Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 69

Shimon Peres, 1923-2016

Shimon Peres, an enduring figure of Israeli life and politics who in more than six decades in politics served as both prime minister and president of the Jewish state and, along the way, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, has died. He was 93, and had been hospitalized since suffering a stroke on September 14.

Born Shimon Persky in what was then Poland, in 1923, Peres immigrated with his family in 1932 to what was then Palestine. Those members of his family who remained behind, including his grandfather, who had urged him to “Be a Jew, forever,” were killed in the Holocaust. During Israel’s war of independence, Peres was put in charge of weapons purchases and military recruitment by David Ben-Gurion, who would later become prime minister. In 1953, when he was 30, Peres was running the Ministry of Defense, where he laid the groundwork for Israel’s nuclear program and is widely regarded as its father.

“My contribution during that dramatic period was something that I still cannot write about openly for reasons of state security,” Peres wrote in his 1995 memoir, Battling for Peace. “After [Moshe] Dayan was appointed defense minister, I submitted to him a certain proposal which ... would have deterred the Arabs and prevented the war.”

The ambiguity of the words was deliberate, and is a cornerstone of Israeli policy toward its program: The country simply does not acknowledge whether the program exists.  

Peres was elected to the Knesset in 1959—where he served for a record 48 years. He was mostly associated with the Labor Party, but over the decades held major positions with all the major centrist and center-left parties in Israeli politics, and became known for his relatively dovish stance on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

In his more than six decades in political life, Peres served in almost every major position in Israeli government and in the opposition. Indeed, as Shmuel Rosner noted in The New York Times, Peres was “probably the only leader who could still claim to have known all 21 of Israel’s military chiefs personally.” And, as he told The Washington Post in 2014, he worked with every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama—10 in all. Still, electoral victory for Israel’s premiership eluded him. In the four elections he contested, Israeli voters either rejected him outright or declined to hand him a decisive mandate to lead the country. He nonetheless did so twice: first in the 1980s as part of a power-sharing agreement with Yitzhak Shamir, and again in the 1990s after a far-right extremist assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, Peres’s great rival in Israeli politics, at a peace rally.

He was foreign minister in the Rabin government, and his role in the talks that led to the Oslo Accords won him the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize (which he shared with Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader). The views of Israelis toward Oslo—and those who signed it—have grown increasingly complicated over the years, with the goodwill generated more than two decades ago now a distant memory replaced by the reality of unrest and the belief, in the view of many Israelis, that they have no partner for peace.

In 2007, the Knesset elevated Peres, by then an 84-year-old elder statesman, to the country’s presidency. There, he refashioned the largely ceremonial post into a media-savvy cudgel and quickly became one of the most beloved Israeli public figures. He held prayers for peace alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (of whom he said: “We are old and we are friends”) and Pope Francis in the picturesque Vatican gardens, championed technology’s potential to improve conditions in the Middle East, and challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shaped modern Israel the way Peres shaped the country at its founding, on his Iran policy. Peres retired in 2014, but remained an influential figure in Israeli politics.

“The meaning in life is not what to be or what to be called, but what to do,” he told the Times a week before he stepped down from the presidency. “Maybe the greatest things I did when I had the lowest title, and maybe when you have the highest title you are prisoner.”

Peres is survived by his three children—Tsvia Walden, the linguist; Yoni Peres, a veterinarian; and Nehemia Peres, a venture capitalist. Sonya Gelman, his wife of 65 years, died in 2011.

Wells Fargo CEO's Financial Punishment

NEWS BRIEF In light of a scandal that has rocked one of the leading banks in the U.S., Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf will not collect $41 million in stock awards, nor will he accept any bonuses this year.

Stumpf was harangued last week by the Senate Banking Committee for his company’s widespread practice of creating phony bank and credit-card accounts to collect fees. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, told him he should resign and give back all the money he made while the scam was going on.

The company fired 5,300 employees who were involved in the scandal, while U.S. and California regulators fined the company $185 million.

On Tuesday, the company announced Stumpf would not collect much of his salary this year while Wells Fargo conducts an independent investigation into its sales practices. Stephen Sanger, the lead independent director of Wells Fargo’s Board of Directors, said in a statement:

We will proceed with a sense of urgency but will take the time we need to conduct a thorough investigation. We will then take all appropriate actions to reinforce the right culture and ensure that lessons are learned, misconduct is addressed, and systems and processes are improved so there can be no repetition of similar conduct.

Carrie Tolstedt, the head of the Wells Fargo division where the phony account scheme took place, has since left the company. She did not collect $19 million in stock awards, nor did she collect a severance that all would have added up to $124 million.

The Labor Department also announced Tuesday that it would start an investigation into the company’s sales practices to determine who encouraged the fraudulent practices that lead to this scandal.

But Stumpf has not been left in dire financial straits as a result of these probes. As CNN reports:

Wells Fargo paid Stumpf $19.3 million in total compensation for 2015, in part due to the bank's growing number of accounts. An intense focus on adding new accounts, former employees say, led to a pressure-cooker atmosphere at Wells Fargo.

Last year, Stumpf received $4 million in awards for factors that included “primary consumer, small business and banking checking customers” that year. Wells Fargo also rewarded Stumpf last year for his success in “reinforcing a culture of risk management and accountability across the company.”

Stumpf will sit before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday, where he is again expected to face fierce criticism from lawmakers.

A Nomination for the First U.S. Ambassador to Cuba in 50 Years

NEWS BRIEF President Obama has nominated a top diplomat to serve as the first U.S. ambassador to Cuba in more than 50 years. But the nomination may face some roadblocks in the Senate.

Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who currently serves as the chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Havana, has worked in the State Department since 1991 as a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. Obama said his nomination is “a common sense step forward toward a more normal and productive relationship” between the U.S. and Cuba. He adds:

Having an ambassador will make it easier to advocate for our interests, and will deepen our understanding even when we know that we will continue to have differences with the Cuban government. He is exactly the type of person we want to represent the United States in Cuba, and we only hurt ourselves by not being represented by an Ambassador. If confirmed by the Senate, I know Jeff will build on the changes he helped bring about to better support the Cuban people and advance America’s interests.

DeLaurentis served in Havana twice before and played a vital role in normalizing relations with the communist country in recent years. The U.S. embassy in Havana reopened August 2015, a month after the two countries restored diplomatic relations.

Several Republican senators, including Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, have vowed to block a nomination for U.S. ambassador to Cuba. Rubio, in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last June, said he would remain opposed to a nomination until Cuba enacted political and human rights reforms.

The United States's $364 Million Humanitarian Aid to Syria

NEWS BRIEF The U.S. State Department announced Tuesday the United States would commit more than $364 million in humanitarian aid to those affected by the Syrian civil war.

“Through this humanitarian funding, the United States continues to provide emergency food, shelter, safe drinking water, medical care, humanitarian protection services, and other urgent relief to millions of people suffering inside Syria and the more than 4.8 million refugees from Syria in the region,” said Anne Richard, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration.

The State Department said the announcement brings the total amount of U.S.-pledged assistance to $5.9 billion since 2011, when the civil war first began. The funding will be divided among various NGOs and relief agencies assisting Syrian refugees within Syria and elsewhere. A portion will also go to Syria’s neighbors, including Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt, who have borne the brunt of the refugee crisis spawned by the conflict.

The announcement comes days after world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly in New York, where the nearly six-year Syrian conflict took center stage. As we previously reported, the subject of humanitarian aid was especially contentious following the deadly bombing last week of a UN humanitarian convoy. The attack occurred just hours after the cease-fire brokered by the U.S. and Russia dissolved, and both countries sparred over who was responsible for the attack on the convoy.

The State Department said lack of access to areas that need assistance the most—such as rebel-controlled neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo, where many of the recent airstrikes have been focused— impede humanitarian efforts, and called on Russian and Syrian leadership not to obstruct access to these areas.

“Instead of helping, Russia and the Assad regime are bombing the humanitarian convoys, hospitals, and first responders trying desperately to keep people alive,” Richard said. “The regime denies save passage for humanitarian convoys, removes medical supplies from U.N. deliveries, and slashes the overall amount of aid. This is unacceptable.”

The Measles-Free Americas

NEWS BRIEF Measles, one of the world’s most infectious diseases, was once everywhere. Two decades ago, North, Central, and South America committed themselves to rid the region of the disease. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) on Tuesday said the Americas had accomplished this goal, making it the world’s first region without endemic cases of measles.

The news came during a meeting of World Health Organization ministers from throughout the Americas. It makes the fifth vaccine-preventable disease the region has eliminated, including smallpox and rubella. Measles, a particularly deadly disease, can cause brain swelling, blindness, and pneumonia.

It’s important to note, however, that measles has not disappeared from the Americas. It’s just not considered endemic. Here’s how PAHO explains what this means for the Americas:

Measles transmission had been considered interrupted in the Region since 2002, when the last endemic case was reported in the Americas. However, as the disease had continued to circulate in other parts the world, some countries in the Americas experienced imported cases. The International Expert Committee reviewed evidence on measles elimination presented by all the countries of the Region between 2015 and August 2016 and decided that it met the established criteria for elimination. The process included six years of work with countries to document evidence of the elimination.

Before researchers developed a vaccine in 1980, measles killed 2.6 million people in the world each year. That has since come down to about 150,000. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance wrote, the nature of measles makes it hard to get rid of. The virus remains contagious in the air for up to two hours, and someone can spread measles four days before they see a rash. The United Kingdom has already wiped it out once, only to see it return.

PAHO’s strategy leaned heavily on giving children the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccination, then following up every four years. This means areas without regular vaccinations are especially vulnerable, like some communities along the California coast where parents don’t vaccinate their children. Nearly two years ago, an unvaccinated child at Disneyland in California contracted measles and spread it to more than 70 children around the area before it was contained. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists 54 current measles cases in the U.S. right now, but all these have been contracted from foreign countries.

Why a Jordanian Writer Was Killed in Amman

NEWS BRIEF Demonstrations broke out this week in Amman, Jordan, as hundreds of protesters called on the government to resign over its failure to prevent the killing of Nahed Hattar, a prominent Jordanian writer, Agence France-Presse reports.

“The people want the fall of the government … No security, they killed Nahed in Amman,” protesters chanted Monday.

Hattar, a secular activist from the country’s Christian minority, was standing outside the Jordan’s Palace of Justice Sunday in the country’s capital, where he awaited trial for sharing a cartoon on social media last month deemed by some to be anti-Islamic, a crime punishable under Jordan’s anti-blasphemy laws. As he entered the court house, a 49-year-old man identified by local media sources as Riad Abdullah, a former imam, shot Hattar three times. Security sources told the Jordanian Times the gunman confessed after the shooting, and said he targeted Hattar for posting the controversial caricature.

The controversy started last month when Hattar posted a satirical cartoon titled “God of Daesh,” a term in Arabic used to describe the Islamic State, which views it as derogatory. The caricature depicts a bearded men in heaven lying in bed with two women as he orders God to bring him a glass of wine and some cashews, as though he were instructing a servant. Hatter’s relatives said the writer posted the cartoon to mock ISIS’s distorted religious views of what awaited them in the afterlife and that he had no intention of insulting Islam, which strictly prohibits depictions of God or the Prophet Mohammed.

After receiving several angry responses, Hattar deleted the post. Two days after sharing it, Hattar was arrested for insulting Islam and inciting sectarian strife.

The Jordanian government condemned the killing as a “heinous crime,” charging the gunman with premeditated murder, committing a deadly terrorist attack, and possession of an unlicensed weapon, according to the Associated Press. He could face the death penalty if convicted.  

Hattar’s family, however, blamed the government for failing to prevent the writer’s death, and called on Hani al-Malki, the Jordanian prime minister, and Salama Hammad, the interior minister, to step down.

“Many fanatics wrote on social media calling for his killing and lynching, and the government did nothing against them,” Hattar’s family said in a statement.

The government also issued a gag order Monday, barring Jordanian news outlets from publishing stories about the writer, including on social media, in order to, “protect the secrecy of the investigation.”

Amnesty International issued a statement Monday condemning the attack as “an alarming message about the state of freedom of expression in Jordan today,” and called on the government to commit to protecting individuals’ freedom of expression, regardless of the subject matter. Freedom of expression has long been restricted in Jordan, whose laws enable the government to restrict media’s internet access and block unfavorable converge.  

Hattar’s death is the latest in a number of violent incidents in Jordan, a U.S. ally which has long been regarded as one of the more stable countries in an increasingly unstable region. Last year, a Jordanian policeman killed five people at the country’s international police training center near Amman. In June, a car bomb was detonated near a refugee camp and military post in the northeast part of the country, killing six.

Uncovering the Mystery of a Sri Lankan Journalist's Death

Before they came to kill him, Lasantha Wickrematunge wrote a 2,500-word story about how he was glad to be labeled a traitor, and happy to join the ranks of Sri Lanka’s dead journalists.

Wickrematunge was killed as the country’s decades-long civil war neared its final months. For much of the 25-year fight between the government and Tamil Tiger separatists, Wickrematunge criticized the government for killing its own citizens, and he founded the country’s most anti-establishment newspaper, The Sunday Leader (It’s tagline:“unbowed and unafraid”). In 2009, gunmen on a motorcycle killed Wickrematunge on his way to work. In a column published three days after his death, Wickrematunge spoke directly to then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The president would undoubtedly call for a thorough investigation into his death, Wickrematunge wrote, “But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name.”

On Tuesday the government, under leadership of a new president, will exhume Wickrematunge’s body, hoping to find clues to who killed him. Guards have stood around his grave since early September, just two months after the government arrested a military intelligence officer in connection with Wickrematunge’s killing.

As Wickrematunge predicted, the former president had indeed called for a swift investigation into his death. And in the years that followed, Rajapaksa ended his country’s civil war after launching a brutal military offensive against the Tamil rebels. The offensive resulted in disapprobation from Western governments that criticized the Sri Lankan military’s operations in civilian areas, but Rajapaksa was unbowed—insisting he’d done what was needed to end the war against what was once regarded as one of the world’s most effective terrorist groups.

For six years, the investigation into Wickrematunge’s death led nowhere. Then last year, in a surprising win, Maithripala Sirisena, the progressive candidate, became president. From the very first months of taking office, Sirisena has promised to re-examine Wickrematunge’s death, and the deaths of other journalists killed in the last decade of the civil war.

Both The Guardian and The New Yorker published Wickrematunge’s posthumous column, which deserves a read in its entirety. But below are a few poignant excerpts.

Already Wickrematunge had twice been attacked, and his home sprayed by machine guns. His family had moved to Australia for safety, and he was sure he’d soon be killed, as many journalists already had. He opened his column by asking why, if he was so sure of his own death as to write a column announcing it, is it necessary to continue to speak out against the government?

I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not.

The paper he founded 15 years before, the Leader, had gained special attention from the government for uncovering corruption. In opinion pieces, his writers frequently blamed both the government and the Tamil Tigers for killing citizens. The paper urged the government to see the Tigers’ position through the context of history, saying it was important to address the root causes of terrorism.

We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors; and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.

Wickrematunge and Rajapaksa had known each other for 25 years—and had begun as friends. The paper sometimes referred to Rajapaksa by his first name, meant as a sign of support. In fact, Wickrematunge was fond of Rajapaksa when he first took power because of his many promises and commitments to human rights. But they found themselves on opposing sides when the president became involved in scandal, and then enforced media censorship. In Wickrematunge’s view, a decade of Rajapaksa’s rule had changed the country for the worse and, the journalist wrote, his paper was its largest critic.

“When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me,” he wrote.

He answered the question he opened the story with—that of his looming murder—by writing that despite its inevitability:

… if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted.

The exhumation of Wickrematunge is supposed to settle two differing reports by medical examiners: one that says Wickrematunge died of a gunshot wounds; and a second that makes no mention of bullets. Colleagues have taken the news with skepticism, and don’t expect quick results. Wickrematunge’s former wife, Raine Wickrematunge, told The Guardian she welcomed a re-examination, and was glad to hear the “process of uncovering the murderers is not happening in a half-hearted manner anymore.”

Since the new president, Sirisena, took power, Sri Lanka has worked to correct many of its concerns over its human-rights record. Internet and media censorship has mostly disappeared, and the rampant killings and abduction of journalists has ended. After his death, Wickrematunge’s posthumous column found international attention. His writing, in turn, focused that attention on the civil-rights abuses in his country.

How BioShock Mocked Video-Game Morality

Near the beginning of the groundbreaking video game BioShock, the player is forced to make what seems like a crucial moral decision: You liberate a monstrous-looking child who has been tormenting the local populace, and are told you can either kill it for a huge reward, or let it go free, but gain far less in the process. BioShock is filled with these moments—life-or-death choices that seemingly add to a larger ethical experience for the user in a departure from the usually consequence-free nature of playing video games.

Upon its 2007 release, BioShock felt like a revolution, or at least the start of one. The complexity of its decision-making approach was basic to say the least; the game only branched into two endings. Nine years after its initial release, BioShock is now available in a remastered, high-definition edition with its sequels—three games in total that proclaimed to allow players to examine their own values as they ventured through dark, fantastic worlds. The idea of multiple moral paths to a player’s story became a fad that video games are still struggling to incorporate, and BioShock: The Collection shows both the appeal, and the necessary limitations, of the ideas the original game generated.

BioShock wasn’t the first of its kind to offer users an array plot outcomes, based on how they behaved while playing. Advanced role-playing games like BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, set in the Star Wars universe, would categorize the player as being on good or evil depending on how they behaved, though that only really affected the character’s appearance. But, of course, video games had largely functioned on rails for the entirety of their existence: A player’s job was to rescue the princess, to get the treasure, to destroy the bad guy, and everything in the game existed to push the player in a single direction.

In BioShock, the main moral conundrum is a simple one, and revolves around the game’s Little Sisters, young girls who walk around tormenting the citizens of the underwater city of Rapture. If you “Harvest” them, their life force helps power your own magic weapons; if you instead heal them and send them on their merry way, you get less power, but the satisfaction of doing the right thing. Behave one way, and you get a “happy” video played at the end of the game, assuring you that your character lived a good life; behave another, and the Sisters take brutal revenge on you, tearing you apart. The only huge difference was the ending cut-scene.

What made BioShock truly interesting was that while it allowed players to exercise their ethical judgment, it also cleverly acknowledged the larger reality of gaming: that players actually don’t have much choice at all (spoilers for the first game’s ending follow). As BioShock’s protagonist wanders through Rapture’s surreal underwater world, battling the crazed survivors of mass human experimentation, he’s guided by a helpful voice calling himself “Atlas.” Atlas is a supposed rebel that’s looking to bring down Andrew Ryan, the tyrannical leader of Rapture, an Art Deco nightmare that he founded based on the principles of objectivism and the philosophies of Ayn Rand.

In the end, Atlas is revealed to be the game’s true villain, a gangster trying to seize power in Rapture; the player is his sleeper agent, who’s unwittingly forced to do Atlas’s bidding any time he utters the phrase “would you kindly” (which he does, often). It was a brilliant twist and the game’s way of ultimately mocking the illusion of choice it supposedly offered. Yes, there were moments along the way where you could approach situations from various angles. But BioShock understood that the medium of video games is always going to be goal-oriented, and the designed worlds still exist for one player to navigate a very specific story toward pre-written endings.

Play BioShock again with the twist in mind, and you catch every utterance of  “would you kindly.” It always comes when there’s no choice at all: You have to move on to the next level, or pick up that weapon, or kill whatever big boss Atlas is pointing you at next. Yes, he leaves the decision about the Little Sisters to you, but that’s just one small element in an otherwise scripted story. It was subversively self-aware for the time—in 2007, BioShock was actively experimenting with the medium and the small choices it could offer the user. But its designer, Ken Levine, also wanted to make it clear that there was only so much he could do within the constraints of the medium.

For all the supposed free will a player could exercise, there was really only one way for the game to end.

Two sequels, also included in BioShock: The Collection, were largely regarded as disappointments. BioShock 2 (2010), which Levin didn’t design, revisited the world of Rapture and put the player in the skin of one of its coolest monsters: the Big Daddy, a drill-toting behemoth clad in a deep-sea diving suit. Though the game embellished on some of the most appealing design elements of the first BioShock, it had much less to offer in terms of original storytelling. BioShock Infinite (2013), a “spiritual sequel” from Levine set in the new dystopia of a steampunk city in the sky, was far more ambitious.

Infinite retained the moral nuance of BioShock, often presenting its users with small crises to resolve in multiple ways. But this time it had no impact on the overall ending, which was much a more convoluted, fully scripted affair involving time-travel. After the release of BioShock, open-ended storytelling was briefly the biggest fad in gaming, with games like Dishonored and Deus Ex: Human Revolution making it the backbone of their advertising. But designers largely struggled to integrate such choices in an interesting way. The acclaimed sci-fi series Mass Effect let its protagonist behave as a morally upright hero or a rude, selfish renegade, which could affect whether other characters lived or died as the game went on. But that series’ ending was widely criticized for being unable to close the circle: For all the supposed free will a player could exercise, there was really only one way for the game to end.

Now, there’s a sub-genre of games geared toward “decision trees,” many of them produced by the innovative studio Telltale Games. This slightly soapier genre strips away much of the adventure of a BioShock-type first-person game. Telltale’s series based on The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones play like Choose Your Own Adventure books, and are essentially living graphic novels that present the user with tough decisions, rather than oncoming enemies or interactive puzzles. It’s a specific genre that has a growing fan base, but it lacks the immersive feel of a bigger, more complex gaming experience.  

Near the end of BioShock, before confronting  Atlas, the player is led before Andrew Ryan, the supposed antagonist who created Rapture and saw it spin out of his control. In one of gaming’s most iconic scenes, Ryan uses the player’s trigger phrase against him, to prove some grand philosophical point: “A man chooses; a slave obeys,” he barks, ordering the player to kill him. At this point, the game takes over, turning off the controls and forcing the player to do as Ryan says. Video gaming has made titanic strides in storytelling since its earliest days; since the release of BioShock, the medium’s horizons have only broadened further. But nine years after its release, the most revolutionary thing about the game was how cleverly it admitted that, in some ways, it wasn’t revolutionary at all.

The Strange Tale of Trump's Taxes

In the absence of facts, speculation will flourish. For example, as long as Donald Trump declines to release his tax returns, his opponents will offer theories for why he has failed to do so.

Trump has claimed that he cannot release his returns because he’s being audited by the IRS. (He complained Monday that he is audited every year.) He repeated that claim during the debate, even though the IRS has said that Trump is free to release his returns even if he is being audited.

Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada who in 2012 claimed (falsely, it turned out) that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes, has speculated that Trump is not as wealthy as he claims and is a “welfare king.” Romney himself has gotten in on the act, writing on Facebook, “There is only one logical explanation for Mr. Trump's refusal to release his returns: there is a bombshell in them. Given Mr. Trump's equanimity with other flaws in his history, we can only assume it's a bombshell of unusual size.”

During Monday’s first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton offered her own theory: Trump is paying no taxes. And the Republican nominee seemed in the moment to confirm it, interjecting to say it would prove he was “smart.” Here’s the exchange:

CLINTON: Third, we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.

TRUMP: That makes me smart.

CLINTON: So if he's paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. And I think probably he's not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide.

In the “spin room” after the debate, Trump suggested that he hadn’t intended to say that. Well, to specific, he said he hadn’t said it all:

REPORTER: It sounds like you admitted that you hadn’t paid federal taxes and that that was smart. Is that what you meant to say?

TRUMP: No I didn’t say that at all. If they say I didn’t it doesn’t matter.

He added,  “Of course I pay taxes.” But when NBC’s Katy Tur asked him directly whether he currently pays income tax, he declined to answer:

I asked Trump if he pays federal income tax now. He dodged. pic.twitter.com/X71jIbz6hl

— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) September 27, 2016

Deadspin put together a clip contrasting Trump’s answer in the spin room with what he actually said during the debate:

You Be The Judge pic.twitter.com/QdccUz8gHz

— Deadspin (@Deadspin) September 27, 2016

As Clinton pointed out during the debate, the last time Trump’s tax returns were made public, during the process of applying for a casino license in the 1980s, they showed he had paid no income tax. The veteran business journalist James B. Stewart recently explained why real-estate law made it possible, and perhaps even likely, that he continued to pay no income tax.

Perhaps Trump misspoke during the debate, or perhaps he committed a Kinsley gaffe—accidentally telling the truth—but his conflicting answers make it hard to know what the truth about his taxes is. There’s one very easy way he could clear up the confusion.

An Emotional Sendoff to Jose Fernandez

NEWS BRIEF Dee Gordon is not known as a home run hitter. He’s only knocked eight out of the park in more than 2,100 career at-bats. But on Monday, with emotions running high following the death of his teammate Jose Fernandez, the Miami Marlins second baseman hit a homer to lead off the game.

As Gordon rounded third base on the way to home, he was overcome with emotion, bursting into tears as he headed to the Marlins dugout. The bench greeted him with equal emotion.

Just amazing, @FlashGJr. #JDF16 pic.twitter.com/Tgg03ZSJlt

— MLB (@MLB) September 26, 2016

The Marlins honored Fernandez, a 24-year-old star pitcher who died Sunday in a boating accident, by all wearing his name and number 16 on their jerseys. Before the opening pitch, the team gathered at the pitching mound, knelt, and had a moment of silence.

What a moment.#JDF16 pic.twitter.com/iT7KLTEmaQ

— Miami Marlins (@Marlins) September 26, 2016

Fernandez was supposed to take the mound on Monday night.

Two others died in the boat accident in Miami Harbor. Fernandez was known for being one of professional baseball’s brightest young athletes—energetic and talented, representing the best of the game. On Sunday, teams across the league honored his memory.

The Marlins went on to win Monday night, beating the New York Mets 7-3.