted another kind of message, a message that explains rather than explores: Men, this is what it’s like to have a period. Jazmine Hughes, a writer and editor for The New York Times Magazine, recently wrote a funny and lyrical article about getting her period on her first day working for the venerable brand. One of Hughes’s final lines in her essay, after several fruit on the bottom-y details about blood and “ultra tampons,” is this:

Being a woman is hard. It’s a public fight for equality, to see our sisters in schools and legislatures, to be paid the same amount of money as men, and to secure our jobs if we want to start a family, but it’s also just trying to get through the day without worrying about whether or not there’s a stain on your butt. It is sweaty and gross and often expensive. So dudes: Fuck buying bouquets, and start buying your lady friends tampons.

So dudes: It’s the unspoken upshot of much of the humor and referencing and Tampax transparency that characterize the culture right now. And it’s a fitting one for a moment of allies and empathy and staying woke, in all its shades. It’s a good one, too: a recognition that, while women’s bodies are their own, their fates will be guided by a collective that will include the other half of the population. And it’s an admission that, as Key & Peele put it to their TED Talk-style audience of guys in the sketch that perfectly married mansplaining and mensesplaining: “It’s worse for them than it is for you to hear about it!”

The First Launch From Russia's New Cosmodrome

This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin flew thousands of miles to a large clearing in the evergreen forests of Siberia. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, was preparing for the inaugural launch Wednesday from the Vsotchny cosmodrome, a brand-new launch pad that had been in the works for four years.

The countdown began at 11:01 a.m. local time. But then, about 90 seconds before the Soyuz rocket took off, Roscomos’s computers aborted the flight. No one was sure why.

Putin was not pleased, according to Russian media reports. The launch was rescheduled for the same time Thursday, and it went off without a hitch, as the president looked on:

The unmanned rocket carried three satellites into orbit. The launch was a big moment for Moscow, which for years has promised to bring its spaceflight missions—which take off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakstan—inside Russian borders. Anatoly Zak explains at Popular Mechanics:

The problem goes back a quarter of a century, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the former superpower's main spaceport of Baikonur in the newly independent republic of Kazakhstan. Moscow eventually settled the dispute with Kazakhstan over Baikonur and now pays the country $115 million in annual rent to use it. But some disagreements have persisted, especially over the environmental and economic damage from failed launches that rained toxic debris below the rocket's path, sometimes in populated areas.

Putin hailed the success of the launch in true Putin form. The equipment overreached itself a little bit yesterday,” he said. “In principle, we could have held the launch yesterday, but the equipment overdid its job and stopped the launch. This is a normal thing.”

However, there would be “an appropriate reaction” within Roscomos over the aborted launch, he said.

The Roots of NFL Draft Obsession

In 1935, the Philadelphia Eagles were the worst team in the NFL, winning just two out of 11 games that season. Up until then, the best players coming out of college were signing up with the best teams in the league. Earlier that year, in order to even the playing field, NFL team owners agreed to set up a draft that would give struggling clubs a shot at picking up players in the offseason. So, on February 8, 1936, at a Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia, the Eagles had the first pick in the first NFL draft.

The Eagles would select Jay Berwanger, a Heisman Trophy winner out of the University of Chicago. In the middle of the Great Depression, however, he chose to work a more lucrative job at a rubber factory instead of pursuing a career in the NFL, turning down the Eagles offer.

On Thursday night, before a crowd of thousands, and with millions of people tuning in from home, the best college athletes will realize their dreams of playing in the NFL at the 2016 draft. The closed-door meeting of team owners 80 years ago has transformed into a massive, three-day, seven-round, 256-pick, primetime media spectacle that even ESPN acknowledges as “our year-long obsession.” But how did we get to this moment, an event that is so much more extravagant than it was ever intended?

While the intensity of the draft increased over the decades, with trading and dealing (and kidnapping) happening behind the scenes, the draft was still an event in hotel ballrooms between the owners and staffs of teams. The process wouldn’t broadcast into the living rooms of fans across the country until then-ESPN President Chet Simmons asked the NFL in 1979 if the league would be interested in the telecast.

Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner at the time, was surprised that anyone would be that interested in seeing a bunch of old guys barter over rookies. Chris Berman, who has been with ESPN since a month after its founding, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune said, “To Pete, it sounded like reading names from the phone book. Everyone said, ‘Who’s going to watch?’”

ESPN had just formed and was looking to make headways. The network saw the potential, even if the NFL didn’t.

The NFL agreed to allow ESPN to broadcast the 1980 draft from the ballroom of the New York Sheraton. The broadcast started at 8 on a Tuesday morning. This was definitely not the primetime event that it is today. But so began our obsession. In 2014, a combined 45.7 million people watched the draft on ESPN, ESPN 2, and the NFL Network.

The football season until then was widely popular, yes, but it lasted just six months. Turning the draft into a media event, and more aptly a reality show for the offseason, would make the football season last throughout the entire year.

“All of a sudden, we got word that people were calling sick to work on a Tuesday in April,” Berman said in that same Chicago Tribune interview. “They were staying home to watch the draft.”

And then came Mel Kiper Jr., the wunderkind draft analyst who brought scout know-how and data to ESPN’s coverage in 1984. He’s still a leading voice in the broadcast today, along with dozens of other analysts, anchors, and former athletes. After Kiper’s hire, the Bleacher Report writes:

Seemingly every year since, the cottage industry of media scouting, mock drafts, and Big Boards has gotten bigger. Teams began realizing the later-round prospects would be better served coming into the league as free agents; the league repeated shaved off rounds, and the length of time allotted to make picks, all to improve the TV product.

It provided drama to home audiences. Passionate fans filled the ballroom, booing picks they didn’t like and celebrating long-awaited prospects who might make this the team’s year. Who could view the yearly disappointment of New York Jets fans and not be amused?

The draft would then move to the New York Marriott Marquis in 1986 and then to Madison Square Garden in 1995, before heading to Radio City Music Hall in 2006. Last year, the NFL held the draft in Chicago, which was such a success the league decided to hold it there again this year. Now, cities are bidding to host the NFL draft, since it’s such a large event with the potential to bring in hefty media attention.

By 1988, the NFL moved the draft from the week to the weekend. In 2006, the NFL Network also started covering the draft, giving ESPN some competition and bringing more coverage to the annual event.

In 2010, the draft moved to a three-night primetime event, starting Thursday. Commissioner Roger Goodell knew the move would make the already huge event bigger. “We continue to look for ways to make the draft more accessible to more fans,” Goodell said then. “Moving the first round to prime time on Thursday night will make the first round of the draft available to fans on what is typically the most-watched night of television.”

It paid off. Today, more people watch the first round of the draft than watch the last day of the Masters Golf Tournament. And fans not only tune into the draft, they’re glued to their televisions for the three-day NFL Scouting Combine every February and pro days at universities before then. The NCAA football season is as much about college athletes representing different schools across the country as it is a long scouting event for the NFL.

Professional football has been a part of American life since the NFL’s founding in 1920, then under the banner of the American Professional Football Association. It grew from a small-time league with 14 teams, like the Muncie Flyers and Decatur Staleys, to a 32-team, multi-billion-dollar operation. But as media progressed, so too did other aspects than just watching games on Sunday afternoons. It turned into 19 million people playing fantasy football, and millions of others watching the draft.

While the media spectacle has changed over the past 80 years, the fundamental nature of the draft remains the same. It’s an opportunity for the league’s worst teams to get a shot at new talent and a chance to do better the next season. And the Philadelphia Eagles still aren’t that good.

Automatic Voter Registration Comes to Vermont

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed legislation Thursday to automatically register eligible voters who apply for a driver’s license or state ID, making the Green Mountain State fourth in the nation to enact an automatic voter-registration law.

“While states across the country are making it harder for voters to get to the polls, Vermont is making it easier by moving forward with commonsense polices that remove unnecessary barriers and increase participation in our democracy,” Shumlin said in a statement.

State officials estimate the new AVR law, which takes effect after the 2016 election, could add 30,000 to 50,000 voters to the state’s rolls. Similar proposals have gathered steam in states with large Democratic majorities but have often stalled elsewhere, as my colleague Russell Berman noted in February:

Oregon began proactively adding unregistered citizens to its rolls last month. California will soon follow suit under a state law signed last year. Serious efforts to enact similar proposals through legislative action or citizen ballot initiatives are underway in several other states, including Illinois, Maryland, and Ohio. The drive has won endorsements in the last year from President Obama and both Democrats running to succeed him in the White House.

Those are all indisputable signs of momentum for an idea now at the core of advocacy efforts to expand access to the ballot box—that state governments should make it easier to vote by simply registering their eligible citizens, rather than forcing them to do it themselves. Yet while the campaign has gained steam, it has also cleaved along party lines in a way that threatens to turn automatic registration into one more partisan flashpoint in the battle over voting laws.

New Jersey’s experience underscores the partisan divide in most states. Democratic legislators included AVR in a bill revamping the state’s election system last year, alongside other changes to early voting and online registration. But Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, derided the proposals as costly and “reckless” when vetoing the legislation in November.

In earlier remarks about the bill, Christie also criticized it as an attempt by the Democratic Party to undermine the state’s elections. “There's no question in my mind that there are some advocates of this who are looking to increase the opportunity for voter fraud,” he said during his monthly radio show in June 2015.

Only one state has bucked the partisan trend so far. In West Virginia’s Republican-controlled legislature, lawmakers from both parties fashioned a compromise bill that combined a moderate voter-ID law favored by Republicans with an AVR system proposed by Democrats. Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, signed it into law on April 13.

The Arrest of the San Bernardino Shooter's Brother

Federal agents have arrested three relatives of one of the San Bernardino shooters in California.

The AP reported Thursday that the brother and sister-in-law of Syed Rizwan Farook, as well as woman who is married to a friend of Farook’s, have been charged in an investigation of marriage-fraud conspiracy. The two women are Russian immigrants, the AP says. The older brother is Syed Raheel Farook, a U.S. Navy veteran. The FBI searched his home in February and confiscated a computer and other items.

The Los Angeles Times explains the family ties:

Raheel Farook’s marriage to a Russian national also came under suspicion in the weeks after the December attack. The elder Farook and Enrique Marquez — a friend of Syed Rizwan Farook who has been charged with buying weapons used in the assault — were married to a pair of sisters from Western Russia: Tatiana and Mariya Chernykh.

Tatiana was married to Raheel Farook, while Mariya was wed to Marquez in 2014.

The younger Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people and wounded 21 others in a conference room last December in San Bernardino, California. The couple was killed in a shootout with police that day. U.S. officials determined soon after that the shooters were inspired by the Islamic State, which later praised Farook and Malik as “followers” but did not claim responsibility for organizing the assault.

Late last year, federal prosecutors charged Marquez with immigration fraud over an alleged “sham” marriage; agents alleged Mariya Chernykh paid Marquez $200 a month for their union. Marquez was also charged with the illegal purchase of two rifles used in Farook’s shooting and explosive material that was used to build a pipe bomb found at the center where it occurred, and with conspiracy for planning terrorist attacks with Farook in 2011 and 2012 that were never carried out.