Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 756
June 7, 2016
Stanford put on defensive over assault prevention efforts
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — With outrage brewing over the six-month jail sentence in a rape case, Stanford University is defending its handling of the incident where a member of the school’s swimming team was spotted by a garbage bin on top of an unconscious woman.
Two graduate students passing by on bicycles interrupted the attack, chased down a freshman student and held him until campus police arrived. The student, Brock Turner, was arrested and agreed to withdraw from Stanford and never return rather than go through expulsion proceedings.
The school has since found itself defending policies put in place to prevent and respond to sexual assaults, arguing that the case should be cited as evidence of its success, not failure.
“Stanford University did everything within its power to assure that justice was served in this case, including an immediate police investigation and referral to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office for a successful prosecution,” university officials said in a statement.
A judge who attended Stanford as an undergraduate sentenced the 20-year-old Turner to six months in jail and ordered him to register as a sex offender following his conviction on felony assault and attempted rape charges.
Like other U.S. colleges and universities, Stanford has been under renewed pressure from federal education officials, state lawmakers and students to improve the way sexual assault victims are treated and to ensure perpetrators face serious and consistent consequences.
When Turner began his short-lived career as a swimmer for the prestigious California school in September 2014, orientation sessions for new students featured a video of student-athletes discussing the issue and a talk by the provost on their rights and responsibilities as members of the Cardinal community. Stanford also required new students to complete online training over the summer that covered topics such as acquiring affirmative consent for sex.
Four months later, Stanford police arrested Turner for assaulting the woman he’d encountered while they both were drunk at a fraternity party. Along with banning him from campus for life, the university offered the victim counseling and other support services even though she was not a student.
“What the case highlighted was the importance of our training and prevention efforts, and those are continuing, particularly in terms of bystander intervention — ‘If you see something, do something about it’ — and this case has been an excellent example for all of our students,” campus spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said.
Some Stanford faculty and students remain unimpressed with the university’s handling of sexual assaults and its response to the Turner case.
The Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention, a Stanford student group that staged protests and a teach-in for parents this school year, started an online petition calling on the school to publicly apologize to the victim, devote more money to prevention and survivor counseling programs, and to undertake a survey of how prevalent sexual assaults are among campus fraternities.
Stephanie Pham, who co-founded the group and just completed her second year at Stanford, called the university’s statement about its role in seeking justice for the victim “cold” and said it “lacked sympathy for the survivor in any way.”
“Sure, there were bystanders that stopped the rape from proceeding and sure, they took whatever required steps afterward,” Pham said. “However, Stanford utilized its statement to defend its brand and defend its image.”
Lapin said Stanford welcomes the student efforts to educate their classmates, but said the online petition unfairly suggests the university shares blame for the length of Turner’s sentence.
“There is a certain point where the university doesn’t have the authority. So we did a thorough investigation, we presented considerable evidence to the county for prosecution and it was a successful prosecution,” she said, noting that the vast majority of campus assault cases never get reported to police.
Turner’s sentence sparked anger from critics who say Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky was too lenient on a privileged athlete from his alma mater.
Backlash in the case continued Tuesday as several venues in New York City announced they had cancelled appearances by Good English, an Indie band from Oakwood, Ohio formed by three sisters, one of whom wrote a letter of support for her childhood friend that was made public.
The prosecutor had argued for a six-year term for crimes that could have sent the 20-year-old to prison for 10 years.
At his sentencing, the 23-year-old victim read a 12-page statement in court, addressed primarily to Turner and taking him to task for not taking responsibility for his actions. She did not criticize the university and thanked the graduate students who tackled Turner and summoned police.
“I don’t sleep when I think about the way it could have gone if the two guys had never come. What would have happened to me?,” she said. “That’s what you’ll never have a good answer for, that’s what you can’t explain even after a year.
The Associated Press does not generally identify victims of sexual abuse or assault.
Stanford acknowledged that more needs to be done but said it is a national leader in implementing prevention programs, student training on intervention and support for victims.
“There is still much work to be done, not just here, but everywhere, to create a culture that does not tolerate sexual violence in any form and a judicial system that deals appropriately with sexual assault cases,” its statement said.
Virtually everything America has told us about breakfast is a corporate myth
Have you ever stopped to question that well-worn dictum, “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? I for one have spent many a day of my life breakfastless. Does this mean I’ve regularly risked my health? Popular opinion might argue yes. Aaron E. Carroll writing recently in the New York Times says absolutely not.
Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, argues that common myths around the importance of breakfast stem from “misinterpreted research and biased studies.” He cites a 2013 paper published in the Journal of Circulation that offered evidence tying skipped breakfasts to coronary heart disease and another to obesity. “But, like almost all studies of breakfast,” notes Carroll, “this is an association, not causation.”
Carroll goes on to illustrate the numerous confirmation biases inherent in research that supports this commonly held belief. Prime among these tactics, writes Carroll, are “causal language” and improper citation of results that convince people “skipping breakfast is bad.”
As for the rationale behind this manipulative “observational research”? Carroll writes:
Many of the studies are funded by the food industry, which has a clear bias. Kellogg funded a highly cited article that found that cereal for breakfast is associated with being thinner. The Quaker Oats Center of Excellence (part of PepsiCo) financed a trial that showed that eating oatmeal or frosted cornflakes reduces weight and cholesterol (if you eat it in a highly controlled setting each weekday for four weeks).
Like so many issues tied to corporate-interest research, the problem comes down to a lack of “randomized controlled trials.” That’s not to say they don’t exist. But as Carroll points out, even those that draw no definitive connection between breakfast and the state of one’s health suffer from methodological weakness.
In the end, like most things that concern your health, a bit of common sense and moderation goes a long way. Eat a stack of pancakes one day, have a cup of coffee another. Either way, you’re likely to survive.
Writing for AlterNet in an essay on the corporate breakfast myth, Anneli Rufus reported:
Seeking to provide sanitarium patients with meatless anti-aphrodisiac breakfasts in 1894, Michigan Seventh-Day Adventist surgeon and anti-masturbation activist John Kellogg developed the process of flaking cooked grains. Hence Corn Flakes. Hence Rice Krispies. Hence a rift between Kellogg and his business partner/brother, who wanted to sweeten Kellogg’s cereals in hopes of selling more. Guess who won.
In pre-Corn Flakes America, breakfast wasn’t cold or sweet. It was hot, hearty and lardy, and it had about 4,000 calories.
“Breakfast was the biggest meal of the day. Eaten before you headed out to do a whole day of farm chores, it had to keep you going until dinner,” says food historian Andrew F. Smith, author of Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine (Columbia University Press, 2009). Pre-industrial Americans loaded up on protein-rich eggs, sausages, ham and American-style belly-fat bacon along with ancient carb classics: mush, pancakes, bread.
The Great Cereal Shift mirrored — and triggered — other shifts: Farm to factory. Manual to mechanical. Cowpuncher to consumer. Snake-oil superstition to science. Biggest of all was food’s transition from home-grown/home-butchered to store-bought.
“Cold cereals are an invention of vegetarians and the health-food industry, first through Kellogg’s and then through C.W. Post, which steals all of Kellogg’s ideas,” Smith explains.
“These companies realized early on that people like sugar, and kids really like sugar — so they shifted their sales target from adults concerned about health to kids who love sugar. It’s a thoroughly American invention.”
As is orange juice, another breakfast contrivance marketed as healthy for kids. Media buzz about vitamin C and advances in pasteurization spawned the orange-juice industry in the 1930s, turning an obscure luxury into a household necessity.
“Orange juice has come to symbolize purity in a glass,” writes agriculture expert Alissa Hamilton in Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice (Yale University Press, 2009). Her research reveals a highly processed product whose use of cheaply grown foreign fruit now mandates a massive carbon footprint:
“Orange juice marketers have succeeded in creating an aura of golden goodness around the product. The idea that orange juice is ‘an essential part of a balanced breakfast’ is familiar and for the most part unchallenged.”
Hamilton is outraged that commercial orange juice is “advertised as pure, fresh, and additive-free. Those who buy orange juice buy the stories that the industry tells.”
Robert Reich: The Democratic race isn’t over until it’s over
This morning I heard from an old friend here in California who said “I’m for Bernie, but he doesn’t really have a chance anymore. So isn’t my vote for him in the California primary just prolonging the agony, and indirectly helping Trump?”
I told him:
1. True, the electoral numbers are daunting, and Bernie faces an uphill task, but a win Tuesday will help enormously. One out of 8 Americans lives in California.
2. Regardless of the electoral math, Bernie’s candidacy has never been mainly about Bernie. It’s been about a movement to reclaim our democracy and economy from the moneyed interests. And a win for Bernie in the California primary (and in other Tuesday primaries in Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota South Dakota, and New Mexico) will send an even clearer signal to Washington, the Democratic Party, and the establishment as a whole, that a large and growing share of Americans is determined to wrest back control.
3. The goals Bernie has enunciated in his campaign are essential to our future: getting big money out of politics and reversing widening inequality; moving toward a single-payer healthcare system and free tuition at public universities (both financed by higher taxes on the richest Americans and on Wall Street); a $15 minimum wage; decriminalization of marijuana and an end to mass incarceration; a new voting rights act; immigration reform; and a carbon tax. All will require continued mobilization at all levels of government. A win Tuesday will help continue and build on that mobilization.
4. Bernie’s successes don’t help Trump. To the contrary, they are bringing into politics millions of young voters whose values are opposite to those of Trump’s. Bernie has received majorities from voters under age 45 (as well as from independents). He’s won even larger majorities of young people under 30 – including young women and Latinos. Many have been inspired and motivated by Bernie to become political activists – the last thing Trump and the Republicans want.
June 6, 2016
History in hand, Clinton faces voters as presumptive nominee
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — History already in hand, Hillary Clinton will celebrate becoming the first woman to lead a major American political party Tuesday following votes in California, New Jersey and four other states — contests Clinton hopes send her into the general election in strong standing.
Clinton reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee on the eve of Tuesday’s voting, according to an Associated Press tally. Her total is comprised of pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses, as well as superdelegates — the party officials and officeholders who can back a candidate of their choosing.
Clinton greeted news of her achievement with a measured response, wary of depressing turnout and eager to save the revelry for a big victory party Tuesday night in Brooklyn. During a campaign stop in California, Clinton told a cheering crowd she was on the brink of a “historic, unprecedented moment,” but said there was still work to do in her unexpectedly heated primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“We’re going to fight hard for every single vote,” Clinton declared.
Heading into Tuesday’s voting, Clinton has 1,812 pledged delegates and the support of 571 of the 714 superdelegates, according to the AP count.
The AP surveyed the superdelegates repeatedly in the past seven months. While they can change their minds, those counted in Clinton’s tally have unequivocally told the AP they will support her at the party’s summer convention.
During a rally Monday evening in San Francisco, Sanders said a victory in California would give him “enormous momentum” in his bid to push the Democratic primary to a convention fight. Sanders is urging superdelegates to drop their support for Clinton before the gathering in Philadelphia, arguing he is a stronger candidate to take on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
But Sanders has so far been unable to sway the superdelegates, and there were signs Monday that he was taking stock of his standing in the race. Speaking to reporters, Sanders said he planned to return to Vermont on Wednesday and “assess where we are” following the California results.
The senator’s comments came on the heels of a weekend phone call with President Barack Obama, who has stayed out of the Democratic primary to date but is poised to endorse Clinton as early as this week.
“The president intends certainly through the fall, if not earlier, to engage in this campaign,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “That’s an opportunity the president relishes.”
Obama and Clinton battled ferociously for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Tuesday marks eight years to the day Clinton conceded to Obama in an emotional speech where she noted she was unable to “shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling.”
The former secretary of state reflected on breaking that barrier as she made her final swing through California on Monday, and she’s expected to do so again on Tuesday night in New York.
“It’s really emotional,” Clinton said. “I’m someone who has been very touched and really encouraged by this extraordinary conviction that people have.”
Glenda McCarthy, a 64-year-old from San Pedro, California, is among the loyal Clinton supporters who have longed for this milestone moment.
“I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” McCarthy said. “Not just a woman, but a woman who is so strong.”
Clinton’s victory is broadly decisive. She leads Sanders by more than 3 million cast votes, by 291 pledged delegates and by 523 superdelegates. She won 29 caucuses and primaries in states and U.S. territories to his 21 victories.
Clinton has been eager to move past the protracted primary and fully turn her attention to her general election battle with Trump. She energized Democrats with a blistering speech last week challenging Trump’s qualifications for the presidency, reassuring supporters that she’s prepared for a bruising campaign against the unpredictable businessman.
Trump vanquished his remaining Republican rivals about a month ago, a stunning achievement for the untested political candidate. Despite his controversial statements about minorities and his vague policy proposals, many Republicans quickly consolidated around his nomination.
But Trump has continued to irritate GOP officials, including with his recent criticism of a U.S. district court judge. Trump has said Judge Gonzalo Curiel can’t be impartial in a legal case involving the businessman because his parents were born in Mexico and Trump wants to build a wall along the border.
Several leading Republicans, as well as legal scholars, have flatly rejected the logic of that argument.
Trump also continues to struggle to build out a robust general election campaign staff in battleground states or a national fundraising network, though the real estate mogul insists he can win without the trappings of a traditional campaign.
Trump was also spending Tuesday in New York, with a primetime event scheduled at his golf resort in Westchester.
New Jersey and California are the biggest prizes up for grabs Tuesday, with Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota also holding contests. The final Democratic primary will be held next week in the District of Columbia.
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Pace reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Catherine Lucey in Compton, California, and Hope Yen, Stephen Ohlemacher and Lisa Lerer in Washington contributed to this report.
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Follow Julie Pace and Ken Thomas on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and http://twitter.com/KThomasDC
Migrant rescue at sea unites 1 family, breaks up another
SICULIANA, Sicily (AP) — The metal fishing boat was packed full with more than 700 migrants on their way from Libya to Italy. Samia Leila sat on one side, sandwiched between mostly young men. Rashid Jaqali, his wife and his daughter squeezed into the bow, and his two sons were split up on either flank, just visible over hundreds of heads.
When help finally came, relief soon turned into chaos. People scrambled wildly to get off, knocking the boat off its precarious balance. Leila, fighting the crowd, was one of the first out; Jaqali, his wife, his daughter and one son came next. Their older son, Mohammed, waved to his mother from across the boat, motioning: I will follow you.
The boat lurched violently from side to side. Then it capsized. Those rescued watched helplessly from afar as their loved ones left behind fell, one by one, like crawling ants, into the water.
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For migrants, summer is the season of hope — and of death. It is the time of calmer waters, and tens of thousands embark on the desperate journey across the Mediterranean to Europe.
Many don’t make it, for reasons that include flimsy boats and overcrowding. In the last week of May alone, more than 1,000 migrants are believed to have drowned on the route. Death estimates from the boat carrying Leila and the Jaqalis on May 25 are up to 250; this account is pieced together from interviews with survivors and aid groups.
Rashid Jaqali, a 45-year-old Kurd from northern Syria, had moved his family to Libya so that the Kurdish militia couldn’t recruit his sons. He and his younger son, Yehia, went in 2013, and the rest of the family joined them a year later.
Their refuge in the northwestern city of Zawiya didn’t last long. None of the children went to school. The girl, Suzanne, was taken out after a couple of months because they didn’t have official documents. And the boys worked; Mohammed handled aluminum for interior decoration, his father marble.
As lawlessness spread in Libya, so did the rumors of kidnappings. The son of a family friend from Syria was mugged and thrown out of his car. Other friends told them about a man held hostage until his wife gave her jewelry to the criminals. The road to Tripoli was cut because of militia infighting.
Rashid’s boss stopped paying him, but he was too afraid to quit. There was no going out of the house after dark. Life in Libya had become even worse than in Syria.
“We got out of one whirlpool into a larger one,” Rashid said.
The family decided to move to Germany, where his wife’s relatives lived. They waited seven months for the waves to calm down. Rashid paid off his debts, tied up loose ends and forked out about $1,200 to a smuggler, a special discount for families.
Mohammed, 17, prepared his own backpack; he liked to dress well. He took a selfie with his new haircut, and promised his sister a camera when they got to Germany. He had no friends in Libya to say goodbye to.
His mother, Fatma, stuffed another backpack, keeping her jewelry well protected. When the time came, the smuggler sent a car to get them.
“The enemy is behind you, and the sea is in front of you. Where is the escape?” asked Rashid. “The sea is the escape.”
Leila was another Syrian who fled to Libya, only to find herself trapped there.
She joined her husband, a chef, in Tripoli in 2013, but then the country’s capital descended into open war. Leila’s husband and his two children left for Germany. Her husband’s daughter, Mirna, is almost 16, and it was no longer safe for her in Libya.
Leila was afraid of the sea, so she planned to eventually join them through a reunification program. But her husband’s residency papers in Germany were delayed and her Syrian passport expired.
With no other options, Leila called the same Libyan smuggler her husband had used. She paid $450, a hefty sum for a single traveler from Tripoli. She sold her car, quit her job in a medical supplies company and sat at home for a few weeks waiting. To prepare, she took anti-sea sickness pills.
On May 2, she shipped her clothes to her husband in Mannheim, in Germany. “For $100, imagine!”
On May 24, the smuggler told Leila her journey would begin that evening. She fasted to ask for God’s blessing. Just after sundown, the smuggler picked her up from his girlfriend’s house.
It was her chance to escape once again.
“I was dying,” said Leila, a determined 29-year-old with a lively giggle. “Not physically. I was dying bit by bit inside….We died a hundred deaths every day, like the saying goes.”
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Just after midnight, hundreds of migrants crammed into a warehouse with metal gates, where each smuggler had brought his clients for the scheduled journey. Leila was shocked by the number of single, mostly African men. The Jaqalis had also thought — wrongly — that the group would be small and mostly of Syrians.
Leila asked for a life jacket, thinking it could give her an hour more to live if they sank. The smuggler promised one but never delivered it.
After making sure the coast was clear of any security, the smugglers took the migrants to the beach. There they shoved 60 or 70 people at a time into a small inflatable boat meant for 20, and headed toward a larger fishing boat moored a few kilometers offshore.
“I prayed to God before I got on board,” Leila said. “I said, God, make it easy, or if I die, make it fast.”
People were lifted up into the fishing boat. The Africans were housed in the bottom, near the engine, with no windows and access to above only through a well-guarded ladder. Young men and women went in the upper deck, some under an umbrella-like tarp, and in the middle deck, with metal bars surrounding it. The few families on board sat in front.
Despite protests from the passengers, the smugglers continued to fill the boat until it was overloaded. When one woman complained, a smuggler told her, “May you all die.”
The Jaqalis couldn’t sit together. Mohammed sat on one side near Leila, and 15-year-old Yehia on the other. Rashid could see the children and gestured occasionally, but no movement was allowed. On the uppermost level, designated organizers smacked anyone who stood, out of fear of tipping the boat.
It was calm in front. But where Leila squatted, the swings were so extreme that at times her back almost touched the water. She read the Quran in silence in the middle of a North African crowd — she had vowed to read a short verse 1,000 times. She ended up reading it nearly 2,000 times.
She could hardly breathe from the hash smoked by the young men around her, and their curses disturbed her. Every five minutes, she looked at her watch.
“You are in the middle of the sea, you don’t know anything, you don’t know if you will make it or not,” she said. “You feel like time is not moving.”
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Six hours later, at 10 a.m., the engine finally stopped. The boat driver announced that help from the Italians would arrive in 40 minutes.
Leila saw a small inflatable boat appear in the horizon, ahead of a larger military rescue vessel.
“We were alive,” she said. “Everyone was alive. We got through the hard part.”
But the worst was still to come. The Italian rescuers threw life vests in the water, and the young men on board swarmed to the same spot to grab them and get off. The commotion started the boat rocking.
“We would say, calm down, kids. You will all get one,” Rashid Jaqali said. “No one waited….Instead of rescue, there was death with those vests.”
The rescue workers first saved the women, the children and the families. They spotted Leila among the young men, possibly because of her green headscarf, and carried her into the inflatable.
At that moment, with all the tension lifted, she couldn’t speak. It was as if her memory had stopped.
“No language was registering,” she said. “There was no English. No Arabic, no language whatsoever. Nothing. Not a word.”
She finally pulled herself together and helped the rescue workers with translation, working side by side with the doctors in a sterilized white suit.
In the meantime, Rashid Jaqali was fighting to get his wife and daughter clear of the young men. Yehia slid along the metal bars in the middle of the boat to reach his parents, terrified. Rashid squeezed him between two women and pushed them up front for the rescuers.
Yehia pointed out Mohammed on the other side of the bow, squatting on the floor and holding the metal window next to him. When Rashid looked over, there were 20 people ahead of him.
Now migrants were climbing up from the engine level, making the boat rock even more. Rashid recited the Fatiha, the Quranic verse Muslims say when in trouble, as he stepped off the boat into the inflatable.
Fatma was one of the last women off the boat. As she left, she spotted Mohammed.
“He waved at me and said go, and they will come and get me. He said that with his hands,” she said in tears. “He wanted to save me. But my heart was burning, not saved.”
The boat was rocking wildly. When Rashid took one more look back, it had tilted over.
“What the hell? I didn’t see anyone any more, it was that upside down,” he said. “An Italian pushed me into the ship. I said to him, ‘My son! My son!'”
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Five days later, the Jaqalis were still waiting to hear word about Mohammed.
“I am going nuts,” said Rashid, pulling on a cigarette, with black circles around his eyes and stubble on his face.
His wife held out pictures of her son.
“I dreamt of him,” she said. “He was smiling at me. Only his leg was injured. I saw him three times. He was alive.”
But Leila knew the young man seated near her on the boat must have died.
“We all know, and we are pretending,” she said.
On the sixth day, the news finally reached the Jaqalis: Mohammed was dead. Suzanne put flowers in the window sill to mark the loss of her brother. Fatma said her son hit his head and died on the spot.
“Didn’t I tell you I dreamt of him wounded? He was smiling at me from afar,” she said, sitting on her bed with glazed eyes. Minutes later, she asked if it was possible to erase her Libyan number from her phone. “I don’t want anything to do with Libya. I don’t want to remember it.”
A day later, Fatma was hospitalized. She passed out and had the shivers.
A week and a half later, the Jaqalis have yet to bury their son. Their plans are all but shattered. Fatma wants to stay close to her son’s body where his burial is likely to be, while Rashid is unsure what is best for the other children. Fatma watches video of the capsizing, trying to locate her son and imagine how he might have fallen. She mutters that he didn’t want to go to Germany, as if he knew he would not make it.
Leila is thankful that she was traveling alone, and not waiting for male relatives who might have ended up like Mohammed.
She is on her way to Germany to meet her husband. She leaves Siculiana fully made up, with new clothes and her marriage certificate in hand. She does not wear a veil, and her blonde hair flutters in the wind.
“I was saved through a miracle,” she said. “I feel like I am born again, right now….It would be impossible to witness something harder than this.”
Hearing set in case of Charleston church shooting suspect
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A federal judge in South Carolina is scheduled to hold another hearing on the status of the case against a white man charged in the shooting deaths of nine black parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church a year ago.
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel is holding a Tuesday hearing in the case of Dylann Roof, who faces numerous federal counts, including hate crimes.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced last month that prosecutors will seek the death penalty against Roof. No trial date has been set.
Roof also faces nine murder counts in state court, where prosecutors are also seeking the death penalty in a trial set to begin in January.
The anniversary of the shooting at the church often called Mother Emanuel is next week.
Asian stocks higher after Fed chief’s remarks
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Asian stock markets rallied on Tuesday as investors took heart from reassuring comments by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on the strength of the U.S. economy.
KEEPING SCORE: Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.6 percent to 16,675.45 while South Korea’s Kospi gained 1.3 percent to 2,011.63. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index advanced 1.4 percent to 21,329.95. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.2 percent to 5,371.00. Stocks in Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia also rose. The Shanghai Composite Index in mainland China turned 0.1 percent higher at 2,936.04.
YELLEN: In a speech Monday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen stressed that the U.S. economy appears fundamentally solid despite a jobs report for May released Friday that showed the weakest monthly gain in more than five years. She noted that other gauges of the job market have been more positive and shied away from sketching any timetable for when the Fed might raise interest rates again because of myriad uncertainties.
ANALYST’S TAKE: “Federal Reserve chair Yellen was cautious in her remarks on the shocking payrolls reading, which reinforced that June is not the month to make a move. The slightly dovish remarks sat well with financial markets, prompting a rally in equities,” said Bernard Aw, a market strategist at IG in Singapore. “While the message Yellen wants to across is that she still wants to move rates higher, the timing of subsequent rate hikes is murky.”
WALL STREET: U.S. stocks jumped on Monday. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.6 percent to 17,920.33. The S&P 500 rose 0.5 percent to 2,109.41. The Nasdaq composite index gained 0.5 percent to 4,968.71.
OIL: Benchmark U.S. crude oil gained 2 cents to $49.71 per barrel in electronic trading on New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.07, or 2.2 percent, to $49.69 a barrel on Monday, its highest closing price this year. Brent crude, which is used to price international oils, added 9 cents to $50.65 a barrel in London.
CURRENCIES: The dollar rose to 107.68 yen from 107.52 yen while the euro rose to $1.1371 from $1.1357.
Report: Fewer school suspensions, lots of absences
WASHINGTON (AP) — New government numbers offer a mixed snapshot of progress for the nation’s schoolchildren — with worrisome figures on how many students miss school, stubborn disparities on discipline, but encouraging strides in cutting the overall number of suspensions.
The Education Department report found 6.5 million students nationwide were chronically absent in the 2013-14 school year. That’s more than one out of every 10 students missing at least three full weeks of school. It’s the first time the department has collected student absenteeism data.
On a positive note, the survey found a significant drop in school suspensions for K-12 students, down nearly 20 percent from the previous reporting period. But, the report also suggests sharp disparities between how black and white students are disciplined in school as well as the types of advanced coursework offered in high school to black and Latino children.
“A systemic failure to educate some groups of children as well as others tears at the moral fabric of the nation,” Education Secretary John B. King Jr., said in a phone call with reporters. “What sets the U.S. apart from any other country is the idea that opportunity is universal. These data show that we still fall far short of that ideal.”
Here’s a look at the numbers released Tuesday from a biannual survey of all public schools and districts in the country.
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CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM
“One of the very worrying data points is that 13 percent of all students are chronically absent,” King said in an interview with The AP. “Even the best teacher can’t be successful with a student who’s not in school.”
The rates were higher for high school students. More than 3 million were chronically absent — nearly one in five high school students.
The department defines chronically absent as missing 15 or more days during the school year, a pattern that increases a student’s chances of falling behind and dropping out of school.
Black and Latino high school students had about the same rate of absenteeism, 22 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Rates for white students were not provided in the initial release of numbers from the department’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
The Obama administration began a program last fall, called Every Student, Every Day, It partners with states and local groups in 30 communities around the country to identify mentors to help chronically absent students get back on track.
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SCHOOL DISCIPLINE-THE GOOD NEWS
Across the country, 2.8 million K-12 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions. That’s a nearly 20 percent drop from the number reported two years ago.
“A 20 percent reduction, overall, in suspensions is breathtaking,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights. That’s a “tremendous testament to our educators’ commitment to making sure the students are in school and can learn.”
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SCHOOL DISCIPLINE-THE BAD NEWS
Black preschool children are 3.6 times as likely to get one or more out-of-school suspensions as their white counterparts, the report said. Black children represent 19 percent of preschoolers, yet they account for 47 percent of pre-school kids getting one or more suspensions. The comparison to white students: they make up 41 percent of preschoolers, but represent only 28 percent of pre-school children receiving one or more suspensions.
“These disparities beg for more districts to follow the lead of places like Baltimore and Chicago, which are dramatically limiting the use of suspensions in early grades,” Lhamon said.
The report also found that 1.6 million students attend a school with a sworn law enforcement officer, but not a school counselor.
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COLLEGE-READY COURSEWORK
Nationwide, almost half of high schools offered classes in calculus, and more than three-quarters offered Algebra II. But black and Latino students didn’t have the same access to high-level math and science as other students.
According to the report, 33 percent of high schools with substantial black and Latino enrollment offered calculus. That compares to 56 percent of high schools with low numbers black and Latino children that offered calculus. Similar gaps were seen for physics, chemistry and Algebra II.
Inequities were seen in Advanced Placement courses, too. While black and Latino students made up 38 percent of students in schools that offer AP courses, only 29 percent of them were enrolled in at least one AP course.
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Associated Press writer Mark S. Smith contributed to this report.
Trump campaign wasting precious time, GOP critics say
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump is wasting precious time.
By now, Republican Party critics argue, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee was supposed to have stationed senior staff in battleground states, moderated his fiery message to attract new supporters and begun raking in big money.
Instead, he’s spending more time right now picking fights and settling scores than delivering a message that might help draw voters.
Five long weeks since he defeated his last remaining GOP rival, Republicans fear the New York billionaire has squandered his head start. As Democrat Hillary Clinton eyes her party’s nomination, Trump’s campaign has been roiled by infighting, his battleground strategy is lagging and his fundraising operation is barely off the ground.
“I am getting bad marks from certain pundits because I have a small campaign staff. But small is good, flexible, save money and number one!” Trump insisted Monday on Twitter.
Some would-be Republican supporters also fear his unwillingness to budge from a flame-throwing formula targeting immigrants and Muslims that worked so well in the GOP primary.
Case in point: Trump’s recent comments about the Mexican heritage of the judge presiding over a case against his now-defunct Trump University. The Republican businessman has refused to back down from his claim that the judge’s ethnic background creates a conflict of interest, drawing scorn from across the GOP as well as the legal community.
Republican South Dakota Sen. John Thune said Monday “it’s not a good place to be” for Republicans to have to repeatedly explain their presumptive nominee’s statements.
“There are I think conversations going on with the campaign, and hopefully that message is being clearly conveyed,” Thune said. “But yeah, he’s going to have to adapt. This is not working for him. They were inappropriate comments.”
Trump also has been slow to adapt to other contours of an expansive general election. Since Texas Sen. Ted Cruz dropped out of the race last month, he has spent precious little time in the battleground states that will likely decide the election.
He has ignored Florida and Ohio, preferring to spend the bulk of the past two weeks in California — a state that hasn’t supported a Republican presidential candidate in nearly three decades.
The ongoing rivalry between aides loyal to Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and to campaign chairman Paul Manafort appears to affect virtually all aspects of the campaign.
Two weeks ago, political director Rick Wiley was fired in the midst of a battleground hiring effort. While the campaign hoped to have senior staff in place across 15 states by June 1, the ex-political director did not finalize a single hire before leaving, according to an aide with direct knowledge of the hiring who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The positions remained unfilled as the factions pushed separate candidates to step in as Trump’s political director. Two campaign aides said Manafort appeared to win that battle, getting Trump to hire Jim Murphy, a Republican operative who was involved in Bob Dole’s failed presidential campaigns. The aides insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the hiring.
But Murphy’s hiring was a surprise to others in Trump’s inner circle, underscoring the level of confusion.
“Never heard of him,” Hope Hicks, the only communications staffer on Trump’s payroll, wrote in an email Sunday night after The New York Times reported Murphy’s hire.
Lewandowski rejected the idea his candidate is wasting time, arguing that Trump has been delivering a message that appeals to everyone, with numerous trips planned in the coming weeks.
“I think what we’re talking about is jobs and security and bad trade deals,” Lewandowski said, describing the end-of-May deadline as a false one. He said the campaign is constantly hiring and has state directors all over the country left over from the primary season.
After Clinton delivered a scathing foreign policy speech last week that doubled as a takedown of Trump’s qualifications to be commander in chief, Trump responded only with a tweet mocking her reliance on teleprompters — ignoring the former secretary of state’s record as the nation’s chief diplomat during intensifying international conflicts.
The dysfunction reached new heights Monday during a conference call, first reported by Bloomberg Politics, in which Trump instructed some of his most visible supporters to ignore talking points sent out by his own campaign and to continue focusing on the Trump University case and U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, according to two people on the call.
The memo warned supporters not to speak about the case, because it concerned Trump’s business ventures. But Trump said he “absolutely wants us to talk about the case,” said one participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss a private call.
Barry Bennett, a Trump adviser who was also on the call, described the disagreement as a “communication breakdown.” He said Trump told his supporters his attacks against Curiel had “nothing to do with skin tone, it’s about his bad judicial work.”
Trump’s slow start with fundraising also has sparked widespread concern across the party.
Trump and the Republican National Committee spent weeks hashing out a money-raising plan after he became the presumptive nominee and stopped funding his White House bid largely with his own fortune.
Yet starting from scratch has been a slow process.
Trump held a small donor gathering ahead of a May 24 rally in Albuquerque and a large fundraiser the next day at the Los Angeles home of Tom Barrack, a good friend and fellow real estate investor. He peppered the rest of his California primary swing with smaller financial events, said Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s national finance chairman.
By comparison, Clinton and her top surrogates have hosted some 17 California fundraisers since May 1 alone.
It has taken Trump several weeks to get new large-scale events on the books — although five in Texas and New York are planned for the coming weeks — leaving some of his fundraisers scratching their heads about his lack of urgency.
Rick Hohlt, a Washington lobbyist who has raised money for GOP presidential nominees since 1981 and plans to help Trump, said the campaign’s propensity for planning only two weeks ahead poses “a challenge for organizing some of these bigger fundraisers.”
Still, he said the candidate “may be right” about his ability to do more with less.
Terry Sullivan, Marco Rubio’s former campaign manager, suggested Trump’s greatest challenge is his inability to craft a message that appeals to voters beyond his loyal base.
“Trump is a political one-trick pony. He can really excite his base by doing the same trick over and over, but after the rest of the voters have seen it for the 73rd time, they’re still not amused,” he said.
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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Alan Fram in Washington, Jonathan Lemire in New York and Tom Beaumont in Des Moines contributed to this report.
Florida AG asked Trump for donation before nixing fraud case
WASHINGTON (AP) — Florida’s attorney general personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump around the same time her office deliberated joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates
The new disclosure from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s spokesman to The Associated Press on Monday provides additional details around the unusual circumstances of Trump’s $25,000 donation to Bondi.
The money came from a Trump family foundation in apparent violation of rules surrounding political activities by charities. A political group backing Bondi’s re-election, called And Justice for All, reported receiving the check Sept. 17, 2013 — four days after Bondi’s office publicly announced she was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University’s activities, according to a 2013 report in the Orlando Sentinel.
After the check came in, Bondi’s office nixed suing Trump, citing insufficient grounds to proceed.
Bondi declined repeated requests for an interview on Monday, referring all questions to Marc Reichelderfer, a political consultant who worked for her re-election effort.
Reichelderfer told AP that Bondi spoke with Trump “several weeks” before her office publicly announced it was deliberating whether to join a lawsuit proposed by New York’s Democratic attorney general. Reichelfelder said that Bondi was unaware of the many consumer complaints received by her office about Trump’s real-estate seminars at the time she requested the donation.
“The process took at least several weeks, from the time they spoke to the time they received the contribution,” Reichelderfer told AP.
The timing of the donation by Trump is notable because the now presumptive Republican presidential nominee has said he expects and receives favors from politicians to whom he gives money.
“When I want something I get it,” Trump said at an Iowa rally in January. “When I call, they kiss my ass. It’s true.”
In addition to the money given by his foundation, Trump himself has donated $253,500 in Florida since 1999, most of it going to Republican candidates, the state party or political committees affiliated with GOP officials. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, also gave a $500 check to Bondi a week before her father’s money came in, as well as another $25,000 to the Republican Party of Florida the following year.
The AP reviewed thousands of pages of records related to consumer complaints about Trump University and its affiliates filed with Bondi’s office. The documents — previously obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, which first reported Trump’s donation to Bondi — reveal a new reservoir of unhappy Trump University customers, despite recent claims from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee that the students of his real estate seminar company were overwhelmingly satisfied.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and a separate federal class action civil lawsuit in California allege that Trump University — which was largely owned by Trump himself — defrauded consumers by as much as $35,000 each with promises of a real estate investing education that they either did not receive or found to be worthless.
All told, more than 20 people requested help from the Florida attorney general’s office in obtaining refunds from Trump University and affiliates, with Bondi’s predecessor receiving numerous other complaints about the seminar company Trump partnered with. Many of the Trump-related consumers alleged that they paid money for training materials and personalized instruction which were never delivered.
“I was laid off work for the first time in my life and really need this money to support my family,” wrote one of the many people seeking help, adding that he had been promised a refund but never received it. “$1,400 is so much money for my family.”
The documents complicate prior claims by Bondi’s office that she received only one consumer complaint about Trump University at the time that she decided not to join the New York investigation.
Bondi’s office said that its statement about receiving only a single complaint was accurate at the time because most of the complaints dealt with the Trump Institute, a separate corporate entity from Trump University, and were made before she took office at the start of 2011. The Trump Institute was licensed by Trump to run his seminars, however, with Trump keeping a share of the profits, according to depositions in the Trump University case. In internal emails, Bondi’s own staff appeared to lump Trump University and the Trump Institute together — as New York’s lawsuit has done.
Bondi was not the only GOP attorney general to shy away from suing Trump.
The Associated Press first reported last week that then-Texas Attorney Greg Abbott received $35,000 from Trump, three years after his office in 2010 dropped a proposed lawsuit over Trump U. Following AP’s report, former Texas Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens said the case had been dropped for political reasons. He also made public a detailed internal summary of what he called his staff’s strong case against Trump.
A spokesman for Abbott, now the Texas governor, said the case was dropped after Trump’s organization agreed to stop offering his namesake real-estate seminars in the state. Within months, Trump University was out of business nationwide.
By choosing not to pursue Trump in court, the GOP attorneys general left the unhappy students in their states on their own to try to get refunds from the celebrity businessman.
Both Bondi and Abbott have now endorsed Trump for president.
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Associated Press reporter Gary Fineout reported from Tallahassee, Florida.
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